She’d not quit. She’d taken a break so that she could get her head together. She’d not walked away from Baltimore forever. Just for now.
Jenna walked Detectives Morgan and Bishop outside and without a backward glance, left her to consider the task she’d accepted. As they got into a dark SUV, she withdrew back into her home. She closed the door to the sound of the car engine rumbling and gravel crunching under tires.
Nervous tension simmered in her belly as she thought about re-creating the face for Morgan’s Lost Girl. It was a job. A favor. Nothing she hadn’t done a thousand times before in Baltimore. But this time the idea of drawing the child’s face unsettled her enough to make her reconsider.
You quit.
Though tempted to back out of the job, she wouldn’t, if only to prove to herself and to Detective Morgan she was no quitter.
Facing her easel, she turned the image around and studied the half-erased eyes. Automatically, she reached for her pencil and began to sketch. Eyes. Why was it always the eyes that haunted her?
Her chest tightened and the more she stared at the portrait’s unfinished eyes the more anxious she grew. The cabin’s walls shrunk. Finally, unable to draw, she crossed the room and stepped out onto the back deck. Tilting her face toward the sun, she inhaled the sweet scent of wildflowers, pollen, and hay. Breathe in. Breathe out. She glanced down at her trembling hands. Never in her life could she remember being scared. Her aunt had always said Jenna attacked life. And yet here she stood unable to finish a damn portrait.
“What the hell is wrong with me?” she whispered.
Frayed edges of a pink blanket coiled through her thoughts.
A similar blanket, soft and smelling of milk, had been a treasured item of hers when she was a child. She’d held it close when she’d laughed and played with her mother and father. Sometimes, she’d imagined it had been a princess cape or a magic carpet. Other days, it kept her warm and soothed her to sleep at night.
Days after her fifth birthday, when the bad man took her from her home, her pink blanket had become her lifeline. She clung to it when he’d taped her mouth closed and tossed her in the trunk of his car. Later, when he’d thrown her into a closet and locked the door, she wept into that blanket.
He eventually took the tape off so she could eat the fast-food burgers he brought her. He spoke sweetly to her, tried to coax her to eat but all she could do was cower in the corner, clinging to the blanket. Finally, he’d slammed the door closed and left her in the dark.
Ragged pink threads brushed more memories to the front of her mind.
Later she would learn that he had killed her family and he had held her for nine days in that closet. But then, when she’d been alone and afraid, time had stopped as she’d cried for her mother. She’d been the lost child and could easily have been killed and found later wrapped in pink. Dead and tossed in the cold ground.
But her captor had been a drug user and on the ninth day of her containment, he’d overdosed on heroin. It had been hours before cops had broken down the door and found her in the closet, half starved.
“You’re one lucky girl,” the officer had said as he’d carried her from the small apartment. Clinging to her blanket, she’d blinked as the sun had hit her eyes and she’d tucked her head in the officer’s broad shoulders.
One lucky girl. How could she respond to that?
Jenna folded her arms over her chest and savored the open space and the warm breeze flittering through the trees. No amount of pine cleaner could wash away the memory of the tiny, putrid closet with walls that left her with a lasting fear of confined spaces. That fear had found renewed life in the last few weeks until finally it had driven her out of Baltimore.
You quit.
“No, I didn’t quit, Detective Morgan.” She glanced back at her house. It would be hours before she could return inside.
“She’s an interesting piece of work. Attractive but different,” Bishop said.
Different didn’t come close to describing Jenna Thompson. There was a solemn look in her gaze that reached far beyond her thirty years. The eyes of a woman who’d seen bad things. She’d been a cop so that stood to reason. However, he suspected, what she’d seen went beyond the Force. He’d watched how her hands had trembled very slightly when she’d tapped her index finger on the picture. The image had struck a nerve. Was it because the victim had been a child? Lots of cops took emotional hits when the victim was young and innocent. The case certainly had touched Georgia deeply.
Rick glanced in the rearview mirror at a sleeping Tracker and then pulled out onto the main road. As the lush green trees lining the backcountry road whooshed past, he pictured the petite, trim, controlled woman with the long, dark braid that draped over her shoulder like a seaman’s rope.
“What did her captain say about her when you called?” Bishop asked.
“She was decorated and served with honor. Her boss, Mike Ferrara, was sorry to see her go and said the door was always open if she wanted to return. He said she can create a face from just about any witness, no matter how rattled. She’s one of the best. He has hopes she’ll return soon.”
He’d tried to walk away after the shooting, but in the end, he couldn’t walk away from the job. The Force was in his blood, just as it was in Tracker’s. Some canines couldn’t make the transition to civilian life. They lost the will to live and died soon after retirement. Tracker would have been like that. And he wasn’t much different. Civilian life had made his skin itch and crawl with impatience.
He was no damn quitter.
As they grew closer to the city, trees gave way to more and more concrete. “What else did you find out about her?”
“She’s been in Nashville several weeks, rented the house of a murdered woman, and draws pictures. That’s it.”