Every Fear by Rick Mofina Page B

trying to board a flight to Los Angeles.
    Dupree was on it.
    And he should’ve called by now, Grace thought, staring at her phone. The cafeteria was okay for cell phones. “Surgeons are on them all the time, talking to brokers or booking tee times,” a nursing supervisor had told her. Grace added sugar to her tea just as her phone finally rang.
    “The airport dead-ended,” Dupree said.
    “What happened?”
    “Turned out the mother was a nervous flyer who’dbeen mixing alcohol and medication. She spooked some travelers when she said she’d had dreams that the devil was going to steal her son. Comparison of the baby’s footprint with Dylan Colson’s didn’t match.”
    “So we’ve got nothing.”
    “This is solvable. With all the attention, something will break. What about there at the hospital, anything?”
    “No, her condition hasn’t changed.”
    “Forensics isn’t done yet, they’re still scrutinizing everything they picked up at the scene. They’ll be going at everything all night, maybe they’ll give us something.”
    “Maybe.”
    After Dupree’s call, Grace looked at the time. It was coming up on, what? Fourteen or fifteen hours since Dylan Colson’s abduction and nothing concrete had emerged.
    The false alarm on the takedown, the alert, the intense news coverage, hundreds of tips to process, but nothing solid that brought them closer to the suspects. Words blurred as she flipped through her notes. All were fragments. Pieces of a thousand possibilities. Nothing stood out as a solid lead. Had she overlooked something? Had they done everything? Had they looked everywhere? What was she missing?
    Initial background checks of the Colsons revealed nothing more than an old parking ticket issued to Lee. Maria was a churchgoer who attended mass every Sunday and did a lot of volunteer community work.
    These were good, decent-living people.
    Detectives and FBI agents were scrutinizing theColsons’ circle of friends, neighbors, and social networks for any possible links, for anyone who may have lost a baby, or wanted a baby, or had a grudge against Lee and Maria.
    They lit up the neighborhood to check databases against people with criminal records, or those whose names were with the sex offender registry. Nothing. They’d examined the Colsons’ e-mail exchanges, Internet travels, and phone records. Scores of detectives were probing several other areas; they’d been going full tilt.
    Dupree pointed to patterns in baby abductions and believed the odds favored a break arising from the way offenders traditionally acted. “They’re often illogical in the time after the abduction,” he’d told her. “They get tripped up on the getaway part because they don’t plan it and they’re irrational.”
    Irrational? Agent Dupree, whoever did this is insane.
    Grace thought of Maria and Lee upstairs in the intensive care unit. Since the Lake City takedown earlier that day, Lee had never left her side, had never released her hand as he whispered prayers into her ear.
    While observing them, Grace had, for a moment, let her emotional guard down. She had no one in her life to anguish over her. No one to miss her, should she lay dying. And the more she thought about it, the more it weighed on her. She looked at her hands. No rings. No strings. Nothing to complicate her life.
    Wasn’t that the way I always wanted it? Ever since that time? Knock it off. You’ve always been a loner. That’s the way you like it. You’ve got a job to do. Focus on it.
    All right. She went into her bag and pulled out Dylan Colson’s baby book with its soft blue, pink, and yellow flower motif. Baby’s First Year. Lee had volunteered it from the house. Filled with Maria’s journal entries about their son’s birth, it was as close as you could get to a diary.
    Maybe there was something here.
    Again, she examined Maria’s neat handwriting, intrigued by some of the passages. “To Mommy’s Angel, no one believed we would have you, except