Elizabeth Heiter - Vanished

“Well, let’s see what he has to say.” Jack lifted his hand to knock on the door, but before he could, they heard bolts sliding back.

Three bolts slid free before the door swung open to reveal Darnell Conway. Evelyn knew he was in his late forties, but he looked younger, with smooth dark skin and close-cropped hair. It was only his deep brown eyes that showed his age. And something about the anger lurking in the depths of those eyes made the hair on the back of her neck stand straight up.

Was he the Nursery Rhyme Killer? Had he taken Cassie eighteen years ago? Had he stalked Evelyn, intending to grab her, too?

Did he recognize her now? It was hard to tell, because Jack reached in his pocket and held up his police shield, drawing Darnell’s instant attention.

It had been twenty years since Darnell had first been investigated by police, when he found the body of his girlfriend’s daughter. But as soon as he saw Jack’s badge, hatred and fury raced across his features, so fast that if she’d blinked at the wrong time, she would have missed it.

Judging by the way Jack’s eyes darted to hers, he hadn’t blinked, either. “Mr. Conway, I’m Jack Bullock, Rose Bay PD.”

“What are you doing in Treighton?” Darnell asked, his voice as smooth and even as his expression.

Jack motioned to her. “This is Evelyn Baine, FBI.”

Darnell’s eyebrows twitched, and then his lips did the same. “FBI, huh? Anything I can help you with?”

If her name meant anything to him, she couldn’t tell. Damn it.

“Can we come in?” Jack asked.

From what little Evelyn could see of the house behind Darnell, she realized the inside was a hell of a lot nicer than the outside. Not just clean and tidy, but expensive furnishings. So, why live in this neighborhood?

Darnell’s gaze flicked to Jack, then to her. “No.”

“We’re investigating the disappearance of Brittany Douglas,” Evelyn told him.

“Never heard of her.”

Jack scoffed. “Her abduction has been all over the news.”

“I drove up the coast for a few days. Got back yesterday.”

“She was abducted yesterday.”

Darnell’s eyes, hard and shuttered, settled on Jack. “Like I said, never heard of her.”

“She’s twelve years old,” Evelyn said.

Darnell didn’t blink, just stared at her.

“That’s only two years older than your girlfriend’s daughter was when she was killed.”

Darnell’s expression shifted into fury. “Are you implying something, agent ?”

“You found her, didn’t you?”

“So what? I wasn’t arrested twenty years ago and there’s a damn good reason. I didn’t kill Kiki’s kid. Leave me alone and get the hell off my property!”

He slammed the door so hard Evelyn took an instinctive step back.

“That went well,” Jack said dryly. But as they got back into the car, he asked, “You think he did it?”

“I think we’d better take a close look at him. And fast.”

Six

Tomas had never gone home last night, but he’d fallen asleep at his desk sometime after six. The call that had woken him less than two hours later had initially seemed like a crank call, a person who refused to give his name reporting “something suspicious” in the marsh. But when asked to explain the term suspicious , the person had said it looked like a body in a trash bag.

Brittany had been missing almost thirty-five hours now. The profiler had been on scene since yesterday and the CARD agents since the night before that. They’d given him the statistics, so he knew it was way too likely the caller was right.

The thought made him slow instinctively as he tracked through the marsh, and his foot sank into the goop at the bottom. Tomas yanked the top of his knee-high plastic boot until it popped free and pushed onward. Ahead of him, Jack Bullock moved forward with seeming ease.

And that was ironic. Except when taking a police call, Jack had probably never visited this part of Rose Bay. Tomas could actually see the house where he’d spent most of his formative years.

It was raised on wooden stilts at the back for when the marsh waters rose, and the exterior was stucco. When he was a boy, there had been a deck off the back, but it was gone now. His parents had finally moved once their last son left home, and since then, the house had gone through a series of owners. From this distance, it looked forlorn and neglected.

“Can you imagine?” Jack huffed, gesturing at a shack up ahead of them. “Who’d want to live there?”

Tomas kept quiet, deciding to assume Jack didn’t know he’d grown up a hundred yards away. As for the shack, it was unoccupied and had been for more than a year. “It’s empty. Let’s check it out when we’re finished here, make sure no one used it to hide Brittany.” More likely, they’d just find someone’s drug stash, but it was worth a shot.

Jack turned to say something else, then cursed as one of his feet slid out from underneath him. He caught himself before he was soaked, but still let out another stream of obscenities. “How far out into the marsh did the caller say it was?”

“It shouldn’t be much farther.”

“We should’ve taken the boat,” Jack groused, breathing hard in the heavy humidity.

“The water level’s too low.” It only came up to their knees in the early-morning tide, and Tomas knew it wouldn’t get much deeper where they had to search.

He’d spent enough time in the marshes as a child to know them. The spot he was now searching for a body had once been a favorite place for him and his brothers; it was where they’d row their dad’s old canoe, race through the marshes and out into the ocean. Back then, the main thing they’d had to worry about was their drunken neighbor, who liked to shoot at anything that moved with his hunting rifle. Tomas longed for that kind of simplicity now.

Since Brittany had been abducted and Evelyn Baine had come to town, Jack had been a bigger pain in his ass than usual, Walter Wiggins was threatening to sue the police department for not protecting him after he’d been threatened and the whole town was in an uproar over yesterday’s arrest of Brittany’s father. To make matters worse, Evelyn had brought him a suspect.

Despite presenting a profile that pegged the abductor as white, late last night she’d returned to the station with Jack and named Darnell Conway as her key suspect. And if Rose Bay learned that a black man was the prime suspect in the abductions of young white girls, the riot at the station the other day was going to look like a peaceful gathering. And he’d be in for a shitstorm he wasn’t sure his small police force could handle.

“How much farther?” Jack asked, sloshing ahead of him.

“We’re close.”

Being from the wrong side of the tracks wasn’t something Tomas liked to advertise about himself. But it gave him an advantage in his job. He’d grown up seeing Rose Bay from the other side. Instead of the perfect, safe community where the rich could feel secure leaving their doors unlocked and their children with nannies, Tomas had seen the dangers.

He’d been raised to respect the natural perils, from the undertow in the ocean to the speed of high tide when it poured in over the sand bars. He’d known to avoid the neighbor who always smelled like sour whiskey and not to let the man who claimed he was from the energy company into the house when his father wasn’t home.

Brittany’s parents, on the other hand, had felt secure in allowing their daughter to play alone in the front yard, lulled into complacency by Rose Bay’s seeming perfection. Nothing bad had ever touched them, so they thought nothing ever could. Until their daughter was taken from right under their noses.