by Kay Hooper
Either Faith Parker was the neatest woman alive … or she had spent very little time here.
She went into the living room and sat down at the small desk tucked away in a corner. The single drawer held only a few things. A small address book showing meager entries—names, addresses, and phone numbers that meant nothing to her. Her checkbook and a copy of her lease, both of which indicated that she had lived here for nearly eighteen months before the accident. There were regular deposits made on Fridays, obviously her salary, which was enough to live on without living particularly well; some months it appeared that ends had barely met. Checks had been written to the usual places, some of which matched entries in the address book. Grocery stores, department stores, hair salons, dentist, a couple of restaurants, a pharmacy, a women’s clinic, a computer store.
A computer store.
Faith looked slowly around the room with a frown. According to the register, she had bought a laptop computer on a payment plan only a few weeks before the accident. It should be here.
It wasn’t.
She’d had only a purse with her when she rammed her car into that embankment, they’d told her. So why wasn’t the computer here?
On the heels of that question, the phone on the desk rang suddenly, startling her. Faith had to take a deep, steadying breath before she could pick up the receiver.
“Miss Parker, this is Edward Sloan.” The lawyer’s voice was brisk. “Forgive me for disturbing you on your first day home, but I thought there was something you should know.”
“What is it, Mr. Sloan?”
“The service I hired to clean your apartment this week found it in … unusual disarray.”
“Meaning I’m a slob?” she asked, even though she already knew the answer.
“No, Miss Parker, I think not. Many drawers had been emptied onto the floor, pillows and other things scattered about. It had all the earmarks of a burglary, perhaps interrupted in progress, since nothing appeared to have been taken. This was three days ago. Knowing you were still in the hospital, I took the liberty of acting in your stead. I reported the matter to the police, then met them at your apartment. They took the report, took photos of the place, and questioned others in the building. But since no one saw or heard anything out of the ordinary, and since your television and stereo were still there and nothing had been damaged as far as we could determine, no further action was taken.”
“I see,” she murmured.
“The cleaning service was allowed to do their job immediately afterward. They were instructed to put things back in place as neatly as possible, and to use their judgment as to where everything belonged. Do you have any complaints on that score, Miss Parker?”
“No.”
“Have you discovered anything missing?”
He knew about her amnesia, but it seemed an automatic, lawyer’s question.
“No,” Faith repeated, looking down at the checkbook entry concerning the computer. She did not want to mention it, though she couldn’t explain why, even to herself. “Nothing.”
“If you do discover anything, you’ll let me know?”
“Of course, Mr. Sloan.” She hesitated. “There is one thing. You said that all my recently incurred debts had been paid?”
“Yes.”
“How did you know about them, Mr. Sloan?”
“Miss Leighton supplied that information, Miss Parker. I believe she took the liberty of going through your desk to get a correct accounting. Other than regular monthly bills such as utilities, rent, a small credit card balance, and so on, there were two recently incurred debts. One for a laptop computer, which Miss Leighton informed me had been in her possession since your accident, and the other for new living-room furniture. Both accounts were paid in full.”
“I see.” She swallowed. “Thank you, Mr. Sloan.”
“My pleasure, Miss Parker.” He hung up.
So Dinah Leighton had the laptop that Faith had bought weeks before her accident. Why? And where was it now?
Her thoughts were whirling, confused. Then, to make matters much, much worse, she caught a glimpse of something on the television. She lunged for the remote and turned up the sound.
“… Kane MacGregor, one of those closest to the missing woman, expressed his trust in the efforts of the police to find her,” the off-camera voice intoned solemnly.
The blond man before the cameras looked tired, his face drawn and thin, his gray eyes haunted. Numerous microphones were thrust at him. A question Faith could barely hear was asked, and he replied in a deep voice that made a warm shiver course through her.
“No, I have not given up hope. The police are making every effort to find her, and I believe they will do so. In the meantime, if anyone watching has any information they believe could help locate Dinah”—his calm voice quivered just a bit on the name—“they should call the police and report it as soon as possible.”
“Mr. MacGregor, have you called in the FBI?” one reporter shouted out.
“No, the matter is not within their jurisdiction. We have no evidence that Dinah has been kidnapped,” he answered.
“Have you hired a private investigator?”
Kane MacGregor smiled thinly. “Of course I have. I’m doing everything in my power to find Dinah.”
“Which is why you’re offering a million dollars to anyone providing evidence that will locate Miss Leighton alive and well?”
“Exactly.” He drew a breath, the strain really beginning to show on his lean face. “Now, if you people don’t mind—”
“One last question, Mr. MacGregor. Were you engaged to Miss Leighton?”
For an instant, it seemed Kane MacGregor’s face would crack open and all his wild emotions would come spilling out. But it didn’t happen, and only his voice, harsh with pain, revealed what he was feeling.
“Yes. We are engaged.” Then he pushed his way through the reporters, followed closely by a tall, dark man with a scarred face, and both disappeared into a waiting car.
Faith found herself sitting on the couch, her arms hugging a pillow to her breasts, dazed, no longer hearing the news broadcast.
Kane MacGregor was the man in her dreams. And he was Dinah’s fiancé. She was having dreams about Dinah’s fiancé? Intimate dreams?
Pain, hot and cold like a knife made of ice, sliced through her. She heard herself breathing in shallow pants, felt her heart thudding, her body trembling.
Had he been her lover first? Had their relationship ended a long time ago, before Dinah came along? Or was Kane MacGregor’s haunted, grieving face hiding the knowledge that he’d been involved with her and Dinah at the same time?
Then Faith went even colder.
Dinah was missing. Faith had been in a serious accident.
Did it mean something?
Her apartment had been broken into after her accident, and though she couldn’t know for certain if anything had been taken, the lack of personal papers and photographs was decidedly unnatural.
Did it mean something? Anything?
Why couldn’t she remember?
“Oh, God,” she whispered. “What’s happening?”
THE SEARCH
ONE
“Were you?” Bishop asked.
Kane, concentrating on driving, spared him only a quick glance. “Was I what? Engaged to Dinah?”
“Yeah.”
“Unofficially.”
Bishop thought about that for several beats. “Does unofficially engaged mean it was all in your mind or all in hers?”
Kane felt a flicker of grim amusement. “You have to have everything spelled out, don’t you, Noah?”
“Just trying to understand.”
“Then I guess I’d have to say it was all in my mind. I hadn’t asked her yet.”
“But you were going to?”
It was Kane’s turn to think, and when he answered it was with a weary sigh. “Hell, I don’t know. I think so. I mean, I hadn’t planned to, but it was in the back of my mind that’s
where we’d end up. At least …”
“Until just before she disappeared?”
Kane nodded. “It’s like I told you. Everything was fine. Then she got preoccupied, I assumed by whatever story she was working on. Then there was the accident her friend was in, and she seemed to get even more distant and distracted.”
“And she never told you what she was working on?”
“Goddammit, Noah, you know Dinah. She’s always been like a clam when it comes to a work in progress. With that amazing memory of hers, she never needs notes. And sure, a story absorbs her, sometimes makes her oblivious to most things. But this time it had gone on long enough to bother me. So I tried to get her to talk about it that last morning, to tell me what she was investigating. She told me practically nothing and ended up mad at me to boot.”
“Stop feeling guilty,” Bishop said. “You couldn’t have known she’d disappear that day.”
Since guilt was only a small part of what Kane was feeling, he was able to shrug without comment.
Bishop looked at him thoughtfully. “And you’re sure, absolutely sure, that wherever she went, it wasn’t willingly?”
“Absolutely positive. And even if I’m wrong about that, she would never stay away this long without letting me know where she is. If she could get to a phone, she’d call me.”
Bishop was silent for a couple of miles, then said, “We’re reasonably sure that nothing in her personal life would have driven somebody to snatch her.”
It wasn’t a question, but Kane answered anyway. “Nothing I can imagine. When her father died a few years ago, he was the last of her family, I told you that. Or at least the last she knew of. He left her a huge portfolio of stocks and other investments, but she just turned the management of everything over to someone and more or less ignored the money, as far as I could see.”
“You said both you and the police talked to her financial consultant?”
“Sure, early on. Easy enough for me, since he manages my money as well. He said Dinah’s business affairs were perfectly in order, that she wasn’t being blackmailed or pressured in any way as far as he knew. No large, unexplained deposits or withdrawals to or from any of her accounts. Nothing. Not a single goddamned breadcrumb to follow.”
“Still,” Bishop said, “maybe it’d be worthwhile to talk to him one more time. Money tends to be at the root of most bad things one way or another. He might know something no one else could tell us, especially now that he’s had plenty of time to think about it.”
By this point, Kane wasn’t willing to discount anything, even going over familiar ground a second time. Dinah had been missing for more than a month, and so far the investigation had led nowhere.
Noah Bishop, special agent for the FBI, had come into the picture only the day before, when he’d arrived in Atlanta. He had been out of the country, whether on Bureau business or his own, Kane hadn’t asked. He wasn’t formally a part of the investigation, but both his badge and his manner meant that when he asked questions, even of cops jealous of their territory, he usually got answers.
Kane and he had been good friends since college, when they’d competed in track-and-field events, and had been roommates in their junior and senior years. Their career choices had taken them in different directions after graduation, but Noah always found a long weekend every few months to visit Atlanta.
He had managed three of those visits after Kane had become involved with Dinah, so he had known her fairly well. And since she had been characteristically curious about the FBI and Noah’s very specialized abilities and knowledge, and he had a high regard for investigative journalists with integrity and strong ethics, they had found much to talk about.
So, he was almost as upset over her disappearance as Kane was, but only the whitening of the scar down his left cheek bore witness to that emotion. Otherwise, he appeared completely calm and in control, his voice steady and sometimes filled with a dry humor, his powerful body relaxed, pale sentry eyes watchful as always but tranquil.
Kane wasn’t fooled.
In response to Bishop’s statement, he said, “Okay, we’ll talk to Conrad Masterson. I’ll call him tonight. In the meantime, there must be something else we can do.”
“Between you, the cops, and your private investigator, I’d say everything that could be done has been.” As if ticking off the facts on his fingers, Bishop said, “Her movements that last day have been traced as much as possible and every potential lead followed. Everyone she’s known to have talked to that last week has been questioned at least once. You’ve kept a fire burning under the police. Your P.I. has been dogging every step of the investigation and working his own contacts. You’ve spent days in Dinah’s office going through ten years’ worth of files, and weeks running down information on anyone she might have pissed off in the course of doing a story. You’ve talked to her financial manager, her co-workers, and her boss. You’ve talked to neighbors in her apartment building. You’ve searched her apartment—twice. You’ve offered a million-dollar reward for information.”
Kane braced himself.
Quietly, reluctantly, Bishop said, “Unless something new comes to light … Jesus, Kane. I’m sorry as hell—but the trail is looking awfully goddamned cold.”
Kane hadn’t wanted to admit that to himself. Not today, when Bishop had kept him from lunging across the desk of a police lieutenant and choking the man. Not yesterday, when the last of Dinah’s known enemies had proved to be in prison on the fifth year of a ten-year sentence. Not the day before that, or the days and weeks before that, when useless information had piled up and leads dwindled and hope dissolved.
“I know,” he said. “I know.”
Conrad Masterson had always amused Kane. He was average in appearance—average height, average weight, an average bald spot atop his head. He didn’t care how he dressed, which explained his badly cut suit, and wasn’t impressed by impressive surroundings, which was why his small office was filled with aged furniture and worn rugs and smelled vaguely like a wet dog. Or two.
He had no charm, tended to stutter when he got excited (always about a new stock or other investment opportunity), and had been known to arrive at the office wearing different colored socks and unsure where he’d parked his car. But what he lacked in common sense and personal style, Conrad more than made up in financial brilliance. In the investment community, it was well known that he made money for all his clients, handled their business with scrupulous honesty, and was the absolute soul of discretion.
Blinking behind his thick glasses, Conrad said miserably, “I want to help, Kane. You know I do. And if I thought there was anything, anything at all, in Dinah’s financial dealings that might help find her, I would have said so to you or the police long before now.”
“But you won’t show us her file?” It was Bishop who asked, his voice level.
“I can’t do that. As long as there’s no proof otherwise, I have to assume she could walk in that door any minute. And given that, I have to keep her files confidential. I can’t give you details—I just can’t. And the judge agreed with me when the police tried to get a warrant, Kane, you know she did. Unless you or the police come up with information that indicates Dinah’s disappearance was somehow connected to her financial dealings, my hands are tied.”
“Legally tied,” Kane noted.
“I have to protect my clients’ privacy.”
Kane drew a breath and tried to remain patient, knowing only too well that he would want his own affairs treated exactly the same way. “Okay, Conrad. But think. Surely you can tell us if there was anything unusual, say in the last few months. You’ve had time to think about it.”
“Yes, but … unusual how? Dinah left her investments to me for the most part, you know that, Kane. Occasionally she sold stocks against my advice for quick cash, usually because she was trying to help somebody—”
“What do you mean?” Bishop interrupted.
Conrad considered the question and whether he would b
e breaching confidentiality, then decided to answer frankly. “Just that. She’d do a story on a home for battered women, and then call me to sell some stock so she could give them fifty thousand to remodel or hire a better lawyer, something like that. She’d do a story on a poor congregation losing its church, and right away pour tens of thousands into their rebuilding fund.”
He smiled with wistful fondness. “I could always tell. She’d have that note in her voice when she called, so determined you could call it hell-bent, and I’d know she’d found another wounded soul or bird with a broken wing. She’s given millions over the years. Even before her father died, she used most of the income from her trust fund to help others.”
Kane swallowed. “I … never knew that. She never said anything about it.”
“No, she wouldn’t have. It wasn’t something she talked about. She once told me that her father had taught her a lesson she’d never forgotten—that you helped people without shouting about it, because just the act of helping them made you and your own life better. She believed that. She lived up to that.”
Bishop glanced at Kane, then said coolly to Conrad, “With that in mind, don’t you think she’d want you to help us find her? So she can help more people, if nothing else. The trail is cold, Mr. Masterson. And she’s been missing for five weeks.”
Conrad bit his bottom lip. “I wish I could help, Agent Bishop. You have no idea how much. But—”
“Had she come to you recently and asked you to sell stocks without any explanation, or without an explanation you considered reasonable?”
“No. She always had a reason, and, after all, it’s her money. She’s free to spend it however she pleases. Usually, it was her stories and learning about somebody in need that started it for her. Something that got her passionate and made her get involved.”