Leslie Parrish - Pitch Black

Alec nodded and waved her on, then grabbed his phone and called his boss again. Sam barely listened to his side of the conversation, focused only on finding out anything she could that would help them find out whom her mother had been going out with tonight, and where they were headed.

Pulling up the browser, she checked the cache and had no problem locating the dating Web site. And she didn’t even have to play a guessing game, varying her dad’s middle name with his birth date, because the ID and password were saved right on the screen.

“I’m in,” she said, not five minutes after she’d sat down.

Alec finished his call and stepped behind her, watching over her shoulder.

Quickly figuring out how the site operated, Sam found all the private communications, the profile requests, the personal Q &As her mother had received and had sent. A few of the men sounded skeevy-and judging by her lack of response, Mom had thought so, too. A few others, though, seemed to have caught Christine Harrington-aka Missy Chrissy’s-interest.

“Damn it,” she muttered, flipping through screen after screen to see if she’d missed anything.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing about a date. No mention of an in-person meeting.”

Feeling hot moisture begin to flood her eyes, Sam willed herself to remain strong and not give in to her rising panic. Just because her mother hadn’t left an easy trail to follow didn’t mean there wasn’t one. It was entirely possible the communication had gone to private e-mail.

Five minutes later, though, after she’d gone through every Outlook message for the past several weeks, she’d still found absolutely nothing.

“I don’t know whether this is good news or not,” she said, hearing her own voice shake. “Maybe they moved on to phone communication. Maybe they did it all with IMs.”

“We can trace those.”

“Not fast enough,” she snapped.

Desperate to do something, she quickly surfed over to her own site, wondering if the psychopath had left another taunting message. But there was nothing beyond those ugly words that informed her he had robbed her of someone she loved.

“Does she have other e-mail addresses? Most people would create a new one to deal with Internet-dating correspondence. Would she really give out her personal one, the one you use?”

Sam snapped her fingers and went back to work. And judging by how close to the top of the cache the mailbox site was, her mother did, indeed, have a backup address.

But it wasn’t saved to the computer. Neither was the password.

She ran through a number of variations, anything she could see her mother using, to no avail. Within ten minutes, she was ready to scream in frustration.

Alec realized it. He put his hands on her shoulders, squeezing. “It’s okay. Let’s think of other options. Who else might know what she’s up to? Any close friends?”

“She has lots of casual friends, but probably the only one she talks to every day is Uncle Nate.” Would her mother really have confided in him, though, considering he was every bit as disapproving as Sam?

“He’s her brother?”

She shook her head, already digging her cell phone out of her purse. “He’s not really my uncle. He was my father’s partner many years ago.”

Alec’s head tilted in confusion.

“Dad was a Maryland state trooper. After he died, Nate quit, went to law school, ended up a judge about seven or eight years ago.”

“And he’s still close to your mom?”

“Very.” She found the home number and dialed it. Getting no answer, she immediately dialed his cell.

“Hello? Samantha?” he asked, answering on the second ring. He sounded distracted, a little out of breath.

“Yeah, it’s me. Listen,” she said, trying to keep her voice calm, not wanting to upset the older man, “I’m at Mom’s. I’m trying to find her.”

“Why?”

Not sure how much to say, she kept it simple. “There’s some trouble, and I really need to talk to her, to make sure she’s okay.”

“Well, of course she is, dear.”

Her heart leaping, she asked, “You mean you know where she is?”

He hesitated, then finally murmured, “Yes, I do. She’s right here with me.”

Something was wrong; Lily felt it. He hadn’t showed. It was nine thirty; Lovesprettyboys should have been here by now, and he hadn’t made an appearance.

“Damn it, why isn’t he here yet?” Lily muttered.

The agent handling the electronic surveillance of the scene, a guy named Vince Kowalski, whom Lily had met for the first time a few hours ago, shrugged, obviously not concerned. “These things are always a gamble. You think for sure the creep’s gonna show; then he gets spooked or he gets sidetracked or he even gets a conscience.”

“Not this guy,” she whispered, talking more to herself than to the other agent.

The two of them sat in an unmarked, nondescript van, parked about ten houses up from the Williamsburg home where Tiger Lily was supposedly babysitting her bratty but-cute little brother. They’d been sitting in here for hours, having arrived well before dark in case their suspect decided to scope out the neighborhood in advance.

Yet nothing had happened.

Lily honestly didn’t know what she would do if he didn’t show. Having thought about this night, pictured it, almost willed it to happen since that August day when she’d first seen that awful cartoon avatar doing unimaginable things to a cartoon boy, she needed this to happen. For him to be caught, justice to be served.

For him not to come, to have built this up until she wanted to scream with the pressure… She just wasn’t sure she could stand for it to come to absolutely nothing.

Maybe it’s for the best .

She tried to ignore that little voice in her mind, which often sounded remarkably like her mother’s, who had, along with Lily’s father, died in an accident when she was a child. Then, thinking about it, she realized that just as her mother had always seemed so wise in life, she still sounded that way in Lily’s mind.

Maybe it was for the best. Not that they didn’t catch the man from Satan’s Playground. He had to be stopped, had to be locked away where he could never destroy the innocence of any child he happened to get his hands on. But maybe, just maybe, Lily wouldn’t be the one to stop him. Because if she didn’t let it go, get her mind back where it needed to be, she was going to lose a job she’d come to love. Leave a team she worked so well with and thoroughly admired, and a boss who not only had the most integrity of any man she’d ever known, but was also one of the most exciting ones.

Don’t even think that way. Having any kind of crush on Wyatt Blackstone was not only immature and stupid; it was probably career suicide.

Just like sticking to this case would be.

But could she let it go? Could she really?

“Wait! I see something.”

Lily leaped from the seat, crouching beside Kowalski.

He pointed to the computer screen, which displayed views from the three discreet cameras a crew disguised as phone repairmen had set up in the neighborhood early this afternoon. “See him?”

Lily did. A man had moved into the top frame, rounding the closest corner, slowly shuffling up the sidewalk. Walking with his head down, he was further disguised by the raised hood of his jacket. His hands were shoved in the pockets, his shoulders hunched.

Both his appearance and his movements seemed out of place in this residential neighborhood. The hooded jacket such an obvious attempt to conceal his face, the trepidation of his walk-he was most definitely up to something.

She held her breath, watching him draw closer, step by step. When he got within two fenced yards of the target, he paused, glancing behind him, then in front, then back again. Their van was parked several houses away, and the windows were tinted to conceal the inside from the out, but Lily still almost held her breath, as though afraid he could see them.