Save Her Child by CJ Lyons (best historical biographies txt) 📗

scrubs who had a surgical cap covering her hair and a mask over her face, head ducked low as if she knew a camera was there. But her shoes were wrong. She wasn’t wearing the clogs or thick sneakers with extra support that the medical staff wore. This woman was wearing open-toed sandals.

It was Beth. She’d exited two minutes before Matthew appeared carrying the bag.

“He sent her ahead while he carried the baby out hidden in the bag,” Luka said. Matthew Harper had orchestrated Beth’s escape.

“Why would a minister take Beth’s baby?” Leah asked. “They had to be working together.”

How did Beth know Matthew? Luka wondered. Who was she running from that she had to go to such extreme measures, sneaking out, hiding her baby?

“Give me the elevator lobby,” he told Ramsey. “Follow Matthew Harper as he exits.”

Ramsey looked surprised but did as he was told, squinting at the time stamp and pulling up the other cameras. They watched as Matthew left the elevator and crossed the lobby, exiting out the door that led to the visitor’s parking garage.

“Wait, keep rolling,” Luka ordered. A few minutes later, the woman wearing the sandals emerged from the elevator. She must have stopped somewhere after leaving the OB floor because she now carried a plastic bag and held a Mylar balloon so that it hid her face. She followed Matthew’s path although her pace was rushed, her stride urgent. “Okay, the garage, let’s see him leave.”

Ramsey switched cameras. “We don’t charge ministers; his ID badge lets him in and out of any of the parking garages, even the paid ones.”

A white SUV with the Holy Redeemer logo on it pulled up to the automated exit lane. Ramsey froze the image. Matthew leaned out the driver’s window, swiping a key card. But no one else was visible in the SUV. The rear windows were tinted dark. Beth appeared nowhere else on the video; she had to have been in the vehicle, but Luka couldn’t swear to it.

Which meant there wasn’t enough for a warrant. But definitely enough for a serious conversation.

“Luka,” Leah breathed. “They have to be in the car, with Reverend Harper. Where would he take them? Who are they running from?”

But Luka had an even greater question: What were the odds that Matthew Harper would be the last person to speak to both Spencer Standish before his death and their missing mother? A woman on the run and a man killed before he could run. That couldn’t be a coincidence.

“I’m not sure,” he told Leah. “But I’ll find out.”

He thought about calling Harper, then decided against putting her in the middle of a tug of war between him and her father. But he needed to know how and why Matthew knew Beth. And exactly how Beth was connected to Spencer Standish’s murder.

Thirty-Two

When Harper arrived back at the police department, the uniformed officers had Darius booked and waiting for her in an interview room.

She glanced through his possessions that they’d confiscated: the knife, a wallet, a belt, several cheap rings, and the chain that seemed much too delicate for a guy like him, a thin gold rope with a lily dangling from it. Exactly like one she’d seen Lily Nolan wear in her mugshots and when Harper had arrested her last year.

She called Sanchez in the cyber squad. “I had Miller bring in two phones found on a suspect. Did you get anything from them?”

“You mean the phones signed in twenty minutes ago that are at the bottom of a list that includes three full computer hard drives, six other phones, and—”

“I get it, I get it. You’re busy. But I really need to know what’s on those phones.”

“Hang on. If I can get anything off them quickly—” The rustling noises of plastic evidence bags came over the line. “Warrants came through, so that’s no problem. Let’s see. The first one, the burner, has no encryption, no security, easy enough. Hmm… only two people on the contact list, a guy named Darius and someone named Lily.”

Bingo. “Send me the call logs. How about texts? Can you send me those?”

“Yeah, sure. It’ll take a few minutes. It won’t be all of them, only the conversations she saved.”

“Whatever you have. And GPS? Can we trace where that phone’s been?”

“We can. But that’s going to take longer.”

She bounced on her toes in frustration. So close to nailing Lily’s killer. “How long?”

“I’ll have it for you by tomorrow. Soonest I can do,” he said before she could protest.

“Okay. What about the other phone? The one with the pink glitter?”

“Can’t get anything on that one until I recharge it—even then it might be encrypted or have security I can’t get through.”

“No such thing.”

“Flattery won’t change the facts. Give me until tomorrow and I can let you know if we can get anything from it.”

“Okay. Thanks. But you’re sending the text chats now, right?”

“Already done.”

“I owe you one, Sanchez.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be collecting.”

She hung up and logged into the secure cloud server that hosted the case management system for the department. Sanchez was true to his word; waiting for her were the text strings from Macy’s phone along with her call logs. Almost all the calls were between Macy and Darius, except for a forty-two-minute call last week to Lily—which meant that now that Harper had Lily’s phone number, she could get a warrant for all of Lily’s data from her phone carrier. It would take a few days, though, and she couldn’t wait. There were no saved text messages to or from Lily, which left her with very little ammunition.

Hopefully, though, it would be enough to get the answers she needed from Darius. Harper gathered her props, heaved in a breath, and entered the interview room.

“Hey again, Darius. Ready to talk?” The kid was only eighteen, a year younger than Macy, with no real record beyond some petty larceny. And given that he’d already refused a lawyer, telling Miller that he wanted everything recorded for the lawsuit he