Love You More (Tessa Leoni, #1)(23)

Crap, she was tired. Really, truly, bone deep, could curl up on the command center floor and fall asleep right now sort of tired. She couldn’t get used to it. The intense bouts of nausea followed by the nearly deadening sense of fatigue. Five weeks late and her body already wasn’t her own.

What was she going to do? How could she tell Alex, when she still didn’t know how she felt about it herself?

What was she going to do?

Bobby, who’d been in earnest conversation with his lieutenant colonel, finally broke away and took a seat beside her. He stretched out his legs.

“Hungry?” he asked.

“What?”

“It’s after two, D.D. We need lunch.”

She looked at him blankly, not quite believing it was after two and definitely not ready to deal with all the current issues that surrounded mealtimes.

“You okay?” He asked it evenly.

“ ’Course I’m okay! Just … preoccupied. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re still missing a six-year-old girl.”

“Then I have a gift for you.” Bobby held out a piece of paper. “The lieutenant colonel just had this faxed over. It’s from Tessa Leoni’s file, and it includes an emergency contact other than her husband.”

“What?”

“Mrs. Brandi Ennis. Guess she watched Sophie when Trooper Leoni was on patrol and Brian Darby out to sea.”

“Hot damn.” D.D. grabbed the paper, skimmed the contents, then flipped open her phone.

Brandi Ennis answered on the first ring. Yes, she’d seen the news. Yes, she wanted to talk. Immediately. At her home would be fine. She provided an address.

“Give us fifteen minutes,” D.D. assured the elderly-sounding woman. Then she and Bobby were out the door.


Twelve minutes later, D.D. and Bobby pulled up in front of a squat brick apartment building. Peeling white trim around small windows. Crumbling concrete on the front stoop.

Low-income housing, D.D. decided, which was probably still a stretch for most of its inhabitants.

A couple of kids were playing in the snow out front, trying to fashion a sad-looking snowman. They spotted two cops getting out of their car and immediately bolted inside. D.D. grimaced. Countless hours of community relations later, and the next generation was still as suspicious of the police as the first. It didn’t make any of their lives easier.

Mrs. Ennis lived on the second floor, Unit 2C. Bobby and D.D. took the stairs up, knocking lightly on the scarred wooden door. Mrs. Ennis opened before D.D.’s fist had even dropped down, obviously waiting for them.

She gestured them inside a small but tidy studio apartment. Kitchen cabinets to the left, kitchen table to the right, brown floral sleeper sofa straight ahead. The TV was on, blaring away on top of a cheap microwave stand. Mrs. Ennis took a second to cross the space and snap it off. Then she asked them politely if they’d like some tea or coffee.

D.D. and Bobby declined. Mrs. Ennis bustled at the cabinets anyway, putting on a pot of water, getting down a package of Nilla wafers.

She was an older woman, probably late sixties, early seventies. Steel gray hair cut no-nonsense short. Wearing a dark blue running suit over a petite, stoop-shouldered frame. Her gnarled hands shook slightly as she opened the box of cookies, but she moved briskly, a woman who knew what she was about.

D.D. took a moment to wander the space, just in case Sophie Leoni was magically sitting on the sofa with her gap-tooth smile, or maybe playing with duckies in the bath, or even tucked inside the lone closet to hide from her abusive parents.

As she closed the closet door, Mrs. Ennis said calmly, “You may sit now, Detective. I don’t have the child, nor would I ever do that to her poor mother.”

Sufficiently chastised, D.D. shed her heavy winter coat and took a seat. Bobby was already munching on a Nilla wafer. D.D. eyed them. When her stomach did not flip-flop in protest, she reached out carefully. Simple foods such as crackers and dry cereal had been good to her thus far. She took several experimental bites, then decided she might be in luck, because now that she thought about it, she was starving.

“How long have you known Tessa Leoni?” D.D. asked.

Mrs. Ennis had taken a seat, clutching a mug of tea. Her eyes appeared red, as if she’d been crying earlier, but she seemed composed now. Ready to talk.

“I first met Tessa seven years ago, when she moved into the building. Across the hall, apartment 2D. Also a studio, though she changed to a one bedroom not long after Sophie was born.”

“You met her before Sophie was born?” D.D. asked.

“Yes. She was three, four months pregnant. Just this little thing with this little belly. I heard a crash and came out into the hallway. Tessa had been trying to carry a box filled with pots and pans up the stairs and it had broken on her. I offered to help, which she declined, but I picked up her chicken fryer anyway and that’s how it began.”

“You became friends?” D.D. clarified.

“I would have her over for dinner on occasion and she would return the favor. Two lone females in the building. It was nice to have some company.”

“And she was already pregnant?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“She talk much about the father?”

“She never mentioned him at all.”

“What about dating, social life, visits from her family?”