Now he was here for Dakota. The little boy with the face of an angel. With dark auburn hair curling around his head, he was the image of his mother. It hurt Joe to look at him. The child perched in his mother’s arms at Paul’s funeral, staring with wide, brown eyes at the gathering of people. Oblivious to the seriousness of the occasion, he hadn’t understood the finality of his father’s death.
Joe told himself the boy was his primary reason for standing in front of the little clapboard house, not his mother.
Maggie appeared in the doorway as if conjured from his deepest thoughts. Her pale skin was almost translucent, the light dusting of freckles even seeming faded. Yet, despite her red-rimmed eyes, she was every bit as beautiful as the first time he’d seen her in the tribal youth center. She’d stood out like a flame amidst the dark-haired, dark-skinned teenagers she was shooting hoops with.
Standing with her hands drooping at her sides, the agony in her gaze pierced Joe’s soul in a way he hadn’t expected, and his arms ached to hold her and soothe away the fear and anguish.
Then he remembered how quickly she’d gone into another man’s bed after he’d left—the bed of his stepbrother he’d resented as a child growing up.
His lips firmed into a straight line and he nodded. “Maggie.”
A single tear slid down her cheek. “Dakota’s gone.” She wrapped her arms around her middle and shivered. Dressed only in jeans and an oversized green sweatshirt, she wasn’t up to the cold of the late-October prairie breeze.
Joe had the sudden urge to walk away—no, make that run—as far away as he could get from her. But he couldn’t leave Maggie when she was so vulnerable. “Let’s go inside.” For the better part of the last month, he’d avoided her at every turn—a tough thing to do in such a small community. Especially when he was a tribal policeman and she worked with the reservation youth. Sometimes they crossed paths. He worked hard to make those occasions brief.
She led the way into the living room and waved at the couch, muttering something about sitting. Yet Maggie stood half turned away from him, her gaze on the scene outside the window as if watching for her son’s return.
Joe shrugged out of his coat and slung it onto a chair. The two state police officers moved in and out of the house, talking to each other and into the radios they carried. To Joe, Maggie might as well have been the only one in the room.
After one long minute, he couldn’t stand the silence any longer. He walked up behind her and pressed a hand to her shoulder. “Maggie, sit. I can’t talk to you when you have your back to me.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just…” Her hand made a weak wave. “I can’t focus. I can’t think.” Then she turned and stared straight into his eyes. “I want my son back. Oh, God, I want him back.” Her head hung down and her shoulders shook with the force of silent sobs.
Joe stood helpless in the face of her grief. When words wouldn’t come, he pulled her into his arms and pressed her face against his shoulder. He held her for a long time without speaking.
“It’s so cold outside,” she whispered, her breath warm against his chest. “They didn’t even take his blanket.” Burrowing against him, her tears soaked into his chambray shirt.
A twinge of jealousy skittered across his consciousness to be squelched in the rightness of a mother’s tears for the son she’d lost. The son she’d had with Paul. Joe swallowed the knot of regret in his throat. “We’ll find him.”
WITH JOE’S ARMS around her, Maggie felt as though she’d come home. Hope feathered the inside of her stomach. Even after her tears dried, she didn’t lift her head, didn’t want to move from the certainty of Joe’s embrace. She knew if she did, the gaping black horror of the past would rush back to overwhelm her.
Joe pressed a finger beneath her chin and tipped her face upward, breaking through her wall of thoughts. “Maggie, what time did you notice Dakota missing?”
The blinking red of her alarm clock pierced her clouded memory. “Four-fifteen. I woke because it was cold in the house. They could have taken him between the time I went to bed around midnight and when I awoke.” His touch made her want to lean on him and let him shoulder her burden. But this was Joe.
She jerked her chin out of his grip, hardening the heart she’d given him freely once. If not for the loss of her son, she would have nothing to do with him. But despite the pain of her past, he was the only man she trusted to find her son alive. And she’d sell her soul to the devil himself to get Dakota back.
“Did you hear anything, see anything?”
She’d answered all these questions for Delaney but Joe needed to know as much as he could to search for her son on the reservation. The FBI hadn’t arrived yet, but Maggie would bet her son’s life on Joe. She inhaled and let the air out slowly, combing through her barely conscious memories of the past hours. “No. I didn’t see or hear anything.” Her voice caught and she bit hard on her lip to keep from shedding more tears.
She concentrated on Joe and it was as if she could see his thoughts churning in eyes so brown they could be black. His hair had started to grow out from his tour of duty with the South Dakota National Guard. He looked more like the tribal police officer she’d known rather than the unbending military man she’d seen at her husband’s funeral.
Officer Toke stepped in the door and nodded toward Joe.
Maggie held her breath hoping for news. Something tangible.
Joe pushed to his feet and strode across the room. “Did you find anything outside?”
The man shook his head. “The ground is hard and dry. Without snow, we couldn’t trace footprints.”
Maggie leaped to her feet and joined the men. “What about fingerprints?”
The police officer shook his head. “Dusted and sent to the state crime lab. Takes time to identify each. We’ll need yours to match up.”
She nodded but her shoulders sagged, the heavy burden of her failure pushing them down. “How could they just come in and leave without a trace? I was in the house all the time,” she whispered. A shiver rippled down her back.
Joe reached out and pulled her against him. “It’s not your fault, Maggie.”
“But I should have woken up.”
His fingers tightened on her forearms. “We’ll find him.”
She stared up into his dark, swarthy face, his high cheekbones and strong chin, evidence of his power and ancestry. He was Lakota, one of the surviving members of a proud nation of Sioux warriors. If anyone could find her son, he could.
The aching emptiness in her belly eased, followed quickly by an acidic froth of guilt. She should have told him her secret when she’d found out about it, before he left for the Middle East. But the time had passed. Now she had to keep the knowledge to herself.
Tribal police officer Delany Toke cleared his throat. “Joe, we found some graffiti on the exterior wall.”
Joe’s eyes narrowed. “What graffiti?”
“It was on the west side, out of line of sight of the road,” Del said.
“That’s been there a month.” Maggie raked a hand through her hair. Had it really been four weeks since the ugly paint had appeared on the side of her little house?
“Did you report it to the police?” Joe asked.
“No. I didn’t want the persons responsible to think I was scared. I had enough problems getting through to some of the teens as it was.” But that hadn’t stopped Paul from doing something about it. He’d been angry