Vanished

Was Ashley sexually assaulted?

The young man held up a smaller plastic container. “It looks like he used a tranquilizer dart to neutralize her.”

J.T. clenched his jaw to keep the words, “That’s my daughter you’re talking about,” from spilling out. He steadied himself and took the bag with the dart and examined it.

Is this why Kim didn’t hear anything? Why Ashley didn’t scream?

Day one, 7:00 a.m.: Ashley missing twelve and a half hours

“Colin told me you were working on the case.” Emma Fitzpatrick let Madison into her house.

“I wouldn’t have had it any other way when I heard about Ashley missing.” Madison scanned the familiar foyer, remembering back to the time she had worked with J.T. on Emma’s brother’s murder case.

“You’re here to see Kim?”

“Yes. I want to talk to her. Is she up?”

“Actually, I doubt she slept any last night even though she went to bed. She’s in the kitchen with Grace. We were fixing breakfast. We’re trying to get her to eat something.” Emma started for the back of the house. “Have you eaten yet?”

“No, but—”

“If I discovered anything from my trauma last year, it was that a person has to take care of herself if she’s going to do her best job.”

“You’re beginning to sound like Grace.”

Emma slanted a glance over her shoulder. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“You should.” When Madison entered the kitchen, Grace greeted her with a smile and a mug of coffee. “I heard you coming and remembered you like your cup of joe black.”

A night of no sleep was beginning to catch up with her. Madison drank some of the brew, wondering when she would turn into a huge cup of coffee. “Thanks. This tastes wonderful, Grace.” Then turning to the teenager at the table, her gaze riveted to the window overlooking the backyard, Madison added, “I came to see you, Kim. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“I told Dad and Rachel what happened.”

The waver in the girl’s voice italicized the fragile control she had over her emotions. Madison noted that as she sat across from her and placed her mug on the table. “I know. But sometimes when you retell an event, it triggers a memory you forgot.”

“Nope. I told them everything.” Kim shifted her attention to Madison, a dullness in her gaze. “I told Ashley to go outside and play while I talked with Lexie. It had stopped raining and the sun had even peeked out of the clouds. I checked on her as she went to the swing and sat down, then I took a seat on the couch again and talked until I heard Dad come home.” Hopelessness rang in the rote recitation of the facts.

“You didn’t see anything out of place in the backyard?” Madison asked, concerned by both Kim’s apathetic tone and her appearance, as though she had wakened from a nap and hadn’t bothered to comb her hair.

The teenager shook her head. Suddenly her lower lip quivered while tears flooded her eyes and a look of devastation took hold of Kim.

“It isn’t your fault,” Madison said, knowing from J.T. that Kim blamed herself for Ashley’s disappearance. Blame was such a wasted emotion, but she almost always saw it in this type of situation. The “if onlys” could eat at a person until there was nothing left.

Kim blinked, loosening a tear to slide down her cheek. “You don’t understand. I screamed at Ashley to leave me alone. Daddy doesn’t think so, but I think she ran away because of me. What if she fell and hurt herself so that’s why she hasn’t come home?”

Madison wished that was the case, but more and more she felt J.T. was right. Ashley had been abducted. “As we speak there are search dogs and teams of people out looking for Ashley. If that happened, they’ll find her.”

Suddenly Kim reached across the table and clutched Madison’s hand. “I need to help in the search. Make Daddy see that. Please.”

The desperation in the girl’s voice tore at Madison’s composure. Knowing the people involved in this tragedy made her job doubly hard but doubly important, too. “Kim, I want you to think back to yesterday. Close your eyes if it will help you visualize the scene with Ashley in the backyard.” After the teenager did as she was instructed, Madison continued, “Now, do you see anything unusual, anything out of place?”

A long minute passed with a heavy silence filling the air, spiced with the aromas of bacon and biscuits.

When Kim opened her eyes, her forehead wrinkled and she tilted her head to the side, as J.T. did when he was thinking. “There was something shiny by the bushes along the back of the fence where Ashley’s fort is.”

“Could you tell what it is?”

“No,” the girl answered slowly, then more definitely, “No.”

The ringing of Madison’s cell phone pierced the quiet. She quickly answered it.

“It’s J.T. I told you I would call if we found anything. We discovered Ashley’s clothing in a pile behind a set of bushes forty feet from the back gate. There was a dart from a tranquilizer gun at the bottom of the pile. That’s why Kim didn’t hear a scream from Ashley. We’re bringing in a cadaver search dog.”

The implication of bringing in a dog that specialized in finding dead bodies, even ones buried in the ground, caused her to draw in a sharp breath. “I’ll be right there.”

Day one, 7:30 a.m.: Ashley missing thirteen hours

Madison hurried to the area where some of Ashley’s clothing had been found. She stopped at the perimeter of the taped-off section, spying J.T. directly across from her about fifteen yards away. The grim look on his face as he watched the crime scene techs process the evidence and comb the ground for any more clues highlighted the anguish he had to be feeling, standing to the side, unable to do anything but watch.

She skirted the edge of the taped area and came to his side. “Have they found anything else?”

“No,” he said in such a tight voice she was afraid he would shatter any second. “Finding her clothes, folded in a neat pile, like that—” His voice came to an abrupt halt, his jaw clenched so tight a nerve twitched on his face.

Why would the kidnapper remove Ashley’s clothes, leave them here for them to find? Was it some kind of ritual he needed to perform? Was he toying with J.T., trying to break him? Was the little girl molested? Question after question bombarded Madison, with no real answers. The only thing she knew was the effect it was having on J.T. Color leached from his normally tanned features and the despair in his expression as he watched one of the crime scene techs remove the evidence bags to their van illuminated how effective the kidnapper’s technique was if he was after revenge.

She didn’t care that they were standing among a swarm of people. She took hold of his hand, hoping to impart some support. He needed to know he wasn’t alone through this. “We may be able to find some clues on the clothes that will help us.”

He closed his eyes for a long moment as though he had to shut out the scene around him in order to keep going. “The kidnapper came prepared. He brought a tranquilizer dart to silence Ashley. As I suspected, this wasn’t spur-of-the-moment. He planned it, possibly for years while he was in jail.”

J.T. was so positive it was a criminal he had put in jail, and frankly she was beginning to think that was the most likely prospect. This case was becoming more personal as the hours passed.

He turned toward her, breaking their linked hands apart. “Another search team found a trail off to the left that ended at the road. But I don’t know if that means Ashley was taken in a car somewhere or if she went that way to play sometime recently.” Frustration marked his face. “The trouble is her scent is all over the place. She loved to play here which isn’t making it easy for the dogs.”

“When will the cadaver search dog be here?”

He checked his watch. “A half hour. I should have had it here from the beginning. It’s just…” Not finishing his statement, he snapped his jaw closed, every line of his body conveying the anxiety that gripped him.

Madison lay her hand on his arm, hoping to draw his attention to her and away from the techs still working the crime scene. Again she wished she could take some of his pain away and felt helpless because she couldn’t. No one could but God. J.T. faced the bushes where Ashley’s clothes were found, his mouth set in a frown.

“It’s rough having to admit the possibility there could be a body. You weren’t thinking along those lines.” She gently squeezed his arm, imparting her support the best way she could.

“I need to think more and feel less.”

She moved in front of him and blocked his view, forcing him to look at her. The brief anger that flashed into his eyes dissolved into a solemn expression. “No matter how much you want to be totally the sheriff right now you won’t be able to do that. It’s not possible to forget you’re the parent as much as you would like to. We all understand.”

The tic in his jawline increased its twitching. “How do you know what I’m going through?” He swept his arm wide to indicate the people around them. “How do any of them know?”

“This isn’t my first missing child case, J.T. Matthew Hendricks has dealt with quite a few abductions in his career. We’re here to help, and as much as we can, we do understand what you’re going through.”