Elizabeth Heiter - Vanished

She’d never get a better chance to clear the air with Jack. “So, Jack, why the animosity? I haven’t seen you since I left for college.”

Jack’s gaze shifted back to her, anger flickering in his deep brown eyes. “I don’t care what you do for the FBI, Evelyn. You don’t belong here and you know it. You never did.”

Evelyn instinctively leaned away from him, then stiffened her spine. “This is a race thing? Is that why you questioned me so hard eighteen years ago? Were you trying to make me cry?”

“No, it’s not about race,” Jack snarled, but the expression in his eyes said otherwise. “I don’t give a shit whatever mix you are. I questioned you hard because you were one of the last people to see her alive. It wasn’t about your precious little feelings. It was about bringing that girl home.”

He got to his feet, jabbing a finger at her. “And it’s the same now. Can you really tell me you’re impartial? Can you honestly profile this case? Or are you so jammed up with hatred and anger that you’re going to overlook something? So focused on Cassie Byers that you’re going to miss seeing what’s going on with Brittany Douglas?”

A vein started throbbing in the center of his forehead. “You’re here for Cassie, but she’s been dead for eighteen years and you damn well know it. You feel guilty because you were supposed to be a victim, too. But we need someone impartial. We need a real profiler here, not an intended victim coming home to play hero.”

He pounded a fist down on the table. “We need to catch this asshole!”

She swallowed hard, unable to form a reply, and then just watched him as he shook his head in disgust, and strode from the room.

She wasn’t trying to play hero. Finding Cassie meant finding Brittany, too. But damn, as nasty as Jack’s words were, he was half right. She could try to use the original abductions to tell her about the perp, but her focus needed to be on the girl missing now, not Cassie.

And for her, it was always going to come back to Cassie.

She pressed a hand to her temple. Maybe Jack had a point. Maybe she didn’t belong here.

Eighteen years ago, she sure as hell hadn’t. Eighteen years ago, everyone had stared at her as though she were some kind of curiosity with her light brown skin in a world of white. At the time, she’d been the only one living in town who didn’t fit.

Some people—like Cassie—hadn’t cared. But a lot of them had. Most were too well-mannered to be rude to her face, but even at ten, she’d heard the whispers. She hadn’t always known what they meant, but she’d known they were about her.

It had been twenty years since she’d first set foot in Rose Bay. The town had changed. But maybe not as much as she’d thought.

She was trying to rein in her emotions when Tomas raced into the room. “Where’s Jack?”

“He left a few minutes ago. Why?”

Tomas’s eyes narrowed, as if he could tell something was off with her, then he said, “I need him to get over to the hospital and talk to his favorite suspect.”

Evelyn stood. “Walter is at the hospital? Why?”

“Brittany Douglas’s dad just beat him up.”

“Why?” Had she screwed up, rejecting Walter as a viable suspect? “Did he have a specific reason to suspect Walter?”

“I don’t know,” Tomas replied. “Two of my officers are bringing Mark Douglas in.”

When Evelyn started to follow him to the front of the station, Tomas warned, “I’d stay where you are. We just arrested the victim’s father. No one’s happy with us.” Instead of returning to the CARD command post, Evelyn picked up her pace to match Tomas’s stride.

He glanced at her, looking surprised, then warned, “Everyone was terrified already. Now we’ve pissed them off. Things are volatile out there.”

As she walked to the front of the station with him, she saw that volatile was an understatement. Angry residents swarmed the parking lot, held at bay by a pair of cops. The crowd was mostly men, between twenty and sixty. They wore everything from shorts and T-shirts to suits and ties. Evelyn guessed there were thirty of them, but with only three cops who hadn’t been expecting this kind of trouble, it was too many.

The crowd was pushing and screaming and the cops, even though they were obvious veterans, looked overwhelmed. Evelyn had never seen her hometown like this, even eighteen years ago. Despite what she’d seen in the Bureau, it was actually a little scary.

Especially as a police car pulled up as close to the station door as it could get and two officers dragged a man out of the backseat who had to be Mark Douglas. His eyes were bloodshot, his face ragged with grief, his hands raw and bloodied.

The cops were young, clearly rookies. One held tight to Mark’s arm. The other’s hand lingered near his sidearm, his gaze darting nervously around the crowd as it rushed in on him.

“Pigs!” someone shouted. “We do your job for you and get arrested for it?”

“Let him go!” someone else yelled.

“Shit,” Tomas said. “Jack! T.J.! Get out here! Grab your batons!”

“Maybe...” Evelyn began.

“Stay inside the station,” Tomas told her, heading for the front door. “Most of our officers are out running down leads, and this could get ugly.”

Evelyn grabbed his arm. “Do you have a bullhorn?”

Tomas gave her an incredulous look. “In my office,” he said, pulling free and opening the front door.

The yelling roared several decibels louder. The pair of cops trying to manage the crowd was being pushed back toward the station. The cops trying to bring Mark inside were trapped against their patrol car. One of them pulled his weapon, and just like that, two residents had him slammed into the car.

Evelyn saw the weapon drop to the ground and Tomas raced into the crowd as she spun for his office. She wasn’t a negotiator, but she’d worked with the best the FBI had. And she knew calming the crowd down fast was the best chance to avoid getting someone hurt.

As she sprinted into Tomas’s office and found the bullhorn, Jack and T.J. hurried past, carrying heavy shields she hadn’t expected a small town like Rose Bay would have.

Jack and T.J. shoved their way through the crowd with their shields, trying to get to the rookies by the car.

Evelyn spotted Tomas in the middle, his hands out in a calming gesture. A broad-shouldered man with silver-streaked hair who seemed to be the closest thing the mob had to an instigator yelled back at him, slapping Tomas’s hands away.

The two cops who’d been holding back the crowd were yelling, too. It sounded as if they were agreeing with their neighbors that Brittany’s dad shouldn’t have been arrested, and promising to let him go if the crowd went home.

The rookies who’d brought in Mark Douglas were down near their patrol car. One had crawled half-underneath it to avoid getting trampled, while the other struggled to get back to his feet, his hand pressed to his bleeding head.

Mark, still in cuffs, was being dragged through the crowd. He kept looking backward, and seemed to be arguing with the crowd to let him get arrested, which was only making them angrier.

Evelyn opened the door, stepped to the edge of the crowd and lifted the bullhorn. She pressed the button to broadcast, knowing she needed to return their focus to what really mattered. “This isn’t helping Brittany. You need to leave the investigation to the police!”

The crowd quieted, seeming to still almost instantly. But that only lasted a fraction of a second. Then the man talking to Tomas yelled, “Was it your idea to arrest the victim’s father?” And the crowd surged forward, shifting direction, toward the front of the station, toward her.