Deadline (Sandra Brown)

gone, I have a chance to write in this diary. I’m way behind.
This seems like a good day to pour my heart out. My heart that’s broken. Broken hearts truly do hurt. I didn’t know that for a fact until I had to leave my baby in that awful old house up in Oregon. Carl told me he was born dead. I’m not sure I believe him, but I never heard the baby cry, and I sorta hope it’s true, because then I don’t have to feel so guilty for running off and leaving him. I’d burn in hell for sure if I’d left him there still alive. I think about that all the time. I guess you could say it haunts me.
And I wonder sometimes, what if Carl was wrong (or lied), and the baby was alive when we escaped, and some cop found him? Where is he now? Would he be in an orphanage or something? Or was he given away to a good family?
What if we crossed paths someday and didn’t even know each other? Maybe I would recognize him if he looked anything like Jeremy. Or he could have blond hair like mine. What color would his eyes be?
Why do I do this to myself? It’s torture to think about what he would look like and what he’d grow up to be.
Of course I look at Jeremy and wonder that, too. What kind of life is this for a child? I chose Carl. I chose this life. Poor little Jeremy has no choice except to go along. I guess if that other baby boy had lived, he would have gone along with our way of life, too. That’s a sad thought. Almost as sad as knowing that he died before taking his first breath.
And I’m sure that’s what happened. Carl wouldn’t be so mean as to tell me that the baby was dead if he wasn’t.
Wherever my other little boy is, I hope his soul is at peace.
Mine isn’t. It never will be. Not over this.
     

Chapter 29
    I ’m going to have a drink. Want one?”
    “Please.”
    “Anything you want, it’s on the house.” Dawson poured two minibar bottles of bourbon into glasses. “Somebody gets shot in your room, hotel management goes all out to make up for it. To say nothing of how bad they felt about my overlooked room-service order.”
    After Carl was taken away, they had been questioned extensively by Knutz. Acting on Headly’s telephone call from his hospital bed, the FBI agent had assigned men the job of checking hospital security cameras. Others were sent to warn Dawson. He didn’t answer his cell phone or his room phone, but sheriff’s deputies, waiting in the lobby for their charge, verified that he was in his room and that Amelia Nolan was with him.
    Knutz had been hesitant to bust in on a romantic rendezvous, but when a desk clerk remarked on an elderly man with a bouquet of flowers entering the hotel and going up in the elevator, Knutz mobilized a SWAT team from Savannah Metro.
    Meanwhile, a silent evacuation of that floor of the hotel was conducted while agents in the room next door to Dawson’s, using listening devices, confirmed a hostage situation. Snipers took up positions on the roof of a neighboring building that afforded them a view into the room through a window. When Carl pushed Amelia aside, they were ready.
    After all the officials finally had cleared out, Dawson was informed by a nervous manager that he was being moved to the hotel’s best suite. It didn’t rate five stars, but it had a living area separated from the bedroom by a pair of French doors and was better appointed than his previous room.
    Now he passed Amelia her drink. She was curled into the corner of the sofa. He took one of the easy chairs and raised his glass in a mock toast. “Cheers.” He shot his drink and set the empty glass on the coffee table. He looked across at her, knowing the time had come for the inevitable denouement. “Well, now you know the reason .”
    She nodded.
    “Can’t say you weren’t forewarned to keep your distance.”
    He got up and walked over to the windows. From this perspective on the top floor, he could see that there were still a few patrol cars parked in front of the hotel. The media vans had come and gone, following Carl to the hospital’s trauma center. His condition was reported as “serious.”
    The man wanted for decades by the FBI had been nabbed. He was the story now. No doubt national news crews were keeping the airlines into Savannah oversold. Dawson Scott, magazine journalist, would be a footnote in the news coverage, and he hoped he remained so. None of the SWAT officers swarming the hotel room had overheard his declaration. He hadn’t told Knutz about his relationship to