Baltimore [3.5] Broken Silence Read Free

her?’
    ‘Angel,’ he said. ‘She was wearing a necklace with an angel pendant when she was found.’
    ‘She’s only about six years old.’
    Daphne had been eight when she’d sat at the table with the cheerful therapist. It was another lifetime. It was yesterday , she thought, because the horror of what had happened to her never really went away. She’d been kidnapped with her cousin, locked up by a monster who terrorized her and tortured her cousin. Daphne’s escape had been a miracle. Her cousin hadn’t made it.
    ‘Six was our guess,’ Joseph confirmed. ‘Kate? You want to fill Daphne in on the details?’
    ‘Not really,’ Kate said stubbornly. ‘I still think this is a bad plan. We have therapists, Joseph. We don’t need to drag Daphne into this. Besides, she’s on leave. She shouldn’t be here.’
    Well , Daphne thought, now Kate’s rant about selling tickets to my nervous breakdown makes a helluva lot more sense .
    ‘ Kate .’ Joseph barked her name, his patience obviously frayed.
    Daphne linked her arm through his, leaning into him. Calming him as he’d calmed her. ‘I’m okay, Kate. I promise there won’t be any nervous breakdowns. Tell me the details.’
    ‘Fine.’ Kate crossed her arms over her chest. ‘She was found four days ago sitting in a snowdrift near a burned-out car, on a secluded road west of the city. She was half-frozen and in shock. Covered in blood. Some of it was hers. Most of it wasn’t. There were two bodies in the car, a man and a woman, burned past recognition.’
    Dear God . This precious little girl had seen it happen. Daphne’s eyes filled with tears, but she blinked them back. There would be time for compassion later. Now this child needed another kind of help.
    ‘Their fingerprints were burned off too?’ Daphne asked.
    Kate nodded. ‘Yes. The man had a bullet hole in his chest and another at the base of his skull. The medical examiner thinks the emaciated woman had been terminally ill.. We found no ID on the victims, or clothing for that matter.’
    ‘They were stripped nude?’ Daphne asked, horrified. ‘All of them? Even the little girl?’
    ‘No, the girl was fully clothed. It’s likely that the killer just didn’t want their clothes to identify them,’ Kate said. ‘The M.E. found no evidence of sexual assault.’
    ‘And the child?’
    ‘No evidence of sexual assault was found when she was examined in the ER,’ Joseph assured her, and Daphne’s stomach relaxed a fraction.
    ‘No plates on the car, a ’92 Olds Cutlass,’ Kate continued. ‘No purses or wallets. No scraps of paper or trash. It was completely stripped, the VIN sanded away.’
    ‘Both places?’ Daphne asked, knowing that most cars had the vehicle identification number embossed in two different places. The second place was usually harder to get to.
    ‘Both of them,’ Kate confirmed. ‘Somebody knew what they were doing and they’d come prepared. They doused the car with gasoline but poured polyurethane over the bodies, which made them burn faster. A passing motorist saw the smoke and called 911. Firefighters put out the fire, but the bodies were already charred. Angel was found by a firefighter who was checking the surrounding area for smolder. She hasn’t said a word since she was brought in. She can hear, we know that. There doesn’t appear to be any physical reason for her silence.’
    ‘The trauma is reason enough,’ Daphne murmured. ‘Assuming those were her parents, she witnessed the most horrific thing a child could see. Has no one reported her missing?’
    Joseph exhaled heavily. ‘No one.’
    ‘Her prints aren’t in the missing-children database either,’ Kate added. ‘We put her picture up on the wire four days ago and no one’s stepped forward.’
    ‘Who’s the woman with her?’
    ‘Heidi Breckenridge,’ Joseph said. ‘She’s from social services. I’ve worked with her before. She’s good. But she hasn’t been able to get any response from the