“She remembers getting Allie out of the car seat. She remembers standing in the baby-food aisle at the store. She remembers that the cashier was pregnant and she remembers that it was almost dusk when she pushed her cart, with Allie in the seat, out of the store. And then…nothing…” Lucy’s voice broke slightly.
“The police report said that she was taken from the parking lot.” Ramsey jumped in with what he knew to keep her on track. “They think she made it to her car, because it was found with the door open.”
“Right. It was a ’74 Ford Pinto. Lemon colored. With a dent in the left back fender, and the driver’s side front wheel well was rusted out. It had close to a hundred thousand miles on it and a half a tank of gas. Her mother, who’d gotten pregnant with her in high school and never married, had given it to her just before she found out my mom was pregnant and kicked her out of the house.”
“Her mom lived in Aurora, too, right?”
“Yeah. But she was in prison by the time Allie was born. She was drunk, ran her car off the road and into a yard, hit a six-year-old girl and then left the scene of the accident. The little girl later died. My grandmother got six to ten.”
“Was she back in the picture when she got out? Did you ever know her?”
“On and off. Prison roughed her up a bit. And she hung with some unsavory folks. Mama didn’t want her around me. Last I heard she was living in Florida with some guy. We don’t even get Christmas cards from her anymore.”
Ramsey had been spoiled by all four of his grandparents growing up. And watched all four of them die, too. One at a time. As cancer and old age and too many years of hard work took their toll.
“So the night of the rape…your mother was found, unconscious, on the bank of the Ohio River between Aurora and Rising Sun.”
“Right. She couldn’t remember how she got there. But she kept describing a face. And hands. She remembered him touching her, but details of the attack were lost. She remembers him slapping her but has no idea how her arm got broken.”
“And she has enough of a memory of the actual rape to convict him of it in case the judge throws out the DNA evidence.”
“Yes.” Her voice broke again and silence hung on the line. Ramsey pushed aside his laptop, sat up and pulled on a pair of shorts.
“But she has no memory of Allie at all. The baby was in the grocery cart, and then nothing.” Lucy’s exhaustion pulled at him.
“I remember reading that Allie’s car seat was in the Pinto when they found the car abandoned in the grocery-store parking lot.”
“Yes. But by the time Mama was found, the car had already been moved to a back lot at the police station. The store manager had called it in half an hour after Mama left the store because of it being unattended with the door wide-open.”
“Police were on alert for her then, almost as soon as she’d been taken.”
“Yeah.”
“And when they found her, there was no sign of your sister.”
“Right. Nothing. Not a diaper, or a shoe. Nothing. It was like she’d never been there.”
“But then, they don’t think the rape took place where they found your mom.”
“Right.”
“We need Wakerby to tell us where he initially took your mother. We need to know where he raped her.”
“I know. If we had a crime scene…”
“We need to know what vehicle he put her in when he took her from the parking lot. Even the type of vehicle would be good.”
If the rape had happened recently, they’d have surveillance tape to refer to.
“I need my mother to remember something besides a slap and a face. I need to know what the walls looked like, if there were walls. And if not, I need to know that. What did the ground feel like beneath her? Was she in a
bed? On a floor? In a car? I need to know if there was more than one person and whether or not she heard Allie crying—”
“All we need is a place to start,” Ramsey interrupted softly. Calmly. He couldn’t work the case officially. But there was nothing to stop him from using his professional skills to help if he could. “One piece of information inevitably leads to another.”
“I know.”
“So…how are you?”