Missing Person

by Matt Lincoln

  “This goes without saying, but do not tell Ward about this when you see him,” Dowell said, giving us a fierce look to hammer his point home.

  Rachel nodded, drew her fingers across her lips, and flicked the invisible key over her shoulder.

  “Good. Now leave before someone sees you.”

  As soon as we stepped through the door, Dowell slammed it shut behind us so hard that I could feel the puff of wind on my back.

  “This is great,” I said as we headed down the front walk. “This is something we can use.”

  “Call Cal. Let them know what we’ve found. The sooner we track down that boat, the better.” Rachel bunched her fists by her sides and bit her lip. Energy had returned to her, as it always did when we came across new information, and she set a fast pace as she took off down the sidewalk, seeming intent on walking all the way back to our hotel.

  I’d call a taxi after I spoke with Cal if we were still walking. I patted my pockets until I found my phone and then dialed Cal’s number, holding the phone up to my ear as I lengthened my stride to keep up with Rachel.

  Cal answered quickly, their hello a languid drawl.

  “Hey, Cal. We got something off Dowell,” I said.

  “Hot damn!” Cal cried and then quickly dropped their voice to a quieter tone. “Oops, shouldn’t have yelled that with Graham upstairs. What did you find? Hang on, let me grab Lex and Ramirez.”

  I listened as Cal clattered up the stairs and hissed, “Psst,” at Lex and Ramirez, no doubt frantically waving them over.

  “What is it?” I heard Lex say once she was in range.

  “Come with me,” Cal said, and all of their footsteps tramped back down the stairs.

  “Jace is on the line,” Cal continued, assumedly once they were all safe within the lab. “He and Rachel found something.”

  “You went to speak with Dowell, right?” Ramirez asked.

  “We did,” I answered. “He told us about a boat that’s not in any of our files. A luxury yacht called the Wandering Heart. It’s probably out to sea on the gulf somewhere. We’re coming back in a few hours, but we need you to coordinate with Linda and Meg to try to find it, okay?”

  “No problem,” Lex assured me. “We’ll get right on it.”

  “Also, Graham is really suspicious about your trip,” Cal said, a nervous note in their voice. “She definitely didn’t seem to buy the story I told her about you going to see Rachel’s parents. You’d best be ready for an interrogation when you get back.”

  I scrunched up my face in displeasure. We definitely did not need a confrontation with the marshal right now. “Crap. Okay, we’ll deal with that when it comes up. Thanks for trying to cover for us.”

  “We should go,” Cal continued. “She definitely gets suspicious when we all disappear together, so it won’t be long before she comes to see what we’re doing down here.”

  “See you soon, Jace,” Lex added.

  “Bye,” Ramirez said gruffly.

  “There is one other thing,” Cal said as the others’ footsteps headed away from the phone and back upstairs. “It’s about the Greyson Gem. It can probably wait till later unless you want to hear it now?”

  “Hit me,” I said. Rachel was still barreling along the sidewalk with no intention of stopping, even though it would take us several hours to walk all the way back to the hotel. However, it seemed like she needed to burn off some energy, so I let her continue to lead the way.

  “Okay, so I couldn’t sleep at all last night, so I decided to do some digging on the information you gave me, not that there was a lot to go off of.”

  “Sorry about that,” I said, though it wasn’t like there was much I could do to control that fact.

  “Eh, makes it more interesting,” Cal replied. “I might have found something, and the keyword there is might. It’s hard to tell for sure.”

  “What did you find?” I asked, my interest piqued. If Cal really had learned something, they would be the first person to do so since the search began.

  “I found a record of a necklace on display in the seventies at the New Orleans Art Museum, of all places. I mean, it’s pretty hard to compare the picture you gave me to the one on the file. Yours is pretty grainy and far away, but they could be the same thing. The shape is similar. The necklace was on loan from a private collection, though the donor isn’t listed. The record is pretty shoddy. There’s no mention of when the necklace left the museum or if it’s still there. But it could be something, right?” Cal spoke a little breathlessly, eager to get their findings out.

  “Could be,” I agreed, though I had some reservations. “It’s hard to tell, but it might be the necklace” was a common theme amongst my family’s reservations, and the thing usually wound up being something else entirely. I had to remind myself that it was still worth looking into. And Cal’s lead was in town. It wasn’t like I had to go out of my way to investigate it. “Thanks, Cal. We can look into it after this case wraps up.”

  “I’ll see you soon,” Cal replied. “I should go. I can hear Graham and Lex arguing upstairs. Hurry back.” And they hung up.

  I’d fallen behind Rachel, and I hurried to catch up, jogging a couple of steps until I pulled up alongside her.

  “Shall I call a taxi, or do you want to power walk all the way back to the hotel?” I asked, hoping to inject a little levity into things.

  “Huh?” Rachel finally pulled out of her headlong charge and looked around. “Right. Sorry. I don’t know what came over me. I just needed to move.”

  I still had my phone out, so I called a taxi company and gave the man the intersection we were on. Once I hung up, I led Rachel over to a nearby bench to sit while we waited. Well, I sat. Rachel paced in endless circles around me. It made me a little dizzy to watch her, but I doubted I could stop her if I tried.

  “We might have a problem with Marshal Graham when we get back,” I told her after a few moments of silence. “Sounds like she’s growing suspicious of us.”

  “We’re so close.” Rachel was behind me, but I didn’t crane my neck to look at her, knowing she’d be out in front again in just a few steps. “I won’t let her stop us now.”

  “Or we could enlist her help?” I suggested a little hesitantly. “We’ve got actionable intel now. Maybe if we let her in on it, she won’t be so mad at us for going behind her back.”

  But Rachel shook her head as she passed by the front of the bench. “She’ll be mad. She’ll lock us in my office or something to make sure we don’t do anything else. She might even try to take our jobs. We need to track Malia and Ward down first. If we have a success under our belt, she’ll have less leverage.”

  “Okay,” I said, though I wasn’t quite sure I agreed with her. Surely, if we explained, Graham would understand. But I supposed we’d tried that in the beginning, and it hadn’t really worked. It was a bridge to cross when we arrived at it. First, we had to get back to New Orleans.

  Our taxi arrived a few minutes later and took us back to the hotel, and Rachel paid the man to wait while we retrieved our bags, and then he took us to the airport. Our next plane wasn’t for another five hours, since Rachel hadn’t been sure how much time we would need in Nashville, and she argued with the American Airlines agent for a good twenty minutes, trying to get us on an earlier flight. So we had to wait. Sitting in those hard seats with nothing to do but percolate in our own thoughts was a tough thing. I munched my way through the snacks Rachel had bought me yesterday and went hunting around the shops for more once those ran out.

  It felt like we were there for two days rather than five hours, but eventually, it was time to board the plane and head home, leaving Nashville far behind. When we landed late that evening, I turned my data back on to check for any messages. I had two—one from Meg telling me that she and Linda had people out searching the gulf for the Wandering Heart, and one from Cal, letting me know that Graham wanted to speak with us first thing tomorrow morning. I grimaced as I put my phone away. It was not a conversa
tion I was looking forward to.

  22

  I was late heading into the office the next morning. It was on purpose this time, and not just due to my perpetual inability to be on time for things. I was trying to put the confrontation off for as long as possible. But after several ignored calls from Lex and several more texts, I knew that I couldn’t put it off any longer.

  The mood in the office when I arrived was tense, and that was putting it lightly. The threat of an oncoming storm might have been a better way to put it. I could taste it the moment I walked through the door, and I hesitated with one foot over the threshold, unsure if I was ready to step into all this. But I wasn’t going to abandon my friends, so I took a deep breath, stiffened my spine, and headed inside.

  Everyone was in the conference room, clearly waiting for me. Graham stood at the head of the table, pacing back and forth while all my coworkers clustered on the far side, heads close so that they could whisper to each other. Graham noticed me the moment I walked through the door, piercing me with her stare so that my steps faltered for a second as I crossed the room.

  I eased the glass door open and slipped inside. If the rest of the office had been filled with the threat of an oncoming storm, then the storm had arrived within the conference room, pounding rain against the table and spitting lightning from thunderous clouds. I met Rachel’s gaze and widened my eyes, and she pursed her lips in reply, anxiety on her face.

  “Good, you’re here,” Graham said in that very specific kind of professional tone that served only to hide the anger and distrust underneath. “We can get started. We need to have a chat, the six of us.”

  I sat down beside Ramirez without saying anything. Lex was next to him, then Cal, and finally Rachel at the end. At least we made something of a united front, all seated in a line like that. Graham stayed standing but stopped her pacing, bracing her hands on the table in front of her as she looked down its length at the rest of us. I gulped as surreptitiously as I could while we waited for her to speak first.

  “Where did you two go yesterday?” Graham asked finally after she let us stew for several long, drawn-out moments. She held up a finger, forestalling our answer. “And don’t lie to me.”

  “Nashville,” Rachel said simply. Technically not a lie.

  “What for?”

  “Personal business.”

  “And you needed to take your coworker with you for personal business?”

  “Yes.”

  It was like watching a high-powered tennis match, except the ball was a bomb. My eyes swung back and forth between Graham and Rachel each time one of them spoke. Cal was the only one not watching the confrontation. Their eyes were fixed firmly on the tablet they held under the table, their expression of discomfort the most obvious of the group.

  There was a pause in the back-and-forth volley.

  “What kind of personal business?” Graham asked, serving up a bomb.

  “None of your business,” Rachel replied coldly, and I cringed. That wasn’t going to go over well.

  And it certainly didn’t. Graham’s face went stony, and her fingers curled atop the table.

  “It is actually,” she began with measured preciseness. “Since I have reason to believe that you’ve been going behind my back and against my explicit orders to look for Simon Ward. Would that be an accurate assumption?”

  Rachel hadn’t blinked since the conversation started, and it was starting to freak me out a bit.

  “I needed to see my parents,” she said, matching Graham’s tone perfectly. “I didn’t want to travel alone, so I took Jace with me. We didn’t stay long because I wanted to make sure we were back here when you found something. Is that enough of an explanation for you?” There was icy venom in Rachel’s voice, and Graham started to open her mouth to reply, but Rachel cut her off with her next question. “What have you done to find my daughter? Because from where I’m sitting, it doesn’t seem like very much.”

  Graham stalled out, missed the next volley, and the ball the two of them had been batting back and forth flew into the shadows and disappeared.

  I waited for Graham’s answer with bated breath. We all did. No one blinked as we watched her, and for the first time, Marshal Graham’s walls fell. She dropped into the nearest chair and leaned her head on her hand.

  “Not much,” she admitted. “I’m sorry.”

  I could just barely stretch my leg out under the table and nudge Rachel with my toe. I gave her a look once I had her attention, wondering if we should tell Graham what we had learned. She’d been spinning her wheels, and it was getting her down. Surely, she would appreciate the intel.

  But Rachel shook her head, the motion almost imperceptible. I thought she might be holding a grudge against Graham now—an admittedly rightful grudge—and was now letting it get in the way of things.

  Rachel hummed in the back of her throat, turning her attention to Graham once again. “Hm. Maybe if you’d asked for our help earlier, you would have found something by now. The offer still stands.”

  With that, I realized what Rachel was trying to do. She was trying to extend an olive branch in her own way, but she needed Graham to come to her first. If Graham asked for our help, then we couldn’t get in trouble for our previous investigations.

  Graham hesitated, actually considering it, and then, surprising us all, she nodded. “I still think you’re too close to it, but I’ll admit that I’m spinning my wheels here. If you want to help, you can. But in a limited capacity.” She stressed that last part. I wondered if it was really just because she thought Rachel was too close to things or if it was that age-old bias against working with another agency and losing credit for the collar.

  Rachel shook her head. The ball was in her court, and she wasn’t about to let it go without a score. “No. We want to be fully hands-on, or we take what we know and leave you hanging. We’re actually doing you a favor here. We can do this by ourselves.”

  I was impressed by how perfectly she’d set Graham up for this moment. Graham realized she’d been outmaneuvered, but she covered it well in a film of righteous indignation.

  “I knew it. You’ve been disobeying my orders.” Her anger didn’t have much bite to it anymore, and I saw in her eyes that she’d realized there wasn’t much she could do about it and that she might as well join us. “Fine. Fine. What is it you know?”

  “We believe he’s on a yacht called the Wandering Heart, somewhere out to sea. We’ve got people looking for it as we speak,” Rachel explained. “You can have the collar, Marshal Graham. I don’t care about that. I just want to be the one to get my daughter back.”

  “How did you learn this?” Graham asked. Now that she and Rachel had come to some kind of agreement, she seemed more relaxed, more open to our input. Her body language had changed completely from antagonistic to inclusive, leaning back in her chair so that her chest was open and facing us rather than hunched over and withdrawn.

  “We found Frances Dowell,” Rachel explained.

  Graham whistled, genuinely impressed. “I’ve been trying and failing to do that for ages, and you guys just casually figure it out behind my back. That’s good work.” She sighed and pushed her glasses on top of her head so that she could rub at her eyes unimpeded. “I’m sorry. I should have included you from the beginning. My pride got in the way. It’s something I’ve always struggled with.”

  Rachel stood up from her chair and very deliberately rounded the table to approach Graham on the other end. She stopped right beside the other woman, and Graham swiveled her chair so she could look up at Rachel without craning her neck. Rachel stuck out her hand. “I can’t say that I forgive you for trying to force me out of this, but I’m willing to work together if you are.”

  Graham rose so that the two of them were on the same level and shook Rachel’s hand, their eyes locked. “Let’s bring your daughter home.”

  If only it were as simple as all that. If only someone could just make a grand speech and forge an alliance, and then
the next thing they knew, they’d be miraculously on their way toward finding their target.

  But no.

  There was no call the moment Rachel and Graham released each other’s hands, informing us of the location of the Wandering Heart. There was no new clue dropped into our laps for us to rush out and investigate, and so we were left with our awkward new alliance, wondering where we all stood with each other.

  I was actually the one to make the first move. Rachel had sat back down halfway between Graham and the rest of us, attempting to bridge the distance, but no one really spoke until I pulled out my phone and dialed Meg’s number, connecting the device to the speaker in the center of the table so that everyone could hear.

  The connection was poor when she picked up. Static sprinkled throughout her voice, making it hard to understand her.

  “Jace?” she said, and I could tell that she was shouting.

  “Hey, I wanted to check in on how the search is going,” I called.

  “Say again? You’ll have to speak louder.”

  I repeated myself, practically shouting into the phone so that my voice rang around the enclosed conference room.

  “Oh, gotcha. Sorry. We’re out on the gulf right now, so it’s hard to hear over the engine and the waves.” It was hard to hear her through the static as well, and I leaned in close to the speaker as if that would somehow help.

  “Have you found anything?” I asked.

  “Not yet. We’re actually heading in soon. Linda and I have recruited a few people to help, so they’re going to take over for a while. We need to get some rest.”

  “Maybe we could go with you the next time you go out?” I suggested.

  “I’ll talk to Linda about it. I’m sure it won’t be a problem,” Meg said confidently. “Oh, speak of the devil, she’s calling me over now. I should go. I’ll call back in a few hours and give you an update.”

  “Alright,” I said, but she’d already hung up.