Rachel Goddard 01 - The Heat of the Moon

that my palm was moist. “I’m Rachel Campbell.” The name tasted strange on my tongue but came out smoothly.
    “Jack Steckling.” He narrowed his blue eyes, looking down at me. He was ruggedly handsome, square-jawed, with broad shoulders that gave an impression of strength. “You got some information about the Dawson girls?” 
    “Oh, no,” I said. Telling myself to stay calm, I went into my spiel. “I’m looking for information. I’m a Ph.D. candidate in psychology at the University of Maryland, and I’m writing my dissertation on the families of abducted children. This is one of the few cases I’ve heard of where two children in the same family disappeared. I’m visiting some relatives in St. Paul, so I thought I’d drive up here and see what I could find out.”
    He nodded. “Yeah, sure. I remember that case like it was yesterday. Come on back, let me see if I can help you out.”
    Walking with him down a narrow fluorescent lit corridor, I had a peculiar sensation, as if I were floating on water, moving without touching down. I could barely take in the knowledge that the man beside me, although I’d never seen him before, had once been part of my life and I’d been part of his. He’d looked for my sister and me and never found us. He remembered us as if it had happened yesterday. But he didn’t see Catherine Dawson in my face. The thought left me feeling obscurely bereft, yet simultaneously relieved.
    We entered a room that must have been twenty feet long but seemed small, crowded, crammed full, with most of the perimeter taken up by filing cabinets, a newspaper-laden table, and six desks spaced out at right angles to the side walls. On a table by the windows a coffee maker poured a stream of fresh coffee into a glass pot. The rich aroma made my mouth water.
    Only two desks were occupied, by a young man talking on a phone and an older man reading a newspaper. Steckling sank into a padded rolling chair and motioned for me to take the straight-backed wooden chair next to his desk. With movements polished smooth by long habit, he reached inside his jacket, withdrew a large and heavy-looking pistol, and slid it into a desk drawer. A pungent odor of oil rose from the gun and hung in the air, competing with the coffee, even after the drawer was closed.
    “So,” he said, “what kind of information are you after?”
    In spite of my careful rehearsal, I wasn’t ready for this. My heart hammering in my chest, I reached down to my bag, which I’d set on the floor, and pulled out the pad, a pen and the recorder. “Do you mind if I tape this?”
    “No problem. Go ahead.” After he made room by pushing aside his phone, I laid the recorder on the desktop and switched it on. He was looking at my hands, studying the scar, but he didn’t say anything. Would a detective’s first reaction to the sight be a suspicion of violence?
    I asked, “Did you work on the Dawson sisters case from the beginning?”
    He leaned back, fingers knitted together over his stomach. The gold wedding band on his left hand was old, badly scratched. “Yeah. First call came to me.” His eyes lost focus as he looked into the past. “I’ll never forget it. She was screaming in the phone.”
    “She?” Keep it cool, impersonal.
    “The mother. Barbara. Screaming her girls were gone. I had trouble calming her down enough to tell me where it happened.”
    The grip of panic tightened around my chest. I didn’t know if I could go through with this.
    Screaming her girls were gone.
    “The way she told it,” Steckling said, “she left the girls on the playground and just went up the street to a shop for a minute. When she got back they were gone.” 
    “She left them alone on the playground?” I heard Mother’s voice: She didn’t take care of you. Anything could have happened.
    “Yeah. Seems crazy, doesn’t it? But she was in the habit, never gave it a second thought. She said they’d always been okay, and she claimed she never was gone more than a few minutes. Used to go in the shops up on the next block, then come back for the girls.”
    “Are you saying—” I stopped to clear my throat. “Was she a bad mother?”
    “I wouldn’t say bad. Just careless.” He paused. “But all it took was a little carelessness.”
    I fussed with the recorder, moving it a few inches closer to him, to give myself an excuse not to look him in the face. Across the room one of the other policemen rose and walked to the