I had no intention of calling Mel. After convincing them to give me a police escort to the city limits, I bid them goodbye in my head and sped off for home.
I’d plugged my phone in as soon as I’d started the car. Now I punched the preset for Hannah and waited until she picked up.
“It’s Dana,” I started quickly. “Where are you at sweetie?”
“I’m at home.”
“Listen, I’m sorry if this is a bad time to talk but I need your help.”
“It’s, um, okay.”
“That card I found; it’s for an adoption agency. I need you to think hard. Where would Katie have gotten it?”
I needed to know where these guys were hanging out looking for expectant mothers and babies. I knew they couldn’t just be hanging out at WIC offices all of the time. That seemed pretty risky. And, I thought, coming from Columbus, he really went way out of his way to do that.
“It had to be the park near our house, where you met me,” Hannah answered. “In the fall when Katie first came to stay with us. She liked to go there.”
I shook my head to myself. The bastard, he probably chatted her up and found out she’d left the order. She’d be polite to him because she was raised to be polite and always deferential to men.
“That could be it. Maybe these guys choose places like WIC when it gets too cold to hang out at parks...they move around between places outside of the bigger cities that they know will be populated by women and infants.”
I’ll bet, I thought to myself, he would have taken both Katie and Jef or just Jef that day at the WIC office if Hannah hadn’t been there. He saw his chance to separate Katie out of the mix and get her out of the way so he could grab Jef later.
“I went to Katie’s funeral tonight, Dana.”
“Really? Why didn’t you say something? I’d have gone with you. You didn’t go alone, did you?”
“I did. I needed to lay her to rest in my own mind. But, I wasn’t completely alone. Mel was there.
“Oh. Well, that’s interesting. She didn’t say anything to me either.”
“She was talking to Jonah Gingrich, a boy Katie told me wanted to court her before...” She didn’t finish.
I made a mental note to ask Mel about that but, knowing what I did, I figured she was on the wrong track with the boy. I changed the subject instead.
“Is Jamie there right now?”
“No. She went to see her sister.”
“Did you two talk?”
“Yes...a little.”
“And?”
“It didn’t go well. I’m going to start looking for my own place and move out as soon as I can.”