Baltimore 03 - Did You Miss Me?

know a knife was used – definitely on Zacharias and maybe on Kim. Lieutenant Hyatt, can we get a canvass of all the storm sewers in the area of the crime scene, in case he tossed it?’
    Hyatt nodded his shiny bald head. ‘Consider it done.’
    Joseph turned to Brodie’s BPD counterpart. ‘Drew, you have all the weapons found in Millhouse’s trunk, right? Any knives?’
    ‘About fifteen knives, along with the ten assault rifles and two pistols. When the ME releases the autopsy photos we’ll see if any of the knives fit your wound.’
    Brodie had picked up the photo of the knife Reggie had used in the courtroom. ‘Quartermaine will tell us for sure, but Zacharias appeared to be sliced with a non-serrated blade about this depth. This could be the knife,’ she said.
    ‘I was thinking that too,’ Joseph confessed. ‘It just seems very . . . tidy. See what you can find on the knife. From a print standpoint, we’re pretty sure it was handled by George, Reggie, and Cindy.’
    ‘And Daphne,’ Grayson inserted. ‘Reggie had dropped it on the floor and Daphne grabbed it while the deputies were restraining him. She crawled right into the thick of it.’
    The mental picture had Joseph’s stomach rolling over even as his chest filled with pride. ‘That woman is too damned intrepid for her own good,’ he muttered.
    ‘We’ll check every square millimeter of the knife,’ Peterson promised.
    ‘Good.’ Joseph tapped the table again, thinking of all the unexplored angles. ‘Kim got a text, possibly about her sister’s abduction, at seven last night. If Kim did set Ford up, she had him in position by eleven, because that’s when the movie ended.’
    ‘That gives whoever snatched her sister four hours to stow the kid and get to the alley,’ Deacon said. ‘Philly is a two hour drive, so the little sister can’t be stowed any farther than two hours from town.’
    ‘Unless he kept her,’ JD said. ‘He may not have stowed the girl right away.’
    ‘Possible,’ Deacon said thoughtfully. ‘He’d need a pretty big vehicle. Kim and her sister would have been small, but Ford’s a big guy. How did he get them out of the alley? In a van? A car with a really big trunk? Is Bill Millhouse’s car big enough?’
    ‘We’ve examined Millhouse’s car,’ Brodie said. ‘Our first inspection didn’t reveal any blood and both Kim and Ford were bleeding when they left the alley.’
    ‘His trunk’s also too small,’ Peterson added. ‘Millhouse would have been hard pressed to fit Ford in his trunk, even if he hadn’t been carrying enough assault rifles to kill everyone in that crowd.’
    ‘It could have been so much worse,’ Bo said quietly, ‘if JD hadn’t noticed Bill Millhouse skulking around.’
    ‘And if Stevie hadn’t shot Marina,’ JD added gruffly.
    Joseph considered the teenaged killer. ‘When Daphne saw that Marina was dead, her worry was for the unborn child. Marina had been very pregnant during the trial, but when I checked her body, she was wearing a maternity pad.’
    ‘She missed the last days of the trial,’ JD noted. ‘We thought she’d had the baby.’
    ‘Maybe she wasn’t pregnant to start with,’ Deacon said.
    ‘Quartermaine can tell us for sure, but she looked like she’d had a baby recently. Assuming it was a live birth, that baby’s out there somewhere. With Marina dead and all the Millhouses in jail, who’s taking care of him? Or her. And where?’
    ‘Maybe the “where” is the same place they’ve stashed Ford and Kim,’ Deacon said.
    ‘I was thinking that, too,’ Joseph said. ‘We need to find out where the baby is. We know it’s not at the Millhouse home.’
    ‘I’ll put a team of my detectives on it,’ Hyatt said. ‘I’ll have them check with the hospitals, find out where it was born.’
    ‘Thank you,’ Joseph said. ‘Does anyone have anything else?’
    ‘I do,’ Hector said. ‘Something that is too big a coincidence in my book. Ford isn’t the first person in this family to be abducted. Daphne and her cousin were kidnapped almost thirty years ago. Daphne was eight, her cousin seventeen. Her cousin’s body was found a week later in another state.’
    Joseph frowned, a shiver skittering down his back. ‘That’s way too much coincidence. Why didn’t she mention that?’
    ‘I got the impression that it’s something she’s buried pretty deep. When she walked into her house, she had this moment of major déjà vu. I honestly thought she