Chapter 3

THREE

Josie stood to the side of the trail, under the shade of a maple tree, and watched as Officer Hummel, the unofficial head of the Denton Police Department’s Evidence Response Team, took photos of the stroller. With each series, he moved in closer, until the camera was solely focused on the polaroid in the center of the car seat. Shifting the baby in her arms, Josie took out her cell phone, pulled up her photo gallery, and studied the shot of it that she’d snapped earlier. The quality was terrible, almost blurred. The picture itself was barely two inches by two inches. Any smaller and it would be the size of a postage stamp. Its white edges were smeared with a burnished red. A partial bloodied fingerprint was visible in one corner. The image itself appeared to be of mud and rocks—the riverbank, maybe? In one corner was a flash of bright blue but Josie couldn’t tell what it was from. An object? A trick of light? A reflection from something? It couldn’t be from somewhere inside the park. Although Denton’s city park seemed to have everything—even a carousel—it did not have a pond, stream or any other body of water.

At this point, it didn’t matter all that much. The 911 call, the abandoned infant, and the blood made it clear that Cleo Tate was in trouble. The most important thing was locating her. Hummel found more drops of blood along the edge of the path—soaking into the dirt that edged the asphalt and forming beads on the leaves of the shrubbery. Assuming the blood belonged to Cleo Tate, the blood at the scene wasn’t enough to infer that she had been grievously wounded but it was a clear sign that she was in imminent danger.

Teams of officers had already been dispatched to search the park. The Denton PD was fully mobilized, and yet Josie felt the seconds slip by like water flooding from a faucet. The process was moving but it just didn’t feel fast enough.

It was never fast enough when a life was in jeopardy.

Frustrated, she used her thumb to swipe to the driver’s license photo of Cleo Tate that Brennan had texted her. Unlike most people, Cleo had smiled for her driver’s license photo, as if she was excited to have it taken. Her brown eyes sparkled. Along her left cheek was a constellation of moles. Shiny dark hair, parted in the middle, hung to her shoulders.

“Where are you?” Josie murmured. Hummel didn’t hear her, too engrossed in his work.

The baby was growing heavy. Josie put her phone away and shifted the infant again, drawing a soft sigh. It was considerably cooler beneath the tree and a breeze ruffled Josie’s hair, offering even more relief. Someone was supposed to be bringing another stroller. While she’d waited for Hummel to arrive, there had been plenty of additional uniformed officers to hand the baby off to, but Josie was the only person that could keep her calm. If she wasn’t so worried about Cleo Tate, she might have taken a little pride in this fact. She was nervous enough as it was about motherhood. When an infant she didn’t know felt comfortable enough to fall asleep in her arms, she took that as a good sign. The baby’s head rested on Josie’s shoulder. It reminded her of the way Harris used to fall asleep for her at this age, always leaving a sizable wet spot of drool on her shirt.

Brennan came around the bend. His dark hair was slick with perspiration. He sounded slightly out of breath as he pushed a stroller toward her. This one was sleek, its seat forward-facing and angled back. At the front was a single large wheel and at the back were two bigger ones, all designed for more challenging terrain than a city sidewalk. “Best I could do,” Brennan said. “Conlen lent it to us. He’s got kids.”

“Great,” Josie said, trying to keep the disappointment out of her voice. She wasn’t sure that this particular model was appropriate for a four- or five-month-old but it had straps to secure the baby. They had to work with what they had.

Brennan pulled a three-pack of onesies from under his arm, still sealed in their packaging, and handed them to Josie. “Someone else ran to the store and got these. Seems like she shouldn’t have to stay in what she’s wearing, especially with the blood.”

“Thank you,” said Josie. The onesies were for babies in the six-to-nine-month age range. Holding the baby close to her chest with one arm, she tore the packaging open and took one out. It would be big but she wasn’t about to complain.

Brennan went on, “We made contact with Cleo Tate’s husband, Remy. Turner’s bringing him to the park.”

“Turner?” Josie said, unable to keep the incredulity from her tone. He was notorious for disappearing in the middle of shifts. When he went home to change his pants, Josie figured she wouldn’t see him again until their next shift together. She had called him right after finding the polaroid, leaving him a detailed voice message about what was happening, but she hadn’t expected him to respond, much less return to work. She had been fully prepared to call Gretchen instead, even though she had been occupied all morning with the body of a man found floating in the Susquehanna River.

Brennan shrugged. “Yeah. Dougherty radioed. Turner told him that he’d call when they get here.”

From across the trail, Hummel muttered, “Hell hath frozen over.”

Ignoring him, Brennan motioned to the Tate stroller. “Look, I don’t want to sound stupid. I didn’t have time to google it. What’s a polaroid?”

Without looking up from his work, Hummel said, “You really don’t know? You’re not that much younger than we are.”

Brennan swiped a hand over his forehead. “I’m pretty sure you’re old enough to be my dad.”

This earned him a scowl. “I’m not even forty, dickhead. What are you? Twenty-five?”

“Twenty-seven.”

Josie motioned for Brennan to hold the new stroller still while she checked the straps. She had a feeling asking him to find the brakes and put them on would take an inordinate amount of time. “Polaroids are instant photos. You take the picture, and it pops right out of the camera. You have to wait a few minutes for it to develop but it’s still very fast. My grandmother had one back in the eighties. Some of the baby pictures she took of me were polaroids.”

Hummel let his camera hang around his neck and then went over to his kit to get an evidence bag. “They’re making a comeback. Teenagers love them.”

“How do you know that?” Brennan asked.

Josie laid the baby in the seat. Her little legs kicked as Josie worked to change the onesie. Hummel took the stained one. Josie tucked the packaging with the remaining clothes into the netting under the seat. The baby began to wriggle as Josie secured her. “Because on several of the cases we’ve worked the last few years involving teens, polaroids have come up.”

Hummel nodded as he used a Sharpie to scribble on the evidence bag. “This one kid convinced his girlfriend to let him take nude photos of her using the polaroid. Claimed that way they couldn’t be shared.”

Brennan winced. “Let me guess. He took digital photos of the polaroids.”

Hummel deposited the bloodied onesie into the evidence bag. “You got it. Total nightmare.”

“But with this…” Brennan waved a hand at the stroller. “Why take a polaroid of some muddy rocks and leave it in the stroller?”

“The alternative is to take a digital photo and have it printed somewhere,” Josie said, tightening the straps around the baby, who was now gazing up at her with curiosity. “You’d have to leave a name, maybe use a credit card, and if you could get away with walking into a store and having them print it on the spot or letting you print it yourself, there would be surveillance video of you, witnesses.”

“Couldn’t you just print it at home with one of those color printers?”

Hummel interjected, “You could. We probably couldn’t track you down that way—unless you left prints on the photo. It looks like I’ve got a partial here, though it could be from Cleo Tate. Anyway, if we were able to locate you somehow, we’d likely be able to find the digital photo on one of your electronic devices.”

The baby put a fist into her mouth. Still, there was no crying. Josie was certain that she would be hungry soon. She had no idea if Cleo Tate was breastfeeding or using formula but either way, there were no other bottles in the diaper bag. Josie said, “There are so many of these polaroid cameras on the market now that even if we could figure out the brand or manufacturer from the photo, we’d never track down the person who took the photo that way.”

“It’s old-school,” Hummel said. “As long as your prints aren’t on the picture, you don’t exist. Even if they are, unless you show up in AFIS, we can’t actually find you that way. We can only match up prints after you’re caught by some other means.”

Which meant that whoever left the photo had thought about what they were going to do well ahead of time. Josie would bet a week’s pay that the partial print was from Cleo and not the person who’d left it. Even if it wasn’t, the quality was likely not good enough for Hummel to run it through the database. The photo was some kind of message and Josie’s gut told her that no one was going to be happy once its meaning was made clear.

Brennan’s radio squawked. “Turner’s here with Cleo Tate’s husband. They’re at the park office.”

Josie pushed the jogging stroller down the path. “Let’s go.”