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

by MariaLisa deMora

  “Not the water.” She gestured towards him in an echo of the vague movement he’d used earlier. “You. You’re leaking. I can tell you want to ask me something.” Muscles at the edges of his mouth tensed briefly. “It’s got you worried, because you don’t want to piss me off. But, you’re wondering how much of what you’ve asked me to do I can do from here.” She tipped her chin towards the desk and patted the arms of the chair. “And you’re halfway convinced to tell me to pull off, back away, and you’ll sort out another way to see about finding this woman you’d like to make a sister-in-law.”

  Todd’s involuntary jerk gave away so much, chin lifting as his back straightened and he settled his weight evenly on both feet, arms swinging ready at his sides, plastic bottle crackling in one fist. Defensive posturing at its finest.

  “Todd, Todd, Todd.” Keeping him in sight from the corner of her eye, she gave him a view of the top of her head as she tipped her chin down, feigning disappointment. Speaking to her knees, she asked, “Did you really think I wouldn’t look at everything to do with the missing woman?”

  “No.” He sighed, and she saw his shoulders lower, rounding down as he slumped. “I should have told you.”

  “Yes, you should have.” She sat straight and turned the chair, angling it back towards the desk. The folder she’d prepared was waiting in a drawer, and it was the work of moments to retrieve it. She slapped it on the desktop with a loud crack and glared at him, still angry he’d thought to come here and try to do whatever it was he’d hoped to accomplish. “I think the subject has been abducted, but the boyfriend had nothing to do with it. He’s got steady employment and a strong family and network of friends, and is financially stable. He doesn’t fit any kind of profile. According to those aforementioned family and friends, his grief and anger continue long past the media cameras’ withdrawal. There are four witnesses that place her in a different town the afternoon of her disappearance. Absolutely nothing points to a crime of planning or passion, and when questioned using persuasive techniques, the boyfriend gave no indication that his story is anything other than true.”

  “Persuasive techniques?” Cords stood out in Todd’s neck, testimony to how hard he was straining to keep his face expressionless.

  “You don’t want to know.” His imagination would conjure far worse methods than what she’d authorized, the tasteless drug not having any negative side effects other than a tiny bit of amnesia, necessary to protect her operative. “Is that really what you’re curious about? I tell you she’s been taken, and you’re going to get stuck on how I ruled out your main suspect?”

  “Who do you believe took her?” His fingers were busy with the bottle lid again, twirling it one way, then the other, repeating the action in slow, steady movements. “Was it someone she knew?”

  “Nope. If I’m right about this—” Alace paused, letting the unspoken words settle in that she wouldn’t be saying anything at all unless she was more certain that he’d believe. He leaned forward by a fraction of an inch, catching himself and swaying upright. There it is. “Then timing and location indicate she’s probably the victim of a serial killer hunting in the Rocky Mountains.” She gave her next words consideration, deciding that to retain Todd’s confidence in her ability to do the job, even through this time of enforced rest, she needed to expose the existence of having a team. “We’ve patched together reports about bodies found over several hundred miles of remote areas, where there’re more than enough similarities to draw parallels between them. Timing fits, too, with the subject one of a small cluster of disappearances correlating to the killer’s exposed pattern.”

  “Mackie.” Todd cleared his throat, the rough sound relaying the deteriorating hold he had on his emotions. “Makenzie. Not ‘the subject.’”

  “I can’t personalize things and remain effective, but I can imagine how it would feel hearing it said like that.” Alace tipped her head in a shallow nod. “I’m not ready to give you a formal rundown on everything and I won’t provide specifics. Not now, because we’re continuing to work various angles, and maybe not ever depending on how things shake out. There is an outside chance she’s still alive, but you shouldn’t hope too much. There have been no rescues to date, only recoveries.”

  “Is there any good news I can share with her sister?”

  “No. In fact, if you’ve shared at all, I’d be quite displeased.” She took a slow, careful breath, leaving him sitting in silence for a moment. “Should I be displeased, Todd?”

  His headshake came fast, and was definite, but didn’t truly reassure.

  “You should make this your last unscheduled visit. Do you understand me? If and when I have information you need to know, I will contact you.” Alace stared at him, somewhat mollified as sweat beaded along his upper lip. “Set the alarm on your way out.” She turned away, keeping him in view but effectively dismissing Todd in a way he hopefully couldn’t miss.

  She recovered, reassembled, and booted the computer before he’d cleared the stairs. Focused on the security feeds as he stepped off the bottom step, she watched as he wavered towards the kitchen, then thought better of making himself at home and instead went to the door. He tapped a sequence on the keypad before he made his way through, and closed the door behind him. She could have armed the alarm from here, but making him lock up set a clear impression regarding his unwelcome status. Outside cameras confirmed he left the property, and city tracking picked him up on license plate scans three blocks away, then six, then nine, proving he had kept going.

  Good boy.

  Alace closed those browsers and slipped her headphones on as she navigated to the video footage she’d been watching before Todd showed, rewound it to the beginning, and pressed the play button again.

  “State your name, please.” The prosecutor was out of frame, so she couldn’t see his expression, but his voice was gentle, encouraging.

  “Mackie.” The little girl in the center of the video paused, shuffled forwards in the rigid witness chair, and leaned closer to the microphone. The audio system buzzed, and Mackie jerked back until the noise reduced to the annoyance of a mosquito. She licked her lips and continued with her full, legal name. “Makenzie Nicole Temple.”

  “Can I call you Mackie?” The prosecutor waited for her nod, then reminded her, “We need to hear your words, Mackie.”

  “I’m sorry.” As the young girl cringed, her thin shoulders crowded her ears. “Yes, you can call me Mackie, Mr. K.”

  “For the record, Mackie’s referring to myself as Mr. K. I’m fine with that, as Khosrowshahi is a mouthful for anyone.”

  Hassnal Khosrowshahi, one-time prosecutor from the Denver DA’s office, was about as far from a comforting father figure as Alace could imagine. After more than seven years in that position, two years past the legal proceedings currently under review, he’d taken a swift and messy fall from grace. The allegations of criminal behaviors stretched back not just through his tenure there, but beyond to the time he initially passed the bar. She hated that this vulnerable child had been in his orbit at any point of her life.

  Mackie shouldn’t have been in this situation at all. She should have been testifying from an isolated room with her support team nearby, or been deposed on tape, with the recording played for the jury without the child being present in the room. Khosrowshahi didn’t care about the potential damage being done to the little girl.

  He’d had his eyes on a higher appointment and had said repeatedly in closed-door company that this case was the one to bank on. Piggybacking his aspirations on the horrific crimes done to this child. Lowest of the low, but nothing that would have gained him Alace’s attention.

  Until now.

  Alace stopped the playback and made a note, then restarted it to the sound of the gallery tittering at the tiny joke.

  “Mackie, can you tell the members of the jury how old you are and where you go to school?”

  The warm-up questions continued in this vein for a while, without any apparent rel
axing effect on the child. When asked to look at the people seated in the jury area, she squirmed in her seat, casting sideways glances that quickly darted back to the base of the microphone in front of her. Alace made another note regarding the judge, because he could have stopped this at any time and didn’t. Two decades wasn’t long in the grand scheme of things. It wouldn’t hurt to see where his career had taken him. Wouldn’t hurt her, anyway.

  Finally, after many more long and excruciating minutes of testimony from the little girl, the prosecutor got to the meat of why they were here.

  “Mackie, is your grandfather in the room?”

  If the child had appeared withdrawn and shy before, now she seemed to fold into herself, making her body as small a target as possible. Her whispered “yes” set the audio equipment humming, rising into a painful squeal that made her cringe back in the chair. When asked to point him out, she lifted one tiny forefinger over the balustrade of the witness box, angled to the right and out of frame, gnawed and ragged nail bitten to the quick, quivering in time to the visible heartbeat pounding in the little girl’s throat.

  What transpired over the next forty-five minutes was unconscionable, the child’s agony and terror exposed for everyone to see as the prosecutor asked ever more explicit questions.

  Mackie had been systematically molested and eventually raped by her grandfather, beginning at age four and continuing until about eighteen months before the trial, when he’d roughly penetrated the then ten-year-old, brutally injuring her for the final time. She’d been unable to hide the pain and bleeding from her twin sister, and after her humiliated confession about what had happened, it had been Maddy who’d made things stop by going after their grandfather with a baseball bat.

  Why the man had picked one identical twin over the other, Alace would never know.

  From Maddy’s testimony earlier in the trial, it was clear she hadn’t been thinking when she’d run the few blocks between their houses, bat in hand, but simply wanted him to pay for what he’d done to her sister. The protective one of the pair from then to now.

  The grandfather had been a serial predator, with victims and witnesses coming forward from various branches of the family to help convict him. Maddy hadn’t killed him, had hardly connected with the hickory wood before he’d disarmed her. Fortunately, a sheriff’s deputy had witnessed her frantic race—crossing streets without caution—and so had been close enough to hear her shouted accusations.

  The encounter formed the beginning of the end for the old man. Alace had checked, her half-formed idea of taking care of him totally unnecessary. He’d been shanked in prison only a few years after being convicted, something she counted as a good death, even if not as protracted a one as he’d deserved.

  That had been the first of many life challenges for Mackie. From then until the day she’d gone missing, her life had never been easy. There’d been no coasting, no grace period, no comfortable place to land.

  Her school was unforgiving of her fragility, as well as of her more self-destructive coping mechanisms as she grew older. The only stable and supportive influence in her life had been her sister, Maddy. No matter what Mackie did, Maddy stood shoulder to shoulder, supporting and defending her.

  From the outside in, the destructive qualities of the relationship were clear to Alace. Maddy couldn’t have seen it, not as close as she’d been to Mackie. Alace thought moving to Utah might have been Mackie’s last attempt to break from her cycle of codependence.

  Up to that point, she’d get into shit and Maddy would rescue her, cleaning up whatever mess was left behind. Maybe if Mackie had been left to sort her own consequences at any point things would have gone differently, but that was a coulda-woulda that didn’t matter now. Mackie had met a guy and decided over the course of a weekend that she’d relocate and follow him home. Nothing Maddy could say had deterred her, either, causing the first documented argument between the two.

  Police called to a local diner had arrived to find the women facing off in the parking lot. Interestingly, in a picture posted to social media from a bystander, it had been Todd standing on Mackie’s side with the potential boyfriend shown only on the fringes of the group.

  Alace studied the image closely, noting body posture, facial expressions, and most importantly, the confused look on the two cops’ faces. Whatever was being said—Alace would give her eyeteeth for a video with sound but had found nothing so far—didn’t match whatever the officers had expected as they’d rolled up.

  She leaned back in the chair, recrossing her ankles on the stool set nearby for that purpose.

  Something about that single image didn’t sit right. Her intuition told her there was more to the story, more than just the more stable one of the pair rampaging about the other sister’s wild-hair decision. Todd had known Maddy and Mackie all their lives, and at the time had been Maddy’s sometime lover for months. He’d been around Mackie enough to have understood the toll her behavior was taking on Maddy. Yet in this pivotal moment, he hadn’t stood by Maddy. Why?

  Knowing the answer wasn’t present in the information currently available, Alace angled towards the laptop and logged into a service feed. She took time to craft the request, being selective both in her keywords and recipients. There were a dozen contacts she’d used for this kind of inquiry before, but only a couple she would trust with something this sensitive. Todd was Eric’s best friend. It would not be well received if he knew she was looking into Todd as part of this request.

  Her gaze flicked to the image a final time, and it finally hit her. When he’d been standing in the doorway today, his body language had been nearly identical. Fear. Whatever Maddy and Mackie had argued about, Todd had been terrified by it somehow. Resolve strengthening, she pushed the button to send the message and backed out of the programs, shutting down the computer and locking it and the removed battery in the drawer before she stood and stretched until her joints popped, slowly making her way to the bed.

  She’d checked on Owen earlier and found little additional information uploaded after their chat last night. He’d be on his way back to the car right now and available to collaborate soon enough.

  Once arranged on the comforter, Alace texted Eric with a dinner request, knowing he would be pleased she asked. She then took a picture of her socked feet, again crossed at the ankle, this time propped on a pillow, and sent that to him, too. They earned her two messages. One more verbose verifying he’d pick up the meal as requested. The other was a single word, the seven letters on the screen somehow imbued with the same vibrating intensity as when he murmured it against her skin, synesthesia be damned.

  Beloved.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Alace

  A red light blinking along one edge of her computer screen caught Alace’s attention. Fingers contorted, she hit a keystroke combination that ran a script to back her out of the darknet node where she’d been chatting with a source. This allowed her to flip to the security system more quickly. The view on the cameras surprised her, and Alace picked up her phone to check the screen and confirm she hadn’t missed a text.

  Eric was pulling into the garage, the alert tied to movement on the external cameras.

  She checked the time, verifying she hadn’t been working for longer than the doctor recommended. Turning the chair to face the doorway, Alace propped her heels on the stool and waited.

  With the speed at which he appeared in the hallway, Eric must have taken the stairs two at a time, and she wrinkled her nose in annoyance that he wasn’t even the slightest bit out of breath.

  “Alace.”

  Muscles in the back of her neck seized tight at the single fucking, fucking word. The grave tone was so out of character Alace instinctively knew whatever had brought Eric home from work was bad news, and her hand protectively cupped her belly.

  “What?” One breath in for four seconds. “What’s wrong?” One breath out for four seconds. The expression he wore was anguished and fearful. A glance at her computer sh
owed no alarms for anything to do with her activities. Whatever this was, it had to do with them, the two of them.

  “Have you seen Todd?”

  So out of left field, the question caught her unawares, and her head nod was jerky instead of smooth. “Yes. I told you last night, he was here yesterday. Came to check up on the sicko.” She reminded him of the lie Todd had tried to feed her, more successful because Todd was Eric’s best friend. She allowed her fingers a single soft caress against the tiny curve of her body before resting her elbow on the desk. “What’s up?”

  “He didn’t show for court today. Totally unlike him.” Eric had fully entered the room while they talked and now paced in short, agitated arcs. “I went to his house. His car’s in the garage and the doors were all locked, but there was a smell in the air I didn’t like.”

  “A smell?” Alace retained her relaxed posture, even though her fingers screamed to dance across the keyboard and pull up the cameras she’d put inside Todd’s house. Not something she wanted Eric to know, unless the resulting coverage showed something they might need. She’d done it as insurance, to keep an eye on the man who’d been so bold as to approach for her help. “What kind of smell?”

  “Medicinal. Faint, but there. I couldn’t place it.”

  Yeap, time to pay the piper on this one. “Don’t be pissed.” She turned to the computer and woke it with a touch. “I wasn’t watching him. I just put them in place when I talked to him about what he needed.” A folder on a cloud server held her shortcuts for Todd’s house. She opened a log that reflected the alarm usage, then clicked the software for the cameras. “I haven’t even looked at anything because there’s been no reason. All the movement and info on this gig has been leading us well away from town, no need to check up on Todd.”

  A review of the alarm log timestamps showed Eric’s entry and exit as the most recent activity, but it was a three-peat, because his first entry of the code had alarmed the system, so he’d had to put in the code again to actually enter, and then again to exit. Before that was an entry that corresponded with Todd going home after their interaction the previous day. Nothing in between.