Love You More_ A Novel - Lisa Gardner [84]
Brian had died for her. Now I would survive for her.
Anything to get my daughter back.
“I’m coming,” I whispered. “Be brave, sweetheart. Be brave.”
“What?” Erica said, from the top bunk where she was mindlessly flipping cards.
“Nothing.”
“Window won’t break,” she stated. “No escaping that way!” Erica cackled as if she’d told a great joke.
I turned toward my roommate. “Erica, the pay phone in the commons area—can I use that to make a call?”
She stopped playing her cards.
“Who you gonna call?” she asked with interest.
“Ghostbusters,” I said, straight-faced.
Erica cackled again. Then she told me what I needed to know.
24
Bobby wanted to stop for dinner. D.D. did not.
“You need to take better care of yourself,” Bobby informed her.
“And you need to stop fussing over me!” she snapped back, as they drove through the streets of Boston. “I never liked it before and I don’t like it now.”
“No.”
“Excuse me?”
“I said no. And you can’t make me.”
D.D. twisted in the passenger’s seat until she could glare straight at him. “You do realize pregnant women are expected to be hormonal and crazy. Meaning I could kill you now, and as long as there’s one mother on the jury, I’d get away with it.”
Bobby smiled. “Ahh, Annabelle used to say the same thing!”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake—”
“You’re pregnant,” he interrupted her. “Men like to fuss over pregnant women. It gives us something to do. We also, secretly, love to fuss over babies. Why, the first time you bring in the infant to meet your squad … I bet Phil will knit a pair of booties. Neil … I’m guessing he’ll provide Looney Tunes Band-Aids and the baby’s first bike helmet.”
D.D. stared at him. She hadn’t thought of booties, Band-Aids, or bringing the kid to work. She was still working on baby, let alone Life with Baby.
She had a text from Alex: Heard about the arrest, how goes the rest of the battle?
She hadn’t answered. She didn’t know what to say. Sure, they’d arrested Tessa Leoni, but they’d also failed to find six-year-old Sophie. And the sun had gone down for the second time, now thirty-six hours since the initial Amber Alert, but probably two full days since Sophie had gone missing. Except, most likely the Amber Alert didn’t matter. Most likely Tessa Leoni had killed her entire family, including Sophie.
D.D. wasn’t working a missing persons case; she was leading a murder investigation to recover a child’s body.
She wasn’t ready to think about that yet. Not prepared for Alex’s gentle, but always probing questions. Nor did she know how to segue from that conversation to Oh yes, and I’m pregnant, which you haven’t heard yet, but Bobby Dodge knows all about, having been informed by a female murder suspect.
These were exactly the kind of situations that made D.D. a workaholic. Because finding Sophie and nailing Tessa would make her feel better. While talking to Alex about the new world order would only be falling deeper and deeper down the rabbit’s hole.
“What you need is a falafel,” Bobby said now.
“Gesundheit,” D.D. answered.
“Annabelle loved them when she was pregnant. It’s meat, isn’t it? You can’t stand the smell of meat.”
D.D. nodded. “Eggs don’t do wonders for me either.”
“Hence, Mediterranean food, with its many and varied vegetarian dishes.”
“Do you like falafels?” D.D. asked suspiciously.
“No, I like Big Macs, but that’s probably not going to work for you right now—”
D.D. shook her head.
“So falafels it is.”
Bobby knew a place. Apparently a favorite of Annabelle’s. He went inside to order, D.D. stayed in the car to avoid kitchen odors and catch up on voice mail. She started by returning Phil’s call, asking him to rerun Brian Darby’s financials, while digging deeper for other accounts or transactions, possibly under a family name or an alias. If Darby had a gambling habit, they should be able to see its impact on his bank account, with large sums of money coming and going, or perhaps a series of cash withdrawals from ATMs at Foxwoods, Mohegan