A Hostage to Delusion - M J Marlow (detective books to read .TXT) 📗

A Hostage to Delusion

Prologue

The rain was coming down heavily as Lieutenant Dekker Yates headed home after a long and eventful day as a Lieutenant on the Centerville Ohio police force. He hadn’t slept well for several nights now and he was running on fumes. So when something vaguely person-shaped darted out of the trees along the road, he slammed on his brakes a bit later than he should. He heard a cry of alarm and looked up to see a girl standing illuminated in the headlights just inches from the grille, her eyes large with fright. He got out of the car and approached her slowly.
“Are you all right, kid?” he asked as he moved. She was shaking like a leaf and looking around for some place to run. The dark-haired child with her dove gray eyes couldn’t be more than fifteen or sixteen, he noted, but she was heavily pregnant. Something about her seemed really familiar, but he knew he had never met this girl. “Can I help you, kid?”
For a moment he thought that she would refuse to answer him and run. He had never seen a more terrified child in his life and he knew something very bad had happened. She looked at him closely and something in his eyes made her relax a bit.
“Grandmother,” she finally nodded as some of the fear left her. He saw actual concern in his eyes. “Please hurry. I think I’ve killed her.”
Dekker hid his reaction to her strange statement and got her in the car beside him. They drove down the long driveway she had come running down and he saw the old Victorian monstrosity with a tinge of alarm he kept hidden from her. This was his grandmother’s house! He parked and followed her inside, glancing around the house he had not been inside for over ten years.
“Justine?” he called as he entered. He heard a moan and went towards the sound. He saw Justine lying on the floor and called for an ambulance. He turned to talk to the girl and she was gone. “Damn!” He looked down at Justine and saw her cold green eyes focusing on him. They were filled with pain but also a great deal of anger. “What have you done, Justine?” he asked as he helped her to her feet and over to the couch.
“How did you find me?” Justine countered his question with another. She looked around and her eyes narrowed, as she did not find who she was looking for. “Where is your sister?”
“My sister?” Dekker hissed. “That girl is my sister?”
“You and your father weren’t going to be able to look after her properly,” Justine sniffed. “You had other things to think about with Margaret’s death…”
“So you just took her?” Dekker broke in coldly. Justine glared at him. “A man went to prison because of you! You had no right!”
“She’s my granddaughter,” Justine replied. “I wasn’t going to let her stay with your father. He killed my daughter. I wasn’t going to let him hurt the girl, too.”
Dekker placed a call to the station. When he was done, there was ice in the eyes of the woman who was his grandmother. He truly hated her then. Her lies had sent a man to prison for a murder that had never taken place. And his sister was now out there somewhere, traumatized by a murder she had not committed. When his partner arrived, he was quite happy to have the bitch arrested.
“Arrested?” Justine snarled at him as the cuffs were put on her. “I took custody of my own grandchild…”
“Without her father’s knowledge or consent, Justine,” Dekker broke in firmly. “That constitutes kidnapping so I am arresting you.” He looked at his stunned partner. “You handle the arrest procedure, John,” he said. “I have to find my sister.”
He looked through the house and didn’t find the girl anywhere. When the others arrived, he had them move out into the neighborhood to see if they could find the girl. When he got Justine to the hospital under guard he went to the Administrator’s Office.
“Dad,” he said to the man seated behind the desk. “I’ve arrested Justine Dekker.”
“You what?” Grant Yates exclaimed. “Where is she?”
“In the Psych Ward for evaluation,” Dekker told his father. He looked uneasy as he wondered if he should tell Grant the rest. “She wasn’t alone, Dad,” he said as he ran the tip of his fingers along the top of the frame holding the family photo from the year Cassie had disappeared and his mother had died. She’d just turned five and a man had gone to jail for kidnapping her. “She had Cassie.” He could see his father go white. “Justine lied to us, Dad! She had Cassie this whole time.”
“Where is your sister now?” Grant asked his son.
“She ran, Dad,” Dekker told him. He tried to dispel the image of that closet with the whip and shackles. Dekker went to the liquor cabinet and poured himself a drink. “I am going to keep looking for her.”
“Do so,” Grant nodded. “I don’t care how much it costs or who you have to hire. I want that child brought home.”
Cassie watched from the woods as the man who had found her continued searching for her. But the higher branches of the tree she had climbed provided a perfect vantage point. He and his men never thought to look up once and she was perfectly safe. When the ambulance came and went and the police car followed, she climbed down.
“You should have gone with them, child,” a familiar voice sounded behind her. A hand clamped over her mouth as Cassie began to scream and she felt the prick on her arm. “You belong to us now, Cassandra.”

Six Months Later…

Dekker was at breakfast with his wife and his father when the phone rang. After three years he no longer jumped. He saw the number on the Caller ID screen and a flare of hope that had refused to die surged into his mind. He picked up the receiver as he put the speaker on.
“Henry,” he acknowledged the identity of the caller and saw his father rise to his feet. “Tell us you have something good to report.”
“That depends on how you take the news,” Henry Evans, the private detective they’d hired three years ago, replied. His voice was filled with weariness. “Ready?”
“Do you really need to ask?” Grant spoke up. “What’s going on, Henry?”
“A four-month old boy is in the ER at the hospital in Centerville,” Henry told them. “He has a very rare blood type so an alert has been sent out to the area hospitals for three units of that blood because there is none on reserve.” He waited a moment before he continued his report with the part that he knew would interest them. “Because it was used when Dekker was shot last year.”
“We’re on the way,” Grant said as he grabbed his car keys from the hook on the inner kitchen wall. “Are you calling us from there?”
“Yes,” Henry acknowledged. “Delia is talking to the boy’s parents now.”
They were hard pressed not to run when they arrived. This was the first good news they had run across in months. The young couple, Steven and Amy Parker, was waiting in an office off of the ER. Their four-month old son was sitting on Amy’s lap looking around in interest. Grant was frozen in shock as the boy looked up and he saw his wife’s eyes.
“He doesn’t look like he’s dying,” Grant said to Henry, who was leaning against the wall. The man shrugged. “A little fiction to bring out news of Cassie?” He nodded his approval of the tactic. “It might work.”
“It already has,” Delia smiled as she came in waving a fax. She looked exhausted but triumphant as she put the paper down in front of Grant. Tendrils of hair hung out of her usual ponytail like scarlet ribbons along her neck. Like all members of her family she had auburn hair and deep green eyes. “It took some doing but I finally convinced the hospital to release this information to me.” She tickled Oliver under the chin and smiled. “Given the little guy’s tenuous hold on life, they had no choice.”
“Cassandra Baker, aged 15,” Grant read, “was admitted to a hospital in Toledo on October 23rd. She was hemorrhaging from injuries suffered in a car accident and needed several units of blood during the C-section the obstetrician was forced to perform.” He felt his heart ache as he read the rest of the report. “Her guardian told us to tell the girl the baby had died.”
“Why would anyone do such a heinous thing?” Steven asked as he clutched his wife’s hand. “We were told that Oliver’s mother had died giving birth to him and shown the medical report. She’d lost a lot of blood because of injuries due to a car accident and they had to take Oliver out by C-section.”
“That poor child was led to believe her baby was dead?” Amy was in tears. “What kind of monster would do such a thing?”
Grant was silent. He knew the kind of man they were talking about. He’d met them before. The report said that the girl had died, but he was not so certain. He fixed his steel gray eyes on Henry and the man nodded. He was already on the way even before he physically left the room.
“I’ll send out teams and find the girl,” Henry nodded. “The hospital listed her parents as George and Gloria Baker. We’ll move out into the towns nearby and start hunting.” He allowed a brief smile. “Good work, Sis.”
“We’re going to find her,” Delia said to Grant as she laid her hand on his. “I know we are.” She nodded to the couple. “I’ll leave you. I need a hot bath and a few hours of shut-eye.”

Cassie sighed wearily as she cleared the last table and took the bucket to the kitchen to help George finish the dishes. It had been her first full day of work at the diner since her accident and the loss of her son and she was exhausted. But she was not going to go upstairs and leave the clean up to George. She saw George frowning at her and knew he was worrying about her again. The doctor had told her to take it easy, but working kept her from remembering the child she had never had a chance to know.
She had woken up in their home above their diner when she was abducted. He and his wife, Gloria, had taken her in at Jonathan Garrison’s request. And no one, especially in this town that bore his family’s name, ever said no to Jonathan Garrison. He had arrived to tell her that the Bakers had adopted her and would be her parents now. Her own family didn’t really want her, he told her. How could they, given what she had done?
“Are you looking forward to the dance, Cassie,” George smiled over at her as he rinsed off the dishes and she put them in the auto washer. “It’s all Adam has talked about this week.”
“I don’t want to go, George,” Cassie told him. He and his wife had been kind to her since they had taken her in and she was almost happy to be a prisoner. They had never lied to her or tried to manipulate her as her grandmother and Jonathan Garrison