Angel Interrupted by Chaz McGee Read Free Book Online

brawling and all the doctors were just pushing the cases through and that—” His voice broke and he stopped to regain control. “That woman cared enough about my son to take a second look at his scan when the doctors had dismissed it and, because of her, they had him in surgery within half an hour. It saved his life. She deserves some justice. It’s all I can give her, but I owe it to her.”
    “I understand, sir,” Maggie said. “I won’t let it go.”
    “I know you won’t. That’s why I put you on it.”
    “Unfortunately, that means Calvano needs to be lead on the missing kid case,” she said for him. “They might be related.”
    “Do you think they are?”
    “Only in the sense that whoever took the boy used the first crime as a distraction and was able to get away unnoticed.”
    “You’re sure?’ Gonzales asked.
    “The time frames are different. MO is different. No connection between victims.”
    “What about the mother?” he asked. “Could she have harmed her boy?”
    Maggie looked so sad at the mention of the missing boy’s mother. She wasn’t just empathetic to people, she assumed their sorrow and carried it inside her for the duration of a case. “It’s not her, sir. I talked to her briefly, but I had to have her taken to emergency psych. She’s broken. Lost her husband a year ago. Her kid is all she has. She thinks it’s her fault. It’s not her.”
    “You’re sure about that?” Gonzales was being very careful; he’d had enough public relations disasters thanks, in part, to me.
    Maggie nodded. “She didn’t have the time, she doesn’t have the motive, and she didn’t have the means. Witnesses saw her with her kid seconds before the crime scene distracted everyone, and there’s no way she could have killed him and hidden the body far enough away to avoid detection. We’d have found something. He was taken, sir. I put three offices on a closer search of the park, though it’s been trampled by volunteers. I doubt they’ll find anything.”
    “We can’t stop people from wanting to help.”
    “Not when there are six of us and sixty of them.”
    “We’re going to have a lot more than six people on our side, and you don’t have to worry about Calvano screwing it up. I made a decision, and then I made a call. The feds are coming in on the missing child case.” Gonzales noticed Maggie’s smile. “Yes, Gunn, Calvano will have to deal with them instead of you.”
    “When will they be here?”
    “They’re in Baltimore wrapping up another case, but they’ll be here tonight.”
    “You know that Calvano’s going to roust that poor neighbor before they get here,” she predicted. “He’ll want to get his licks in while he can.”
    “The guy might be involved,” Gonzales warned her. “Calvano’s been right before.”
    “From what I hear, Robert Michael Martin is just some poor guy who wants to be a hero,” Maggie said. “He’s not organized enough or motivated enough to have done what this abductor did. I think we’re looking for a pro.”
    Gonzales sighed. “What kind of world has professional child abductors?”
    “Our world?” Maggie suggested.
    Gonzales regained his professional detachment. “I want you to ignore the media, ride herd on Calvano, and find out who did this to Fiona.”
    “What about the boy?” She sounded wistful. Like everyone, she wanted to help.
    “You’re going to work on that, too.”
    “How?”
    “Use the Harker case as a cover but, when you can, I want you to pursue any local angles on the kid, all right? You and I know the feds are going to come in with a profile and they’re going to broaden the search—but this is a small enough town that someone, somewhere, knows who it was. Or at least suspects who it was. He was taken from the heart of town. There’s got to be a local connection. I want us to be the ones who find it.”
    “So you want me to solve the Harker case, and find out who took the boy, and keep Calvano in line all