Finding His Child

Her breathing quickened, and she felt the first traces of panic creeping down her spine like a pointy-legged spider. Tears leaked out of her closed eyes, loosening things enough that she was finally able to pull one open. She could feel the gunk on her lashes against her cheek every time she blinked, waiting to adjust her vision to a brightness that never came.

Pitch black.

That’s when the reality of her situation hit her.

She was alone, in a dark, dark room with her arms chained above her head.

And she was naked.

The chains rattled again as her hands involuntarily jerked down to cover her bare body, though of course, that proved impossible. Her skin prickled into painful gooseflesh from the damp, unrelenting cold that surrounded her, and try as she might, she couldn’t make out even the most indistinct shapes around her.

Alone in the dark. With only the sound of her teeth chattering to keep her company.

Mommy?

Tara was seventeen years old, far too old to address her mother that way, but she would have given anything to hear her mother’s voice calling, feel her mom’s soft arms around her, taking off the chains, rubbing the soreness from her shoulders.

A soft whimper escaped her. She thought she heard a low sigh in response. A male sound. A sound of satisfaction.

Mommy? Mommymommymommymommymoy!

She didn’t realize she’d spoken out loud until she heard him laughing.

Her body jolted again, sending her spinning to face the sound. “Who are you?” she cried. “What the hell are you, some kind of freak?”

He must have moved, because this time, the laughter came from behind her. She turned again to face him, her bare toes scrambling for purchase on the icy floor. She felt something warm running down her cheeks and realized that she was still crying. It was all coming back to her—the hike to the hot springs with Paula, the way the warm water had felt on her aching feet, the shadow on the rocks, the tall, thin stranger standing above her. She’d tried to speak to him, to say hello, but he’d grabbed her, she’d tried to escape, and then everything had gone black.

He was still laughing. A slow fury boiled up inside her, and she clenched her hands—still stretched above her head—until her fingernails dug painfully into her palms.

“What do you want?”

In response, she heard a small click, and then a brilliant, blinding light assaulted her eyes like an explosion. She turned her head abruptly to the side, squeezing her eyelids shut. She didn’t want to see. She wanted to wake up and find out that this was all just a dream, not real, not this. But after a few seconds of silence, she couldn’t stand it anymore and peered into the brightness, blinking rapidly as her eyesight adjusted.

He was standing in front of a spotlight—the large, portable kind the police sometimes used at crime scenes on TV—lighting a cigarette. The acrid smell of tobacco smoke wafted toward her, and she realized he could see her naked. Then, almost simultaneously, Tara realized that his seeing her was the least of her worries.

At that point, a horrible feeling prickled across her skin, causing her teeth to chatter again, making her whole body tremble and strain against the chains. She wasn’t going to see her mother, not ever again. Not Paula, not her school, not her boyfriend Todd, the captain of the soccer team in a football town. Just this horrible place, with this man whose refusal to speak terrified her more than anything.

“What do you want?” she asked, her voice a small, shaking thing, knowing as she asked that he wouldn’t answer.

He took the cigarette from his lips and smiled. They stared at each other for a long time. And then he finally moved, putting one hand on the back of her neck, the other moving to encircle her waist. Overcome by the urge to throw up, Tara still managed not to scream. Not until she felt him crush his cigarette out on the vulnerable skin at the small of her back.

Chapter Two

As they followed the teenager’s path to its conclusion, Sabrina could practically hear the giant clock in her head ticking the precious seconds away. The sad thing was that even though she was rushing her team down the mountain, she knew they’d never make up those lost hours—and it would be Tara who paid for it.

“Hold up a minute.” She stopped and braced herself with a hand against the rough bark of a pine tree. It was always a bad sign when the mixture of dry pine needles and damp dirt and grass on the ground began to blur, the images smashing together as if someone had put pieces of the forest into a kaleidoscope.

“You want me on point, Bree?” Jessie asked, crunching to a halt behind her.

Sabrina shook her head, and God bless America, her vision cleared once more. “No. No, I’m okay. Just lost the tracks for a minute.” She reached up to rub the bridge of her nose, then dropped her hand to scan the ground. It only took a few seconds to find where Tara’s trail converged with someone else’s—a male who’d left large prints, about a size eleven or so, with a thick zigzag pattern on the sole. But then something odd happened—Tara’s prints vanished, and the man’s continued, bearing telltale scuff marks at the toes, which told them he may have been carrying something heavy. Like a teenaged girl.

She didn’t even want to think about why Tara may have needed to be carried.

They pushed on, until finally, the trees started to thin to the point where the green, wet dimness that had enveloped them all the way down the mountain gave way to stretches of gray sky that provided only a little more illumination. Eventually, with an abruptness that Sabrina had always found a little shocking, nature ran into human construction as the team spilled out onto a slim, gravel-packed logging road. The trees, of course, stopped at the road’s edge.

Unfortunately, so did the tracks.

“Take a rest, Bree,” Jessie said as she moved up beside Sabrina. “You’ve been on point for a while now. Alex and I will check the roadsides, and we can switch positions once we find the trail again.”

If we find the trail again. Blowing upward so her sideswept bangs lifted slightly off her forehead, Sabrina just nodded, refusing to give a voice to her doubts. She reached up to rub the back of her neck, feeling the fatigue starting to creep into her muscles now that she wasn’t moving. Alex and Jessie spread out and started cutting for sign—searching for telltale indicators that they’d found the continuation of the trail—along the sides of the road. Sabrina let her hand drop, and she knew, she knew her flank trackers wouldn’t find anything. She’d noticed the tire tracks the minute they’d set foot on the logging road—noticed, but hadn’t wanted to confront the truth they told.

He’d parked his car here. And with the small amount of traffic that came through this way, it would be a miracle if anyone had seen it—or him. Or Tara.

Here’s a riddle for you: How can you make a girl vanish in the forest so the state’s best trackers can’t find her?

Wrap her up and get her out on a vehicle—car, four-wheeler, dirt bike. Wrap her up. Get her out. Hide until we stop looking.

Feeling a headache coming on, Sabrina rolled her head around, trying to drive out some of the tension settling at the base of her neck and smack in the middle of her right temple. The gray sky suddenly grew brighter, so bright that it almost hurt to keep her eyes open. She ducked her head, looking at the small pools of moisture that had formed in dips in the gravel. She caught one at just the right angle, and it glowed, reflecting the sky and sending a sharp bolt of pain through her right temple.

Oh, hell. Hell, hell, hell. All signs pointed to her having about an hour before the migraine really hit, and after that, she’d be more useless than a paper hat in a rainstorm. She shoved her hand into the cargo pocket on the side of her leg, checking for the bottle of ibuprofen she always carried. It didn’t always help, but sometimes, if she swallowed at least four of the little orange pills in time, she could head off the worst of it.

Sometimes.

Please, let them work this time. Tara needed her.

Or maybe Sabrina needed to look for Tara. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that they not give up, that they find the man who snatched her off the mountain. That they find her.

Don’t think about what condition she’d be in when they found her. Don’t think.

Pressing the pills to her mouth, Sabrina swallowed them dry, their hard edges scraping the inside of her throat. She reached up to pull at the rubber band that was holding her hair in place. Keeping her heavy, black hair out of her eyes was always a plus on the job, but at that moment, the ponytail just made her scalp ache. As her hair fell around her shoulders, doing nothing to ease the pain in her head, she heard the slow crunch of tires on gravel. Pulling the rubber band around her wrist, she turned to see an unmarked police cruiser crawl slowly through the mist. The brown sedan slowed to a halt several yards away, and that’s when she finally noticed that a thin yet relentless drizzle had coated her arms and face—the trees had probably protected the team from it while they had been under their cover.

Though it was an unmarked vehicle, it had one of those bubble lights resting precariously on the roof, as if the driver had tossed it up there in a hurry. Her head started to throb in time with the flashing red light as it broke up the gray and green of their surroundings. She could just make out the silhouette of the lone driver behind the windshield whenever the wipers pushed the mist out of the way for a moment. The driver turned the engine off, but he didn’t get out.

Whatever.

Wrapping her arms around her body, Sabrina tried to ignore her growing discomfort. She had a job to do, and if some lazy cop was afraid of getting a little wet, so be it. After setting her bag on the damp ground, she opened it and pulled out a small piece of waterproof tarp. Crouching down next to the backpack, she used rocks to make a little tent with the tarp over a portion of the tire track. That would preserve most of the track if it started to rain hard, and the cops could cast it at their leisure—which apparently they had a lot of, since the officer behind her still hadn’t come out of his car. She got a small camera out of the pack and took a few flash pictures, just in case.

At the sound of a car door finally slamming behind her, Sabrina stood, her back still to their visitor, and tossed the camera back in her bag. Her head throbbing in time with her suddenly racing pulse, she shoved her damp hair out of her eyes, then twisted it into a loose, wet braid. God, telling the cop what they’d discovered was not going to be easy. Because someone had gone missing on Renegade Ridge, and for the second time, Sabrina had no clues left on how to find her.

“Ms. Adelante.”

She was just about to tell the speaker that Ms. Adelante was her mother and to call her Sabrina, when something about his low baritone struck her as familiar. She closed her eyes, just for a moment, wishing hard that the cop would be a stranger. Then she turned, knowing before she saw his face exactly who he was.

“Aaron.” His name came out almost on a sigh.

The drizzle was growing heavier, and it coated Aaron Donovan’s tousled, slightly too-long brown hair with shiny droplets. His eyes were set so deep, Jessie had once commented that they always seemed to either be glaring at you or using their X-ray powers to look at your bones. They were fixated on her at the moment, and she had no doubt Aaron was glaring today. The thin jacket he wore over his black dress pants and gray shirt and tie was already soaked through, but he didn’t seem to feel the cold.

“Storm coming,” he said when he reached her, and there were a thousand unspoken words contained within that one phrase. Aaron Donovan stole her breath, and not just because of his physical presence.

The detective’s deep voice sounded calm, reasonable, almost as if he were informing her that her car was parked in a disabled spot or that she’d just jay-walked across Main Street. But beneath that calm was a man ready to snap—and she knew that he’d long ago marked her as the reason. It was in the restlessness that hummed off his body, the mix of anger and steely resolve still in his expression. And to tell the truth, it scared her.

“Yes, Detective, there’s a storm coming,” she said, proud of herself for keeping her voice strong and calm, despite the fact that every muscle in her body was so tense, she thought she might break into a million pieces at the slightest touch. Not that he would ever think of touching her.

They stared at each other, the thousand unsaid words still hanging between them, a thousand accusations in Aaron Donovan’s still, gray eyes. It was Sabrina who turned away first, looking up to where wispy, almost-black clouds were rapidly rolling underneath the overcast sky, pushed along by a wind that was getting stronger by the minute.

“How long are you going to keep up the search?” he asked quietly.

The search had just started. It was an inappropriate question, and he knew it.

Don’t break down. Don’t cry. Don’t show that female weakness—you can’t afford it. Sabrina took a moment just to breathe, to get control of the swirl of emotions threatening to make her lose it completely. “As long as we can,” she finally replied, her eyes still turned up to the sky. She knew he wanted to hear the words “as long as it takes” come out of her mouth, but that was one promise she’d broken before. She’d never make it again, especially not to him. “But I need to tell you—” God, she didn’t want to tell him they’d lost another young girl. Not him. She didn’t think she could stand to see that blame in his eyes again.

I had no choice, you son of a bitch. Get out of my head.

“Your department took two hours to call us out here,” she snapped finally, looking him in the eye once more. “No one knows the parklands like we do. They should have called us in sooner.”

And that’s when he knew. He understood what she was about to tell him, and the knowledge drained the color from his face, his full, chiseled mouth growing even harder. One hand darted under his jacket, no doubt to find the gun tucked into a shoulder holster. But there was no one to threaten. No one to shoot. Tara had vanished, and so had the man who’d met her on the ridge, leaving a chilling story told in footprints behind them.

“Not again,” he finally managed, sounding as if he would choke on the words.

Without thinking, she reached for him, just to put a hand on his arm, to offer some comfort. With a barely audible hiss, he moved out of her reach, so her fingers only grazed his sleeve. And then they could only stare at each other.

Sabrina broke the silence when she couldn’t stand it anymore. “Cast this tire track. I think it’s important.” His face darkened for a moment, and then he gave her a curt nod, reaching for his own radio. It only took him a minute to mobilize the department crime scene techs, asking them to come out to the ridge with some dental stone as soon as possible. The drizzle wouldn’t harm the track for a while, but full-fledged rain would.

“Bree?” Behind her, she heard Alex crunching down on the gravel road.

“Wha—?” God, she hoped she’d been wrong about the car. She hoped they had discovered something she’d missed.

“You’ll want to see what we found,” Alex continued, addressing Aaron this time. “I can show you.”

Ah, so Alex was rescuing her from the big, bad detective. And heaven help her, she wanted to be rescued.

Stealing a glance at Aaron, who’d since gotten off his radio, she saw the corner of his hard mouth twitch upward, giving a slightly mocking edge to his expression. Guess he knew just how much she wanted to run away from him. But it was important that one of them take the police up to the clearing—it was a crime scene, after all, and she well knew that looking for miniscule evidence was hardly SAR’s area of expertise.

“No, Alex, it’s okay. I’ll take him up.” She immediately wanted to kick herself for the perverse stubbornness that made her refuse Alex’s tacit offer just because of a slight challenge in the cop’s eyes that she may or may not have imagined. Trudge up the mountain alone with Aaron Donovan? Now, that was going to be a real kick in the head. But it was too late for her to back down now, and they all knew it. “See what Jessie wants and then call in the team that was dispatched along these logging roads. If the trail does pick up again, we’ll need as many bodies as we can to help us find it.”

The tire tracks flashed once more in her mind. They weren’t going to find a thing.

As Alex started to turn away, she spoke again. “Alex, make sure you protect this tire print.”

Widening his eyes, Alex scrutinized the track, then looked at her questioningly.

“Until the crime scene people get here to cast it. It might be important.” With a nod, he moved toward Jessie, leaving Sabrina alone with Aaron.

She looked him straight in the eye, refusing to flinch even though it took all she had. “Come on.” With that, Sabrina took off, darting into the trees and moving swiftly and silently up the ridge. Now that she knew where the footprints lay, she had no trouble following them back up.

Given that her job entailed a lot of hiking, not to mention rock climbing and rappelling, Sabrina was in excellent shape, despite the fact that no amount of extra sit-ups would give her the six-pack abs Jessie and Alex had. So hiking up this rather benign part of the mountain without a trail wasn’t that much of a challenge, even though it would have had most people huffing and puffing. But damn if Aaron wasn’t keeping up. Actually, he wasn’t just keeping up, he was snapping at her heels like a pack of wild dogs, pushing her farther and faster.

In less than half an hour, they reached the spot where Sabrina had seen the last of Tara’s footprints, not a word having passed between them. Careful not to disturb the trail, she motioned to the detective to follow directly behind her, leading them both to where Tara’s trail first led away from the hot spring.

“Paula said she stayed behind soaking in the pool while Tara went out to make a call on her cell phone,” Sabrina explained, even though she knew Aaron had probably learned that bit of information two hours before she had. Not that she was bitter. “You can see the lug print of her hiking boots here.” She pointed to the trail, and Aaron nodded, scanning the ground. She walked him to the clearing where Jessie and Alex had first spotted the man’s trail intersecting with Tara’s.

“So, there’s the mystery trail, made by someone we believe was on the mountain at the same time as the girls,” she continued, gesturing to the line of crushed grass that still remained, although it had grown fainter as the grass healed itself and began to stand up again. “It looks like he met up with Tara.”

Okay, now his silence was really getting to her. She stopped walking and waited for him to respond, noticing that he was staring at the ground as if he could interpret the signs himself. But she knew that wasn’t the case.

“These tracks were made at the same time as Tara’s?” he asked. He wasn’t questioning her, just asking for an explanation. For which she should probably be grateful, given their past.

She took a couple of steps to where the ground erupted in a sudden confusion of broken weeds and plants and disturbed dirt in a language that was completely foreign to him, but plain as day to her. “Look over here.” She crouched down by the prints and moved her hand above the ground to show him what she was talking about. “She stopped to talk to him. You can tell by the number of prints overlapping and shuffling here. People don’t hold still when they talk to each other—they’re always moving, shifting their weight.”

“You know the prints are male by the size?” he asked quietly, choosing to tower above her rather than join her on the ground. The jerk.

“That, and the fact that they point outward—men tend to do that, while most women turn their toes slightly inward.” It was a delaying tactic, that explanation. She didn’t want to show him what they’d seen next.

“I know there’s something you don’t want to tell me, but we’ll be up here all night unless you step it up.”

All night, alone with Aaron Donovan. Once upon a time, that might have been an appealing proposition. Now, it just made her head hurt. She reached up to rub the bridge of her nose, a soft “ahh” of pain escaping her lips before she could stop it.

He was by her side in a heartbeat, crouched before her so his too-handsome face was directly in hers. “Are you all right?” His hand curved around her bicep, as if to offer comfort, though it hovered inches above her skin.

She reared back, shocked at his question, at the notion that he might care even slightly about her answer.

“Sabrina?”

Pushing off the ground with her hands, she sprang to her feet, smacking her palms together to clean off the pine needles that had clung to her skin. “I wasn’t the one who waited for two hours before calling us in, Detective,” she replied, practically spitting out the title as she dusted her hands on the front of her pants. He rose slowly and lifted an eyebrow in response, the mocking look back on his face.

Shaken and not really knowing why, Sabrina spun away from him. She had no time for this—on that point, Donovan was right. She needed to step it up for Tara. With an impatient motion of her hand, she indicated for Aaron to follow her, not looking at him as she led the way to the next patch of dirt that had a couple of telltale hexagons embedded in it. Just ahead, she knew, were a few more complete versions of Tara’s prints. “Right here, Tara’s stride interval increases,” she said, her tone all business now. “That’s the distance between her footprints. Basically, that means she started to run.”

Aaron swore under his breath, a ridge forming between his dark eyebrows. Overhead, the sky darkened perceptibly, and the rumble of thunder from the east seemed to be coming closer.

Sabrina gestured with her chin to a spot up ahead, the quick movement reverberating throughout her skull. “He followed her. I think she fell.”

It had taken her team several painstaking minutes to piece together the whole grim story, but piece it together they had, and as she led him back down to where they’d left Jessie and Alex, Sabrina relayed it to the detective. Someone had been perched on a rock above Hot Spring Seven, presumably watching the girls as they’d soaked in the pool. As soon as Tara had gotten out to make her phone call, he’d started down the mountain, intercepting her as she’d made it to the clearing. There was a struggle, and Tara broke free and started to run, only to be tackled to the ground a few seconds later. Somehow, her attacker had managed to subdue her, and the heavy, scuffing partial prints they’d found as they made their way down the mountain indicated that he’d carried her down.

To the old logging road where his car had sat, waiting for them.

He didn’t say anything once she’d finished. He pulled out his radio and directed more police and the department crime scene techs up the mountain from where they stood, telling them in no uncertain terms that they needed to avoid stepping near the trail of crepe-paper stakes she’d left behind. Once the first people started arriving, he’d offered to escort her back to the logging road in a tone that she knew was more demand than request.

Back at the road, she turned to him, meeting his gaze directly—and immediately wishing she hadn’t. There was something so sad in his expression when you caught him off guard, just before he had a chance to close off again, a vulnerability that undid her more than his barely concealed hostility had.

“We have to find her,” Aaron said simply, and because she knew what frightened him, his words made her ache for him.

Without thinking, she reached for him, her hand closing around his bare wrist. “Aaron,” she said, because that’s all she could say.