The Girl With No Name

Chapter Six

Josie watched from the porch as Brittney pulled away in her old model Toyota Camry, heading to the hospital to sit by Misty’s bedside. The name was bothering her. The Raymond part hurt, of course, but she had only ever known one Victor in her lifetime, and he’d been evil to the core. In fact, Victor Quinn had routinely beaten his wife while his young son hid under the kitchen table or behind the couch. Ray used to tell her that the amount of blood and guts he saw on the job couldn’t hold a candle to what he’d seen in his own home before the age of thirteen.

Had Misty really named her baby after Ray’s father? Not for the first time, Josie had the sense that Misty had somehow appropriated her life and was mismanaging it horribly.

“Boss?”

She looked away from Brittney’s tail lights to see Noah staring at her with a furrowed brow. Josie sighed. “Yes?”

“You want to ask for that Amber Alert now?”

“Yes. Immediately.”

“You think it will do any good? With so little information?” he asked.

“There is always a chance that if we issue the alert, someone will notice a friend or family member who suddenly has a newborn child with them and call us. We can’t take any chances with this. The Amber Alert is top priority. When we’re done here, we’ll head over to Foxy Tails and talk to the boss. Do you have Misty’s cell phone number?”

Noah flipped through a few pages in his notepad and showed it to her. She keyed it into her own phone and called it, but was sent directly to voicemail. “Call the station, have someone there write up some warrants,” Josie told Noah. “We’ll find out where the phone last pinged, see if we can triangulate its location. Although, if I just stole someone’s baby, I wouldn’t be carrying around their phone.”

“You’re assuming we’re dealing with someone smart,” Noah said.

“Listen, I want someone going through Misty’s personal effects. See if there is anything useful. Let’s try not to damage anything though. If the department has to pay to replace any of her furniture, it’s going to get expensive.”

As Noah nodded and started walking back toward the entrance of the house, a black Chevrolet Cruze pulled into Misty’s driveway and Detective Gretchen Palmer hopped out, raising a hand in greeting as she approached. She was dressed in what Josie had come to think of as her uniform: black slacks with a white Denton PD polo shirt under a black leather jacket that had seen better days. It was a man’s leather jacket and had been worn and scuffed over many years. Josie was certain there was a story there, but it wasn’t her place to ask.

“Boss,” Gretchen said, addressing Josie as she reached the top of the porch steps, her notebook already out. She pulled a pair of reading glasses from the inside of her jacket, slipped them on and ran a hand through her short, brown spiked hair as she read off her findings. “Met with the ob-gyn. Derossi wasn’t planning a home birth. Due date was tomorrow—she was having a boy—and they were going to induce her next week if she didn’t go into labor on her own. In fact, she had an appointment she missed yesterday. She came to them about two months into her pregnancy. Everything was picture perfect. No complications. Baby healthy as can be. She never mentioned the father, and there was nothing on her chart. While I was there, I popped down to the emergency room. Miss Derossi’s skull is fractured and there’s some bleeding on the brain. They’ll likely need to do surgery. She also has a missing tooth, a fractured wrist, and severe bruising on her forearms and on her throat. Looks like someone tried to choke her and she fought back pretty hard so our bad guy hit her over the head to knock her out and make his escape.”

“Jesus,” Josie said. “We have to find the baby. What else have you got?”

Gretchen flipped a page in her notebook. “They think the head injury was sustained within the last few hours. The docs also said she probably gave birth yesterday; she’s still bleeding a lot and there’s some tearing. Whoever was with her didn’t sew her up. They’ll do that at the hospital now, and they’ve already called for an ob-gyn consult.”

Josie grimaced. “Is that typical? Do midwives usually stitch women up if they… tear during home births?”

Gretchen looked at her over top of her reading glasses. “Most midwives would, so long as the tear wasn’t too complicated or deep.”

“So, we can safely assume that whoever was here with her yesterday and helped her deliver her baby, most likely wasn’t professionally trained and didn’t have Misty’s safe recovery as a priority. If it was the same person, they let an entire day go by and then took her baby by force.”

“Strange, isn’t it?”

“Because why would you need to take the baby by force after all that? Why not just wait till the mom was asleep and sneak off with him?” Josie said, thinking aloud.

“You think there was another person.”

“Yes. There was someone who helped her deliver the baby and someone else who took the baby. I don’t think they are one and the same.”

“Is it possible this person took the midwife with him?”

Josie shook her head. “I don’t know. We’re assuming it was a midwife. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe the person who helped her deliver was working with the person who took the baby—or maybe they’re in trouble too. We don’t have enough evidence to make an educated guess either way. But just to be safe, better check on all the trained midwives in Denton. There can’t be that many.”

Gretchen made a notation on her pad.

“Anything else?” Josie asked.

“Yeah. There were no issues with any of the testing done during Misty’s pregnancy. From a cursory exam of Misty herself, she doesn’t appear to have had a complicated birth. So, we should be looking for a healthy baby. As long as whoever took him takes care of him, he should be okay.”

Josie shook her head. This was about as far from okay as it got.