I apologize for taking so long to update, guys. I hope this was worth the wait. Enjoy.
"Alright people, what've got?" Woody asked when he came through the door marked 1407. Although his limp made it difficult for him to appear strong and commanding, he used his voice and attitude to prove to everyone in the room that he was in control. As he moved further into the apartment, his colleagues quickly filled his hands with phone records, notes from interviews with neighbors and reports from CSU. When he'd made it half way to the kitchen he noticed a familiar face at the table.
"What's up, Doc?" he asked, when he'd crossed onto the tiles of the kitchen floor. Dr. Macy stood and extended one hand to the detective and clapped the other on his shoulder.
"How you doin', Woody?" he asked with a sincere smile. Woody jerked his head towards his cane.
"I could do without this," he said. At the mention of his injury, the pair fell awkwardly silent. Without missing a beat, Renee saved them from talking about how their lives had changed since they'd last seen one another.
"We've been through most of the boxes," she started, directing her attention to Detective Hoyt. "These are the guys we've found that have been paroled in the last six months and who I think are capable of this." She handed him a slip of paper with fourteen names and fourteen addresses on it.
Woody scanned the list quickly. He recognized only one name; Ricky Framingham. During his first year in Boston, Woody had helped put Ricky away for attempted murder. Ricky was what Woody, and anyone else who knew him, would refer to as 'bad news'. As far as Woody knew, Ricky had never killed anyone; it just seemed that when people were murdered, Ricky's name always came up. When a crime was committed in Boston, chances were good that Ricky knew something about it. Woody doubted Ricky had taken Grace, but as he divided the names on the list between his fellow detectives he kept Ricky's address for himself. He wanted to hear what Ricky had to say first hand.
"Miss Walcott, I've just spoken to your neighbor in 1402, Miranda Owens." Woody said when the other detectives had their assignments. The district attorney raised her eyebrows and sealed her mouth into a harsh line.
"Did you?" she said quietly. Her tone made Woody suspect she was hiding something.
"Yeah, do you know her?" he asked innocently.
"Not really," she admitted. "Eddie knows her better than I do." She put her hands on her hips then, anxious for him to get to the point of his questions.
"Why's that? She's your neighbor, not his." Woody noticed then, the uncomfortable way Dr. Macy looked around the room at the mention of the ex-husband. He wondered briefly if he should have approached Miss Walcott in private.
"Because, detective," she started with an annoyed grin, obviously not caring who heard what she was about to say, "He's sleeping with her. Did he forget to mention that when you talked to him?" Woody flipped through his notebook even though he knew Mr. Thomas hadn't said a word about his girlfriend.
"The ex-wife and the kid a few doors down. That must be weird," Woody said to no one in particular. He made a quick note in his book to speak to Mr. Thomas about Miss Owens before handing Miss Walcott her telephone records. "I'm going to go talk to this Ricky Framingham character." he announced. "I need you to look through those records and let me know if there are any numbers you don't recognize." Before she could agree to do what he'd asked the phone on the kitchen wall gave a sharp, piercing ring.
Renee's stomach churned at the sound. Everyone was suddenly silent and every eye was on her. Detective Hoyt motioned to a technician in the living room. The technician slipped into a set of head phones and went to work on the buttons and wires of the recording device he'd set up on the counter. When he gave the signal to Hoyt, he turned to Renee.
"Take a deep breath; keep him on the phone as long as you can." Renee nodded slowly. She knew the procedure but as she reached for the phone she feared that she wouldn't be able to hold herself together long enough to speak with Grace's kidnapper. She cleared her throat and pressed the receiver to her ear.
"Hello?" she said as calmly as she could. She took another deep breath, closed her eyes and everyone else in the room disappeared while she waited for a voice on the line.
"Renee," the voice said, "I just saw you on the news, what's going on?" Renee sighed and turned to face the others. She waved her hand across the room to let everyone know the call was a false alarm and let her palm fall in the center of Garret's chest as if to steady herself. Unbeknownst to her, he had been less than a step away since the phone first rang. He was looking directly into her eyes now as she spoke into the phone.
"Jesus, Mom," she muttered and then launched into a brief recap of what had happened this morning. As Renee listened to her mother's questions and concerns, she slowly balled Garret's shit into her fist. "Mom, I can't really talk you right now, okay?" she said finally, her voice pleading for her mother to hang up the phone. "I'll call you as soon as I know anything." With her eyes still locked on his, Renee hung up the phone and tapped her fist lightly against Garret's chest. "I'll be right back," she announced, then turned on her heels and headed for the bathroom.
Renee locked the bathroom door behind her quickly crossed the tiles to the edge of the bathtub. She sat there for a moment, rocking slightly with her hands pressed between her knees. The sick feeling intensified in her stomach and bile rose in her throat. A second later she was on her knees, bent over the toilet, using both hands to hold her hair from her face and crying the first of many tears that would come that day.
x x x
He hadn't seen her or heard from anyone who had in over an hour and it worried him. Grace had been missing for more than six hours and Renee was holding everything together marvelously well. But Garret knew better than to take her at her word when she said she was fine to believe her when she gave a hopeful smile. He put down he'd been sifting through and went to find her.
The apartment was large but its open concept left few doors behind which she could hide. When he twisted the knob on her bedroom door he heard someone move inside. Deciding now, that perhaps she didn't want to be found, Garret rapped lightly on the door and quietly called her name. She didn't invite him in, but she didn't tell him to go away either. Taking this as a good sign, Garret eased into the room, opening the door only as much as he had to in order to squeeze through, and pressed it delicately closed behind him.
Renee didn't look up when she heard him enter. Instead she stared unseeing out the window. She was sitting on the floor in the dark, her back pressed against the frame of her bed and her knees tucked up to her chest. Beside her, the shallow drawer of her nightstand was open. If she had leaned an inch or so to the left, she might have hit her head against its handle. Almost everything in the drawer had been thrown aside and now lay in a heap on the floor. It took Garret only a second to realize she had been scrounging for the 'in case of emergency' pack of cigarettes she hid in the back of the drawer.
The air around her was heavy with smoke and Garret could see she'd smoked close to half the pack already. Outside the day had turned a violent grey, as if to mimic their situation. The dark shine of the nervous and promising sky cast Renee in a silvery blue haze, punctuated by the orange glow that swelled and faded with every drag on her cigarette. Standing in the doorway, less than ten feet away, Garret thought she might have looked like a lounge singer hand she been sitting at a piano rather than on her bedroom floor. Her tired eyes and soft lips waited tensely for the next pull on the cigarette that dangled expensively between her fingers.
"I thought I'd come see how you were doing," Garret said finally. Renee didn't respond, only tapped her cigarette towards the floor where it's ashes dropped expertly into the half empty water glass at her feet. Garret waited for what seemed like forever for her to speak. When she didn't, he turned and reached for the door handle. Before he could turn it, he finally heard her voice. It was so timid and nervous that he thought perhaps he had imagined it, but when he turned back into the room, she said it again.
"Don't." And he didn't. Instead he crossed the room and sat on the floor beside her. When she dropped her spent cigarette in to the glass a moment later, Garret watched it fall as if mesmerized by it. He watched the butt bob once under the water then settle on the surface. When he looked back up, he found that Renee had shaken another Marlboro out of the emergency package. The cigarette dripped perfectly from her lip and Garret thought for a moment about how in high school, he and his friends had thought smoking was just about the sexiest thing a woman could do. Since then he'd grown up, become a doctor and now he knew better. But right now, with her cigarettes and pain, Garret thought Renee looked just like the women he and his buddies had fantasized about. The allusion was broken a breath later when Renee struck a match and brought it ever closer to her mouth. Garret watched as the flame trembled in her shaking hands and finally burned out. She dropped the hot match into the water where it hissed for only a second. When the first match was silent, she tried another. Again, the tremors in her hand shook the flame out before it reached her cigarette.
"Here," Garret said quietly and turned to face her. He picked the match book from the floor, struck one and lit her cigarette. When he dropped it, it plunked and hissed in the water but, this time, Garret didn't watch it. Instead his attention was focused on the black streaks that coursed down each of Renee's cheeks.
When Renee realized what he was seeing, a few more tears fell from the corners of her eyes and burned through the make-up stains on her face. Moved by her quiet and uncharacteristic display of emotion, Garret took her hand in his own and laced his fingers through hers. When she didn't pull away, Garret resumed his original position with his back pressed against the bed. He stretched his legs out in front of him and set his gaze out the window and through it, saw the dark and hopeless day Renee had been staring at.
They stayed that way for a long time and soon rain started to beat hard against the glass. When the thunder came, Garret tightened his grip oh her hand, only letting go to light another cigarette for her.