Searching for Cate

And if it was the last thing she did, she was going to break up the ring and send whoever was responsible to prison. But first, she wanted to hang them upside down by their genitals. And leave them there for a week. Maybe longer.

She owed it to her cousin Susan.

Traffic cleared up a block away from the civic plaza. The difference between the blocks that housed the federal buildings and their surrounding area was astounding, like going from one world to another. Every so often, like today, it hit her anew.

After making a left, Lydia drove into the structure, not even bothering to look for a place in the open lot. You had to arrive at six to get a spot there. She parked her car, made her way back into the daylight and hurried across the grounds to the second federal building. She took the stone steps leading to the glass doors two at a time. The doors parted automatically, and she sailed right through. It was a quarter to nine and already busy.

The second she got off the elevator on the seventh floor, she walked into Mike Santiago, narrowly avoiding his jelly doughnut. Considering that Mike’s reach cleared him to over seven feet, there was little danger of jelly smearing across the navy blazer she had on today.

Once he lowered his prize, he took a bite, then nodded his head toward the rear of the room where the A.D. had his office. “New girl’s here. She’s in with Sullivan.”

Lydia made her way to her desk. They were all out in the open here, unrestricted by cubicle walls. That was both good and bad, depending on which side of a private conversation you were on.

“We’re not girls, Santiago,” she told him mechanically, knowing he expected it, “we’re women.”

Married, with two kids and one on the way, Santiago was as faithful as they came. But he liked perpetuating the image of a Romeo. “You can say that again. This one makes me glad God made me a man.”

Lydia deposited her purse into the bottom drawer of her desk, then shut it with her foot. Looking at the tall, slightly rumpled agent, she shook her head. “God’s not finished yet.”

Mike did his best to imitate a leer as he spread his hands before him. “Any time you want to sample the goods, Graywolf…”

They’d known each other ever since she’d joined the field office some six years ago. And had been friends for almost as long.

“Death would be preferable.” Taking off her jacket, she draped it over the back of her chair. Her blond hair was caught back in a clip and worn up, her style of choice while on the job. “Besides, I have something really special at home.”

“Brag, brag, brag.” Tommy Hawkins came up behind her, munching on another doughnut, a plain glaze. Tiny bits of sugar broke off, marking his path from the common room. In his late fifties, widowed with one estranged son who lived on the opposite coast, Tommy seemed to be counting the days to retirement. And dreading it. “Morning, Beautiful.”

She gave him her best deadpan expression. “That’s sexist, Tommy.”

“That’s observant,” he corrected, then winked broadly at her. “I won’t tell if you won’t.”

A smile curved her mouth. “You win again.” She indicated the doughnuts both men were consuming. “What’s the occasion?”

“I didn’t ask,” Tommy said. “That way, nobody can tell me they’re not meant for everyone.”

Mike wiped his lips and tossed the napkin into the basket by Lydia’s desk. “New girl—excuse me, woman, brought them.”

“She trying to bribe us?” Tommy asked.

“Works for me,” Mike responded. “Wouldn’t mind having another.” He glanced toward the common room. From here, he could just barely see into it. The large box of doughnuts was on a table near the rear of the room.

Lydia looked in the opposite direction, toward Assistant Director Aaron Sullivan’s office. She could see a poised, young blonde in a teal-blue suit sitting in the chair beside Sullivan’s desk. The new special agent. Her new special agent if she were to believe Sullivan. The A.D. had said the young woman would be working with them. And specifically, she would be taking Patterson’s place. Her partner had put in for a leave of absence shortly after he’d been wounded. It was his second time and he thought that perhaps it was an omen that he should reevaluate his career choice. Over the years, they had come to work like a well-oiled machine. She’d known him longer than she’d known Lukas. Although the time interval since he’d left had been short, she already missed him like crazy.

Welcoming his substitute, even his temporary substitute, was not going to be easy.

Lydia looked back at the men she worked with. “Anyone know anything about her?”

Tommy shrugged, finishing his doughnut. “Just that she’s a transfer from San Francisco.”

Lydia sighed. “Which means she’s probably a hotshot, or thinks she is.”

Santiago laughed. “And we all know that you’re the only hotshot around.”

Playing along, Lydia patted Mike’s face. “And don’t you forget it.”

All three saw Sullivan rising from his chair. He’d be summoning them soon. Tommy straightened his jacket, but it still looked wrinkled. “Time to make nice, Lydia.”

Plucking her own jacket from the back of her chair, she slipped it on again. “Yeah.”

Instinct had Cate glancing over her shoulder a second before the three people entered the assistant director’s inner office.

These would be some of her new co-workers.

They looked friendly enough, she decided. The woman seemed to be sizing her up. Undoubtedly wondering if she was going to be competition. Well, she’d put the special agent’s mind at rest soon enough. She had no desire to compete on any level, except possibly against herself. All she wanted to do was her job.

That and find her birth mother.

The day after the funeral, she’d gotten down to work, though still on leave. She utilized everything she had at her disposal, determined to track down any shred of information regarding her birth parents and her subsequent adoption. What Doc Ed had said to her was true enough, she would still be Cate Kowalski at the end of the journey. But depending on what she found out and the effect it had on her, she very well might be a different version of herself.

And if for some reason that didn’t happen and she remained just as she’d always been, that was all well and good. But the bottom line was that she needed to know why she’d been given up. And most of all, she needed to know the identity of her biological parents.

Doc Ed had given her her start, handing her names. Thanks to Jeremy Kovel, a computer wizard she’d briefly dated, and his almost uncanny ability to pluck things out of cyberspace, she’d managed to find Ava Gerber. Ava was the secretary who had handled all the details for Larry Lieberman, the lawyer who had arranged for her adoption.

Retired and desperate for company, Ava needed no prodding to get her to talk about her days with Lieberman. The woman turned out to be one of those secretaries who ran the entire office and was up on everything that had ever crossed not just her desk, but her boss’s as well. Thanks to Ava and her incredible memory, made more accessible over wine and dinner at the finest restaurant in San Francisco, Cate wound up getting the names of not just her birth mother, but her birth father as well.

“I got the feeling that he didn’t know anything about it,” Ava confided over her third glass, her head nodding dangerously. “But she put his name on the baby’s birth certificate.” She’d grinned broadly at her. “That would be you, I guess.”

Her last name, it turned out, was Blue. Bonnie Blue. Like the old sea chantey about the ocean. In any event, the name didn’t really fit, and there was a reason for that. As it turned out, the name wasn’t really her birth father’s, either. He’d been a would-be musician who’d billed himself as Blue in his short-lived career of going from one half-baked band to another. His real name was Jim Rollins, and his so-called career had lasted long enough to attract the attention of one Joan Haywood.

Instead of becoming a successful musician, Rollins had wound up going into life insurance and was a salesman for Gotham Life when he’d died in a three-car pileup on I-15 on his way to Las Vegas for a three-day weekend. Twice divorced, he had no children, no family that she could unearth.

Cate turned from that dead end to searching for her birth mother, Joan Haywood. The trail had brought her to Bedford, California.

Since the bureau had field offices in Santa Ana and Los Angeles, she’d decided to put in for a transfer. She’d needed a change of scenery, anyway. The Santa Ana office was closer to Bedford and to her birth mother’s last-known address, so she’d chosen the one city over the other.

Cate realized that she was gripping the arms of the chair she was sitting in when the trio walked into the office. She dropped her hands into her lap. She was going to have to work at learning to relax. Otherwise, by the time she did find her birth mother, who had moved several times in the past twenty-six years, gotten married and was now Joan Cunningham, she was going to be far too stressed out to have something good come out of the meeting.

Chapter 7

After a very poor night’s sleep during which she had woken up every hour on the hour, Cate finally gave up and stumbled into the living room of her garden apartment. She narrowly avoided tripping over a small box she’d opened some time earlier. It took her a minute to remember where the light switch was. Boxes impeded her progress to the opposite wall.

There were boxes everywhere within the two-bed-room ground-floor apartment. She’d been here almost a week now and it still looked as if she’d just arrived from San Francisco.

Cate tried to remember if she’d unpacked any paper yet besides the sheets that were with her printer. Frustrated, she went into the second, smaller bedroom, which would eventually become her office, and took a sheet right off the top.

It had taken her two trips to get everything together in one place. She’d brought her car down first, then flew back to rent the U-Haul. Whatever she couldn’t cram into it, she’d left behind. She wasn’t much on possessions, anyway. Her mother used to tell her that if you owned too much, it wound up owning you.

Fiercely independent, Cate liked being in control of everything, had been that way since her father, since Big Ted—she amended with an ironic smile—had died. She’d controlled the timing of her move down here, the method used to do everything.

Control, however, didn’t extend to unpacking within a given amount of time. That she did on a need-to-have basis. So far, beyond her computer and printer, she’d unearthed a week’s worth of clothing and her coffee-maker. Everything else she’d brought with her, besides the small amount of furniture that was now disbursed within the rooms, was still sealed away within the boxes.

Her furniture might have still been on the truck if it hadn’t been for Lydia. To her surprise, when she’d mentioned in passing that she planned to spend the weekend unloading her U-Haul, Lydia had volunteered to come over with her husband and help. She’d also volunteered Santiago and Hawkins, much to the agents’ surprise.

Cate had tried to turn down the offer, saying that it wasn’t necessary, but Lydia wouldn’t take no for an answer. From anyone.

Sometimes pushy had its place, Cate thought with a smile. She had no idea how long it would have taken her to unload the U-Haul by herself.

Making her way to the kitchen, paper still in hand, she went to the refrigerator to take out the can of coffee she kept there. If she wasn’t going back to bed, she needed a cup of coffee. Maybe several cups.

She got along well with her new partner, which was a nice bonus. And the woman’s husband was a sweetheart. The two looked perfect together, like the figures on top of a wedding cake, except far more lively and animated. Anyone looking at them knew they were in love.

She envied Lydia, envied her because she would never know what that was like, being married to someone she adored who adored her back. Her one chance had come and gone with Gabe.

“So you’re the new special agent. Read your file.” There’d been no expression on Lydia’s face when the woman had initially greeted her.

Lydia seemed to have materialized out of nowhere and looked her carefully up and down. Cate knew she was being sized up. But she didn’t have long to wait to discover what the verdict was. A smile entered Lydia’s eyes at the same time it curved her mouth.

“Pretty impressive” had been her verdict about what she’d read. “Reminds me of me.” One of the other agents in the room had punctuated her statement with “Ha!” and she’d nodded behind her. “That would be the bull pen. Don’t mind them. All thumbs and male testosterone.” She winked and her smile widened. “Nice to have another female on the team. They can get pretty rowdy sometimes.”

She wasn’t sure if Lydia was serious or joking, but she liked the woman’s friendly manner. Liked her almost instantly because Lydia didn’t seem worried about guarding her territory, she’d made it instantly clear the job was about teamwork. Lots of it.

“This thing gets uglier by the day,” Lydia had warned her, dropping off a thick-looking file on her desk. She discovered that all the notes taken on the case that hadn’t made it onto the computer were stuffed in there. “It’s about all the awful things in society the rest of the world doesn’t want to hear about. Kidnapping, child prostitution. The worst of it is, we still don’t have much, despite all the hours we’ve all put in.” Lydia placed her hand on the file before Cate had been able to open it and asked, “Are you up to it? Because if you’re not, I can recommend having you transferred to something that isn’t quite as gut-wrenching to deal with.”

It was a first. No one had ever given her a choice, considered her reaction before. It made her feel instantly accepted. She’d looked at Lydia and said, “I’m up to it.”

Lydia had nodded and smiled. “Good.” She removed her hand from the file.

In a way, Cate thought now, Lydia reminded her of a slightly older version of herself. Very together, very efficient, and driven. All qualities she could relate to. Except perhaps the “together” part, she mused. She still tried to project that image, but inside she felt like a little girl lost, waiting for someone to find her.

Knowing that no one would.

It was up to her to find them. Or in this case, her birth mother. Until that was resolved, she felt as if she was just hovering around, unable to find a place to really settle.

Which, she supposed, was one of the reasons most of the boxes still remained packed. It wasn’t that she intended to pick up and go somewhere at a moment’s notice, but she couldn’t quite get herself to unpack and make herself at home here, because she wasn’t certain that “here” would be home.

Besides, she was far too busy to unpack more than a few things at a time. Whatever time she had away from the job and the man-hours it demanded, she spent on the computer, trying to track down the whereabouts of one Joan Haywood, now Cunningham.

It was far from easy. She was good, but she wasn’t in Jeremy’s league. From what she had managed to piece together, both while in San Francisco and now here, her birth mother had gone on to have a regular life after she’d given away her firstborn. Joan Haywood had attended a local four-year college, gotten married in her senior year and then moved down to Southern California.

Her husband, Ron, a former air force pilot, now aerospace engineer, had gone where the jobs were. There’d been five addresses in the past twenty years. And a sixth she couldn’t find. The last known address had been in Bedford, even though he was working for an aerospace company in El Segundo. Having gotten familiar with the area, she could appreciate that it was quite a drive. One he didn’t have to make for long. Raytheon had laid him off. And then he and Joan, along with their children, had disappeared, going down somewhere beneath the radar. They’d moved, leaving no forwarding address.

Facing a dead end, she’d turned to Jeremy, her computer fairy godfather. In part, he was responsible for her broken night’s sleep. Jeremy had called yesterday, saying that he’d managed to hack into records that were far off the beaten path. The records testified that a Ronald Cunningham had undergone a top-secret clearance check a little more than two years ago. The check had been requested by one of the leading companies in defense. When Jeremy had mentioned the name, she’d recognized it instantly. A major branch of the company was domiciled in Orange County, just north of Bedford.

It took Jeremy a little while to ascertain that the social security number for Ron Cunningham and Ronald Cunningham were one and the same. To elude detection, his “break-ins” could last only ninety seconds. Gleaning information had been slow-going. He’d waited until he had more before calling Cate.

When he did, it was well past midnight. Closer to two in the morning. “Got an address for you, Cate. You ready to take it down?”

She’d been in a deep sleep when the phone rang. It had taken her a couple of breaths to get her mind reasonably in gear. It took a little longer to find a writing utensil and paper.

“Don’t you ever sleep?” she asked.

Jeremy was a self-described insomniac who prowled chat rooms in the dead of night when nothing else presented itself as a diversion. This was a diversion.

“Not when something’s on my mind. I’ve been looking for this woman for you since you left our field office. By the way, how is it down there?”

Her first response would have been “chaotic,” but that would have been describing her life, not conditions. She gave the standard reply. “Weather’s perfect.”

Jeremy made a little disparaging noise with his teeth and lips. “Huh. It has no character.”

She thought of the cold, clammy winters, the sticky, humid summers she’d left behind. Watching leaves turn color did not balance out the minuses. “That’s okay. I’ve got character enough to spare.”

There was no paper to be had, but the local newspaper caught her attention. Scooting off the bed, Cate bent down to capture a corner of the paper and pull it back to her.

In a pinch…

She spread the paper on her lap, her pen poised over one of the margins. “Okay, shoot.”

Jeremy recited the address and phone number he’d found in the top-secret files. He turned down her offer to pay him for the information. This was what he did, he told her, he challenged himself. Not for any personal or monetary gain, but just to see if he could do it.

Grateful for his help, Cate jotted the address and phone number down along the margins of the newspaper. She did her best to print carefully. Someone once told her that her handwriting looked as if a spider had been dipped in ink and then allowed to run pellmell over a page. Cate fervently hoped she’d be able to make it out in the morning,

“That’s it for now,” Jeremy had concluded.

She put the pen back down on the nightstand. “Thanks, Jeremy. I owe you one.”

She heard him laugh shortly. “After all the work I’ve put in, you don’t owe me just one. You owe me your firstborn.”

There was a slight pang in her stomach. She tried not to think of Gabe. “Since there’s little chance of there ever being a firstborn, let me take you out to lunch the next time I’m up there.”

“You’re coming back?”

He sounded eager, which she thought was sweet. She’d always liked Jeremy, thinking of him as a slightly unkempt younger brother, even though in reality he was a couple of months older than she was.

As to what she’d just said to him, she’d meant coming back to Frisco for a visit. His question made her stop to consider. And realize again that from where she was standing, her future was undecided and murky.

“I don’t know. Maybe. We’ll see.” She knew nothing was going to be decided until after she’d met with her birth mother and eradicated the hollow feeling she’d been carrying around inside of her for the past three weeks. “First I need to take care of these loose ends.”

Everyone who knew Cate knew she was like a bulldog with a bone. Once she clamped down on something, she wouldn’t let go until it was resolved to her satisfaction.

“Just don’t let them strangle you. Pleasant dreams, Cate.”

“Yeah, you, too.”

But even as she hung up the receiver and stifled another huge yawn, Cate knew she wasn’t going to get any sleep, not tonight. If she forced herself to remain in bed, all she was going to wind up doing was counting the minutes as they trickled their way into dawn. And then count more minutes as she waited for a decent time to arrive before she showed up on her birth mother’s doorstep.

Glancing at the address and phone number she’d written in the newspaper margins, she decided that she needed to transcribe both while they still looked reasonably readable.

After that, she promised herself, she’d see about maybe unpacking a few more things.

Cate’s hand felt damp on the receiver as she gripped it, her fingers tightly holding the mouthpiece. Her hand was so sweaty, she was surprised that the receiver didn’t just slip out of it.

The line on the other end was ringing. She silently counted the number of rings.

She’d waited until eight o’clock, forcing herself to shower and get dressed before she made the call. To hear the voice of the woman who had rejected her. Granted, she’d wound up in a home most kids only dreamed about, rich in love if not possessions, but it could have easily gone another way. She could have landed in an abusive home.

Or worse.

Her birth mother had no way of knowing what her fate was to have been when she gave her away. Right now, it was very hard not to be resentful, if not downright angry with the woman.

“Hello?”

The high-pitched female voice that answered the telephone on the fourth ring sounded way too young to be the woman she was seeking. Joan had been seventeen when she was born. That would make her forty-four or forty-five now. The person on the other end of the line was definitely not forty-five.

Her mouth felt like cotton. Cate forced herself to speak. “Hello, this is Catherine Kowalski. Is this Joan Cunningham?”

There was a short, breathless, nervous laugh. It was as if the girl was unaccustomed to speaking to people. “No, this is Rebecca.”

That would be Joan’s daughter, Cate thought. There was a pause, after which Cate pressed on. “Then may I speak to Joan, please?”

“Sorry, she’s not here.”

Damn it, she’d waited too long. Joan had left the house for the day. According to what she’d found, her birth mother worked as an interior designer in one of those small, trendy stores along the Pacific Coast Highway. Athena and Daughter.

With effort, she managed to rein in her impatience. “What time will she be back?” Cate asked politely.

“I’m not really sure,” the girl responded. “My mom’s in the hospital.”

Chapter 8

Christian flipped the chart closed and frowned. This was the downside of his job and he hated it.

He never minded being roused out of bed at some ungodly hour of the night or predawn to help bring a new life into the world. Even in his worst moments, when the futility of life got to be too much for him, there was something indescribably exhilarating about holding a brand-new human being in his hands. About seeing eyes open for the very first time. About seeing a tiny chest rise and fall as a baby took its first breath. All of it humbled him.

And made him feel hope.

Hope was what he tried to dispense now to Joan Cunningham, the woman in room 527. Hope that the life she cherished so much was not going to be cruelly yanked away from her now, in the prime of her life.

He knew she was frightened. Who wouldn’t be in her place? She’d come to his office two days ago with huge eyes and a tremor in her voice. Even as she spoke, there was a silent plea in her eyes, a plea for him to tell her that her fears were unfounded.