“Can we hear the tape?” Addy had dropped her hands into her lap, clasped them together so tightly her fingers were white.
Wyatt wished he could take her hands in his and at least try to console her just a little.
“Of course.” Henley reached into a desk drawer and removed a handheld recording device. “By the way, when he entered the hospital and killed a nurse and one of my men”—Henley met Wyatt’s gaze, then Addy’s, unadulterated rage in her own—“he had changed his appearance. He wore glasses and he’d shaved his head.”
“Jamison is bald?” Addy echoed, her eyes suddenly wide with fear.
“According to the nurse who survived his attack and two other members of the hospital staff,” Henley explained, “his head was as smooth as a baby’s butt.”
Addy turned to him. “Put Womack on my mother’s room,” she demanded, her expression, her voice, frantic. “Now!”
Wyatt reached into his pocket for his phone. “You think he knows your mother is in the hospital and might show up?”
Her face went even paler. “He’s already been there. I saw him. He was mopping the floor. He bumped into me ...” Her breath hitched. “He asked me if she—Irene—was my mother.”
Wyatt made the call. Addy didn’t stop twisting her fingers together until he’d closed his phone and confirmed that it was done. “He’s fillingin hospital security on our concerns en route. If Jamison is there or shows up, he’s not going to get near your mother.”
Addy breathed an audible sigh of relief. She turned back to Sheriff Henley. “Can we hear the call now?”
Henley pushed play on the recorder.
A new tension simmered through Wyatt as he watched the kaleidoscope of changing reactions play out on Addy’s face. She flinched at the crashes and screams. The inaudible rants and snarls by Daniel Jamison had her leaning forward in an attempt to make out the words. His intent was unmistakable. He wanted his wife dead.
“Here it comes,” Henley warned.
The screams and the sobs abruptly stopped.
A moment of taut silence, then ...
“There will be no princess in this house!”
33
5:40 a.m.
Adeline stood in the yard in front of Daniel Jamison’s house. The place where he and his family had lived before he tried to kill his pregnant wife.
Bald as a baby’s behind.Ms. Nichols’s words kept echoing amid Adeline’s other churning thoughts.
Daniel Jamison—known in a former life as Tristan Solomon—was her brother.
And all this time she’d thought her biggest DNA glitch was Cyrus Cooper and his shitty sons.
She’d been wrong.
The windows of the old turn-of-the-century bungalow were dark. Like the soul of the man who lived here. His wife was hanging on by a thread, her unborn daughter’s fate dependent to some degree on her mother’s continued survival.
There will be no princess in this house!
Adeline whirled around, her gaze seeking and finding Wyatt where he stood a few feet away. “You know what this means?”
“That old Ms. Nichols was right.”
Adeline nodded, not surprised that he was thinking along the same lines as she. “She knew he was bald. She knew about the princess thing.” Adeline turned back to the house, shivered as the nasty vibes washed over her. “He’s holding them in an old house or shack near water.”
Not once in her career as a cop had she ever put any stock in a so-called psychic’s claims. But this was real. Nichols had nailed too many details.
Dawn had started its slow winter climb above the treetops. The whole place was creepy. Deep in the woods. Jamison had settled his little family well away from town or any neighbors. The property had been searched already and no dead bodies, human or otherwise, had been discovered. Inside they’d found nothing to indicate he’d been looking into Prescott’s, Arnold’s, or Adeline’s lives. Not a single piece of evidence.