Read Online A Daughter's Story by Tara Taylor Quinn - Free Book Online

her kitchen with tears in her eyes, she smiled.
Feeling more at home than she’d felt in a very long time.
    “I missed you so much. Not just at first, but over the years. I
never stopped missing you.”
    “I missed you, too.”
    “You did?”
    “Yeah, although it took me a while to admit it.”
    “What changed?”
    “I’ve mellowed out a bit since I got engaged.”
    Emma’s grin grew. “Who’s the lucky woman?”
    That started a conversation that lasted more than two hours. He
told her about his fiancée, Morgan, and her ten-year-old son, Sammie. He also
shared with her how much he enjoyed teaching American Literature and Creative
Writing to college students. And then he brought the conversation back to Ramsey
Miller. “He needs a DNA sample from Claire,” Cal said. “That’s why he originally
went looking for the evidence box.”
    “I know.” Emma hadn’t told her mother about the DNA request,
the reason for it. She hadn’t told her about the missing evidence, either.
    “Did Ramsey explain what was going on?” he asked quietly. “Do
you know about Peter Walters?”
    A feeling of dread settled in her stomach. “Yeah.”
    Detective Ramsey Miller had been on a case, tracking down a
missing little girl. He’d followed a lead and found Peter Walters, the
fifty-five-year-old kidnapper, and the toddler he’d abducted. Found them before
Walters had been able to harm the girl. But, in Ramsey’s words to Emma, she
said, “It was clear that it hadn’t been the bastard’s first time at bat.”
    “Miller found things hidden beneath the floorboards in
Walters’s basement—items belonging to little girls. He’s looking at all
cold-case abductions on the East Coast and in the Midwest, testing DNA from the
missing children, looking for a match. So far, he’s positively identified four
victims,” Cal said softly.
    “He told me that he found the stuff in the basement after a
confession from Walters regarding what he’d done with one of the victims before
and after he’d killed her.”
    A confession that, according to the detective, had made him
puke.
    “He thinks Claire might be the fifth.” Emma’s voice broke on
the words. For so long now she’d prayed. On good days, she was able to picture
Claire alive and well and happy—unaware that she’d been abducted.
    “He’s not sure, Em. From what I’ve gathered, Miller is trying
to rule out victims as much as anything. When Claire was taken, DNA testing
wasn’t available. Now they can get samples of DNA from a twenty-five-year-old
strand of hair. He just needs something of Claire’s, something she touched or
wore, to see if he can pull a sample. He wants to either rule Claire out as one
of Walters’s victims, or identify her and close her case.”
    That scared the hell out of Emma. What would she and Rose do if
Claire’s case was closed and their hope was unequivocally destroyed?
    How did one go on without hope?
    “He’s not working alone on this,” Cal continued. “There’s a
Detective Lucy Hayes, from Aurora, Indiana, who’s helping him on the side,
without pay. Miller gave me as many details as he could. According to him, he
got in touch with Detective Hayes when he tried to check out a box of evidence
pertaining to a cold-case abduction in Indiana and found it was already checked
out. By her. He told me this only to reaffirm that he hadn’t just been hounding
my father. He wanted me to know that he’s looking closely at every single case.
It’s like a quest for him. And apparently with this Hayes woman, too. They want
to find Walters’s victims, identify and track down Claire’s abductor, to solve
as many of these cases as they can.”
    She understood quests. It made her nervous as hell that someone
else was exerting as much energy into her sister’s case. Which made no sense.
She needed to know what happened to Claire.
    “There’s something else, too,” Cal continued softly, on the
other end of the line. “Miller also wants to