by Nalini Singh
Given Miriama’s age, her reliance on her phone for communication was unsurprising.
Photo editing software made up the bulk of what was on this computer. Will checked Miriama’s current projects, then slotted in the memory cards from her cameras, but nothing jumped out. Shot after shot taken in pursuit of her signature portraits, plus several finalized images—including one of a bare-chested Dominic in bed, his smile intimate, and a stunning one of Pastor Mark sitting stoop-shouldered on a church bench, but none of it told him how to find her.
He took the memory cards regardless, and made a mental note to dig deeper later. Right now, he had another priority: he needed to follow up on Fidel Cox. Locking up the café, he returned to the police station.
The system spat out the correct case file after a single inquiry.
According to the notes of the officer who’d driven in to record Matilda’s complaint on behalf of Miriama, the police had sent Fidel’s photo out across the country and received exactly zero tips in response. Fidel was an experienced hunter, so everyone figured he’d “gone bush” until the heat died down.
It had probably not helped the search that Fidel Cox was one of the most nondescript individuals Will had ever seen. His mug shot, taken in the aftermath of a drunken brawl a year before his molestation of Miriama, showed a man with pale brown skin, black hair, and brown eyes. He was neither big nor small, neither tall nor short. He had no distinguishing marks, no tattoos, no scars. No feature on his face that stood out.
Fidel Cox was a man who could blend in anywhere. If he hadn’t wanted to slink off into the wild, all he would’ve had to do was change his name and grow a beard or shave his head. Either would’ve dramatically altered his looks.
Was it possible he’d come through Golden Cove and been missed?
Will had already made a short call to the tourism center on the way back from Matilda’s, been told that aside from the Japanese couple Nikau had taken to see the gold-mining shacks, Golden Cove hadn’t had any visitors in the previous five days. As far as the center was aware, there were no hikers on the local trails, either. Still . . .
He picked up the phone and called the tourism center again. It was Glenda Anderson who answered this time, not her part-time student assistant. The fifty-something woman with bright pink hair and a penchant for stilettos was a legend in the town after her years dancing in the cabaret show of a cruise liner.
“Have they found that poor child?” she asked, clearly recognizing Will’s number. “My heart’s just sick about it. She is such a sweetie. Always saves me a piece of that cheesecake I love.”
Will’s eyes went to the trash bin where he’d thrown the takeout container in which Miriama had brought him his carrot cake. “No,” he said. “But I’m hoping you can help me with something.”
“Anything for you, you handsome young man.” The flirtatious statement lacked its usual spark, more rote than anything. “Shall I get on to the computer?”
“Yes.” First, Will repeated the same questions he’d asked the assistant, in case the youth had missed something. When that all failed to pan out, he moved on. “Do you have any records of a male tourist going onto the trails over the past six months?” A very long window, but per Matilda’s words to the responding officer, Fidel Cox had been intimately familiar with this area and with living wild.
“Well now,” Glenda said to the accompaniment of the click-clack of her keyboard, “that’ll be a long list since it covers four months of the tourist season. Shall I email it to you?”
“Yes.” Will stared at Fidel’s mug shot again, thought about how the man was a chameleon. “Can you also email through their identification?” The tourism center made it a point to request some form of photo ID that could be copied and kept on file just in case things went wrong and searchers had to be provided with an image.
Will didn’t think Fidel Cox would’ve given them any real identification or that he’d have even checked in with Glenda and her people—odds were, if Fidel had come back into Golden Cove, he’d slipped into the bush miles from the town itself. But Will would be careless in his duties if he didn’t clear this particular avenue of investigation. And not all criminals were smart. Any number had been caught because of stupid errors.
Two hours later, he’d gone through every single one of the names and ID photos and come up with nothing. If Fidel Cox had returned to the area, he’d done so in a way that wouldn’t be noticed. None of the other hikers appeared suspicious: every single one had provided either a passport or driver’s license as ID and a quick search on various data banks—or via social media profiles—told him none had lied.
Not ready to give up yet, Will called a colleague of his who worked in the crimes against children area. “Hamish,” he said when the phone was picked up on the other end. “I need a favor.”
“You never call, you never write, and now you want a favor,” the lawyer said in his usual dry tone. “This keeps going on and I might get suspicious that you’re just using me.”
“We have a use-use relationship.”
“True.” The sound of creaking, as if Hamish was tilting back his chair as he so often did while he sat in his office. “But you used to buy me a beer now and then before you went full hermit-mode.”
“Put it on my tab.” Will wondered when he’d be . . . equalized enough to go back into the world he’d once not only inhabited but owned with a casual expectation that he could control it. He had the feeling the answer was never.
“Maybe I’ll come visit you in that West Coast town of yours,” Hamish threatened. “I looked it up—the wife thinks it might make for a nice romantic getaway when the weather’s a bit less pissy. On the flip side, my middle-aged body isn’t keen on going hiking or participating in the various dangerous activities on offer. Can you fish there?”
“There’s a spot on the rocks that’s probably safe enough if you wear a life jacket and hook yourself onto the cliffs with anchor ropes.”
Snorting, Hamish said, “What can I do for you, my good friend who I never see?”
“I’m trying to trace a man named Fidel Cox. He was never prosecuted, but he was implicated in a crime against a child.” Hamish was a walking encyclopedia when it came to men and women who might target innocence. “I’m going to email you his photo. It’s five years old, so keep that in mind.”
A short pause, while Hamish waited for the photo to download on his end. “Got it,” he said. “I’ll run it through my private database. I’ve also got this fancy software that’ll age Mr. Cox. Said software is from sources who shall not be named because they might be providers of illegal knockoffs—but tell anyone and I’ll deny it. It’ll take a while. I’ll call you back, whatever the result.”
“Thanks, Hamish.” Before hanging up, Will found himself saying, “You should come to Golden Cove this summer. I’ll borrow a boat and we’ll go fishing and have that beer.”
“You’re on,” was the enthusiastic response. “I should probably mention that I hate fish. You’ll have to eat them all.”
Hanging up afterward, Will stared at the windows awash with rain. He’d made an effort to sound normal for Hamish, but the man who’d once grabbed an after-work beer with the lawyer was long gone. This Will . . . This Will wasn’t so sure who he was anymore. But he knew how to do his job.
He turned back to his desk, and ran a deeper search on all the tourists whose names Glenda had forwarded. All came back clean. Most had been international visitors who’d long ago returned to their countries of origin; the small group of New Zealanders had no criminal records among them.
He then began to make his way through the stack of memory cards he’d taken from the café.
It was only when he looked up after going through all of them that he realized it was dark outside. Going to the doorway, he pulled it open and looked over to the fire station, the rain hitting his face as it slanted in
under the eaves.
No lights. No vehicles parked out front.
Hardly a surprise—the rain was crashing down. He took care of a few other matters, then made sure his phone was fully charged and shrugged back into his high-viz jacket for the drive to Anahera’s.
This rain was made to cause emergencies and he needed to be ready to respond. Most Golden Cove residents would call him rather than the official emergency line. At the last minute, he went back and picked up the watch and tin. The station did have a safe, but he wasn’t comfortable leaving the items here before he’d had a chance to examine them.
He put the memory cards not in the main safe but in the hidden gun safe; there was nothing suspicious on them, but it was Miriama’s work and deserved to be protected.
Once in his car, his hair damp again and his jacket gleaming with transparent droplets, he drove past the clinic to make sure Dominic de Souza wasn’t still just sitting inside, shocked and lost. Seeing the place was dark, he swung by the two-bedroom house the doctor rented from Daniel May. It wasn’t far from the surgery.
The single light in the kitchen showcased Dominic at the table, head slumped on his arms. Will frowned. The other man didn’t look in good shape. He was about to get out and knock on the door, make sure depression wasn’t getting the best of Dominic, when another person moved into the frame.
It was the pastor. The gray-haired man was holding a mug of something, and a plate of what looked like toast. He put both in front of Dominic, then placed his wrinkled hand on the doctor’s shoulder and squeezed. When Dominic raised his head at last, the older man sat down next to him, seemed to be talking intently. After a while, the doctor nodded and picked up a piece of toast to take a small bite.
Satisfied Dominic was under careful watch, Will turned his vehicle toward Anahera’s place. He thought about picking up something for dinner and taking it along with him, but it looked like everyone had shut up shop early because of the weather. Well, he had half a loaf of bread in his fridge at home. He and Dominic would be having the same meal tonight.
As he drove through the dark and deserted streets, he could see the May estate in the distance—lit up against the night. He wondered if Daniel had returned home from his meetings or if it was Keira up there alone. Just then, he glimpsed red taillights through the trees, as if a car was climbing up toward the estate. Someone from Golden Cove? Or had Daniel come into town to attend the gathering at the fire station, and was now driving home to his wife?
No way to tell from here, the rain diminishing even the limited visibility he normally had of the road up to the estate.
The tourism center, he was happy to see, was also shut up. Glenda lived literally behind it, but he swung around anyway to make sure she was safe. She came to the window and waved when his headlights cut across her front window, well used to his patrols by now. Will flashed his headlights at her in a silent response, carried on. He had to check up on a number of others, elderly and vulnerable individuals who might’ve been forgotten in the tidal wave of worry over Miriama.
All of them proved to be snug inside their homes.
As he drove on, he tried not to think of Miriama out in the cold and wet. He was thinking he should go by Mrs. Keith’s, too, when he got a call. The signal was patchy, but he recognized Evelyn Triskell’s voice: “. . . Vincent . . . his car.”
26
“Evelyn, where are you?”
It took him two minutes of conversation through crackling static to work out that Evelyn was somewhere on the road out of town. Telling her to stay put, he did a U-turn and headed that way. A car went past him in the opposite direction around the halfway point, but they passed on the turn and he couldn’t see much of the make and model through the heavy rain. It had been small, though, not a truck or an SUV.
It was another ten minutes later that he caught the blurred rear lights of a car on the side of the road—and it wasn’t Evelyn’s old Mini. It was Vincent’s silver Mercedes, a car the other man usually only drove for short trips and never in this kind of weather.
Bringing his vehicle to a stop beside the crippled sedan and turning on his hazard lights as well as the blue and red flashers atop the roof and in his front grille, Will got out. Vincent’s car had smashed into the ditch, the front crumpled in. Not enough to have crushed the driver, but enough that the car would need a tow. More worried about Vincent than the car, Will blinked the rain out of his eyes and wrenched open the driver’s-side door.
Vincent looked at him, a streak of blood down one side of his forehead and a faint smile on his lips. “This is the last thing you need, isn’t it, Will?”
“Where’s Evelyn?” Will yelled to be heard over the pounding rain that thundered on his head and dripped in rivulets down his face. The extremely low visibility made it difficult to see any markings on the road right in front of him, much less farther down the road; Evelyn’s smaller vehicle could be lying broken ten meters up and he’d never spot it.
“Evelyn?” Vincent stared blankly at him for a second before shaking his head. “I sent her home. She was driving back in after running one of the hunters home, and she saw I’d spun off the road. Insisted on stopping to call you.”
Will knew the chairwoman of the Golden Cove Business Council; a bulldog had nothing on her. “How could you possibly have convinced Evelyn to go home?” At least that explained the car Will had seen heading into town—it had been the size of Evelyn’s compact.
“Wayne.”
Will should’ve thought of that himself—Evelyn’s husband was in a wheelchair as a result of a stroke, and while he had good mobility around the home, he still relied on Evelyn for a lot. He was older than her by fifteen years at least and far more frail.
If Will had realized Evelyn wasn’t home, he’d have checked on Wayne during his patrol. The Triskells lived on his street and he often lent them a hand if they needed physical help with something. Half the time, the request was a thin excuse for Evelyn to attempt to pump Will for scandalous details about her fellow Covers.
“How seriously are you hurt?” He’d automatically grabbed a flashlight as he left his vehicle, now focused it on Vincent’s head wound.
Blue and red flickered against the night around them, the police lights incongruously like neon flashes in a bar.
“It doesn’t look too bad from here.” Will could see a little blood along Vincent’s hairline, but there was no sign of a gash.
“It’s fine.” Vincent raised his hand to his forehead. “I’ll probably have a headache tomorrow, but that’s about it.”
“We still need to get you in front of a doctor,” Will began.
“Dominic de Souza isn’t in any condition to help anyone.” Vincent’s tone was tight. “And I don’t think you’re going to be driving me out of Golden Cove for treatment. We’ll be in more danger from the weather than I am from this shallow cut.”
The other man was right. With Dr. de Souza crushed by Miriama’s disappearance, and the town cut off by the heavy rain and rising winds, Vincent would have to wait until tomorrow to get any medical care. That was, if the rain let up. “Come on,” Will said, “I’ll run you home. Grab your stuff.”
Vincent didn’t seem to be in any hurry, but Will had things to do. And as far as he could tell from Vincent’s speech and general mental responsiveness, it wasn’t the head injury that was slowing him down; Vincent just seemed oddly unmotivated. When the other man made no move to get the sports bag he had in the backseat, a bag most likely filled with outdoor gear he’d used during the search, Will opened the back door and grabbed it himself.
Returning to the sedan after dumping the bag in his SUV, he turned off the car’s lights, then took the keys out of the ignition before leaning down to look into the other man’s face. “Look,” he said, his patience at an end, “you want to sit out here all night, fine. But I can’t sit with you and I can’t leave you here. So get
off your ass. There are a lot of other people who might need me tonight.”
Vincent blinked, as if becoming aware of his situation for the first time. Swearing under his breath, he got out into the rain. “Will the car be safe here?” he asked, blinking water away from his eyes. “I mean for people on the road.”
Will had been thinking the same thing himself; he had accident alert beacons with him, but they’d be washed or blown away in this weather. And calling Peter at the garage to tow this would just put another man at risk from the worsening weather. “How’s your back?”
“I haven’t got whiplash, nothing like that. The car slid very gracefully into the ditch.” Vincent raised his fingers to the cut on his head. “This is from me leaving a metal business-card case on the dash. It flew up during the slide.”
Trusting the other man’s analysis of his own injuries since he gave every appearance of being fully lucid, Will handed the keys back. “Put the car into neutral. Let’s see if we can push it farther into the ditch so it’s not half hanging on the side of the road.”
The heavens seemed to open up even more as the two of them attempted the maneuver. The one good thing was that the rain made the land slippery. Peter Jacobs’s younger and far more hotheaded brother would probably bitch about the work involved in towing the sedan back out of the ditch, but they got it safely off the road and into the depression. No one should hit it unless they themselves went off the road.
Drenched to the skin and with fingers like ice, the two of them finally got into the police vehicle. Vincent reached into the backseat for his sports bag, pulled out a towel. He offered it to Will. “This is the least you deserve after coming out to get me.”
“No, that’s fine. Dry your forehead so we can check that cut. Head wounds aren’t something to just shrug off.” His headlights cut fleetingly across the wreck of Vincent’s Mercedes as he did a U-turn; the Baker property was situated relatively close to town, off a long drive. “What the hell were you doing out here anyway?” Vincent’s car had been pointed away from Golden Cove and his home.