Laurie Campbell - Home At Last

J.D. was listed near the end, but there had to be other names she could try. Brad’s favorite mechanic. His tennis coach. The woman who embroidered his exquisite holiday gifts to patrons of the Laurence Foundation. She tried them all, and learned that none of them had talked to Brad recently. Not since their sympathy calls last winter, when his parents had been killed in the Bahamas and left him the largest hacienda in southern Arizona.

Maybe he’d gone back there, Kirsten realized with a flash of hope. Maybe he’d found himself missing his parents, wanting to show his children the importance of family by visiting his hometown. There weren’t many names left from Tubac…Brad had left for college with blithe promises to keep in touch with all his friends, but within a few years they had dwindled down to a very small collection. Mike and Ellen, who had stayed in Tubac. J.D. Ryder, who had—

You’re not calling J.D.

It would be easy enough to find him, she admitted as she fumbled through her desk for the number of the Laurence estate caretaker. Brad had routinely kept her up to date on their best friend from high school, the third member of “Tubac’s Terrific Trio.” And after rising so rapidly through the ranks of the Phoenix Police Department, it wasn’t likely that J.D. would have vanished into thin air.

The way he’d done eight years ago, when—

You’re not calling J.D. Ryder!

But after an apologetic denial from the caretaker and with every other name in the directory exhausted, she found herself battling a long-buried sense of uneasiness. It would be a simple call, Kirsten told herself desperately. It would be nothing more than the same questions she’d asked three dozen other people. “Have you talked to Brad lately? Did he mention anything about taking the kids on vacation?”

She could do it. She could call him.

All she needed to do was concentrate on finding her children. Ask J.D. a few simple questions. Listen to him with the same focused detachment she’d listened to all those other voices during the past forty minutes, and forget that his voice had ever been more than a simple source of information.

She could do it.

Swallowing a hard, salty knot in the back of her throat, Kirsten reached for the phone.

“Ryder, you just missed a call.”

Jonesy sounded smug about it, J.D. noticed. The guy was probably hoping it would attract notice from upstairs…Ryder’s been out all morning, losing focus ever since he gave notice. Put me in instead.

Well, maybe they would. It was hard to imagine someone as spit-shined as Jonesy taking over the contacts J.D. had spent three years coaxing from the alleys of south Phoenix, but the brass upstairs seldom saw things the way he did. One more reason he’d be glad to get started in Chicago.

“Thanks,” he said, taking the message slip from the junior officer and heading for his desk. The past month of fourteen-hour days had at last reduced the mountain of paperwork to a very short stack, which he hoped his replacement would appreciate. He added this morning’s reports to the pile, checked the vacation-refusal box on the resignation “Freedom Form” someone had finally delivered, then glanced at Jonesy’s message slip and felt a jolt of heat down his spine.

Kirsten Laurence?

It startled him how quickly the sight of her name could still make his skin tighten. Eight years should have put her safely in the realm of old memories, the kind that roused only a vague nostalgia. High-school friends, good old days, Tubac’s Terrific Trio, nothing more than that.

Kirsten…

It was nothing to get excited about, J.D. told himself, initialing his resignation form and dropping it in the battered Out tray. She was probably planning a class reunion, a surprise party for her ex-husband, something like that. Something that required a courtesy call, some message she couldn’t send via Brad…the way she used to send Christmas or birthday greetings whenever he and his old buddy got together for a beer or a Super Bowl game.

Although those greetings had dwindled to a halt even before the divorce two years ago. He had wondered whether he should phone Kirsten with condolences when Brad described the new love of his life—a former Miss Scottsdale whose attraction had faded so quickly that she’d never been mentioned again. But he had decided against it.

There wasn’t much he could say beyond, “I never expected that.” Nobody would’ve expected that if they’d known her and Brad back in high school…the way he had, during those years when the three of them shared a long bus ride each day. They’d become a trio of best friends, which had amazed J.D. even as it warmed him—but still, that long-ago friendship was no justification for getting in touch with Kirsten. She’d probably put him out of her mind a long time ago, and he didn’t need her taking up any more space in his awareness.

The way she would if he let himself hear her voice again.

But this phone message was something he couldn’t ignore. She’d asked for him specifically, which meant it couldn’t be a simple coincidence of her needing some police officer. Not that a Tucson homemaker would likely need a Phoenix narcotics detective in any case, especially one with only two weeks left on the job.

She’d left a new phone number, J.D. noticed, looking at the message slip and steeling himself against the impact of seeing her name again. This wasn’t the number he remembered using for Brad on those rare occasions he’d called his friend in Tucson. But it made sense that Kirsten would’ve found a new place…she probably wouldn’t have wanted to stay in the same house she’d shared with her ex-husband.

An ex-husband J.D. would have pummeled for walking out on her, old friendship or not, if only she hadn’t wound up happier without him.

Brad hadn’t said that, of course. But he had said that after trying to talk Kirsten into a reconciliation and being flatly refused, the only conclusion he could come to was that she preferred someone who’d take more of an interest in the kids.

Which Brad, in spite of his comfortable heritage, apparently never had done. Except at their last meeting in January, J.D. recalled, when his friend had waxed eloquent about the glories of family. “I never realized how great my parents were until that plane crash, and now all I’ve got are the kids. But once the boys and Lindsay come visit this summer, I could keep them with me. Show ’em a great time…Las Vegas, skiing at Telluride, sailing off Catalina Island…”

The list of sites sounded almost like an itinerary, J.D. had thought at the time, but after the Super Bowl broadcast he had dismissed it as “bar talk.” While Brad might conceivably be planning to abscond with his kids, the possibility wasn’t worth mentioning to Kirsten. There was no reason, J.D. had managed to convince himself, for phoning a woman he hadn’t seen in eight years.

A decision he’d come to, he admitted, mainly because of the same uneasiness he was feeling right now.

J.D. flattened the message slip against the front of his desk. Drew it across the curved edge to smooth out its surface. Propped it against the phone and gazed at it, trying to imagine how Kirsten looked—as quietly stunning as ever, probably, with those incredible blond tresses and the perfect skin to match—and how she might sound when he called. Did her voice still have that faint lilt, that occasional edge of huskiness when—

Forget it, Ryder.

It was a phone call, nothing more. No reason to sit here gaping at a piece of paper as if it contained all the promise of a desert rainfall. Torn between annoyance at himself—he was a combat veteran, for God’s sake, and acting like a teenager!—and a grim awareness that he couldn’t quite seem to draw a full breath, J.D. punched the number into his phone.

One ring.

Gazing blankly across the cluttered squadroom, he forced himself to breathe in as much air as he could. If he wound up talking to her answering machine, he should at least sound reasonably in control of his own voice.

Two rings.

Kirsten might not even be there. She spent every summer taking the kids to art classes, swimming, gymnastics, the kind of thing “every mom does,” according to Brad. J.D. knew that wasn’t true of every mom, but he’d never argued the point. Even though he now had plenty of casework to cite, he’d spent the past decade letting his friends believe that their all-American lifestyle was the normal one.

Three rings.

“Hello?”

It was Kirsten. Sounding exactly the way he remembered. J.D. gripped the phone tighter and closed his eyes.

“Kirs, it’s J.D. How’re you doing?”

He could have said something smoother than that, he realized with a twinge of embarrassment as soon as he heard himself. But she hadn’t called to evaluate his social skills. All he needed to do was listen to her reunion invitation, explain he was taking off for Chicago in another few weeks, and put her out of his mind.

Again.

“Oh, I’m glad you called!” The warmth in her voice startled him, it sounded so close to what he’d fantasized about during those nights in basic training. But why would she be so excited about hearing from him now? “I’ve been trying to find anyone who might have talked to Brad lately.”

Well, that answered that. “Ah,” J.D. said, crumpling the message slip and aiming it at the wastebasket behind his desk. “Yeah.”

“I know this is going to sound really strange, but…did he by any chance mention any plans with the children? Because they were supposed to be home today, only his cleaning lady said he was taking them on vacation—and I don’t know where they are.”

J.D. closed his eyes, feeling as if he’d just been sucker-punched. So Brad hadn’t just been shooting off his mouth.

And here you didn’t want to call and warn her….

“Oh, God,” he muttered. “I’m sorry, Kirs.”

“Well, so, I was just hoping—I mean, nobody’s heard anything, and—” With every phrase her voice sounded shakier. “The police said they can’t do anything about a custody violation, and I’ve been asking everyone, only it’s like they—they’re just gone—I mean, it’s probably okay, because when I got the mail there was a…a…what, a postcard, only—”

“Kirsten,” he interrupted. “Take a breath.”

There was a momentary silence, then he heard a quick, shuddering gasp. All right, she was listening to him.

“Good,” J.D. said. “Another breath, okay? A big one.” He couldn’t make up for what he’d failed to do, but he could at least keep her from passing out.

A longer breath. “Okay,” she said, sounding slightly more composed. But then he heard the panic slipping back into her voice. “They’re just gone—and I don’t know what to do!”

Neither did he, but he wasn’t going to tell her that. “It’s okay,” he said in his best soothe-the-assault-victim tone. “We’ll get it handled.” Kirsten was right about the police not pursuing civil cases—which always shocked parents who viewed custody violations as a crime—but he’d make damn sure she got whatever assistance he could line up. “You say you got a postcard?”

“From the Space Needle,” she confirmed. “Brad always takes them there when they first get to Seattle, and they always send me one of those big postcards. Except this time, Lindsay and the boys wrote their names and drew pictures like they always do, and Brad added a note—”

“Can you read it to me?” This was the kind of thing a private investigator should handle, J.D. knew, but he couldn’t think of anyone to recommend in Tucson or Seattle. His only other contacts were cops, who couldn’t offer the kind of help she needed—and yet it was his fault she needed help in the first place. If only he’d phoned her in January….