No One But You

by Maureen Smith

  Damien looked vaguely annoyed by her obvious reluctance to leave him and Althea alone. “Angelique works at a professional membership association downtown,” he informed Althea, who nodded without comment.

  “Damien and I met in college,” Angelique volunteered. “We were both journalism majors, so we took a lot of the same classes. He was a little shy back then, so I had to make the first move, even though I’d caught him checking me out several times. He claimed he would’ve eventually worked up the nerve to ask me out, but I wasn’t taking any chances. There were too many other vultures circling.” She smiled sweetly at Althea. “Know what I mean?”

  Althea didn’t miss the implication or the veiled warning behind the words. “I do know what you mean,” she said, cool and composed. She flashed the other woman a smile etched in steel. “Gotta watch out for those vultures.”

  “Exactly.”

  Damien’s expression darkened. “We should be heading back to the office,” he said to Althea.

  She nodded, reaching for her purse. “I’m ready whenever you are.”

  He rose from the table, removed a ten-dollar bill from his wallet, and dropped it on the table to cover the tip. For a moment, as he stood beside Angelique, Althea could see what an attractive couple they made, with his dark good looks and her exotic beauty. Her stomach twisted at the thought, for reasons she didn’t care to examine.

  As she slid to the end of the seat, Damien reached down and helped her gently to her feet. The proprietary gesture did not go unnoticed by Angelique. Her eyes narrowed as a cold, territorial gleam filled them.

  She turned suddenly to Damien. “I don’t know whether or not India told you about the homecoming dinner for parents that’s coming up in a couple of weeks. It’s something the school came up with this year, as a way to get more parents and families involved in the homecoming festivities. India would really like for both of us to attend the dinner with her.”

  Damien nodded briefly. “She didn’t mention it, but I’ll talk to her this evening and get more details.”

  “But you will come, right?”

  “I have to check my schedule and get back to you.”

  “All right. I know it would mean a lot to our daughter to have us there together, like old times.” Angelique gave him a soft, winsome smile and stopped just short of batting her eyelashes.

  Damien looked down at her, deadpan, a solitary muscle bunching in his jaw. “I have to go, Angelique.”

  “Of course,” she purred in a voice like oiled silk. “I don’t want to hold you up. I know you have important cases to get to.” She turned to Althea with another one of those saccharine smiles. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Aretha.”

  Althea didn’t bother correcting her. She knew the mistake had been deliberate, and she wouldn’t give the other woman the satisfaction of knowing she’d gotten under her skin. In more ways than one.

  But as she and Damien walked out of the crowded café a few minutes later, she muttered under her breath, “From now on, just call me the queen of soul.”

  Damien gave a low, mirthless chuckle. “Sorry about that.”

  “You don’t have to apologize. I’m a big girl—I can handle it. Besides, you’re not responsible for her actions.”

  But as Damien helped Althea into her car—while a fuming Angelique looked on from the doorway of the restaurant—Althea realized that the other woman had just given her yet another reason not to become romantically involved with Damien. Between the kidnapping investigation and her ongoing battle to reclaim control of her life, the last thing she needed was the drama of dealing with a jealous, vindictive ex-wife.

  Damien couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment he’d decided he had to have Althea again.

  As of yesterday morning, he’d been in full agreement with her that their one-night stand had to remain just that—a one-night stand. When he told her about his policy against dating colleagues, he hadn’t been lying. He’d never dated anyone who worked for the Bureau, although not for lack of opportunities. Over the last seven years he’d received his fair share of propositions, but he’d never been tempted enough to break his own rule about keeping his professional life separate from his personal life.

  Until now.

  Until Althea.

  He wanted her like no other woman he’d ever wanted before. And the more he told himself he couldn’t have her, the more he wanted her. Craved her.

  Damn it all to hell.

  Just what he needed at this time in his life. A craving.

  In the aftermath of his disastrous marriage and the devastating custody battle that resulted in India being taken away from him, Damien had had to work overtime to put the shattered pieces of his life back together. Literally. He’d thrown himself into his job with a ferocity, a single-minded focus that earned him a reputation for being “intense” and “brooding.” His family worried constantly about him, convinced that his obsession with his cases rendered him incapable of coping with the reality of his own dysfunctional life. And they were right. Hunting criminals gave him the perfect excuse to escape into the minds of others—others who had far more problems than he did.

  For giving his all to the Bureau, he was rewarded with the respect of his peers and supervisors, who doled out letters of commendation and put him in charge of various task forces. But the price he nearly paid for being a workaholic was the loss of his daughter—again. After missing three court-appointed visits with India due to work, Damien realized he was in serious danger of causing irreparable damage to the relationship he’d spent years cultivating with his daughter. He had to step back and reassess his priorities, and in the process, he’d learned to stop using his job to anesthetize the pain and anger that had consumed him during the course of his disastrous marriage and in the ensuing custody battle.

  Over the last two years he’d finally gotten his life under some semblance of control. His relationship with India was stronger than ever, and although his family still accused him of being a workaholic, he’d at least developed an internal mechanism that warned him when he’d reached his limit, when he was dangerously close to crossing the line between duty and obsession.

  Which was why Althea Pritchard posed such a problem.

  A woman like Althea had the power to drive a man to the point of obsession. Look at him. He’d spent most of the night camped outside her apartment, lurking in the dark like some stalker. He’d gone home only to grab a few hours of sleep and take a shower. When he returned to her apartment and found her car gone, he’d panicked, fearing that something terrible had happened to her. Once he picked up her vehicle on the radar and he realized where she was headed, his fear doubled. He went after her, trying not to imagine the worst, that she’d been kidnapped by the same sadistic predator who took Claire Thorndike, a psycho who planned to reenact Althea’s abduction by returning her to the place where she’d been held captive.

  The relief Damien felt when Althea burst from the cellar, shaken but unharmed, was unlike anything he’d ever felt before. He never wanted to let her out of his sight again.

  Which was crazy.

  He had no proof to substantiate his belief that her life was in danger. He had a list that drew some uncanny, disturbing parallels between two abduction cases. And he had a gut instinct that warned him something was not right. Neither would be enough to convince Althea to remove herself from the case.

  But he sure as hell intended to try.

  What do you expect her to do? his conscience mocked. Go into hiding until Claire is found—dead or alive?

  Damien frowned, switching lanes. Actually, that wasn’t such a bad idea. He wished he could somehow talk Althea into taking a leave of absence and laying low for a while, but he knew she’d never agree to such a suggestion, and, quite frankly, he didn’t have a right to expect her to just because they’d slept together.

  But his reasons for wanting her off the case were perfectly legit. Not only was she risking her life by remaining involved in the case, but her
presence was a distraction to him. The time and energy he spent worrying about her safety were time and energy that should be spent on the investigation. With a young girl’s life at stake, he couldn’t afford any distractions. He had a job to do, and if Althea was the intended victim of an unknown predator—as he suspected—he had to keep his perspective.

  He was so absorbed in his thoughts that he didn’t realize he’d cut off another driver until he heard the testy blast of a horn behind him.

  “My bad,” he muttered, even as Althea’s amused voice echoed in his head. Has anyone ever told you that you drive like you’re the only one on the road?

  Glancing in his rearview mirror, Damien saw that she had fallen several car lengths behind him, which meant she’d probably missed his near collision. Good. He didn’t need another lecture from her about his reckless driving skills.

  As he hung a right at the next intersection, his cell phone trilled. He picked it up and answered brusquely, “Wade.”

  “Agent Wade, this is Detective Mayhew. I promised to let you know what we found on Claire’s computer.”

  “Go for it.”

  “Nothing unusual on her hard drive. Miscellaneous stuff like school reports and projects, photos, downloaded music, favorite videos, movies, YouTube clips. As for her Internet activity, she visited many of the same sites the average teenager would—MyDomain, Facebook, popular music download sites, online fashion magazines, the American Idol Fan Site, the Web sites of various colleges and universities. No porn, Daddy Dearest will be happy to know.”

  “That’s reassuring,” Damien said. One of the telltale warning signs that a minor may have had contact with an online sex predator was the discovery of pornography on the child’s computer.

  “She bookmarked a ton of sites,” the detective continued, “but there was only one that raised a red flag. It was a local private detective agency. Charm City Investigations. Seems that Claire visited the Web site two weeks before she disappeared.”

  Damien frowned. “Why would Claire need the services of a private investigator?” he wondered aloud.

  “That’s what I intend to find out. I’m heading over there now to speak to the owner. Why don’t you meet me there? I might need you to throw your weight around in case this guy tries to play hardball about client confidentiality, yada yada. He might not talk to a cop, but he’ll sing to a fed.”

  Damien chuckled dryly. “I’ll meet you there. We can play good cop/bad cop. What’s the address?”

  Mayhew rattled off the information, then said, “Before I forget, in case you were thinking about talking to Josh Reed anytime soon, forget about it.”

  “Why?”

  “The kid’s lawyered up,” Mayhew grumbled in disgust. “The attorney went over my head and called the commissioner first thing this morning. It seems that someone leaked to the press that we’d questioned Reed as a possible suspect, and now he’s receiving threatening phone calls and being harassed by reporters. The lawyer said the next time we go anywhere near his client, we’d better be serving an arrest warrant, ’cause the kid won’t be granting any more interviews. Period.”

  “Shit,” Damien muttered under his breath. He was afraid something like that would happen. The media’s involvement in kidnapping cases always provided a mixed bag of blessings and curses. On one hand their nonstop coverage helped the authorities disseminate important information to the public, which occasionally led to crucial breaks in cases. On the other hand, in their eagerness to get the scoop and trump their competitors, media outlets had a penchant for releasing sensitive details to the public that compromised investigations. Damien had experienced the utter frustration of watching a trail go cold because the perpetrator went deep underground after being tipped off by a news report.

  Still, he couldn’t help thinking that Josh Reed’s haste to secure legal representation didn’t exactly bolster his claims of innocence. Maybe Althea was right. Maybe the kid was hiding something.

  “What about the girlfriend?” Damien asked. “Brandi Duplantis. Is she lawyered up, too?”

  Mayhew snorted. “Not yet, but give her time. The day’s still young. Besides, there’s no point in talking to her again. She and her mother already vouched for Reed’s whereabouts on Friday night. Push them too hard and they will get a lawyer.”

  Damien frowned. He knew the detective was right. “Any red flags come up on the cell phone records?”

  “Nope. The last call Claire made was to her best friend Heather Warner on Friday morning. Heather says they often spoke to each other before school to find out what the other was wearing, a practice that started a few years ago when they both showed up to school one day wearing the exact same outfit. Like, oh my God!” Mayhew exclaimed in a perfect mimicry of a scandalized teenage girl.

  Damien laughed. “Hey, that’s not bad.”

  The detective chuckled dryly. “I’ve got two teenage daughters. I hear them yakking in my damn sleep. Anyway, the last call Claire received on her cell phone was on Friday afternoon. It was her gynecologist’s office, calling to confirm her appointment on Monday morning. We’re still going through the phone records, but so far everything’s checking out.” He let out a deep, ragged sigh of frustration. “I gotta tell you. If Claire was meeting someone that night, she sure as hell did a good job of covering her tracks.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not,” Damien murmured, thinking about COLTRANEFAN. After Althea went home last night, he’d called Mayhew to let him know about the cryptic message left on Claire’s MyDomain page. The detective, an eighteen-year veteran on the force who’d seen and heard just about everything, wasn’t terribly optimistic about this particular clue leading to a break in the investigation.

  As Damien hung up the phone and made an illegal U-turn to head back in the direction he’d just come from, Althea’s earlier words about COLTRANEFAN echoed through his mind. With any luck, he’s the mystery date we’ve been looking for.

  Amen to that, Damien thought grimly. We need all the luck we can get.

  Chapter 13

  At ten-thirty A.M., Althea received the phone call she’d been waiting for.

  “The user’s name is James Odem,” the MyDomain representative began without preamble. There was no trace of hostility in his voice over the way he’d been bullied into violating a client’s privacy; he now sounded eager to cooperate and be a good citizen. “He’s a forty-seven-year-old neurosurgeon from Baltimore. He created the account on September 5 and closed it a month later, on October 4.”

  “What time?” Althea interrupted, taking notes. “What time did he close the account on Saturday?”

  “Ten-twenty A.M. Eastern standard time.”

  The morning after Claire was taken from her home. “What’s the process for closing an account? Does it take long?”

  “Not at all. Less than five minutes. All you have to do is log in to your page, click on the link that says Home, go to Account Settings, and select Cancel Account. You’re directed to another page where you have to confirm your choice to cancel the account. Once that’s done, the profile is deleted.”

  “Are users asked to complete a survey whenever they close an account?”

  “Yes. It’s a quick questionnaire that helps us identify areas of improvement and keep track of the number of users who may be switching over to our competitors.”

  “Did Dr. Odem fill out the survey?”

  “According to our records, no, he did not. But he doesn’t have to. It’s on a voluntary basis.”

  “What can you tell me about his account activity? Did he update the page very often? Did he have a lot of friends?”

  “He logged in to the account every day, usually in the evenings between the hours of nine and eleven P.M. He updated the page once a week.”

  “With photos?” Althea asked hopefully. “A new blog entry?”

  “No. There was no blog, and there were no photos of Dr. Odem on the page. He had a very clean, basic layout that included a slideshow of John Coltrane’s al
bum covers. His page was more or less devoted to the works of Coltrane. He added a new song every week. As for friends, he only had ten, and most of these were pages devoted to other jazz musicians. He did have one friend that he corresponded with on a regular basis.” There was a brief pause. “It was Claire Thorndike, the missing girl from the news.”

  Althea found herself moving to the edge of her chair. “How often did he and Claire correspond?”

  On the other end, she heard papers rustling before the rep answered, “Pretty often. At least three times a week. It looks like Dr. Odem deleted all comments and messages on the page before closing his account.”

  The son of a bitch was trying to cover his tracks. “Is there any way you can retrieve all of the messages to and from Claire?”

  There was a slight hesitation. “I have to check with Legal. I could be wrong, but you might need a court order to obtain message transcripts. You know—privacy issues, FOIA, and all that.”

  “I don’t have time to get a court order,” Althea said quietly. “A teenage girl is missing, and the key to her disappearance may lie in the contents of those messages. Your competitors have always worked cooperatively with law enforcement. I hope we can expect the same from you.”

  There was a long, nerve-stretching pause. “It may take a few more hours. We’re having some technical issues with our server. But, yeah, I should be able to get those messages for you. Hopefully by close of business.”

  “Good. That would be very helpful. Could you also send me a screenshot of Odem’s page?”

  “Sure. No problem.”

  “Let me give you my fax number.” After rattling off the number, Althea asked, “When was the last time Dr. Odem sent a message to Claire?”

  “Umm . . . Thursday, October 2. At 10:35 P.M.”

  The day before she disappeared. “Did she respond?”

  “Doesn’t look like it.”

  “All right. Thanks for your time and cooperation.”

  “I hope it helps.”

  “You and me both,” Althea muttered, her nerve endings humming with excitement.