by LENA DIAZ,
He poised his pen over a page in his notebook. “What’s your travel agent’s name?”
She blinked. “I don’t see where that matters.” Her voice still shook with anger, but she was engaged once again, no longer ready to end the questioning.
Had that been the agent’s intent all along when he’d asked that outrageous question? Was it part of his strategy? To make her angry so her fears would fade? Zack glanced at Cole, whose brows were raised as he, too, studied the agent.
“It’s just a question,” Willow said, his voice neutral, with none of the accusatory tone he’d used before.
Kaylee blew out an impatient breath. “Her name is Sandy Gonzalez. She works for Aventuras Travel Agency based out of Miami. She’s handled my family’s travel plans for years, decades.”
“And the reason you decided to vacation alone?”
“How are these questions going to help you find those missing women?” She sounded more perplexed than angry this time.
“Could you answer the question, please?”
She jerked her robe tighter over her hospital gown. “No. I can’t. I just spent ninety-three days of my life being controlled by a monster. Everything I ate, drank, every move I made, was dictated by him. I’ve done nothing wrong, Agent Willow. And in spite of what you’re implying, I didn’t bring any of this on myself.” She waved her hand in the air. “Somewhere out there is a monster who’s holding Mary Watkins and doing unspeakable things to her. Instead of thinly veiled accusations posed as questions, blaming me for what that man did to me, why aren’t you out in the swamp right now searching for her? And that other woman you said was missing?”
He straightened in his chair. “Miss Brighton, my apologies if I sound accusatory. And I know that my questions might seem like a waste of time to you, but this is how we figure things out. We gather as much information as we can about a crime, no matter how trivial, because you never know what the one thing will be that points us in the direction we need to go. As for searching for the missing women, we have teams out in the swamp right now looking for them. They’ve been out there every day since Chief Scott found you. So I assure you, any time we spend with you isn’t taking away from the search. It’s my hope that if I ask enough questions, then something you know—that you don’t even realize you know—will help us figure out how the man who hurt you targeted you and the others, and where he may be right now. Again, my apologies if I offended you in any way.”
Son of a... Zack shook his head. He’d completely misjudged Special Agent Willow. The man’s bedside manner might suck, and he was treating Kaylee far more harshly than Zack was comfortable with, but he’d gotten exactly what he wanted. He’d shaken Kaylee out of her stupor and stopped her from retreating into herself and ending the interview like she had always done before. Which must have been his intention all along.
The decision to engage the feds had been Zack’s. And he’d been regretting that decision since the minute he’d met Special Agent Willow and took an instant, instinctual dislike to the man. But now, well, he had a renewed respect for him, even if he didn’t agree with his methods.
Relaxing his stance, Zack settled in a nearby chair to listen to Willow resume his questioning.
Chapter Six
Three weeks.
It had been three weeks—twenty-one long, tortuous days—since Kaylee had fled the never-ending questions of the task force in Naples and had gone home. Or, rather, she’d gone back to her parents’ home, in Miami Beach. And since she still couldn’t deal with the thought of being alone and vulnerable in her apartment in downtown Miami, she was here to stay, for the foreseeable future.
Thinking back to the barrage of questions, day after day, from Special Agent Willow and detectives from both Broward and Collier County, she shivered and rubbed her hands up and down her bare arms. The only one not to pepper her with endless questions was the man who’d become something of a guardian angel the whole time she’d been in the hospital—Police Chief Zack Scott.
He’d made no secret of his disgust over what had amounted to daily interrogations, where she was treated more like a criminal than an innocent victim. Zack had taken up for her, pushing back against all the pressure and siding with the therapist who insisted that Kaylee needed time to heal. The more they questioned her, the more her mind had shut down, muddying her memories.
It wasn’t long before the only thing she could remember about her ordeal was being rescued by Zack. The therapist said it was her mind’s way of protecting itself from the trauma that she’d suffered, and that if the police didn’t stop their questions, they might permanently destroy the very memories they were trying to recover. Which meant that any potential Kaylee might have for helping them find Mary would be lost. That was the only reason she’d agreed to do what her parents, and her doctors, kept begging her to do—go home.
So here she was, starting day twenty-two standing in the kitchen watching her mother put a pork roast and seasonings into a slow cooker for tonight’s dinner. Later her mother would combine black beans, onions, garlic and green peppers in a pressure cooker. And once the roast and beans were ready, she would dish them over white rice with plantains and warm, crusty bread on the side. It was a traditional Cuban dish that Kaylee loved.
Her mother had made a point of cooking one of Kaylee’s favorite dishes every single night since Kaylee had come home. Which only served to remind her why her mother was treating her so extra special these days, and why her father kept his nose buried in his old-fashioned print newspapers in the family room, afraid to say more than a few words to her.
Because of what that monster had done to her in the Everglades.
She shivered in spite of the overheated kitchen. Her decision months ago to call Sandy, her family’s long-time travel agent, and book a vacation touring the Glades and Naples had been an ill-fated one. A week off from her job had turned into a nightmare on a path through the marsh when she’d been tackled from behind then gagged, blindfolded and thrown into the trunk of the devil’s car.
Her hands clenched into fists on top of the marble countertop. In the family room opposite the kitchen, her father peered at her over this morning’s copy of the Miami Herald, his gaze dropping to her fists. She forced her hands to relax and faked a smile for his benefit. Relief flickered in his eyes and he lifted the paper again, no doubt feeling that he’d done his duty. He’d checked on her. Never mind that he so easily accepted the front that she put on.
Resentment twisted inside her. This was nothing new—her father avoiding any kind of conflict or show of emotion, her mother busying herself with domestic chores, desperately trying to pretend that everything was okay. Because that was what her parents did, what they had always done. They avoided anything remotely painful, even if that meant pretending their only child had never been abducted and that nothing all that bad had happened to her.
But could Kaylee really blame them? They’d suffered so much loss in their lives, so much heartache in their decades-long attempts to have a child. After four miscarriages they’d finally managed one successful pregnancy. But during the delivery, the cord had wrapped around the baby’s throat. The emergency C-section had come too late.
Years passed before they decided to try again for a child, this time through adoption. They’d welcomed Kaylee into their family and loved her as their own, even though she wasn’t the infant they’d originally planned on and was instead a troubled girl of five with a habit of throwing tantrums. Under their patient, loving care, she’d blossomed into a confident, happy child, overcoming the abusive past that had landed her in foster care to begin with. And she owed them a tremendous debt for that. So even though her heart ached with the need to talk to them about her ordeal, she held it back, knowing it could very well destroy them.
And also, because they’d never asked.
To an outsider, that might se
em cold, callous. But she understood her mom and dad like no one else. They were both old enough to be her grandparents, having decided to pursue adoption when they were well past their prime. Which had only served to make the adoption much more difficult. It had taken many years and expensive lawyers to convince the state to declare them as fit parents in spite of their age and to let an adoption go through.
All the time that had passed, all those terrible losses and struggles, had taken their toll. Neither of them were at the peak of health anymore—Dad with his heart troubles, Mom with her COPD that had her out of breath and on inhalers or oxygen half the time, or laid up sick with bronchitis or pneumonia the rest of the time. Which was why, when her parents had come to her hospital room in Naples, she’d made sure that no one told them the truth about what had happened to her.
It was better to lie, to let them believe a sanitized version of the truth, that she’d been held against her will, yes, but that her captor hadn’t really hurt her. Lying to them was her way of protecting the fragile bubble of happiness they’d built around their lives. So she held the truth in.
No matter how much it hurt.
As she watched her mother press the garlic for the black beans, dark, jagged edges of memories battered at her. For several nights in a row, the previously forgotten haunting images of her time in the Glades had been coming back with a vengeance. It was as if a switch had been flipped. Now that her body had recovered, and she wasn’t being constantly questioned, her mind was recovering, too. It was retrieving horrific images that had her waking soaked with sweat, her nails digging so hard into her palms that they drew blood.
The memories were still disjointed, fragments, like looking at a pile of puzzle pieces—each one vivid and clear. But the picture they would form together was still elusive, beyond her grasp. And even though she desperately wanted to forget each of those sharp little pieces of memory, instead she forced herself to think about them and try to put them together into a cohesive whole. Because those memories could be the key to capturing her abductor, the man who’d taken Mary Watkins and very likely the other missing woman, Sue Ellen Fullerton. He could be torturing both of them right now.
Just as he’d tortured her.
She drew a ragged breath. Even though she’d vowed not to tell her parents what had really happened, the compulsion this morning, after a particularly rough night, was too strong to ignore. She opened her mouth to spill at least some of the truth. But her mother turned away to get some peppers out of the refrigerator. Seeing her mother’s gnarled, arthritic hands shake ever so slightly had Kaylee pressing her lips together. No, she couldn’t tell them. So who could she confide in?
Certainly not her friends. She couldn’t stand the looks of pity that they’d given her upon her return from the hospital, or the shocked whispers when they’d asked about her bruises, her cuts, the ligature marks still visible on her wrists and ankles. They were young, immature, self-centered. Exactly as she had naively been before that fateful trip to the Everglades. But where they were still happily going on with their endless parties and frivolous shopping expeditions funded by their parents’ money, she no longer shared those interests. And her friends were already drifting away. They didn’t stop by anymore, or call. The last text she’d received was at least a week ago, and she was pretty sure she wouldn’t get any more.
The only person left with whom she could share her emerging memories was the therapist that her parents had hired here in Miami. And yet, every afternoon when she drove into town to sit in a glass-and-concrete office to meet with her, she couldn’t speak, couldn’t tell the woman anything about the dark, swirling thoughts that threatened to consume her. Sharing such personal, intimate details with a stranger charging by the hour just didn’t feel right.
Kaylee doubted that any amount of therapy could ever “fix” her. Nothing could turn back the clock to the way her life had once been. The ninety-three days she’d spent in the marsh had forever changed her. And she was still struggling to figure out who she was and how to go on. More than anything she wanted to be strong again, to walk down a street without watching over her shoulder or starting at every sound. She wanted to be normal again, to stop being a victim.
But how could she get on with her life when she’d failed to save the other woman being held with her? Here Kaylee was, in the lap of luxury, with the delicious smells of a home-cooked meal filling her nostrils, while Mary was hungry, filthy, suffering hellish torture—if she was even still alive.
Nausea and self-disgust churned in her stomach. She shoved away from the counter.
Her mother’s startled glance flicked up from the slow cooker she was stirring. “Kaylee, is something wrong, sweetheart?”
Is something wrong? The question was so absurd that she almost burst into laughter. Instead, she forced another stupid smile.
“Of course not.” She sniffed. “Dinner smells great, Mom. Can’t wait until tonight.” She gave her a gentle hug.
Her mother smiled and patted her shoulder. “You’re looking pale, dear. You should sit by the pool today. Relax. Get a tan.”
I’m pale because I spent three months in a box, buried alive. Ask me about it, Mama. Ask me what that man did to me.
But her mother didn’t ask. She turned to her cooking, to her safe, easy, normal life where bad men didn’t slice open daughters, or beat them until they couldn’t move or...worse.
“Right. A tan. That’s exactly what I need,” she muttered, ignoring her mother’s questioning look as she headed into the family room. She swiped her phone from the coffee table, ignoring her father peering at her again over his paper, and headed out the sliders at the back of the house.
Plopping down onto one of the lounge chairs by the pool, she held her phone in her hand and started to punch the number for information, to ask them to connect her to the Collier County Sheriff’s Office. But then she stopped. Could she do it? Could she really sit in a room full of cops again and relive the horrific images that kept flowing through her mind, share the horrible things that man had done to her? The last time she’d tried, she’d ended up practically comatose, unable to function. And it had taken weeks for her to climb back out of that dark hole. What would happen if she tried again?
What would happen...to Mary...if she didn’t?
Her hands started to shake. She set the phone in her lap and wrapped her arms around her middle, rocking back and forth, back and forth, just as she had as a child when the memories of abuse threatened to overwhelm her. Just as she did every time the stress of life got to be too much. And she knew, if she didn’t get her fears under control, she’d end up lying on the floor in a fetal position, helpless. Like the victim everyone thought she was.
No. Stop it. You can do this. You have to do this. But how?
One word came to her as clearly as if it had been spoken in a gentle, deep, soothing voice.
Zack.
Just the thought of his kind eyes, his gentle touch, began to calm her, made her hands stop shaking. She knew that she’d fixated on him because he’d saved her from the monster. At least, that was what both the therapist in Naples and the one here in Miami had told her. But even knowing that her placing him on a pedestal like a superhero, as if he were the one man who could defeat the devil, was her mind’s way of feeling safe and secure, she couldn’t stop thinking about him. And she suddenly realized that the only way she could do what had to be done was if Zack was with her. And if she could talk just to him, one-on-one, without that intimidating FBI agent invading her space, maybe she really could help this time.
An eerie calm settled over her once she’d made her decision. Now, all she had to do was make it happen.
She picked up her phone again then glanced over her shoulder to make sure that the sliding glass doors were still closed, that her mother hadn’t silently drifted out onto the pool deck to check on her. Her mom might
not want to confront Kaylee’s recent, traumatic past head-on. But she showed her concern in other ways, by hovering, watching, as if she could keep her only daughter safe by tracking her movements from room to room. The attention was given with love, but it could also be stifling, which made Kaylee’s decision even easier. However, before calling Zack, she called another number that was programmed into her phone.
“Aventuras Travel Agency, Sandy Gonzalez speaking.” The cheery voice came on the line.
“Sandy, this is Kaylee Brighton.”
“Kaylee. My God. I... I’ve wanted to call you, ever since I saw the story in the news. But I wasn’t sure...that is, I don’t... I just wanted to say that I’m sorry. I never meant for any of this to—”
“Stop, stop, please.” Kaylee let out a shaky breath. “What happened to me is in no way your fault. You couldn’t have known what would happen when you scheduled that trip for me. And I feel terrible if your business has suffered because of all of the publicity. Honestly, I don’t know how the local papers got a hold of the fact that I’d even booked my trip through you. I couldn’t believe it when I saw them talking about it on the front page, as if no one should use your agency. I swear I never told them anything. I’ve never even spoken to the media. And I—”
“Kaylee, hold it. Do not apologize to me for anything. Goodness, I would never blame you or think you were behind the bad press. Put that thought right out of your mind. No worries, all right? Is that why you called? You were worried about my company? Because, trust me, that’s the last thing that I want you concerned about.”
“No, that’s not why I called. Although I really should have called, as soon as I saw that story.”
“Honey,” Sandy said, “I’m the one who should have called. I wanted to. But I didn’t want to bring up any bad memories. Are you...are you okay...now?”
Okay. Again she felt like laughing in a rather hysterical kind of way. But Sandy wouldn’t understand. Kaylee wasn’t even sure that she understood.