Seeking Worthy Pursuits: A Dark Romantic Suspense Novel (Alace Sweets Book 2)

by MariaLisa deMora

  “It’s not like that. I liked Maddy as a friend first. We slipped into a relationship naturally, building on years of conversations and experiences. She’s pretty, I can’t deny that, and to try would be a lie. And yes, she fits me, but that’s more because we’ve gotten comfortable with each other, so being with her is as easy as breathing.” He shook his head. “I won’t argue with your evaluation of me, because that’s your opinion and has only as much effect as I allow. My job means when I’m out and about, I’m in the public eye. But I didn’t become a judge on the strength of my looks or how well I fill out a suit, silk or not. So the fact you seem to have a demeaning estimation of me as a person doesn’t matter to me for anything other than what it might mean for my friendship with Eric, and what it could mean for Maddy and Mackie. I hope you won’t dismiss Mackie’s disappearance out of hand because of dislike for me.”

  “I don’t dislike you.” Alace’s head tipped the other direction this time, and he wondered if there was any pattern to her physical tells, if he could discern her real intent by analyzing the physicality she displayed within a conversation. “I didn’t say that. I said you were preeny, and you asked what that meant to me. I didn’t say I didn’t like it about you.”

  “I’m confused.” Should he let this slide, move past it and see if he could steer the conversation back to Mackie? No, it would bother him if he didn’t know. He’d be considering every word around her, overthinking his wardrobe choices, and that lack of comfort would lead to avoidance, which would eventually mean not hanging out with Eric. “You catalogue me as ‘preeny,’ but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s just another detail to tick on your mental list when you think about Eric’s friend Todd?”

  “Pretty much. Preeny isn’t an insult; it’s an observation. I’ve met preeny guys before, and pairing that trait with a dozen others can help give a rounded view of an individual.” The device on the table vibrated and she glanced down at it, brows pulling together. “What kind of car does Maddy drive?”

  “A yellow—”

  Alace was moving before he finished. She tapped the device, the red ring disappeared, and when she stepped out from behind the table, she was clad in soundless, rubber-soled boots he hadn’t noticed on the floor. Where did she— “I’ll be in touch.” A hand gripped his shoulder as she passed, the whisper drifting aimlessly, still wafting through the air as he turned to find an empty kitchen, Alace having disappeared up the hallway to his bedroom.

  “Alace.” His call was met with silence; not even the air moved behind her.

  The doorbell trilled, and he startled to his feet, chair sliding out behind him until it crashed into the barstools next to the breakfast bar. A distinctive click of a key, this from the front door just as he saw a shadow pass through the backyard, shimmering through the twilight and the sheer curtains.

  “Todd?” Maddy. Of course. “Are you home?”

  “Yeah, I’m in the kitchen.” He glanced at the table, gathered the juice can, and dropped it into the empty glass, making a paired set that masked the reality of two people sitting here only moments ago. “Come on in, join me. How’d it go?”

  She paused in the doorway, and he scanned her down and up, then down again. The reality of Alace’s observations hit him like the soft punch of a pillow. Maddy did fit him, effortlessly. And she was gorgeous, even with dark circles under her eyes giving silent testimony of her sleepless nights. Slim-hipped, perfectly proportioned. He opened his arms and she walked into them, willing to ask for comfort now they were alone behind closed doors, and he wasn’t arguing with her about how to manage her grief and fears.

  “You didn’t answer your phone.” Her voice was muffled against his chest, the pressure of her lips a benediction. She turned her head, cheek resting above his heart. “So I took a chance you’d be home.”

  “I forgot it in the car.” Cradling her close, he laid his cheek on top of her head, mapping her comfort by the cadence of her breaths. “I’m glad you came over.”

  Todd eased her into discussion of their evening possibilities, keeping up the comfortable cadence until dinner was ordered online and delivered, served from the packages lined up along the edge of the kitchen countertop. Sometime later he made another aborted attempt to pull his phone out and gave in to her laughing separation from his hold, her hands shoving at his butt as he rose from the couch.

  “Go get it already. You’re making me antsy with how much you miss that thing.”

  At the doorway, he glanced back, catching her giving him a look filled with sad fondness, as if she mourned along with him all the missed opportunities to have this tiny bit of normality and comfort. Since Mackie’s disappearance, most of Maddy’s evenings were spent making calls and posting pictures online in groups and on boards, engaging tipsters in the forums built around that kind of activity. “I’ll be right back.”

  Maddy lifted her chin and smiled, even that so sad it tore another piece off his already tattered heart. “I’ll be right here, Todd.”

  Phone retrieved, he closed the car door, darkness falling in the enclosed garage. Tapping on the phone’s screen, he woke it and unlocked the device, finding the service connectivity restored. He saw the missed call from Maddy, but the previous texts were gone, as was any indication he’d received contact from an unknown device. The only thing remaining from his afternoon pursuits was an addition to his photo roll, a book cover of a popular mystery written by local celebrity Alace Sweets.

  The image on the cover was of a falling-down farmhouse, a sinister half-covered well partially in view behind the structure. The title was On the Case.

  Chapter Four

  Alace

  Hunched over the desk positioned in a corner of the room she’d claimed as an office, Alace ran fingers through her hair, idly straightening it strand by strand until it fell in a comfortable flow behind her ears and down the back of her neck. On the surface in front of her were two tablets, each showing news articles. Different papers, different locations, different decades—but otherwise so much alike they were eerie in resemblance.

  Idaho, twelve years ago: a blight covering more than three years in which thirteen girls and women went missing from towns over a swath of geography that framed the edges of nearly a half-million acres of national forest.

  One reporter had drawn correlations between them, even though the local police had claimed no such connections and publicly refuted the reporter, called his article fearmongering. Repudiated by the authorities, the reporter’s sources were hounded in ways untraceable and had eventually recanted their stories, memories claimed muddier with time than initially thought.

  She flicked that article to the side, surfacing the one directly behind it on the tablet. Idaho, two years ago: sunken areas in a series of forest clearings surveyed by a drone enthusiast revealed strangely similar features too regular to be natural. Curiosity piqued, a forest ranger had followed up on the report, traipsing into the woods thinking he’d hone his orienteering skills if nothing else. His visit had turned up a partial skeleton, human, discovered when his boot sank to the ankle along the edge of the environmental artifact. He swore to the reporter, not the one who’d written the original article, that when he’d pulled his foot out of the hole the hand had been gripping the sole, as if trying to reach sunlight.

  Six skeletons were discovered in that single, sunken-in grave. All had been identified as coming from the pool of missing.

  When the drone operator had reminded the authorities of the other clearings with similar peculiarities, they’d panicked and closed the forest for two weeks.

  Eventually many of the missing had been located.

  The original reporter had dropped from the grid by then, perhaps never knowing his suspicions proved founded in fact.

  She pulled the other tablet closer, neck bent as she read an article printed in a sensationalist rag two months ago, a month after Makenzie Temple was reported missing by her boyfriend—that report a detail Alace noted Todd had left ou
t of his brief recounting of the story as he knew it.

  Eleven girls and women missing from towns and villages surrounding a broad swath of national forest in the great state of Utah. That forest abutted and extended north beyond the Idaho state line, creating a conjoined section of wilderness as rugged and remote as anything any other state could boast.

  Eleven individual disappearances, with more than half chalked up to the walkaway wife syndrome. The others were tagged as troubled kids, runaway material, a covering brush of excuses to hide the fact the local authorities hadn’t tried too terribly hard to find them. Easy way out. She twirled a strand of hair in front of her ear, reading through the article a second time.

  One deliberately placed fingertip to the tablet flicked that image away, and she tapped a couple of times to locate the one she wanted to see next. A topographic map of the area, darker greens indicating heavily wooded areas versus the lighter color of a section ravaged by forest fire two decades ago. Replanted, but those efforts took years to see the culmination of the dream. She enlarged the view, going close enough to read road names on the high-resolution image. Broad sections without roads crisscrossing, without communities trespassing on the isolation. There were a number of widely spaced clearings bisected by a named trail, lightly hiked.

  Another flick against the tablet and she again rooted for the next thing, a web page filled with video streams. Some live wildlife cams, but most were recorded drone flyovers. A tap, another tap, and suddenly a video took up the screen, the rolling circle indicating file buffering glaring up at her. It resolved into a close-up of grass and weeds, the edge of some hard surface the drone launched from, that edge turning into a square diminishing in size as the device took to the air. No narration, but the person who posted had provided longitude and latitude for the location, and a tiny compass swung in the corner of the camera view. Oriented north, the drone flew over an enormous sea of green, trees covering the surface as far as the camera view stretched. Occasionally she could make out the dark brown of the path below, through small breaks in the canopy.

  The drone paused and spun, compass now pointing east as the tiny camera took off again, darting away from the path. Ahead the tree line dipped, and the drone skimmed the tops as it flew into a clearing. It traversed the space side to side, in a uniform path, the intent of the exercise counting the number of surviving seedlings planted the previous year. To one side of the clearing, the drone hovered in place, the view sweeping side to side, surveying a space roughly eighteen feet square where the seedlings were gone. Disappeared as if never planted. But in the center, incongruous in its placement, was an old, wooden half barrel. The contents were dead, dried and withered in the merciless high-altitude sunshine. The drone lifted and turned, and Alace’s hand darted forward, freezing the video. She spent a moment staring at the screen, then carefully rewound it to the moment just before it began to rise. On the far side of the planter was a small rectangle of dying grass. Not dead, not like whatever the flowers had been inside the half-rotted barrel. But dying, as if from lack of nutrient. Yellowed and short, stunted when compared to the vegetation nearby.

  “Alace?” Eric’s voice drifted up the stairs, curling around her like a comfortable and well-known blanket. “You coming down for supper?”

  Alace blinked at the tablets, glanced up at the computer screens filled with biographies of the twenty-four dead and missing women, some more rightly labeled girls, not yet out of their teens, and sighed.

  “Yeah, be right there.”

  She thumbed the off switches for each tablet, ensuring they shut down completely as she considered her options. Discovery of the video footage wasn’t a breakthrough, not really. One piece of video wasn’t worth a trip, wasn’t worth sending one of her operatives to check things out. If she found more, however, that could tip the scales.

  She sat straight in the chair, reached for the computer keyboard, and dragged it towards her. With the keyboard balanced precariously on top of the overlapping tablets, she typed furiously, writing up an analyst request for a job board accessible only via a myriad of security protocols. Disposable email created to field responses, she double-checked the stated parameters and clicked the button to post.

  Deftly composing a message, she carefully considered her words. She hadn’t gone out on a gig herself since dealing with the betrayal of her former handler. A shiver worked through her muscles, leaving the hair on the back of her neck standing on end. A lifetime ago, seems like. Refocused on the task at hand, she reminded herself that unlike the gigs he’d produced for her to work, this wasn’t a for-profit job, wasn’t even a job yet, not really, and she didn’t want to set off a separate line of investigation yet. Mentally delving through her options, she picked Owen, her most dependable hunter. Owen Marcus was an ex-military intelligence, ex-rogue government asset who had spent formative time in Central America, developing a hot hatred for human traffickers. Message sent, she tried to find any chinks in her half-formed plan.

  With a shake of her head and fingers repeating well-known patterns, she quickly exited the server, then the mask server, then the dummy server, finally back to the surface of her vast security network.

  Louder than before, Eric called out again. “Alace? Supper, baby.”

  Her lower leg tingled as she unfolded it from underneath her, preparing for the moment she’d finished shutting down and could stand. “Coming,” she called over her shoulder, timing herself for the next forty-five seconds, toes wiggling and stretching. Unplugging the biometric scanner from the back of the desktop computer, she stood and lifted her arms overhead, arching backwards with a groan. Scanner deposited in the wall safe next to the window, she thudded the heavy mirror back into place against the wall, covering the camouflaged safe door.

  Exactly on time, she exited the room, leaving the door canted open behind her.

  Nothing to see here, folks.

  Chapter Five

  Alace

  “I don’t know how long I’ll be gone.” She stared down at the backpack under her hands, balanced on the edge of the bed. There was a small stack of clothing to shove inside, and then she’d be packed to leave. She didn’t move, couldn’t, not without Eric’s permission, and he was willfully silent from his stance in the center of the open doorway.

  She imagined his soulful eyes, dark with emotion, already worried about her.

  Alace’s nerves reminded her how long it had been since she’d worked a gig herself. Once she’d made the important mental switch from being the immediate and present arm of justice and revenge to the one developing the plans, detailing what needed to happen and matching those demands against available skill sets, it wasn’t a line she had wanted to cross.

  This one is different.

  Not only because Todd had brought it to her but also because the sheer scope of the possible victim count left her staggered. The Idaho police hadn’t made the connections she had, even with the available information right in front of them. They’d attributed the deaths to a variety of individuals, and in one case even claimed a bear attack the cause because of gnaw marks on rib bones recovered from a pile of brush about twenty feet from what Alace knew was another burial spot. They hadn’t bothered to bring sonar equipment in, hadn’t given much thought to what else might be waiting under the sod.

  I’ve got the benefit of experience. She did, too. A serial killer looked at disposal locations differently from investigators. She could tell at a glance that the carefully squared off areas weren’t graves. Those were sloppier, rounded edges, shallow—or deep enough to upend a corpse into. What the police had misidentified as graves were used for a very different purpose. Somehow, and she wasn’t certain how yet, the killer had created the rudimentary equivalent of a livestock holding pen. He’d kept his captives alive, played with them probably, then killed them or allowed them to die through inaction—thirst, starvation, or exposure culling them. Same result any way she looked at it. Except for the large cluster of skeletons found toget
her. Those victims had been abandoned. The coroner reports had corroborated her thoughts, his timeline putting the deaths of all six women very close together.

  If she was right—and her hunches were telling her she was dead on the mark with this one—the drone footage in Utah was of the same kind of holding pens. The one where she’d found the dying rectangle was likely a trap door to access the cage. Undoubtedly the half barrel had a purpose, too; she just hadn’t come up with a valid idea yet.

  Over the past two days, the other five videos identified by her freelancer had revealed the same setup, all within about five hundred square acres. A fairly limited area, given the size of the forest itself.

  The tipping point this morning had come when her system alerted her to another missing woman report. Nearly a week ago, Nyla Davison had left home for work at a bakery in a nearby town, never got to work, and never came home. Her car had eventually been discovered parked in the stall of a car wash, locked, keys inside, her phone and purse neatly tucked in front of the driver seat.

  Another disappearance and no response yet from Owen. He was between gigs and owed her nothing, so if he had decided to fade into the woodwork completely, she couldn’t blame him. A courtesy call would have been nice, but even that, if it meant balancing his mental health against her wondering and worrying, she’d pick him every time. Fact remained that he hadn’t called, and her system had pinged. That was why she had to go. If the killer, and there was no doubt in her mind there was a killer, a singularity to be clarified at a later point, but only a human would hunt other humans in this way. If the killer had taken a new victim, it likely meant they’d reached a point where a previous captive was expendable, or already expired.

  “I’ve got to go.”

  “So you said, beloved.” Her peripheral vision caught sight of Eric stalking towards her. The fluid sway of his hips, the length of stride, the way his arms swung loose at his sides—he was coming for her. Alace stood straight and closed her eyes, head tilted back and to the side. She was inviting him in, making herself vulnerable in a way he wouldn’t mistake. “Tell me what you want.”