“Parker...” she breathed. Her voice had a gentle rasp to it. She stopped struggling but didn’t relax. He could see her trying to put the pieces together in her mind. “Yes, I remember you. We’ve met a few times.” Her eyes closed briefly. A tear slipped out from beneath her lashes. “I came home. He was there. Mikey—”
Her breathing hitched. He touched her shoulder again.
“Easy, Elise. I need to know what happened, but I want you to stay as calm as possible while you tell me. Start at the beginning. I know it’s hard, but you have to give me everything you can.” He kept his voice soft, using what his youngest sister always called his “comfort voice.”
“I know. I know. I’m just so scared.” Elise’s voice cracked. Another tear slipped out the corner of her eye and slid into her hair. She drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly, shuddering. “I can do this.”
Ryan stepped back from the bed and lowered himself into the chair at her side. Before he could start his questions, the door opened and a nurse entered. The woman frowned slightly when she saw Ryan, but she didn’t make a fuss as she checked Elise’s readings. He waited, beginning only after she had left.
“Who’s Mikey?”
“Mikey is my nephew. I have raised him since my sister was murdered. He’s three.”
He could see her emotions were rising to the surface again. And no wonder. A sister murdered and now her nephew missing. Sympathy filled him. He couldn’t imagine what she was going through, but right now he needed to know what had transpired.
“Tell me what happened this afternoon. Dispatch said there was a break-in.”
She was silent a moment. Her eyes were closed as she pulled herself together, but he knew she wasn’t sleeping. Her breath hitched as she struggled to control her emotions. “I was at work when I got a call at the 911 center. It was from my babysitter’s phone, but it wasn’t Diana. It was the girl who cleans my house. She was screaming. I couldn’t understand everything she said. She’s Amish and was talking in Pennsylvania Dutch at the beginning. Then she switched to English and said she thought that my babysitter was dead. Then she got quiet and said she thought she heard someone still in the house. I rushed out, told my coworker to notify the police and send an ambulance and then I headed home. When I got there, she was gone and so was my nephew.”
“Your cleaning girl?” He sat up. The image of the small footsteps flashed through his brain. It would make sense.
She nodded, her brow wrinkling as if she were in pain. “Leah Byler. She comes every week. I think she has Mikey. Please. We have to find them.”
Byler. Amish. He remembered the gray material stuck on the nail. Things were beginning to make sense. “I will make finding her and your nephew top priority, I promise. Right now, though, I need you to finish walking me through the events, okay?”
The sigh she released was impatient, but she nodded.
“So someone broke into your house—”
“No. Not someone. Him. My murdering brother-in-law.”
He blinked. That was some pretty unequivocal language. “When you say ‘murdering,’ are you saying that literally?”
Elise tried to sit up, grimaced, then managed to pull herself higher up on her pillows. “Yes, literally. Two and a half years ago, I was staying with my sister. She’d recently kicked her husband out after a fight between them.” She sighed. “Things had been bad between them for a while. He was controlling, aggressive. He yelled at her all the time. She said he didn’t hit her...but I didn’t believe her. My sister wasn’t clumsy, and yet she always seemed to have bruises. Especially on her neck. He always went for the neck.” Elise’s eyes filled with tears again, and she angrily brushed them away.
“I tried to get her to leave so many times, but she seemed more scared of leaving than of staying. Then Mikey was born—that was when things finally changed. She had put up with the abuse when it was just aimed at her. When he started turning that anger toward their baby, she decided she’d had enough and kicked him out.”
Ryan grimaced. He’d seen this far too often in his work—women who put up with habitual abuse. He was glad that Elise’s sister had been strong enough to put a stop to things to protect her child.
“I think we both expected him to come back in a day or two, drunk and belligerent, so I went to stay with her for a while,” Elise continued. “She was scared to be at the house by herself. But he never came. After a few days, she tried tracking him down, but it was like he’d disappeared. She couldn’t find him...”
“I thought you said your brother-in-law was after you?”
Boy, did he get the stink eye for that one.
“If you’re through interrupting...” Her voice could freeze the air between them. Despite the seriousness of the situation, he was amused. This woman was not easily intimidated, that was sure.
“Yeah. Sorry. Go on.”
A regal nod, and she continued. “As I was saying, he was missing for a while. Then the police came and said that he had apparently been killed. His car caught on fire after some kind of explosion and was totally destroyed. His body was never found. I was relieved for my sister that he was truly gone, but it bothered me that they didn’t find a corpse.”
“It’s not that unusual,” Ryan told her. “Especially if the fire was as bad as you said.”
“Yes, I know that—but even then, I wondered if there was more to it. After he’d left, Karalynne had found evidence that her husband was into something bad, like in a mob or something. I got worried because it seemed like something he would do—fake his death so that he could get away from the trouble he’d created for himself, not caring about the consequences to anyone else. My sister was terrified. She didn’t know what he was involved in, but if it was bad enough to get him killed then she worried that she might not be safe. She was waiting for whoever might have killed him to come after her next.”
Ryan scooted to the front of his seat. There was more to this tale, he could feel it coming. Elise had gone pale again, and her breathing was quicker. Her eyes skittered to the closed door. The woman was practically jumping out of her skin from nerves. Why?
“Elise.” He brought her eyes back to his. “You’re safe here.”
“I know. I know. I’m sorry.” She brushed her short wispy bangs back with her left hand. The sight of her bruised cheek infuriated him. “Karalynne had found some evidence, like I said.”
“What did she find?”
“A box hidden in their crawl space with cash...a lot of it. The box also had a couple of phones—the cheap, pay-as-you-go kind. And a gun.”
Her next words were almost a whisper. He had to strain to hear them.
“A few days later, I came home, and she was all agitated. She had gotten up her nerve and searched through his things more carefully. This time, she found something that terrified her. Hard evidence on an SD card. She wouldn’t tell me what was on it, said I was safer not knowing. I told her she had to go to the police. Because even if Hudson was dead, he’d probably been working with others and this evidence could help the authorities make a case, stop these people from being a threat to her and Mikey and anyone else.”
“Did she?”
Elise shrugged. “I never knew. I stayed with her for another week. When nothing happened, she settled down and told me to go home. I did, even though I was worried for her. Two weeks later, I got a call from the neighbor across the hall. Karalynne been mugged, the neighbor said, and was dead. If she’d been shot or stabbed, or even had fallen and hit her head