Page 111 of Keep This Promise
“All right.”
I follow Emmett into the cell where Ryan spends his days and nights. He looks up, eyes narrowing when Emmett closes the door.
“What do you two want?” Ryan asks with disgust in every syllable.
I don’t waste time. “Where is my daughter?”
I watch as his eyes widen for a second. “What?”
“My daughter. Where is she?”
“How the hell would I know? I didn’t even know you had a daughter.”
I grab my phone and pull up the picture of her smiling with her doll. I took it last week after she had gotten done spinning and laughing as she sang a song. “This is Eden. She’s three, and she has diabetes. She was taken from my house.”
Ryan looks at the screen and then shakes his head. “I don’t know what the hell you’re here for. I have an alibi for that.”
“My daughter had ties to someone I think you know. There was a note that stated a paramedic took the girls. Well, you’re a paramedic, and you took girls.”
“I didn’t take kids.”
Emmett huffs. “I beg to differ, but we’re not here to debate semantics with you. We have reason to believe there may be a connection to the people who took Eden and the people you worked for.”
He laughs once. “I’ve been in jail for the last how many months? I don’t know who your daughter is or what connections anyone has. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some reading to do.” Ryan grabs his book and tosses his leg over the other.
Emmett was right. This was a mistake. “She’s the sweetest little thing. Her smile can make even the hardest man fall to his knees. Last week, she almost went into a diabetic coma, and that’s what’ll happen in about three hours when her medication runs out. Her blood sugar will rise, and her organs will malfunction. Her body can’t regulate itself, and you know this. You’re a paramedic. You know what that’ll look like, and you know she’ll die. I’m not asking you because I give a fuck if the person you work for goes to jail. I just want my daughter back. I am asking you to save a patient who is in desperate need. Please. Please help me. Just tell me where we should look or . . . a name. Something.”
Ryan closes the book and slowly places it on the bed. “Why should I believe any of this?”
“Because I shouldn’t be here. I never should have come into this room, and Emmett sure as fuck wouldn’t have let me if it weren’t a matter of life or death. I am asking you as a father, please give me something . . . unless you are a monster who wants a child to die.”
That causes him to jerk his head up. “I am not a monster.”
Emmett steps a little closer. “No one said you were.”
Although, we definitely think it. “If you’re not, this is your chance to prove it. Who would do this? Where would they take her? Why would they abduct a little girl? They said they want money, we don’t have money, but . . .”
Ryan lifts his hand. “I don’t know what is going on. I’ve been stuck in this place with only a few visitors. However, when I joined the organization, our goalwasto help others. To make a better world and offer an alternative to the drugs on the streets. I lost count of how many times I had to use Narcan to save a girl who ran away, thinking she could escape whatever issues she had, only to watch her end up with more. I don’t know when things changed,” he muses. “It’s funny how it happens. One day, you’re doing good, and the next, the money is coming in like you can’t fathom. It changes you. It changed me. I’m not a monster, Holden, but I worked for one.”
“Who is he?” Emmett asks carefully.
“There is nohe. But if that person took your daughter, it means the money ran out. There is nothing they care about more than that.”
This conversation is going nowhere. I need to go back to that safety deposit box and find something that tells us where the money is or who is pulling the strings because Ryan Wilkinson isn’t going to give us the answers. “Let’s go,” I say to Emmett. “I have to go back to Sophie.”
“I’m assuming you searched the house in Portland after I was arrested?” Ryan asks as Emmett is unlocking the door.
Emmett’s hand pauses. “Of course we did. It was empty.”
Ryan clears his throat. “Might be worth checking the cellar in the garage. I’m sure you never looked there, but that’s just a hunch.”
* * *
“You both stay here,” Jackson commands when we’re half a block away from the house where Eden might be.
While I was at the courthouse, Sophie got another call, explaining where to put the money, and if we didn’t get it to them in the next two hours, we’d never see Eden again.
After Emmett relayed the information Ryan gave us, Jackson and his team headed to the Portland house and have been doing reconnaissance for the last hour and a half, watching to see any movement. About fifteen minutes after we arrived, they got confirmation of people inside the home that should be vacant, and a two-man team has eyes on the garage, which they believe sits over the back basement Ryan pointed us to. A heat signature showed someone enter and then disappear.
