High-Risk Affair

by RaeAnne Thayne

  Cale shook his head. "Thanks for the offer, but I feel better about crashing here, just in case anything breaks in the night."

  His partner raised an eyebrow. "You can be back in Moose Springs from my place in half an hour. Come on, you know Allie's going to skin me alive if I let you sleep on the floor somewhere when you're barely two weeks away from a gunshot wound."

  "What your lovely and compassionate wife doesn't know won't hurt her. She's got enough on her hands with the girls and Toby and managing her diabetes. She doesn't need to babysit me, too."

  At the mention of his family, Gage smiled softly, as he always did, and Cale was surprised at the envy that suddenly gouged him like sharp claws in the gut.

  Where the hell had that come from? he wondered.

  He had always considered himself content with his life and had long ago decided the whole wife-and-kids scene wasn't for him.

  He wasn't cut out to be a husband and father. He had cohabited with a woman exactly one time, a six-week trial about eight years earlier that had been disastrous all the way around. He made a lousy partner, at least in any nonprofessional capacity. He liked not having to report his whereabouts if he decided to head off to the canyons above the city for some rock climbing. He liked sleeping on whichever the hell side of the bed he wanted. With no one to nag him—except McKinnon, anyway—he could work as long as he wanted and could pour all his energy into the job.

  That was the life he preferred, the one he had carved out for himself. Besides his own personal preference, he had absolutely no idea how to make a successful family life, not with a childhood that ranked somewhere between grossly dysfunctional and sheer purgatory.

  But just now, the thought of having someone warm and sweet waiting at home to help him through the tough days, to hold him tight and help him forget for a while, seemed incredibly appealing.

  "Why don't you at least stay out at the Bittercreek with Mason and Jane?" Gage pressed. "They're only five minutes away."

  His friend Mason and his wife Jane were as deliriously happy together as Gage and his wife. Of all the men he might have expected to fall hard one day, the tough-as-cowhide ex-spy Cale had met through investigating a covert child-smuggling operation in southeast Asia would have been last on the list.

  But Gage was completely smitten with his British wife and the two Filipino children they had adopted. He had walked away from The Game without a backward glance and now seemed to want nothing else but to raise horses and kids on the same ranch where he'd grown up.

  "I talked to Mason a few hours ago," he told Gage. "He offered their guest room, too, but I feel better staying here, just in case."

  McKinnon shook his head. "You are one stubborn SOB."

  "So they tell me."

  At the door, his partner scrutinized him carefully. "This case is under your skin, isn't it?"

  Big-time. He knew the Bureau shrink he was supposed to see since the Decker debacle would probably give this some fancy name, would tell him he had some kind of messianic complex or something. He only knew it had become vitally important for him to find Cameron Vance, in a way he didn't quite understand.

  "More than anything, I'm baffled by it."

  "It is a strange one, that's for sure."

  "I can't figure out why the boy would just take off like that in the middle of the night. He just doesn't strike me as the kind of kid to cut and run."

  "Kids get crazy ideas. I should know. Gaby and Anna keep us running every minute to keep up with them."

  "But Cameron Vance's whole dream is to be Special Forces, even given his medical condition. He idolizes his father's memory and spent a lot of time with the other men in his dad's unit. I'm positive he knows a SEAL wouldn't just suddenly ditch his problems and hit the road."

  "I have to tell you, I'm not convinced someone else wasn't involved. Maybe someone close to the kid has gone to a lot of trouble to make it look like Cameron climbed out of his bedroom on his own."

  "It wasn't his mother," he said sharply.

  Gage raised an eyebrow. "I didn't say it was. I still can't shake the possibility that even though we only found his fingerprints in those holes, someone could have been waiting for him on the ground."

  He hated even thinking about it. "You figure out who that might be and where they might have gone with him so we can bring him home and all go home."

  "We're working as hard as we can on this, Cale. What do you think you're going to accomplish for the kid pulling an all-nighter, especially in your condition?"

  Probably nothing. He knew that, but he just couldn't make himself leave yet.

  "Go home and get some rest. I'll see you in the morning," he said instead of answering.

  McKinnon shook his head. "One stubborn SOB," he repeated, but to Cale's relief he didn't push him anymore.

  After his partner left, Cale decided to go in search of Daniel Galvez for an update on what areas had been searched that day and where the grid would take them in the morning.

  He walked out into the cool night air, noticing the flare of flashlights moving slowly on the mountains as the search dog team worked. At the mobile command center, he pushed open the door and found only a handful of people inside, including the man he had come looking for.

  The sheriff gave him a startled look out of red-rimmed, tired-looking eyes. "Davis! I thought I saw you FBI boys leave for the night."

  "Gage went back to his house in Park City to catch some sleep. I thought I'd stick around, if you have no objection."

  "None at all. I'm glad you're here. Save me the trouble of tracking you down. We've got a lead that's probably not connected to Cameron, but it bears looking into."

  "Yeah?"

  The sheriff pulled a paper out of the fax machine. "One of my deputies just took another missing persons report. High school dropout by the name of Wally Simon. One of our regulars. We've busted him half a dozen times since he turned eighteen last year. Petty stuff mostly, though my deputies like to keep their eyes on him. He lives with his mother, Enid, who said he disappeared a week or so ago. She's worried he might be mixed up with something over his head."

  "She give any specifics?"

  "She says a few weeks ago he seemed to come into some money but wouldn't tell her where he got it."

  "Drugs?"

  "It's possible. Kid's a pothead. I can easily see him growing a stash somewhere in the mountains."

  "Any connection you're aware of between him and our missing boy?" Cale asked.

  "Not that I know about. But I should tell you, Simon's a climber when he's not high. He bored everybody in town for months last year bragging about the fourteener he climbed in Colorado. He sometimes hangs out at the climbing wall in town where Nate Randall works."

  Cale digested this new information, sifting through it to try to come up with some kind of link he could work with.

  He hated to ask but had no choice. "Would this Simon be the sort to show up on your radar as a possible child predator?"

  The sheriff scratched his chin. He looked like a man in need of sleep and a good shave, and Cale felt a pang of sympathy for him.

  Moose Springs wasn't big on crime. He imagined two missing persons cases in one day would put a serious strain on the resources of the small-town sheriff's department.

  "My gut says no. Simon's a little prick with a substance-abuse problem and a bad attitude, but none of his past collars have been for anything of a sexual nature that might indicate something like that."

  He would have to check it out, regardless. "Would I be stepping on any toes if I talked to the mother?"

  "You can certainly try. She didn't say much to my deputy, other than to report his disappearance."

  "I don't suppose you have a ride I can borrow? My partner left with our department vehicle."

  Galvez sighed. "Take mine. I'm not going anywhere tonight."

  It was close to 1:00 a.m. when he returned to the Vance log home, frustrated and out of sorts. The lead had gone nowhere, just
as he might have predicted. Enid Simon had been not only uncooperative but close to obstructive.

  She refused to tell him the names of any of her son's friends and wouldn't let him take a look at Wally's room or the piece-of-crap junker he drove that was still parked in the driveway of their dilapidated trailer. She only scoffed when he asked her if her son might have any connection to nine-year-old Cameron Vance.

  It was a big waste of two hours, as far as he was concerned. When he returned to the Vance property, he reported the fruitless interview to an unsurprised Sheriff Galvez.

  "There's nothing more you can do here tonight," Daniel said. "Get some rest. We've got a cot in the back of the command center nobody's using. You're welcome to crash there."

  "You mind if I take a look at the boy's room one more time? I keep thinking there's something we're missing here."

  "Yeah, I feel the same way," the sheriff said. "My guys are killing themselves looking for this boy and we're coming up with absolutely nothing. I hope you find something because I sure as hell don't know where to turn."

  Inside the house, he found the crime unit had finished its job and taped up the door. Cale could have moved it aside and entered, but he only reached inside to switch on the light and surveyed the room from the hall.

  With the soccer ball comforter on the bed and the wadded-up clothes on the floor, it seemed like a typical hoy's bedroom, except for the shrine to Captain Rick Vance on the wall.

  He focused his attention closer on the picture in the middle of all the military honors.

  Vance had brown hair and wasn't smiling. He might have looked stern, except for a telltale gleam in his blue eyes. It could have been laughter or excitement or maybe just plain old enjoyment of life.

  He looked like a hell-raiser, like one of those neck-or-nothing types who tried to reach out with both hands to grab everything life had to offer him.

  Cale had the strange thought that he probably would have liked the man if he'd ever had the chance to meet him.

  Now, he only felt a deep pity that Rick Vance had missed out on watching his children grow up, on cuddling his pretty wife on a rainy spring night, on coaching his son's soccer team and walking his beautiful daughter down the aisle.

  The sudden soft swirl of vanilla and cinnamon gave him his first warning he wasn't alone.

  "Rick's death hit Cam hard," a quiet voice interrupted his thoughts. "Maybe harder than I realized. He adored his father."

  He turned to find Megan standing a few feet away, following his gaze. She looked fragile and pale, her eyes tired and inexpressibly sad. He was taken aback by the ferocity of his sudden urge to fit her close to him and try to soak up some of this burden for her.

  He fisted one hand against the wood of the door frame and shoved the other into his pocket to keep from surrendering to the impulse.

  "I didn't expect you to be here tonight," he said gently. "You need to get some rest. Why didn't you go to your sister's house, somewhere away from this for a while?"

  She shrugged. "I can't leave," she said simply. "What if they find him in the night and he needs me? I have to be here."

  How many nights would she have to cling to that faith? He hoped to God it wasn't many.

  "I could say the same for you," she said. "I thought I saw your partner leave some time ago. I was certain you must have left with him. Why are you still here?"

  He couldn't very well verbalize something he didn't fully understand himself. "I figured one of us should stick around if something broke in the case during the night," he said, which was at least part of the truth. "There's a cot in the mobile command unit. I'll crash there in a while."

  "Not much is happening tonight. I know they've sent most of the searchers home to rest."

  "The dogs are still out there."

  "I know. I also know that with every moment that passes, Cameron's scent becomes harder and harder for the dogs to find."

  She said the words with a grim fatalism that broke his heart, especially as he could provide absolutely nothing positive for her to hang on to.

  Hoping to distract her, he turned his attention to the pictures hanging in the hallway. She had turned it into a family gallery of sorts, mostly of the children at various ages, but a few looked to be of the whole family before Captain Vance's death.

  In one, they stood at the railing of a boat in what he guessed to be San Diego Harbor. In another, Rick Vance sat on a beach with both his children on his lap. Still another was of Vance and his son alone, posing at the mouth of a cave.

  He paused at that one, recognizing the setting. "That's Timpanogas Cave in Utah County, isn't it?"

  She nodded with a small smile of remembrance. "Right before Rick's unit was sent on their second tour to Afghanistan, a few months before his death, we came to Utah to visit Molly and Scott. Scott and Rick took the kids up there one day and Cam loved it. He talked about it for weeks."

  He was touched by the way her features lit up when she talked about her son. "You didn't go along?" he asked.

  "It was one of those father-son bonding moments. Besides, Hailey was only two at the time, and Rick and I both decided we didn't want to lug her up the moun-tainside. And I'm better on solid ground anyway. I think I told you I'm not very crazy about heights."

  "They look like they're having a great time."

  "That's not my favorite picture of their trip. I've got a scrapbook downstairs, if you would like to see it."

  He sensed more in her words than just an invitation tor him to look through family pictures. She needed to talk about her son, if only to shore up her flagging spirits.

  Even if he could do nothing else to find her son lonight, he could at least listen to her.

  Chapter 7

  In the large, comfortable two-story great room, Megan went immediately to a wall of built-in bookshelves near the river-rock fireplace and pulled out a three-inch-thick book with a leather binding.

  "Here it is. This is Cameron's life in pictures." She smiled a little. "I've been keeping it for him since he was born. This one is almost full. I guess it's time to start a new one. I'll have plenty of newspaper clippings to put in that one after we find him."

  He envied her her faith, more so because he knew how hard she fought to cling to it.

  She perched on the edge of the leather sofa and he joined her, waiting while she thumbed through the pictures in the book until she found the one she wanted. "Here we go. This is my favorite. Rick took it."

  It was a picture of Cameron alone, a towheaded boy with his mother's eyes and his father's mouth and heckles scattered across his nose and cheekbones.

  He sat on a huge granite boulder with his hands grasping his upraised knees, looking at the vast valley spread out beneath him as if a world of possibilities waited for him below.

  He had to be only six or so in the pictures, barely past preschool, but there was a solemn maturity in his eyes that Cale found a little disconcerting. Perhaps the boy's epilepsy gave him wisdom beyond his years. Or perhaps he had some child's intuition of the pain of his father's death he would have to endure shortly.

  "He talked about that trip for months. I promised him we'd make it back up there after we moved back to Utah but we've been so busy settling in, I haven't had a chance." Her voice broke a little on the last word.

  "Timpanogas is a cool cave," he said after a moment, giving her time to regain control. "I hiked up there once when I was in college."

  She blinked away her tears, as he had hoped she would. After a moment she swallowed and responded. "Are you from Utah, then? For some reason, I wouldn't have expected you to be a native."

  Big mistake, bringing up his own past. He never quite knew how to answer that question, how to explain the complex, twisting road he had traveled to this point in his life.

  "I grew up in a tiny dot on the map in southern Utah until I was twelve but I lived in the Ogden area through high school and went to college at the University of Utah."

  It was carefully
worded truth, as all his statements about his past had to be, but left out a few major details.

  Most people tended to get a little jumpy if he told them he spent a year at the Moweda juvenile detention facility and the rest of his youth in foster care.

  He usually solved that pesky issue by not revealing anything about his past.

  "Do you have family around, then?"

  "No. No family."

  He wasn't sure what made him say it, maybe the intimacy of the night or some need to let her know he wasn't unfamiliar with pain, but before he realized it, he told her the one detail only Gage knew about him. "I had a sister, but she died the year I turned twelve."

  The year his whole life went to hell.

  No, that wasn't strictly true. It had felt like it at the time, but looking back, he could see his life had already been hell before that terrible time. In an odd, twisted way, Jerusha's death had set him free.

  He never would have expected the darkest time in his life would eventually give way to something he had never once known in twelve years of misery.

  Hope.

  "I'm sorry."

  Her expressive green eyes filled with sympathy. He couldn't believe that even in the midst of her own nightmare, Megan could find room to share his pain.

  "Was she ill?" she asked.

  Now that he had given her the bare bones of information, he knew he would have to fill in the details, no matter how painful.

  "She killed herself," he finally said.

  Her hand reached out to grasp his fingers. "Oh, Cale. I'm so sorry. You were twelve?"

  "Right. Jerusha was fourteen." He couldn't seem to look away from their entwined fingers, wondering why

  they made his eyes burn and his chest feel so tight.

  He had told her that much. He might as well tell her the rest. "We didn't have it easy as kids. Our mom ran off when I was two or three, and our father was...diffi-cult. Jerusha raised me, for the most part."

  "That must have made her death even harder for you to bear," she said softly.