Daddy's Little Girl Read Online Free Page A

your daughter have an argument?”
    “She didn’t run away, Sheriff. That I can say for sure.” Carnes could not keep the testiness out of his voice.
    “I said I was going to irritate you,” Wayman reminded him gently.
    Carnes cooled down. “She didn’t run away, Sheriff.” He explained the divorce situation, how this was their first extended time together. “She was looking forward to the trip as much as I am.” He realized with brutal reality that he had just spoken in the past tense where Deirdre was concerned.
    Please, dear God.
    “So you didn’t have any arguments?”
    “None at all,” Carnes said.
    “And as far as you knew, she wasn’t unhappy in any particular way.”
    “We’d just spent hours talking about her life. She seemed very together, very peaceful.”
    Carnes noticed that during the last few questions, Wayman had taken a small notebook from his pocket and was writing in it.
    “All right, let’s assume for the moment that she had no reason to just up and take off,” Wayman said. “Now I’m going to have to ask you to think very hard.”
    “Fine.” The impatience was back in Carnes’s voice.
    “When you pulled up to the motel office, did you see anybody standing around, or anybody sitting in a parked car?”
    Carnes thought so hard he could feel the beginnings of a headache start down the center of his forehead. The anxiety, the exhaustion of his run through the nearby underbrush, had worn him out. A headache was inevitable.
    “No, nobody.”
    Wayman didn’t seem satisfied with his answer. “Think hard.”
    “I am.”
    “Nobody standing around?”
    “Not.”
    “Nobody sitting in any parked cars?”
    “No.”
    “Nobody over near the restaurant?”
    “No.”
    “Nobody on the driveway as you were starting off the road at the bottom of the hill?”
    Carnes had to think about that for a long moment. “No.”
    “You said on the phone that you asked the waitress at the restaurant. She didn’t see your daughter?”
    Carnes sighed. “No.”
    Wayman closed his notebook.
    “Afraid I’m going to ask you another one of those irritating questions.”
    “That’s your job, I guess.”
    “Is your daughter taking any kind of drugs?”
    Carnes shrugged. “I want to say absolutely no. I guess the best a parent can say these days is, I don’t think so. I mean, her mother and I have talked about the possibility that Deirdre is susceptible like any other teenager, so we’ve both kept a close look after her. For any behavioral changes, things like that. We haven’t noticed anything. Why?”
    “Well, if she took something and it had a bad effect on her, that might cause her to run off. Get scared or lose her sense of where she is. Drugs doing terrible things to these kids today.” There was no contempt in the sheriff’s voice, only a kind of weary pity. Carnes supposed that even out here, in a small town, the local law had to deal with its share of drugs.
    Carnes jumped up from his chair when he heard the throbbing motor of a truck work up the steep incline.
    “That’ll be Ralph,” Sheriff Wayman said.
    “Ralph?”
    “Ralph Potter. He’s got the best bloods in the county.”
    Carnes obviously looked confused because Wayman said, “Bloodhounds.”
    And that was the case. Even above the big Chevy engine powering the big pickup truck, the keening yip and barking of dogs could be heard.
    Suddenly the reality of everything overwhelmed Carnes—the little details that made this nightmare inescapably true—the smell of cigar smoke in the office, the rumbling truck engine outside, the sweat stains darkening Wayman’s armpits. He felt like an alien stranded on another planet.
    Wayman seemed to sense Carnes’s condition.
    As they were going out the door, Wayman put an arm on Carnes’s shoulder. “You’ll be all right, don’t you worry.”
    But it wasn’t himself Carnes was worried about. His concern was Deirdre.
    Almost like a child, he said, “You think we’re going to find