But it was going to be a while before he could even try to start smoothing things over with Taige, before he could start trying to convince her to give him another chance. Both he and Jillian were still trying to deal with the trauma of what had happened. Jilly would scream in her sleep, haunted by nightmares. Those screams would wake him from a dead sleep, and he’d go to her room to find her thrashing on the bed, held captive by the dreams.
She was going to a counselor, but it didn’t seem to help much. Cullen wasn’t going to quit it this time. It might take years for Jillian to move past that trauma, if she ever did.
No. Not if. She would. Jilly was strong. It was just going to take time. Cullen had his own demons to deal with. His guilt over not protecting her. The helplessness that plagued him. It wasn’t him that had saved Jilly, it had been Taige. Cullen had been all but useless, and it ate at him. It was a father’s job to protect his child, but he had failed at it.
As much as Cullen wanted to hear Taige’s voice, he looked away from the phone and shoved to his feet. He passed a long, sleepless night. Knowing that sleep would elude him for the most part, he didn’t bother going to bed. For a few hours, he worked in his office, knocking out another chapter on the book that was due at the end of the summer. Then he made a sandwich and ate it before watching TV and dozing through another L & O rerun.
By morning, he was bleary-eyed and damn thankful that it was Saturday. His dad was coming to get Jilly. It was going to be the first time she had left the house without Cullen since the kidnapping. It would be good for her—and him. By the time Robert Morgan showed up at the house at ten, Cullen was dragging. Still, he crouched by Jilly’s side and studied her face. “You sure you’re going to be okay? I can come with you.”
She gave him a smile. “No, Daddy. It’s just me and Grandpa this time.”
He nodded and then leaned, kissed her cheek. “You call me if you need me, okay?”
“She’s going to be fine, son,” Robert said as Cullen straightened up. “We’re going to get some pizza. See a movie. Maybe I’ll let her con me out of a toy or a book.”
“Or both,” Cullen said with a faint grin. He knew his dad, and he knew his daughter. Jillian had Robert so completely wrapped, if she asked for the Eiffel Tower, Robert would find a way to steal it for the girl.
On his way on the door, Robert paused. “You should get some rest, Cull. You look awful.”
Cullen just smiled, but after they left, he paused in the hallway and stared at the mirror hanging over the console table by the front door. Awful. Yeah. That about summed it up. He’d lost probably ten pounds in the past month, and the bags under his eyes were bordering on ridiculous. Last night’s sleeplessness hadn’t helped, but Cullen had been looking a little worse for wear for a month now.
It wasn’t going to get better for a while, he suspected.
He moved through the house, picking up toys, clothes, and shoes. The cleaning lady was due in Monday, but Cullen didn’t pay her to pick up after his daughter. Normally, he got after Jillian to do it herself, but he’d been coddling her. Logically, he knew he needed to quit doing it so much, but he couldn’t seem to control it.
He dumped clothes down the laundry chute, toys into a basket by the steps for the trip back to her room, and cleaned up toast crumbs, cereal, and spilled milk from the breakfast bar. That done, he headed for the stairs at the front of the house. He was going to get some sleep. Real sleep. Sleep that didn’t involve Taige, sleep that wouldn’t be interrupted when his daughter’s screams woke him.
But he hadn’t even cleared the landing when the doorbell rang. Cullen heaved out a sigh and headed downstairs. Whoever it was would just have to come back. But a peek through the Judas hole and the sigh turned into a flat-out, ugly swear.
“What in the hell do you want now?” Cullen demanded as he opened the door to Special Agent Taylor Jones. Using his body to bar the way, he kept the agent out on the porch. Part of him really wished he didn’t dislike this guy so much; Jones was busting his ass trying to find the man who had kidnapped Jillian, but he was so damned overbearing, and he didn’t seem to care that his questions would put Jilly through that trauma again. He came back to the house once a week, and the first week, he’d been there almost every day.
“Thought you might like to hear the progress we’ve made,” Jones said, showing off what Cullen thought of as the whitest, fakest smile in the South.
With a grunt, Cullen stepped aside. There probably wasn’t any progress, but now was as good a time as any to let the agent come inside. The man was not going to stop trying to bully Jillian, and with Jilly not being there, now was an excellent time to make that known.
“I don’t suppose you’ve given any more thought to what we discussed,” Jones said as he followed Cullen into the kitchen at the back of the house.
“Hell, no. I already gave you my answer on that.”
“You do know, I could take this before a judge. She’s the only surviving victim of a serial killer. We need to find out what she knows.”
Cullen said, as he’d said a hundred times already, “She doesn’t know anything. If she did, I’d be happy to let her help you. I want that bastard caught. But she doesn’t know anything.” He smirked and added, “And you’re welcome to try taking this before a judge. You ought to know by now that my lawyer is the best around, and she isn’t any more interested in letting you bully Jillian than I am.”
“Well, just keep it in mind,” Jones said. But his voice was preoccupied. They sat at the table, one on either side, and met each other’s stare levelly. Cullen knew that Jones had a job to do, and he could appreciate the man’s desire to find Jillian’s kidnapper. Jones probably knew that Cullen’s main concern was Jillian’s safety and happiness. The father would do whatever was necessary to protect his child.
“Is that all you wanted to say?” Cullen asked, making sure the man had nothing else.
Jones shook his head, a queer little smile on his face.
Cullen, already silently forming his thoughts so he could lay his cards on the table, didn’t like that smile. “Then why don’t you tell me the rest?”
“While we were here back in June, one of my agents found a sketchbook of Jillian’s.”
“She loves to draw. She has a lot of them.”
“Hmmm. Well, I was particularly interested in this one.” Jones reached into his briefcase and pulled one out.
“What in the hell were you doing, taking . . .” His voice trailed off as he stared at the sketch pad. He recognized it. The date on the front of it corresponded with the dates when they had been in Atlanta. For no particular reason, he remembered the sketch Jillian had shown him at the airport.
“The first to disappear.” A young girl, younger than Jillian. Then two others.
“Disappear from where?”
“Around.”
Voice rusty, Cullen asked, “Why do you have her sketch pad?” Instead of answering Cullen’s question, Jones flipped open the sketch pad and asked one of his own. “Care to explain this?”
He didn’t bother clarifying what he wanted explained, and it wasn’t necessary. Cullen stared down at the sketch, feeling like he had been sucker punched. It was the one from the airport. But it no longer had three kids.
It had four, and Jillian was the fourth. Still trying to take in that particular shock, he was left floundering as Jones removed something else from the briefcase, three pictures, to be exact. And each picture bore a striking resemblance to one of the faces that Jillian had sketched.
Jones tapped his finger on the one that looked the oldest. It had that yellowish cast to it, and the background was that fake, woodsy looking backdrop that had been used in a lot of school portraits in the seventies. Her hair was long, parted down the middle—again giving him the idea that the picture had been taken a good thirty years earlier.
“Her name was Leslie. She disappeared from Birmingham when she was ten. Back in 1974. As of this summer, she was still presumed de
ad.”
Something about Jones’s voice made Cullen’s gut knot. “Presumed?”
Jones acted as though Cullen hadn’t said a word. He pushed another picture toward Cullen. This one was the black boy with the impish smile, and Jillian had captured the mischief in the boy’s smile almost perfectly. “Kendrick. Disappeared from Atlanta in 1982. Presumed dead.”
Cullen asked hoarsely, “What do you want me to say, Jones? You already know about Jilly. Obviously. But she can’t help you. She’s tried. And I won’t let you traumatize her.”
“Amy. Disappeared 1992. Perdido Key, Florida. Presumed—”
“I get the picture. Why in the hell do you have this, and what do you want me to say?”
Jones leaned back and stared at Cullen. “Your daughter knew something was going to happen to her, Cullen. Did you know?”
“She didn’t know!” Cullen shouted, shoving back from the chair. But then he looked down at the sketch pad and wondered if he knew what he was talking about. It was there, plain as day, sketched out with the talented strokes of Jillian’s charcoal pencil. “Oh, God.” The strength drained out of him, and he sank back down into his chair, covering his face with his hands and trying not to puke.
She’d known. Somehow, some part of her had known, but Cullen hadn’t recognized it for the warning it had been. “You all found this the day she disappeared?” he asked, his voice rusty.
“My agents were here with your father. They found it on her bed. She left it there, almost like she knew they needed to see it.”
Cullen shook his head. “I don’t understand. I don’t get it.”
Jones’s gaze fell away, and that polished, cool veneer left his face for just a second, letting Cullen see the man under the mask. “We’ve been working on identifying the bodies that were buried under the cabin where Taige Branch found Jillian,” Jones said softly. He pulled yet another piece of paper from his briefcase, but this one he didn’t offer to Cullen. “There are more than twenty bodies buried under there, and just about all of them are children or young teens. The first positive match came back yesterday.”
Jones looked up and met Cullen’s eyes as he laid the page down on the table and pushed it toward Cullen. Almost afraid to look, Cullen shifted his gaze downward.
Leslie King.
Most of the jargon on the report was too medical in nature for Cullen to follow, but he saw one thing clearly enough: bones found at the crime scene in Otisco, Alabama, were positively confirmed as the remains of Leslie King, a child missing now for more than thirty years. It had been confirmed through DNA.
“Shit.”
Jones grimaced. “That was my first thought as well.”
TAIGE read the report and looked up at Jones with unreadable eyes. “So why am I hearing this? You never officially put me on the case.”
With that neutral, polite smile, Jones said, “Taige, you put yourself on the case all on your own.” He laid three other reports out. They were preliminaries as well, and staring at the names revealed nothing to Taige. She might as well have been reading a list of names out of the phone book.
But he wouldn’t be here just to update her on the case. He would have done that on the phone or not bothered. Taking a deep breath, Taige reached out and touched one of the pictures that Jones had placed facedown.
She didn’t even have to flip it over. It jolted down her back, and she hissed. Her instinct was to jerk her hand back and cradle it against her chest. It was almost like she’d touched a hot stove. Pain streaked through her, but instead of pulling back, she flipped the picture over and found herself staring at a young, dark face. He had a mischievous smile. Even as the pain swarmed her system, she was more aware of that smile than anything else.
At least until she heard his scream.
This time, the gray didn’t come and wrap her gently in its embrace. It was a violent possession, and she knew she’d be ill when it was over. But she was powerless to fight it, and she knew why Jones had brought the pictures instead of calling her. He’d been hoping for this.
She fell into the boy’s head like a stone falls into water. Taige’s physical connection to herself grew weak, replaced by the one forged between herself and the boy. He lay on the floor, screaming and crying, begging for his mama. There was a man, but his face was distorted. Whether through fear or a child’s eyes, she didn’t know, but there was no way she would learn anything about the man that would help identify him.
Pain streaked through her back as something struck her. The initial blow didn’t hurt so much; it was the fiery pain that came after. Even as lost inside the boy as she was, Taige knew what was happening. Somebody was beating him, not with their hands, but with a belt. A leather one, with a metal buckle. She had a few faint scars from the times when she’d been similarly whipped, and in the small part of her that was still cognizant, she didn’t know what she wanted more: to weep or to tear into something with her bare hands.
Not something. Someone. Some ominous, faceless man who beat a small boy with a fury. And it was fury. It wasn’t some lust for causing pain, although Taige suspected the man did enjoy inflicting the pain. She could hear his harsh, labored breathing, but it sounded more like the gasps of a man in the throes of passion than exertion. Fury drove him. Though she couldn’t see him, and though her gift was one of thought, not emotion, she could feel his fury. It beat at her, crawled over her, digging into her flesh like a thousand little knives.
The boy screamed again and again, until his voice gave out, and then he went silent. He retreated into the safety of his own mind—and Taige felt it when his mind finally gave out. Inside, he stopped living. Although his body still bled and his heart still beat, what had made the boy alive was gone. As Taige came clawing back into awareness, she knew that it had been a blessing.
She was on the floor, a quivering, sweaty mess, and she shoved to her knees. Before she could lurch to her feet, her stomach rebelled. Jones was there, shoving a pot under her just before she would have puked all over the floor. It was a sense of fastidiousness that had him holding her hair as she puked, not compassion, but she was thankful, nonetheless. Her eyes burned, and her throat felt raw as she sat back on her heels.
“God.” Closing her eyes, Taige said a prayer under her breath. A prayer for strength to do what she had to, a prayer for justice, a prayer to stop the man before he killed again. She’d saved Jillian, but that wasn’t enough now. She had to save them all, stop this man before he could hurt another soul.
When she opened her eyes, she saw Jones watching her with faint amusement. “Considering what your uncle did to you in the name of God, it’s a wonder you pray at all.”
“My uncle did it, not God, Jones,” she said tersely. Slowly, every muscle in her body protesting, she pushed herself upright. Taige doubted she had the strength to stand, though. Instead, she rested there on her heels and waited until her breathing slowed. She jerked her chin back to the coffee table where two more pictures still sat. “Those pictures of the boy or other people?”
“Others. Two girls. Did you see anything?”
She shook her head jerkily. “Not much. Not him.” Taige didn’t need to clarify. She didn’t like Taylor Jones, but she knew him well, and she knew what he had been hoping for when he showed her those pictures. “I can’t help you find him—not yet. The boy couldn’t see him.”
“His name was Kendrick.”
Kendrick. Taige squeezed her eyes closed and tried to block out the sound of his screams. “He had a sweet smile.”
Jones didn’t respond to that. Instead, he rose to his feet and went back to his briefcase. “I have the original file from his case. He disappeared in 1982 from a mall in Atlanta. He was there with his mother, picking out clothes for school. He would have started third grade that year.”
The Missing Page 20