“Hey now, I was once a jock and I wasn’t gross. Well, maybe I was for a while, when I was real young.”
“Young as me?”
He stared down into that small intent upturned face. “No, Em, I was never as young as you.”
She giggled, actually giggled. It warmed him to his toes. Molly looked up, smiling. Emma said, “I’m just glad you’re not as young as me right now.” She lightly touched her palm to the wound in his thigh. “It’s not warm anymore.”
“Nope, all of me is at room temperature again.”
She patted him, then skipped off to the small kitchen to help her mother.
It was an easy evening, with no talk at all about the sword of Damocles that was hanging over their heads, no talk just yet about Molly’s criminal father. They played word games, then Ramsey gave Emma a reading lesson using the sets of letters and numbers he’d bought at the bookstore in Dillinger.
The kid was smart and fast. She was writing his name in full sentences, along with her name and her mother’s by nine o’clock. “You put the best teacher in the world with the smartest kid in the world, and just look what you’ve got.” He leaned down to stare at the last word Emma had printed: John.
Both of them tucked her up in the small single twin bed.
“You want a night-light on, Em?”
“No, Mama. Are you going to sleep with me again?”
“Yes,” Molly said easily. “If Ramsey wakes up and gets lonesome, he can talk to us through the wall.”
Emma was smiling even as her eyes closed. They stood looking down at her, this child who had changed both their lives.
“She wrote my name,” Ramsey said. “It was legible. She wrote it in a whole sentence. Amazing.”
“She’s got her mother’s brains.” Molly grinned up at him. “My Ramsey is smart. Yep, that has a real ring to it. Can you believe she spelled john?
“And she did it well. It made her laugh, Molly. Where’d she get the hair?”
“Her father.” Her voice was clipped. She didn’t say anything else. Why hadn’t he come back here after Emma had been kidnapped? He’d teased himself with that question at least half a dozen times now. He simply couldn’t imagine any father not being frantic about his child. That the parents were divorced made no difference. He said, “Let’s go downstairs. Now that Emma’s in bed, I want you to tell me everything about Daddy.”
“I should call Detective Mecklin and Agent Anchor first. I forgot.”
“No, you didn’t, but it doesn’t matter. Let’s do it. Who knows, maybe they’ve got something.”
“Don’t bet your gym socks on it.”
She asked for Detective Mecklin and got put on hold. She stared down at the phone, then suddenly banged down the receiver. “They were trying to trace the call,” she said. “I know it. The bastards.”
“You’re probably right. Let’s call in the morning. They didn’t have enough time. Don’t worry.”
“I guess you’d know all about that.”
“Enough. It’s not as if we really have to hide from the cops, Molly.”
“I don’t want to let them near Emma. Don’t you see? They might take her away and give her over to a battery of doctors, strangers, all of them. She’s doing so well. I can’t take that risk. You didn’t want to do it either. Just leave it alone.”
“All right. Tell you what. Let me call Dillon Savich, my friend in Washington, D.C. See if he knows what’s going on.”
“Who is this friend, exactly?”
“He’s a computer expert who happens to be an FBI agent. Trust me on this, he’s not like Agent Anchor. Actually, he and his partner-who’s now his wife, Sherlock- were the ones who broke The Toaster case in Chicago. Do you remember that?”
“That was the young guy who’d killed those families?”
“Yeah. Russell Bent.”
“They won’t ever let him out, will they?”
“Trust the system on this one, Molly. Russell will be in a psychiatric hospital until he dies.”
“Yeah, but I also remember the killer in Boston who escaped when the judge ordered that he be let out of restraints while he was being evaluated by the psychiatrists. The String Killer, wasn’t that the moniker the press gave him?”