CHAPTER FOUR
> “H ey, Miller, you got a minute?”
With his arm halfway in the sleeve of his brown suit jacket
Wednesday evening, Ramsey looked over at Bill Mendholson, a detective five years his senior and Ramsey’s mentor.
Bill had been out most of the day.
Ramsey had made a connection between the two Boston
missing-child cold cases. He’d gone through both evidence
boxes, including trash found in the area, and read all the reports written by everyone who’d done any work on the cases,
or who’d been on the scene and made a statement, and the only
similarity he could find was that chocolate-bar wrappers—not
the common kind found in drugstores and supermarkets—had
been found in the vicinity of both disappearances. Might not
mean anything. Probably didn’t. But as long as those girls’
disappearances were unsolved, he wasn’t going to stop checking out every single possibility. No matter how remote. He’d been researching chocolate, chocolate manufacturers, the effects of chocolate, perps who offered chocolate, for
most of the day. He’d been immersed in chocolate. Chocolatiers in Boston. Chocolate distributors in the Boston area in
August of 2000. Establishments that sold chocolate bars. He’d
exhausted every possibility he could think of for connections
between the two abductions that took place in the same city
in the same time period twelve years before, and he knew he
had to take a break.
So he was on his way out to check a name and address that had finally come in on a person of interest in the Claire Sand
erson case. An address he was off to investigate.
“Yeah, Bill, what’s up?” Five o’clock was quitting time for
both of them and only an hour away, but with all of the papers
spread on Bill’s desk, it didn’t look as if he’d be heading home
any time soon, either. Mary must be working late. Ramsey would be spending most of the night with the
Sanderson files. Another cold-case toddler abduction. This
one from right here in Comfort Cove, twenty-five years before. And also cleared—thank God—due to recently obtained
DNA evidence, from any connection to imprisoned child molester Peter Walters.
But Claire wouldn’t let him go. He had to find her. Lucy