Page 72 of Tear Me Apart
“Did he ever meet her?”
She nods. “The weekend he...we went to Beaver Creek to see her ski. She won the race. He got her autograph. Shook her hand. I have a picture here somewhere, probably on the camera. I... I haven’t looked at the photos.”
“Let me do it. You don’t need to.”
“No,” she says, voice full of steel. “It’s high time I did. Come with me.”
The camera is downstairs in the kitchen, shoved into the back of the junk drawer. She smiles apologetically as she moves screwdrivers and masking tape out of the way. The drawer is incongruous with the rest of the house, and it makes Parks happy to see Andrea Austin Gorman isn’t utterly perfect.
The camera’s battery is dead, but she has the right cord, and within minutes, it is charged enough to start looking through the photos. Outside of paling, and a few excessively loud swallows, Andrea holds it together long enough to find the shots of Gorman and his skiing celebrity crush.
She holds out the camera, and Parks looks closely.
Gorman, grinning ear-to-ear, one hand with fingers up and spread in a rock and roll sign, the other around a teenage girl with long, dark hair and dark eyes.
Parks feels his jaw drop.
“What is it?”
“Can I take this?”
“Um... I...”
“Oh hell, Andi, these are your last pictures of him. Never mind. Tell you what, can I load the pictures onto my computer?”
“That would be fine. Actually, I can dump them onto a thumb drive. Hang tight.” There is a laptop on the counter, and she expertly offloads the photos and hands over the drive.
“Thank you.”
“Can I ask?”
Ever the cop’s wife, discretion is always paramount.
Parks gives her a long look, then gestures to the computer. “May I?”
“Sure.”
He opens Google and types for a moment. A few seconds later, he turns the laptop around.
“Does she look familiar?”
“That’s Mindy Wright.”
He clicks again, and a photo of a young couple loads onto the screen. Side by side, the photos take his breath away.
Andi looks at the screen for a good three seconds before saying, “My God. Do you think—”
“That Gorman may have found Vivian and Zack Armstrong’s kidnapped daughter? Yes. I do.”
And left unsaid are the words they both think.
And it was the last thing he ever did.
* * *
Parks keeps his cool on the drive back to the office. He doesn’t make any calls or set off any alarms. He has a long way to go to figure out what is going on, but his instincts have paid off.
Mindy Wright isn’t a dead ringer for Vivian Armstrong. She is taller, her face leaner. But she has her father’s eyes and her mother’s chin. So much similarity that Parks is sure if he shows a photo of the girl to Zack Armstrong, he’ll be on the first plane out of Nashville to find her.
