Gone (Deadly Secrets #2)(44)
“Sleep good?” he asked as if nothing had happened last night.
Raegan lifted the cup to her lips and sipped, then turned for the table. “No.”
“That’s too bad. I did.” He poured more coffee into his mug. “I forgot how comfortable that couch is.”
A memory flashed. One of Alec snoozing on that same couch with an infant Emma snoring softly on his chest.
Her heart pinched, but she pushed the memory away and sat, focusing in on the eggs and sausage he’d cooked. When he sat next to her with nothing but his coffee, she frowned. “Aren’t you eating?”
“Already did. Dig in before it gets cold.”
Dammit, he’d made sausage links, her favorite. He didn’t even like sausage. He preferred bacon. Why the hell was he being so nice to her? She scooped up a bite of eggs and chewed begrudgingly.
“So I made us an appointment for an interview with the second family this afternoon. The husband gets off work around two. They said they could see us at two thirty.”
Shock rippled through Raegan as she lifted a piece of sausage with her fork. “You already called them?”
“Yeah.” He rose from the table, grasped papers she hadn’t noticed were scattered all over the coffee table, and came back. “I was looking through these files last night, and I found something of interest. Each of these families in the Portland area was receiving social services through the state for food assistance, basic services like health care, or were part of the Family Support and Connections program that provides parenting classes and resources.” He laid the papers out so she could see them.
Raegan was still reeling from the fact he’d taken the initiative to make those calls when his words hit her. “All three of them? Are you sure?”
He nodded. “I called Barbara Willig this morning. The Willig family’s caseworker was a man named Conner Murray. I also put a call in to the Oregon Department of Human Services and left a message. Someone’s supposed to call me back regarding the other two families.”
“You think they might have the same caseworker?”
“Would be quite a coincidence if they did, don’t you think?”
Raegan glanced back down at the papers. “Yeah, it would be.”
He shuffled the papers together into a stack. “I also heard back from Hunt. The girl we saw at the hospital? She’s autistic. Nonverbal. Looks completely normal but has trouble forming attachments. She’d been missing about a week when she turned up.”
“Were any of the other kids autistic?”
“Not that I’ve been able to find.”
She looked down at the papers. “Then I don’t see how her being autistic has anything to do with anything else.”
“Stay with me a second. We’re brainstorming, right?” He shifted in his seat and smiled, and the rare curve of his lips pushed away the last of her irritation and made her focus in on him. “It’s odd no child remains have been found or reported to the police. If we assume these cases are linked and that someone is kidnapping young kids and killing them, then someone would have found something by now. Let’s face it. Criminals make mistakes, and some of these cases go back at least ten years. Mistakes are how all serial killers are caught.”
Sickness brewed in Raegan’s stomach, but she listened to what he was saying because she knew they had to consider the fact this was a serial killer at work. His targets, for whatever reason, were just much younger. “Okay, go on.”
“It’s possible this person’s taking kids for organ harvesting.”
She’d already thought of that. That sickness rolled faster, killing her appetite. “We should check blood types on all these kids. See if there are any similarities there as well. We should also check out child transplant surgery lists in the Northwest and try to find which transplant companies were used.”
“I agree. But I’m not convinced these kids are being killed.”
Her brow lowered because that wasn’t what she’d expected him to say. Especially considering what he believed had happened to their daughter. “Why not?”
He flipped through the case files in his hands. “All the kids here were healthy, normal children, and they’re still missing. The only kid who’s turned up is the autistic girl found wandering in a park, alone, ten miles from her house. No one has any idea how she got there, not even her.”
“That’s not true. There’s the boy who was found in the back of that car on the highway.”
“Right. A normal, healthy boy. In a getaway car. That had engine trouble.” He pulled his notepad from the bottom of the stack of files and read off what he’d scribbled there. “I talked to the police this morning. The timing belt in that car was busted. It wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. It was also found not far out of the city where traffic’s still pretty heavy. What if the kid was sleeping in the backseat, and the guy left to get help, and before he could get back someone checked the car? Or what if he freaked when the car broke down and just ran, leaving his cargo behind?”
Raegan wasn’t thrilled with the way Alec used the word “cargo,” but she set her fork down, understanding where he was going. “You’re hypothesizing that if the same person is abducting all these kids, then the boy being left in the car was a fluke, but the autistic girl showing up alone in a park was not.”