Mercy. B.J. Daniels

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СКАЧАТЬ and moved down the counter. The man could be full of bull, just wanting attention. Edwin ran into those sorts all the time during an investigation. They were the ones who wanted to contribute—even if they had nothing to offer. They were often happy to make it up.

      As he neared the man, he was surprised that on closer inspection, though not shaved and gray of both hair and beard, the man wasn’t as old as he’d first thought.

      “Where do you know her from?” Edwin asked.

      “That home outside of town.”

      “Westfield Manor?”

      “Weren’t no manor,” the man said with obvious disgust.

      Knowing it couldn’t be possible, he still reached into his pocket and pulled out the photograph Rourke had supplied him with. “The woman I’m looking for, though, isn’t very old. If the home closed twenty-five years ago, Caligrace wouldn’t have been more than—” He was going to say “five.”

      “Sixteen,” the man interrupted.

      Sixteen? Edwin did the math. No way was the woman in the photo forty-one. He tried to hide his disappointment.

      “That her photo?” the man asked and took the enhanced snapshot with his thick fingers.

      “It’s not a great photo. But you think you know the woman?” Edwin asked even though he already knew the answer. This man couldn’t have known her. The dates were all off.

      “That’s not my Caligrace.”

      “No.” Edwin started to take the photo back when he realized the man was crying. He glanced toward the waitress, wondering if he’d been right the first time to suspect this man was unbalanced. But the waitress was flirting with Pete and not paying any attention to this end of the counter.

      “She looks just like her mama, though,” the man said, wiping his eyes before he handed back the photo. “It’s good to see that she made it all right.”

      Edwin frowned at him. “Her mama?”

      “That’s the Caligrace I knew. But she’s buried out at Pauper’s Acre,” he said with a nod of his head in the direction of Westfield Manor.

      “You’re telling me that this woman’s mother was one of the girls who lived at Westfield Manor?”

      “She’s the spittin’ image of her mother, so I’d say, yeah, I am. The home took the bad girls, but they also took unwed mothers when no one wanted them. Caligrace was pregnant. Had a baby girl.”

      Edwin frowned, trying to make sense of this. “So Caligrace and her mother shared the same first name, and this woman in the photo is the baby girl she had after she came to live at the home?”

      The man nodded.

      “How is it that you know this?” Edwin asked, still not sure he could trust this man—or his information.

      The man blew his nose into his paper napkin, took a drink of his coffee, then said, “I saw her the night the bus dumped her off. She was crying. I could see that she was pregnant. She had nothing but the clothes on her back. It was winter. I gave her an old coat I had in the back of my rig. I would have given her more, but...”

      “But?” Edwin prodded.

      The man looked away. “I was thirty-one, married with a pregnant wife at home and two little kids of my own.” He shrugged, his hand trembling as he lifted his coffee cup again. “I couldn’t help her. That’s just the way it was.”

      So the man was fifty-six. He looked a whole lot older. Chalk it up to a hard life, apparently. A married man with a pregnant wife at home and two kids when he met the pregnant sixteen-year-old Caligrace.

      “How was it that you were there that night? Did you work there?” Edwin asked hopefully as he tucked the photo back into his jacket pocket.

      “I was a sheriff’s deputy returning one of the runaways that night.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

      “WHAT ABOUT THE CHILD Caligrace gave birth to?” Edwin asked after he and former sheriff’s deputy Burt Denton introduced themselves. “What happened to her?”

      Burt shrugged. “Never heard.”

      By Edwin’s calculations, the Caligrace in the photo would have been about five at the time of the raid. So maybe her birth certificate was right and she was thirty. Apparently, she’d been put on the state bus that had taken the girls away. Unless someone in town had taken her.

      “Any chance some couple felt sorry for the little girl and took her as their own?” he asked.

      “I would have taken her in a minute, but like I said, I had enough mouths at home to feed, not that my wife would have stood for it.” He shook his head. “No one around here took her in, but someone must have somewhere else since, according to you, she’s still alive.” The man’s eyes narrowed. “You didn’t say why you were looking for her.”

      “She might be a witness in a homicide,” he said carefully.

      The former deputy merely nodded as if he recognized bull when he heard it. “I hope she has a better life than her mother did,” he said, getting to his feet. He glanced at Edwin. “Is that too much to hope for?”

      “No,” Edwin said. “By the way, you wouldn’t have any idea where in that building the two lived, do you?”

      The former deputy, in a telling gesture, looked away. “Facing the building, farthest room to the right on the third floor.”

      “Did the woman you knew ever tell you her last name?”

      Burt shook his head. “She said her family had disowned her. She had no name, and neither did her kid. It broke my heart. I guess that’s why she gave her little girl her own name. It’s all she had to give the kid.” He looked like a broken man as he started to leave. “I really don’t want to talk about this anymore. What’s done is done. Some things are best left in the past.”

      Edwin watched the former deputy leave, then joined Pete at the other end of the counter.

      “Now what?” Pete asked as Edwin took a stool next to him.

      “I have one more thing I have to do,” he said. “You should come along.”

      Pete gave him a wary look. “If it’s what I think it is, not a chance in hell.”

      * * *

      AFTER HIS TALK with Rourke, Frank Curry climbed into his pickup and headed for the state mental hospital. It had been months since he’d seen his daughter. Not that he hadn’t tried to visit. He’d gone up there anyway because he hadn’t known what else he could do.

      Unfortunately, after Tiffany had injured a nurse and several guards during a short-lived escape, she’d been locked up in the isolation ward. At first the doctor hadn’t wanted her to have any visitors—maybe especially the father she hated.

      But СКАЧАТЬ