Page 16 of Bad Mother

Something nagged at Sienna, and she glanced around the room again before her gaze stopped on the coffee table where the photograph had been placed, along with the food wrappers. There was a clear plastic cup still half-full of soda and a few almost-melted pieces of ice.

“Trevor? Who brought you this food?” she asked. Because the drink had to be less than a few hours old, and the half-eaten burger next to it looked mostly fresh as well.

“The man,” he said.

Kat and Sienna frowned in unison. “What man, Trevor?” Sienna asked.

Trevor shrugged, tears filling his eyes again. “I don’t know. He brought me food, but he didn’t stay.”

Sienna’s nerves prickled, and she glanced toward the door as though the unknown man Trevor had just spoken of might suddenly walk through it. But the door was closed. She looked back at the wrappers again, representing several different fast-food locations. He had to have been bringing Trevor food for days. Someone had made sure this kid stayed fed.But who?

CHAPTER EIGHT

Reva Keeling, fifty-four, had left for work three days before, worked an eight-hour shift seemingly without incident, clocked out, and not been seen again until she’d appeared upright in a chair, dead, and clutching a handful of playing cards.

Her boss suspected she might have gotten mixed up with drugs, as she’d recently exhibited some erratic behavior, and she’d become less and less reliable in the last few months. He looked slightly guilty when he admitted he’d been planning on firing her but had put it off, knowing she was raising a grandson by herself after her daughter had OD’d. “You’d think after what happened to her daughter, Reva wouldn’t touch the stuff,” the boss said. “But people are messed up.”

Yes. Yes, they certainly can be,Sienna thought.

Before leaving work, Reva had used her employee discount to order the steak dinner they’d found mostly undigested in her stomach, canceling out the likelihood that she’d been on a date.

They hadn’t been able to locate any family members, and so the little boy, Trevor, was currently in the custody of Child Protective Services. Sienna had dropped him off there herself, and her stomach twisted at the memory of the way the boy had resolutely taken the hand of the woman who ran the group home, his little canvas overnight bag hooked over his bony shoulder.

“Hey,” Kat said, looking up from the paperwork in front of her as Sienna approached their desks. “How’d it go?”

“As heartbreaking as you might expect.”

Kat nodded knowingly. “It gets worse. The victim’s parents are still alive, and even though they’re in their seventies, healthy from all indications, they’ve been estranged from their daughter for over three decades now. They live in Boulder and didn’t even know the great-grandson existed, nor do they want a thing to do with him. ‘I’m sure that boy’s about as useless as his mother and his grandmother’ is what the woman who answered the phone said, right before she hung up on me. As if they weren’t her own flesh and blood at all. Cold, huh?”

Sienna made a huffing sound. That about covered it. Her job was full of heartbreaking stories involving kids, but each one still burned. Those cases simultaneously made her want to quit her job so the little faces would cease running through her head when she woke in the middle of the night and to do her job with a mad vengeance, to work until all hours of the day, to toil weekends and holidays, never taking a vacation lest she miss the opportunity to help just one.

Justone.

“I don’t get people,” she said.

“Be grateful for that,” Kat answered. “The minute you startgettingpeople like that is the minute you should lock yourself in your car and turn on the exhaust.”

Despite the macabre statement, Sienna chuckled. She sat down at her desk, facing Kat. “Were the fast-food places able to offer anything?” Kat had taken an inventory of the fast food that the unnamed stranger had brought to Trevor over the last few days and gone to a couple of nearby locations while Sienna was making sure Trevor was situated.

“Nothing. Without a description or a time the guy might have stopped in, no one could tell me anything.”

Sienna sighed. “I figured as much.” They’d asked the forensic lab to rush the DNA and fingerprint report on the packaging, but that wouldstill take several days at least. As far as which restaurant he’d purchased the food at, if the guy was smart and didn’t want to be found out, he’d surely have gone to a fast-food place across town and not right down the street from the little boy he was mysteriously feeding. “Do you think the guy taking food to Trevor is the killer and was feeding him out of some sense of guilt?”

Kat tapped a pen against her chin. “Could be, but that scenario speaks more to a crime of passion. You know, lovers’ spat gets out of hand; she dies; he feels remorse, panics, knows about the kid at home, and makes sure he stays alive until police find him.” More tapping as her gaze moved upward. “No, Reva Keeling’s body was posed. And there were no other injuries, except those made by the murder weapon. I don’t think it was a crime of passion. There was purpose to her death. If it was a fight that ended badly, her body would have been hidden somewhere.”

Sienna nodded. She agreed with Kat’s assessment. And to add to it, Trevor had said his grandma didn’t have any male friends, nor did he recognize the man who’d brought him food.

But if he wasn’t feeding Trevor out of a sense of guilt or responsibility for the fact that the kid was alone and defenseless, then what was his reason? They’d questioned Trevor a little more when they’d first arrived at the station, but he hadn’t been able to offer much. His description of “the man” was vague at best. He was not as old as his grandmom, closer to Kat’s and Sienna’s age, and he had brown hair. Or maybe black. Sienna was tempted to be frustrated by Trevor’s inability to give them any additional details, but the kid wasn’t even six years old, and he was traumatized.

“Forensics found her phone in her bedroom,” Kat said as though reading her mind. “They’re going to put a rush on it, see if anything interesting comes up.”

“Do you think she just forgot her phone at home?”

Kat shrugged. “Probably. If she was getting high on a regular basis, she was probably forgetting a lot of things.”

Like her grandson. For days at a time.And that was before she’d had the excuse of being dead. Sienna picked up the copies of the two notes and glanced over them yet again. They’d followed what leads they could but so far come up with squat. She looked at the photo of the cards that had been left in Reva Keeling’s hand. They meant nothing to her.

What were the suits? Of the cards the victim was holding?

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