The Missing

by Shiloh Walker

  Too bad he couldn’t deal with the lingering echoes of the dream just as easily.

  The haunted look in Taige’s eyes bothered him. A lot. She wouldn’t tell him what was going on, and Cullen knew from experience that if she wasn’t going to share what had caused those shadows, he may never know.

  Thinking of her, the weird, too-real dreams, Cullen found himself walking out of his bathroom and into the office that was on the other side of his bedroom. He opened the connecting door and went to the bookshelf that spanned the entire northern wall. On the top shelf, out of Jillian’s reach, was a fat leather album. Inside it were pictures, newspaper articles, some clipped from the paper and some printed off the Web, all of Taige Branch.

  He’d seen the first one nine years ago, the day after Jilly was born. He’d been looking through the fat Sunday paper. The nurse came in, bringing Jilly with her, and Cullen had tossed the paper onto the narrow, uncomfortable couch. A section slid to the floor, and when he picked it up a few minutes later, time froze.

  Down in the bottom right corner on the last page of the section was Taige. It wasn’t a great picture. She had sunglasses on and was looking away from the camera. The bold caption above the picture read, “Local Psychic Saves Kidnapped Child.”

  It had happened in Mobile. Some thug pulled a woman out of her car at a stoplight and either didn’t see the baby sleeping in the back or didn’t care. Two days of nonstop searching had turned up nothing. Then a college sophomore showed up at the police department. She’d said she could find the baby. Cullen knew that must have been hard for her, going there and knowing she’d be ridiculed, and after she helped, she’d become the focus of rampant speculation.

  As promised, and without any help from the police, she’d found the baby. All it had taken was getting to the mom’s side. The paper didn’t detail what all had happened beyond her finding the child, but Cullen had done some digging. After the police found the baby exactly where Taige had told them to find her, they had arrested her on suspicion of kidnapping.

  The charges were dropped only after they failed to find any evidence at all linking her to the carjacker turned kidnapper, but not until she’d spent a week in jail. Nobody had come to post bail, and by the time Cullen knew a damn thing, she’d been released.

  There were other stories, some of them no more than a paragraph or two and others that were nearly full-page stories featuring color pictures and interviews with people who claimed to know her. Dante and Rose had been mentioned in a few, always with something along the lines of “No comment” when asked about Taige Branch. A couple of enterprising reporters had even unearthed some of the kids she had helped when she was younger.

  The most recent article was nearly two years old. She’d either gotten better at keeping her name out of things, or she had people helping her on that end. He had a feeling it was a combination of both. Over the past few years it was getting harder to find any information about her, but he had a friend who worked for the FBI. A paper pusher more than anything, but Grant Wilson had confirmed that the FBI did have special task forces, and Taige Branch was often called in to work on kidnappings or other crimes related to children.

  He touched his fingers to the grainy image of her face. It didn’t seem as if she had aged a day physically, but there was a hardness to her that made him hurt inside. He didn’t imagine she’d had much choice but to develop some armor, given the life she lived.

  She’d helped so many kids. Cullen knew there were probably far more than those found between these album pages. Ones that she helped and then disappeared before anybody even had a chance to thank her, much less ask her name. She’d done that sort of thing a lot when they’d been together, and he knew how uncomfortable the attention made her.

  Taige would avoid it as often as was possible, and when it wasn’t, she’d tolerate it with clenched teeth and a grim look, as though she couldn’t understand why people were so amazed by what she did. As though she couldn’t comprehend how amazing she was.

  Cullen turned to the last page in the album and stared at the picture of her there. It was the best image by far, taken by a reporter for the Birmingham News, but it wasn’t one he’d cut out of the newspaper. No, this one was an eight-by-ten glossy that he had paid for. “You’ve got it bad,” he murmured. If anybody saw the album, they’d probably peg him for some crazy stalker, and chances are, they wouldn’t be far off.

  He had subscriptions to every major paper in Alabama because he didn’t want to risk missing any information on her, and he regularly Googled her on the Web. Even when he’d been married to Jilly’s mom, his obsession with Taige never faded. Fortunately, he’d kept it from Kim, and he only hoped she’d never known that he didn’t love her the way she’d deserved to be loved.

  He couldn’t love her, because he hadn’t ever stopped loving Taige—and he never would.

  FIVE

  JILLY stood with her face pressed up against the acrylic, practically nose to nose with a gleaming white beluga whale. Cullen thought the thing looked more like a toy than a whale, but Jilly was entranced. The whale seemed to be in the same boat. He’d swim upward, spin around, and then come back to stare at Cullen’s little girl with besotted eyes.

  Cullen was used to it. Animals had that kind of reaction to Jilly, and they had ever since she’d been born. He could remember bringing her home from the hospital when she was three days old, and the old mutt across the street that usually howled and chased anybody and everybody had come running across the street to check out the new baby. But the dog had stopped dead in his tracks about three feet from the baby’s car seat, whining low in his throat, staring at Jilly the same way he would have looked at his owner after being left alone for a week.

  The whale swam upward again, his long, bulky body amazingly graceful. He circled around and then headed back down to gaze at Jilly through the acrylic. Jilly smiled at him and reached up, laying her hand against the smooth barrier that separated them. The whale nosed the acrylic, and Cullen heard a few of the parents behind him murmuring.

  “Look at that . . . ”

  “Isn’t that sweet?”

  The kids around her weren’t thrilled, though. They wanted to see the whale, too, but the big marine creature was totally focused on Jilly. Cullen made his way through the crowd so he could crouch down by his daughter. “Come on, baby. Let’s go see the sharks again.”

  Jilly glanced up at him. “He likes me, Daddy.”

  “I know, baby. But the other kids want to see him, too.” As they left the exhibit, the whale lingered near the glass, staring after Jilly with infatuated eyes.

  The whale sharks weren’t as entranced with Jilly, but she still enjoyed watching them. She ended up perched on the floor by the great wall, her sketchbook and pencil in hand. By the time they left Atlanta, the sketchbook would be full, and she’d need another one.

  According the brochure, the trip through the aquarium usually took a couple of hours. By the time they left the cool darkness for the heat of the Atlanta afternoon, more than four hours had passed. They had one last night left before they headed back home, and if Cullen knew his daughter, he knew where they’d spend the rest of the day: at the zoo.

  A hot breeze kicked up as they headed for the parking lot. They stopped at the crosswalk to wait for the green light, and the feel of that hot breeze blowing in his face teased a memory, and for a moment, time fell away. It hit him like that sometimes, memories sneaking up on him and hitting him with the intensity of a sucker punch.

  It was like yesterday, standing on an Alabama beach with his arms wrapped around Taige, her mouth sweet and warm under his lips, and her body, so soft and strong, pressed against his own.

  A little hand tugged on his, and the memory fell apart around him. Cullen looked down to find Jilly staring up at him with big green eyes. “The light changed, Daddy. We can cross now.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, it has.”

  EVEN as much as Taige despised Jones, she didn’t shut the door
in his face when he woke her up early the next morning—way early. The sun was already shining, but it wasn’t even seven. Too damn early, considering how little she’d slept the night before. Her reflexes were off, so that might explain why she didn’t feel too inclined to knock that smug, smarmy smile off his face.

  Taylor Jones was just a little too perfect-looking. He had perfectly tanned skin, a perfectly blinding white smile, his hair perfectly cut and styled. She imagined he had a standing appointment at some pricey designer salon for men to keep his hair from growing even one eighth of an inch longer than he liked. His suits were a little more expensive than the typical FBI agent wore, as were his shoes. The man came from money, and she’d heard rumors that he had political aspirations. He’d probably do well in the political arena, too; he had a knack for knowing exactly what to say.

  If Taige hadn’t seen the bastard in action, she wouldn’t believe how utterly ruthless he could be. If he focused that ruthless intent solely on helping victims, she could even admire it. But although he was damn good at his job, he placed his own ambitions just a little higher than the job. He’d ruined the careers of people who got in his way—part of the reason she had decided not to join the FBI. She didn’t want to end up some innocent bystander in one of his crusades.

  But as focused and ambitious as the bastard was, he knew better than to show up at her door after she’d told him she needed time off. So whatever case had brought him here had to be damn important. Otherwise, he wouldn’t risk it. She glared at him, eyes still bleary with exhaustion, but instead of shutting the door on him, she pushed it open wider and let him step inside.

  Without saying a word, she left him in the foyer and went to her room. Her wardrobe was fairly monochromatic: a lot of black, interspersed with the occasional pair of blue jeans, and a few things in red and white. She hated shopping, and as a result, her wardrobe was minimal, containing little more than the basics. Pissed Jones off to no end when she showed up on a job wearing her standards, black jeans and T-shirt. Feeling just a little petty, she grabbed a particularly ratty pair of blue jeans, so faded they were nearly white, snug through her hips and butt with a big hole in the left knee.

  If Jones’s case was something she needed to do, they wouldn’t have any time to waste, which meant she’d show up at the job wearing the jeans she usually saved for yard work or cleaning. The black T-shirt wasn’t much better, faded to a dark, washed-out gray and hanging on her slender body. On the way out the door, she paused long enough to grab her boots and a pair of socks, just in case.

  But it was all for nothing, she knew less than three minutes later.

  She sat on the couch, staring at the confidential file, her heart breaking as a pair of innocent, sky-blue eyes stared up at her. The girl had been kidnapped by her father, who’d been released from jail on parole after serving three years for molesting the girl’s older sister. The mom had been pregnant when he went to trial, and it had been her impassioned testimony that had sent the bastard to jail.

  Too bad they hadn’t kept him.

  Taige swallowed around the knot in her throat and then closed the file and pushed it back at Jones. He didn’t even need to ask. The look on her face told him everything he needed to know, just like the look on his face told Taige that he was seriously pissed. “You’re sure?” he demanded.

  “If I wasn’t sure, you know I’d say so.”

  He turned his head, reaching up to pinch the bridge of his nose. As much a bastard as he was, Taige knew he believed in his job, and she had a feeling the little girl’s big blue eyes were bothering him as much as they bothered her. Touching that girl’s file, she had felt nothing. Staring at the girl’s picture, she’d felt nothing but a familiar sense of grief and guilt.

  Another child she wouldn’t be able to save. She knew, somewhere inside, that she wasn’t meant to save this one—this girl wasn’t hers—but even that knowledge didn’t help her guilt.

  Jones looked back down at the file in his hand and then back at her. “You’re tired,” he said after studying her face. “The last case was a bad one. Maybe if you get some rest today and try again tomorrow . . .”

  Taige shook her head. “It won’t do any good.” But she gestured toward the file. “Leave it if you want. I’ll try again, but it isn’t going to do any good. If you all find her, it won’t be because of me. I’m not going to get a thing.”

  That was how it worked for her. She’d long since come to accept it, and for the most part, she was even grateful for it. She knew people in the Bureau talked about her, had heard it said, “Branch doesn’t find dead ends. Just dead bodies.”

  Not always, thank God. But enough so that those lost lives had left a mark on her, each one adding to the mess of scars she carried in her heart. Sometimes she was amazed her heart still beat. If emotional scars left the same damage as physical scars, she would have died years ago.

  Jones threw the file on the coffee table, and Taige averted her eyes as one photo fell out. Staring at the girl’s face wouldn’t help anybody. As he headed for the door, she followed him. He opened the door and paused to look back at her, his practiced, semipolite mask back in place. “When can I count on you being ready to work?”

  She smirked at him. “You can’t. After all this time, you still seem to forget that I don’t really work for you, do I?” Then she shrugged and answered his question. “I need a few days at least. Maybe even longer. Four months is a long haul for me.”

  The skin around his eyes tightened, but he didn’t say anything, just nodded and left. He wasn’t her boss, but she did have a responsibility to the Bureau. Taige didn’t technically work for him; her official title was civilian consultant. Those responsibilities were something she never let herself forget, no matter how tired she got, no matter how bleak things became.

  She looked back at the table, and although she didn’t want to, she found herself staring at the picture of the girl’s smiling face. Things were looking especially bleak right now.

  ALTHOUGH Taige had told Jones it wouldn’t do any good, after lunch she made herself sit down and go through the girl’s file. Her name was Hannah Brewster. She was three years old, and she’d been at her sitter’s when her father showed up, assaulted the sitter, and then kidnapped the young girl. The sitter was still in ICU. One look at the extent of damage done to the twenty-year-old single mom, and Taige knew it was actually a miracle the young woman was still alive. Her own daughter had been at her dad’s for the weekend, and Taige couldn’t help but feel a little grateful for that. If the sitter’s daughter had been home, there might have been two kidnapping victims instead of one.

  She pored over the report, spent nearly thirty minutes staring at the file, willing herself to feel something. But there was nothing. When she connected with a case, it was instantaneous; sometimes she knew it was coming even before Jones contacted her. She’d feel a rush of adrenaline, and everything inside of her would seem to focus on the job.

  Sometimes all it took was a look at a picture or hearing the victim’s name, and it was like an invisible bridge formed between them, a road only Taige could see and follow. Other times, it was more complicated. Like Chicago. Chicago had been bad, but she had known it would be even before she accepted the job.

  “I’m sorry, Hannah,” she murmured. She touched her fingers to the girl’s face and hoped that Jones would have better luck with one of his other psychic bloodhounds. She wasn’t the only one, and she wasn’t even their best, she knew. But Taige had a talent with kids, so that was probably why he’d come to her first. But she wouldn’t be the only one he approached.

  Frustrated, she shoved all the reports and pictures back into the file, and then she took the file into her office, stowing it inside the file cabinet. It didn’t help much. Putting it away only put it out of her sight, not out of her mind.

  She paused by her desk and stared at the empty wine bottle and the glass from last night. The alcohol seemed to call to her, and for a minute, she almost went
and unearthed the merlot. But instead, she grabbed the bottle and the glass and carried them into the kitchen. She wasn’t going to drink herself into oblivion before one o’clock. Even she wasn’t that pathetic.