by Nalini Singh
Edward had been like that, though it had taken her far too long to see the truth.
“I’m sorry, Will,” the suffering artist said in an Irish accent so beautiful it couldn’t be real, even as his eyes scanned Anahera then came back for a second look; obviously she’d fulfilled a list of basic prerequisites and deserved closer inspection. “I’ve been consumed by my characters since lunch—the girls can tell you. I wouldn’t know if a flying pig went past, much less some local girl.”
Anahera saw Will’s face tense, his shoulders bunch. “Let’s go,” she said to him before he punched the pretentious asshole. “We have to check the other places.”
A curt nod, but he wasn’t done. “Did either of you see Miriama run past here today?” he asked the two groupies.
The girls shook their heads. Then they looked as one toward Shane Hennessey, as if waiting for him to tell them what to do next.
Anahera’s skin prickled.
She was glad to get out of there. “Is it always like that?” she asked after they’d pulled out of the drive and were back on their way to the dump. “Him with a harem?”
“I have it on good authority that the people who win Shane’s residencies are always young, female, and pretty. Such a strange coincidence.”
Anahera snorted. “You have a gift for understatement, cop.”
He didn’t reply, the lights of his SUV cutting through the inky blackness in front of them as he slowed down just before the ragged dirt track that led to the cleared but never developed patch of land that had become a dumping ground.
The tourists never saw this part of Golden Cove, never glimpsed the slick black rubbish bags torn open by feral cats, never had any idea of the abandoned couches and—“Is that a refrigerator?” Fury punched through her. “Even the worst asshole knows to take off the doors before dumping a fridge.”
Face grim, the cop brought his vehicle to a halt on the edge of the dump. “That wasn’t here last time I did a patrol—which was yesterday, just before I saw you on the road. I’ve got tools in the back.” Unsaid were the words that he’d take care of it before they left.
But first, they had to search for Miriama. That was when Anahera had a horrible thought. Heart thumping, she walked through the scattered debris to that fridge that hadn’t been there yesterday and that had appeared right when a girl had gone missing.
“Wait,” the cop said. “We need to preserve evidence if—” Leaving the rest of the chilling words unspoken, he grabbed a pair of thin rubber gloves from the kit he had in the back of the SUV.
Anahera’s pulse thundered as he closed the distance to the fridge, images of Miriama’s sunny smile playing across her mind. Please, God, if you have any mercy at all, don’t let her be there in the cold and the dark. Around her, the dump emanated a sickly sweet smell that would usually turn her stomach, but at that instant, all she could see was the scratched white of that dented fridge.
“Keep the beam of your flashlight on the edge of the door.” Again, the cop didn’t say what they were both thinking: that if Miriama was in there, she was dead. She’d been gone too long and there wasn’t much air inside one of those things.
14
Not reaching for the handle—saving any prints that might be there—the cop put his gloved hands carefully on the bottom edge of the door and managed to break the seal. Anahera’s heart slammed like a bass drum as the door swung open . . .
To reveal emptiness.
Exhaling in a harsh rush, she bent down, her hands pressed against her knees. “Shit,” she said. “Shit.” It was sheer relief that made her muscles tremble, mixed in with a great big dose of adrenaline.
Rising, the cop opened the freezer compartment, and she wondered what he was looking for—it was hardly as if you could fit a woman inside there. An instant later, she realized you could fit a head or an arm or a foot and fuck, why was she thinking like that? Probably because she was with a cop who thought like that. And it made her wonder what he’d seen that he knew that such horror was possible.
“I’ll detach the doors before we leave,” he said when the freezer section proved thankfully empty except for an abandoned bag of peas. “We have to work the site in a grid. We’ll start from the car and walk straight through a foot apart from each other, then back until we’ve covered the entire area.”
Anahera followed him to the starting point and they began their methodical search. When his flashlight beam swung across the bleached white of bones, they both froze, but it turned out to be the carcass of a long-dead cat.
Its bones glinted in the flashlight beam, tiny and perfect.
They carried on. At least there hadn’t been any blood. Anahera tried not to think of another time when she’d found a body. There had been blood then, old and congealed and drying blood. And other things.
Three days dead was a long time in summer.
“What are you expecting to find?” she asked when they turned to retrace their path.
“Nothing,” he said. “A cop who expects things is a cop who misses what’s right in front of him. But even if we don’t find Miriama, if we locate some trace of her—a shoe, the iPod, a piece of fabric from her clothes—it would give us a direction and a place to concentrate the search.”
Anahera nodded and they carried on, piece by piece by piece by piece. Three long hours later, they were at the SUV and had found nothing. Not saying a word, the cop went to the back of the vehicle and grabbed his tools. She trained light on the fridge so he could see what he was doing. It didn’t take him long to dismantle the doors from the fridge so that no inquisitive kid or animal could get stuck inside.
That done, he trained the beam of his own flashlight on what turned out to be a serial number, snapping a photo of that with his phone.
* * *
—
Dawn was still four hours off when Will and Anahera arrived at the fire station. Nikau was the only one there. “I sent Mattie home,” he said. “One of the other women went with her and knows to stay the night. That fuckwit she’s hooked up with isn’t exactly going to be any help.”
Will nodded. “The search crews find anything?”
“No. I told everyone to go home, come back when it’s light. No use going over and over the same areas in the dark.”
“I’ve called in the situation,” Will said, having taken care of that prior to heading for the dump. “We’re not going to get any air support. They’ve got two missing children just outside Greymouth.” An adult woman missing less than twenty-four hours couldn’t compare to two children under ten who hadn’t been seen since they left school the previous day. It didn’t matter what Will’s gut said about Miriama being in serious trouble.
“Daniel has a helicopter,” Nikau bit out with a curl of his lip. “Maybe if you ask, his lordship will deign to help.”
“Grab some shut-eye, Nik.” Engaging the other man in a conversation that involved Daniel would never have a good outcome. “I’ll need you at full capacity come morning.”
Teeth gritted and blood in his eye, Nikau said a terse good night before leaving to walk home.
* * *
—
Anahera didn’t speak until Nikau was out of earshot. “You’re planning to talk to Daniel, aren’t you?”
Glancing at his watch, the cop said, “Might as well wait till morning now. Probably have a better chance of getting his cooperation if I don’t wake him up at two a.m.”
“Daniel wasn’t always an ass,” Anahera felt obliged to say. “If Nik’s your only source on him, well, they have a history . . .”
“No. I’ve had dealings with Mr. May myself.” He left it at that, and she knew she’d get nothing if she attempted to dig deeper.
Hard gray eyes met hers. “I’ll drop you home, but I need to detour to the station first and send through an information request to Miriama’s cell phone provider.”
“Or when it was last active,” Will said. “I assume you want to help with the search in the morning?”
“Of course.” She wouldn’t be able to breathe easy knowing Miriama was out there alone, likely hurt. “What will you be doing?”
“The same thing.” The cop began to turn off the fire station’s internal lighting. “And hope we find some small fragment of her. Because even in the dark, you can’t miss an entire woman.”
The last light went out.
15
Will drove up to the May estate twenty minutes before dawn, while the sky was steel gray brushed with smoke at the edges. He wanted to talk to Daniel before light broke over the horizon, so that if the other man agreed, they could get the chopper up in the air as quickly as possible.
If Daniel turned him down, Will had a few other strings he could tug, a few friends who’d step into the breach; the problem was, most of them didn’t live near the coast. It’d take time for them to fly here, and every instinct he had told him time was critical. He didn’t listen to the voice that said it was already too late.
Reaching the gate at the start of the long drive that led up to the house, he pushed the buzzer twice in a row. The male voice that came on was wide-awake and distinctly irritated. “No, this isn’t a public road and no, you can’t hike through.”
“Mr. May,” Will said before Daniel could hang up, “it’s Detective Gallagher. I need to speak to you on an urgent matter.”
A little to his surprise, the electronic gate began to draw back at once. He waited only until it had pulled back enough to allow his vehicle through.
Like all the properties in this area, the estate was surrounded by rich native ferns and ancient trees that blocked out the sunlight to form a lush green atmosphere reminiscent of a primeval rain forest. With dawn on the horizon, everything was soft and misty and colored in myriad tones of gray. It was eerie, he supposed, but there was also a stark beauty to it as long as you knew that this landscape could kill you if you weren’t careful.
The house that appeared out of the gray-shrouded green wasn’t the showy monstrosity you might expect from a man who liked to flash his wealth, but then Daniel May hadn’t built it; the house had been built by his parents, who’d both passed on a few years back within twelve months of each other. A graceful architectural creation constructed of glass and wood that had been polished to a honeyed shine, it rose just high enough above the treeline that, from the top of the house, you could see the ocean. Otherwise, it was designed to blend into the landscape.
The helicopter pad was set to the right of the property, some distance from the house itself. In between, there was a tennis court and a swimming pool. A guesthouse the size of an average family home sat to the left of the main house. None of these things on their own would’ve made Daniel a pariah in town; the Baker family had the same kind of wealth, though from a different source, and they were well liked. It wasn’t money that divided Daniel from the others in Golden Cove, it was Daniel himself.
Parking his vehicle, Will got out. Daniel had already stepped out of the house and was walking toward him, a slender man of about six-two with shoulder-length brown hair tied back in a queue. His features were fine, his ethnicity difficult to pinpoint. According to the locals, Daniel’s mother had been Korean, his father white—of English descent. May Senior had apparently been very proud that the family history could be traced all the way back to the first settlers in this region.
Despite the early hour, Daniel was dressed in crisp black pants and a raspberry pink shirt. The color should’ve looked ridiculous on a grown man, but somehow, Daniel pulled it off. “What’s this about?” he asked, a frown between his brows and a steaming mug of coffee in one hand. “Does it have anything to do with all those flashlights I saw on the beach last night?”
Will didn’t particularly like being talked to as if he was the hired help, but as he needed the man’s assistance, he decided to keep it civil. “Miriama is missing.”
“Missing?” Daniel took a sip of his coffee, not making any move to offer Will a cup. “Are you sure she hasn’t just taken off to see the sights somewhere else? The girl’s too beautiful to be happy stuck in a dead-end town.”
“She went missing while out for a run.” Will’s temper had never been a hot thing of rage and fury . . . not until the night of the fire. It had cooled again in the aftermath, and he could handle Daniel’s smug sense of superiority without losing control. “I came to ask if you’d help with an aerial search.”
“I’ve got meetings out of town today. What about the police helicopters?”
“There’s another ongoing case involving children.” He’d checked in with his commander, been told the choppers would be going up again at first light, along with a massive army of search volunteers. Will could be frustrated with the allocation of resources while agreeing with them—the children had to be a priority.
“If you won’t help, just say so. I’ll have to call in private aerial teams from outside and they’ll take time getting here.”
He thought it was the word “outside” that did it—Daniel might turn up his nose at the town, snubbing all the social events to which he was invited and making it clear he didn’t think most of the residents were fit to lick his boots, but he also considered himself the most important man in Golden Cove. It was his town; he couldn’t stomach the idea of outsiders coming in and taking over.
That, of course, was part of his problem with Will. Daniel had expected Will to fall in line. His first month here, Will had accepted a dinner invitation from Daniel and his sulky-faced wife. In a place this small and remote, the local cop had to make an effort to build bonds no matter his own desire to keep a distance.
It had been toward the end of the night, as Daniel walked him to his vehicle, that the other man had made it clear he expected Will to keep him informed of everything that went on in Golden Cove. “You understand?” he’d said in that supercilious master-to-servant tone. “This is my town and I like to keep my finger on the pulse. You’ll find I’m a generous man to those who please me.”
Will had simply said, “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” and left.
Two days later, he’d received a call from a friendly senior officer who’d told him to watch his back. Daniel, it turned out, had tried to get Will fired. “Just be careful,” the older man had said. “May might live in Golden Cove, but he has connections everywhere.”
Now the self-professed Lord of Golden Cove grimaced. “I’ll take up the chopper.” A pause before he added, “I’ll need a spotter. Might as well be you if you’re ready to go up.”
Will looked at the horizon through the breaks in the trees, saw the first blazing edge of daybreak. “I’ll call, inform the rest of the search party.” While he did that, Daniel went back inside the house to tell his wife his plans and to inform his secretary that he’d be late.
“Nik,” Will said when the call was answered, “I need you to run the entire ground operation for the time being. Go back over all the areas we did last night, search deeper where you can, and don’t forget the dump and other outlying areas.”
“No problem.”
Will stared out at the trees backlit in orange flame by the rising sun. “And spread the word that I want to know if people saw anything even vaguely related yesterday afternoon.” Will needed a starting point to begin the investigation—a piece of Miriama’s clothing, a description of a stranger in town, a report of a local seen with Miriama, something.
“Where are you?”
“I’m going up with Daniel.”
A taut silence, followed by, “I’ll make sure the others know, so they can signal if they spot something on the ground that could do with a bird’s-eye view.”
“I’m not sure what the cellular reception will be like in the chopper,” Will said, “but i
f you have a major discovery, get the people on the beach to all wave. It’ll be easy to spot that with how low we’ll be flying.”
“You’ll have a signal.”
It was only after the other man hung up that Will wondered why Nikau was so certain about the cell signal. He knew damn well that Nik wouldn’t have gone up with Daniel, and since Daniel was the only one who flew the sleek black machine . . .
Right.
It had to be Keira who’d contacted her ex-husband from the chopper. Either she’d done it at Daniel’s behest, or she’d sneakily messaged Nikau while her husband was busy at the controls. Neither sounded particularly good for Nikau’s already screwed-up head.
Daniel reappeared, having changed into jeans and a long-sleeved white shirt that was probably worth five times the monthly salary of most of the people in town. Neither one of them said a word as they headed to the chopper. Will had already grabbed the binoculars he kept in the SUV—in a place with terrain this rugged, it paid to have them handy.
Once inside the helicopter, he pulled on the headset that would allow him to talk to Daniel, then asked the other man to skim along the coastline first, before going inland and over the areas where Miriama was most likely to have run.
The sun’s rays broke completely through the last of the mist as they rose into the air. Will glimpsed a small and curvy woman with blonde-streaked brown hair on the verandah of the estate house, her elegantly boned face lifted to watch the chopper and her hands gripping the railing. She was wearing a red negligee and, despite their distance from the house, the wind from the chopper blades pasted the silk and lace of it against her body, outlining a shape that had driven many a man to his knees.