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  Pepper’s dad had specifically forbidden him to take home a police car. However, Pepper gave a less direct answer. “No, it wasn’t usual. But it isn’t prohibited by any written department regulations.”

  Detective Miller sat back, sighing loudly. “Why is it this whole incident stinks like last week’s trash?” he complained. “What aren’t you telling us?”

  “Now, now,” cautioned Stamen. “Let’s keep in mind the alternative—Mr. Flammia would have gotten away with his kidnapping victim. The nine-year-old girl, Leslie Holbrook.”

  Miller looked angry but didn’t respond.

  “Man, if you’d been wrong,” mused Detective Chin, shaking her head. Studying Pepper. Finally she took out a piece of paper from the back of her legal pad and glanced at it.

  “I believe you’ve already been notified that your police department has placed you on paid administrative leave,” she said. “Don’t report for work until you’re otherwise notified.”

  Great. Minimum wage will continue to roll in.

  She looked down at the piece of paper and began reading from it. “You are hereby instructed to avoid any communication with the deceased’s family and any involvement in this or any related investigation. You are further instructed not to take any police action or otherwise represent yourself as a police officer while this investigation remains open.”

  “That sounds like a standard warning for investigations of officer-involved shootings. It doesn’t actually apply to Mr. Ryan’s circumstance,” said Stamen.

  “But he’ll be smart enough to follow it, right?” asked Detective Miller. “Because if Mr. Flammia has family, their next move will probably be to file a wrongful-death suit against the New Albion police department. And Wonderboy here personally.” Miller said “Wonderboy” with pained emphasis, like he probably said “hemorrhoid.”

  Miller turned back to Pepper. “You need to remain available to answer any further questions we may have. Especially if we determine there’ll be a criminal investigation separate from this review. You understand?”

  Stamen interjected. “Mr. Ryan will consider any further requests when you make them. However, he does not waive his rights either. He has been incredibly cooperative, considering his condition.”

  “Absolutely incredible,” said Miller. “By the way, we’ll get a sample of the blood drawn from you last night for toxicology tests. Are we going to find any alcohol or drug results?”

  “Nope…go for it,” said Pepper. He was suddenly exhausted. And depressed.

  The detectives stood, putting away their notepads. Detective Chin turned off the recorder.

  Finally, the detectives left.

  Pepper’s dad came into the room. “How’d it go?”

  “He did very well,” said Stamen.

  His dad sighed. “I wish I’d known when they assigned Miller. I’d have asked the D.A.’s office to swap him out.”

  He explained Dan Miller had applied for a detective position with the New Albion police six years ago and was beaten out by Kevin Sweeney. “I’ve seen Miller a few times since, and he has a heck of a grudge against me. But he wouldn’t take it out on Pepper. I’m pretty sure.” Pepper thought his dad didn’t sound so sure.

  “You look exhausted,” said Stamen, patting Pepper’s leg. “I was about to ask for a break if they began another round of questions. But you should be proud of how you conducted yourself today and for your heroics last night. Any questions for me?”

  Pepper had one question, but he couldn’t ask it aloud. How the hell do I get my self-respect back?

  Chapter Forty-Three

  An hour later, Chief of Police Gerald Ryan pulled up to the heavy gate of the Big Red Yard. It was a rolling steel gate, eight feet high with barbed wire across the top. Gerald beeped his horn.

  Don Eisenhower was in the passenger seat. It was lightly raining. Way more rain than usual on Cape Cod in July.

  The weather matched Gerald’s mood because he was preoccupied about Pepper. He was scared and pissed off about what his son had gone through. He’d wanted Pepper to stay at the hospital, but he needed to be here when the K9 team conducted its search. He had to make sure they did everything possible to find Emma Bailey and Emma Addison.

  Leo Flammia had had a small business as a lawn care contractor, cutting grass at various houses around the Lower Cape. From what they’d pieced together so far, he had a dwindling list of customers because he was not particularly reliable.

  The man’s space in the Big Red Yard held a rusty storage container, an old truck and trailer, and miscellaneous lawn care equipment. It was an easy decision to do a deeper search here for the missing girls with the help of a K-9 team.

  The gate slowly rattled open.

  “Pepper’ll be fine,” said Eisenhower.

  His friend always knew what he was thinking. “Any parent can tell you their true weak spot,” Gerald replied.

  “Yup. Their kids.”

  Gerald loved Pepper, even if he didn’t say it often to the boy. That is just how Gerald had always been wired. It was no different with his wife, Mary, when she was still alive. And it didn't mean he loved her any less, either—he’d never gotten over her sudden death during childbirth. He believed Mary knew he loved her by his deeds, not by words, and he hoped Pepper knew it too. That's just the way it was for Ryan men. Nothing wrong with it.

  Gerald splashed his unmarked police car through one last big puddle, then parked. He climbed out, immediately soaking his left foot up to his ankle in thin brown mud water. Shit.

  Now in an even worse mood, he leaped toward the edge of the puddle with his right foot and made it by an inch.

  At least the Greenhead Snatcher was dead, he thought. And the tampons and other female items were clear proof the kidnapper had kept the Emmas alive somewhere. But did the girls have a supply of food? Water? Air?

  Please, God, let the girls be okay, he thought.

  Gerald saw a trailer with the sign “Office.” A huge beast of a dog was chained beside the trailer’s front steps. Possibly the biggest dog Gerald had ever seen. It was lying in the mud under an overhang of the office’s roof, staring at him and Eisenhower like they’d do just fine as an afternoon snack.

  “I hope that chain holds,” said Eisenhower. Tapping his firearm absently, either as a joke or subconsciously.

  Gerald chuckled. “I’m not worried—I run faster than you.” He zipped up his raincoat as they walked through the mud to join Detective Sweeney, who was standing nearby with two other officers.

  “K-9 will be here any minute, Chief,” said Sweeney. “We searched the area ourselves, but it’s a real maze.”

  Maze was an understatement. Contractors rented space in the Big Red Yard by the foot, so they tried to leave no space empty. Roadways snaked through the property, but most of the place was storage containers, trucks and equipment tightly packed in each contractor’s area. It was a total rat’s nest of objects to climb around and over.

  New Albion didn’t have a K-9 unit, so the state police had assigned a team. The hope was a dog could pick up a trace of the girls that the human search had not found. The Big Red Yard was the second of ten sites the K-9 unit planned to search.

  “Where’s Flammia’s space?” Gerald asked Sweeney.

  “Fifty feet down that lane, on the left-hand side.”

  The K-9 vehicle rolled up two minutes later. The monster dog on the chain began barking and jumping around when it saw the K-9 German shepherd, but the police dog ignored it somehow. Damned good training.

  They all plodded through the mud to Flammia’s space. It was marked off with police tape.

  “We just came from the suspect’s house,” the K-9 officer said to them. “No hits there. And this rain isn’t helping Daisy. But we’ll do our best…”

  “That was some pretty intuitive shit by Pepper, stopping Flammia’s van,” said Sweeney.

  Gerald grunted. “You bet. He might have the makings of a heck of a detective someday.” If he li
ves that long, he thought.

  The canine search took only a few minutes. The German shepherd covered every inch of Flammia’s space and even climbed on the trailer and into the pickup truck. The dog had no hits.

  “Broaden the search,” requested Gerald.

  The officer led the dog in a wider sweep, searching the area.

  Gerald heard barking, and they all trotted over to where the officer and the dog waited. They were in the area neighboring Flammia’s space.

  The dog was tugging at a large rolled-up brown tarp. It was like an enormous cigar. A wheelbarrow and some plywood were leaning against it. The officer removed the dog, rewarding him with his voice and a treat.

  Gerald’s throat was tight with a lump as Sweeney and another officer unrolled the tarp, over and over. The roll thinned.

  Then they stopped.

  “Jesus,” said Sweeney.

  It was a body. But it was a man, not one of the two Emmas.

  Everyone backed up. It was now an additional crime scene, and they didn’t want to destroy any evidence.

  “Chief, want I should check his pockets for ID?” asked Sweeney. He’d put on rubber gloves.

  “No need—I recognize the body. It’s Pepper’s music pal, Dennis Cole.”

  Nothing but darkness.

  Emma Bailey lay against the impossibly hard wall, the ball gag in her mouth digging into her teeth. Her eyes were blindfolded, which really didn't matter. She was still in the same dark place.

  And the kidnapper asshole hadn’t come back in who knows how long. Emma had wet her skinny jeans hours ago—holding off as long as she could and then finally giving in, surrendering to the warmth and relief and humiliation. Now her jeans were wet and cold down there…super uncomfortable. Her mouth was beyond dry and her stomach felt like it was full of needles. Whenever Shrek came back, she decided, she would eat and drink. She couldn't take it anymore.

  Where was he? Time flickered in and out. She probably even slept for a while. It was getting hard to tell when she was actually awake.

  Something had changed, she thought. Maybe it was a little hotter in here… Had she been woken up by the sound of the door or feet on the metal ladder? She thought she heard someone shuffling nearby. Then something made a noise against a wall, toward the metal ladder.

  Emma thrashed against her bindings. She tried to scream again, through her mouth gag. She tried to get whoever it was to pay attention to her. To help her.

  Why would Shrek just stand there and not free them up to go to the bathroom? Give them water? Food? What the fuck was his problem now? Emma was regretting her hunger strike, big-time.

  Or was it just her imagination, and he wasn't there? Was she going crazy, like in some horror movie? Or was it the damned angel of death, watching her, waiting for her last breath? Was she dying? Oh, God…

  She even believed she felt a hand on her cheek. A light touch, then gone. She was definitely losing it.

  The Baileys were good people and all, but they didn't go to church or talk about God and stuff very much. Emma started praying now, just in case. She needed help—from anywhere.

  And Emma needed comfort. She pushed out her feet toward New Emma, but she couldn't locate the younger girl’s feet. She swung her feet left and right as far as her bindings permitted. Nothing. Was New Emma still there? Was the girl still alive?

  Emma started sobbing again. Dry-eyed, since she'd long run out of tears.

  No one was ever coming again.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  The hospital had moved Pepper from the emergency area to an intensive care ward. He was now in a room with another patient, an elderly woman. Their beds were about four feet apart, with a thin curtain in between.

  The decor was classic institutional. Totally, antiseptically depressing. Pepper stared up at the white drop ceiling tiles and wished he were anywhere else.

  The elderly woman’s monitor alarms kept going off. Ding, ding, ding, ding. Every time a sensor chimed, it took about fifteen minutes until a nurse or assistant came and reset the monitoring machine. It was like high-tech torture.

  Since the shared room had almost no privacy, he had learned that the elderly woman broke her leg by stepping in a hole during her morning walk with her best friend.

  Pepper felt terrible for her the first time he overheard the ten-minute version of her story, related in the woman’s thick Boston accent. And the second time too. By now he felt terrible for himself, having listened to the whole story five or six times as her kids, grandkids and other relatives and friends rotated in and out of the room over two hours.

  When his neighbor’s crowd finally died down, the elderly woman turned on her TV and set the sound at maximum volume. At least the TV drowned out her monitor alarms. Pepper knew from earlier conversations he’d overheard that the woman’s daughter had taken her hearing aids home.

  In other words, being in the hospital was mostly a miserable experience. His buddy Angel Cavada had popped in not long after the state detectives left and stayed for a good visit. He made Pepper laugh so much, the nurses finally sent him away.

  Pepper dozed off and later woke to find Delaney Lynn standing by his bed. She was carrying her guitar in her hand and had flowers in the other. She had a big smile on her face, but her eyes looked worried.

  “Oh my God, Pepper,” she said. “You look terrible! Look at your poor hand!”

  “You look amazing.”

  Delaney put her guitar against the wall and gave him a hug. The hug hurt Pepper in half a dozen places, but he tried not to flinch. She smelled like vanilla ice cream.

  He kissed her lightly on the lips.

  She kissed him back. Then giggling, she pulled away. “I don't want to start something you can't finish,” she said with a foxy smile. “That’s the story of my life. Bad timing!”

  They both laughed.

  Delaney had lots of questions about what had happened to him, and he told her the short official version.

  “It must have been horrible!” she said. “What did you—” Her phone rang. “Oh, sorry, I’ve got to take this,” she said, and slipped out into the hall.

  “Was that your boyfriend, Scooter?” he joked when she came back a few minutes later.

  “Ha! No, it was the other manager at Sandy’s. He wants me to come in early. And he said Scooter McCord quit today. Didn’t even give two weeks' notice. Said he’s leaving the Cape.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Scooter’s been acting like a real asshole—for some reason he thinks I pointed the cops to him when Emma Addison was snatched. Which is total bullshit, as you know.”

  Pepper heard a clucking noise of disapproval from the elderly woman in the neighboring bed. She had turned off her TV and was probably doing her best to spy on them.

  “And he was a perv too,” said Delaney more quietly. “He got so pissed when I talked about you, his face turned almost as red as his hair! He was so excited when he threw the Harvard thing in my face. Like I was just some piece of ass for you for the summer.”

  “I'm sorry I didn't tell you earlier,” he whispered. “I was too chickenshit.”

  So Pepper told her now. How he’d committed to Harvard and played last winter in the British Columbia Hockey League to get ready for Division 1 hockey. And he explained why he hadn’t told her before—how he’d worried she wouldn’t give him a chance if she knew he was leaving the Cape.

  “I get it. And I hope you get how you hurt me,” Delaney said. “Let’s talk about it more when you’re back on your feet.” She leaned in and gave him another light kiss.

  Then she retrieved her guitar and started tuning it, sitting on the edge of his bed. “Since you're a poor little invalid, I hoped some music might cheer you up.”

  Pepper just smiled. At that moment, he felt like the luckiest guy in the world.

  She started playing the cool old song, “Me and Bobby McGee.” A song made famous by Janis Joplin, but Delaney’s performance sounded more like a cover of the son
g Miranda Lambert had done more recently. Delaney’s rendition was full of passion and drama and a little bit of crazy. She sounded amazing. Mesmerizing.

  She sped up for the final verse of the song, banging out the chords to the song. When she finished, Pepper clapped painfully, his intravenous wire tugging at his hand as he clapped.

  “Amazing,” he said. “You're absolutely amazing.”

  She smiled, and Pepper could think of nothing that would make him happier than spending every day going forward with her. Sharing her music, getting her to smile at him the way she was right then.

  Then she surprised him by saying she’d play him a song she’d written herself. He didn’t know she wrote songs too. She began playing her song on the guitar and singing along. It was tender and sweet, with a heavy edge for someone so young.

  Pepper listened, hypnotized.

  When Delaney finished, she leaned back over to kiss him again, this time much harder than before. A deep, passionate kiss. Almost frantic, it was so powerful.

  Despite his injuries, Pepper kissed her back just as hard.

  Delaney looked him in the eyes. “You never told me the big news you texted me about yesterday. Our big news?”

  And now when it came time for Pepper to tell her what he’d decided—that he was all in running away to Nashville with her—he paused. Maybe because of what he’d gone through since leaving work yesterday in the borrowed cop car? Or maybe now he didn’t know which decision was best? Or was he choking now…too scared to make the leap to run away with her? Some mix of all of those reasons? He couldn’t get any words out.

  Delaney was watching him closely and her playful smile faded.

  “Seriously?” she asked.

  A voice from the doorway interrupted them. “Looks like I’ve found the party!” It was Coach Bullard with a big grin on his face.

  Coach came right in. He had a big silver helium balloon with the word Ouch! on it.

  Pepper groaned and introduced him to Delaney Lynn.