Page 68 of Chasing Dreams
The next envelope held a small white shoe with yellowed laces and a pink and blue flower embroidered on the top. Ken made a note in his pocket spiral. He raised a brow at Austin and Shaine.
Shaine had never seen the shoe before. “It’s a girl’s shoe, and besides, it’s too small.”
The final envelope held a miniature spoon with rubber protecting the bowl.
Again Shaine shook her head, this time with confusion and discouragement weighting her thoughts. “Are you sure you have the right things? We’re looking for the items left in a white Corsica on—what was the date?”
Ken filled the date in for her.
The detective slid the file toward himself and pulled out several blown-up photographs. “Here are the photos from the scene. You can see the shoe just under the edge of the passenger seat.” He thumbed through the papers. “The spoon was found behind the rear seat, the bottle in the trunk behind a box of old magazines that the Lorenz woman was planning to take to a thrift store.
“That’s not Jack’s shoe,” Shaine supplied. “He was too old for a bottle, and there was no spoon in Maggie’s car when he was taken. This stuff belongs to another child.”
Horrified at the implication, she leaned her forehead into her hand and gripped her temples against the headache she could sense building.
“Can we have about thirty minutes?” Ken asked.
She looked up to see the detective glance from Ken to Austin. “The evidence stays right here.”
“We’re not going anywhere,” Ken replied.
With a slightly offended attitude, Parker silently swaggered from the room.
“What’s this about?” Shaine asked almost resentfully. “None of this stuff is Jack’s.”
“But it’s from the car,” Ken said logically.
“And it hasn’t been touched or otherwise contaminated in all this time,” Austin filled in, getting up and moving to sit in the chair Parker had vacated.
Shaine took her hand from her forehead and stared at him. If this meant what she thought it meant, they’d gotten themselves into something bigger than they’d anticipated. “What are you going to do?” she asked.
Austin looked her in the eye. “I’m going to find out what these things have to do with Jack.”
Chapter 14
Austin used one of the empty envelopes to pull the small white shoe toward him. He studied it for a few seconds, preparing himself, relaxing.
Ken, who’d seen the procedure many times, settled onto a chair to wait.
Austin tuned out Shaine’s tense energy and picked up the shoe. A familiar, yet still surprising current ran up his arm. The leather was soft and pliant, the soft gray sole unscuffed. He covered it with his other palm and turned his perspective inward.
A dynamic force of energy swirled and stretched and bent itself into colors and sounds and smells that he absorbed, sorting the senses and forms into manageable snips.
“Her name is Amy.”
It was even harder to pick up on intelligible information than it had been from Jack’s perspective, but he had her, and now all he had to do was traverse the collective and developing images until he found something he could lock into.
It took a while to sift through and find what he wanted, but no one said anything to disturb him.
“Someone watched her for weeks,” he said finally. “Her mother’s young. Very young. The same man is here. I can sense him, but he’s not alone. He didn’t do this by himself, and he didn’t choose this baby.”
Rossi. The name came to him like a divine gift. “Rossi staked out the mother and baby as easy prey. Then he...” The picture shifted and took a new shape, and Austin knew the man who’d taken the baby was only part of a bigger scheme. The one who took the most risks. The one who believed he deserved the most money.
“I have the baby,” he said, inside the kidnapper’s head now. “It’s so stinkin’ easy to get these kids.” Austin detailed directions to a remote location with the word Greasewood in it. It was off Highway 191, which ran north and south from Interstate 10. “There’s a house. Some outbuildings. It’s hot and dry. I leave the kid here and pick up my money at a post office box.”
“See if you can get something more on the baby,” Ken said, his words a gentle direction.
Austin refocused and found a guide point to search from. He scanned each new page that opened to him, backing away from the cloudy unfocused pictures he recognized as the baby’s, and concentrating on the man’s.
