by Susan Stoker
When Dax had heard about Wes’s concerns, he’d called his friend, Cruz, in the FBI, as well as another friend, Lieutenant Quint Axton, who Wes didn’t know, in the SAPD. It was all very confusing and Wes wasn’t even sure how Dax was connected to everyone, but when Hayden Yates, from the Sheriff’s Department, had called and said that Fire Station 7 had their paramedics on standby, just in case, and to let her know if she could do anything, he gave up trying to figure it out, relieved that at least things were happening quickly.
He’d seen his brothers and sisters in blue . . . and red . . . in action in the past, rallying around their own when they were in trouble, but he’d never had to rely on them for his own personal use before. But Wes knew he needed every single eye, every single brain, to figure out where Laine was. He was well aware that the first twenty-four hours of any missing persons case was critical. If Laine had been kidnapped, it was likely the person would either kill her outright, or would keep her to . . . do whatever . . . to her for at least a few hours. It was that “whatever” that Wes didn’t want to think about.
He and Laine had been dating, and even though he saw the bad things that could happen to people, and even the awful things that humans could do to each other, through the course of his job, he still hadn’t really thought anything would happen to either of them. They’d been enjoying getting to know each other, in and out of the bedroom. She was quickly becoming one of his best friends, which felt right. Wes never thought he’d lose her, not so soon after he’d found her, or that there might be a chance she’d disappear from his life in such a mysterious way.
He had a new respect and empathy for the families of missing persons he’d spoken to in the past. He’d felt bad for them, but hadn’t really understood what they were going through . . . until now.
As Wes stood in his house, clutching his phone, willing Laine to call him and tell him with that nervous laugh she had that it was all a misunderstanding, it hit him.
He loved her.
He was devastated just thinking about never seeing her again. If she really was gone, he suddenly realized he would’ve lost one of the best things that had ever happened to him. He might’ve been telling himself they were just dating, but it was suddenly very obvious that wasn’t the case.
He hadn’t told her, they hadn’t spoken of love to each other, but it was there nonetheless. Wes figured he’d loved her from the first time he saw her standing in his barn. From her nipple hard-ons, as she called them, to the blush on her face when she realized she’d been staring at him, he loved everything about her. She was his soul mate—and he didn’t even want to think about how he might not get the chance to tell her.
As the night wore on, and his adrenaline spiked each time the phone rang, then plummeted when he realized it wasn’t Laine on the other end, Wes’s determination hardened. She was out there . . . somewhere. He’d spent his entire life investigating crimes and murders and missing persons. He was going to have to use every ounce of what he’d learned over the years in law enforcement to track her down. Somehow he knew Laine was waiting for him, counting on him to do his job and find her.
It was almost as if he could hear her words in his ear . . . whispering over and over, “Find me, Wes. I’m waiting for you to figure out what happened and come get me.”
* * *
Laine shivered in the narrow space, but kept her chin tilted up so she could see the sky. Seeing proof she wasn’t buried alive kept the claustrophobia she was feeling at bay . . . for now. The night was clear and the stars out here in the middle of nowhere were shining just as bright as they were on her first date with Wes. Looking up at the same stars she’d gazed at with Wes made her feel closer to him. Was he out there right this second, looking up at the sky and thinking about her? If so, they were seeing the same stars . . . somehow that felt significant to her.
“I wonder if there are aliens out there, dog,” she croaked out in a hoarse voice. She’d been talking to the dog for hours; it made her feel not quite so alone. “Maybe ET is out there now, lying on his back looking up at his purple sky and three moons and wondering what happened to his little friend he left behind on Earth.”
The dog had been gone a while, but Laine kept speaking to her, nevertheless. She knew the mutt was probably gone for good . . . off to take care of her puppies, or to find something to eat. She certainly had no reason to continue to hang out at the top of a hole and stare down at her. She really wasn’t that exciting.
Laine shuddered again and wrapped her arms around her waist even tighter. She’d tried to prop her heels up on the boards by her butt and pull her skirt over her bare legs to keep warm, but it didn’t work. The boards were too short and her ankles throbbed when she kept them in that position too long. She was covered in bug bites, the mosquitos having a field day with her fresh blood. Laine had resorted to using the water to wet the dirt on the walls to smear all over her arms and legs. It was drying now, and she felt like an experiment at the spa gone wrong.
Thinking back to the missing dog, Laine knew that even though it was Texas, it was chilly in the fall at night, and the dog was probably curled around her babies, snug and warm, the strange human a long-forgotten memory.
“Maybe if I send up a quick prayer, a cyborg or alien will hear it in passing and send down a search team. They’ll find me in this hole and beam me up, like on Star Trek. They’ll fix up my ankles, and put me in that beautiful blue dress that Cinderella wore in the latest version of the movie. I’ll twirl around and around and when I stop, Wes will be there in his Ranger uniform. He’ll tip his Stetson to me and we’ll dance off into the sunset.”
When she stopped talking, Laine couldn’t hear a thing other than the crickets and their incessant chirping. “Oh my God,” she exclaimed to the night. “I really have turned into Mackenzie. Seriously, this is too much. I’ve made fun of her my entire life for babbling on and on, but look at me. I’m doing the same damn thing.”
Laine closed her eyes and her chin fell to her chest in despair. Her words came out as a whisper this time, “I need you, Wes. Please, don’t stop looking for me. I’m here. I’m right here.”
* * *
At seven o’clock the next morning, Wes met Rose, a realtor who worked with Laine, at their office. She showed him Laine’s cubicle, and he got to work going through her files. He wasn’t a computer geek, so he was out of luck on searching her computer, not able to even log in because he didn’t know her password, but lucky for him, Laine was old school. She had a calendar sitting on her desk with doodles and appointments all over it. He found a drawer full of papers about various listings and notes on houses in the area.
It took him three hours to go through it all, but just when he was about to give up, he thought he just might have found a clue. On yesterday’s date, she’d written, “Johnson.” It was, unfortunately, a common name, but she’d also scribbled “Morningside.”
Doing a quick Google search on his phone, Wes found that there was a Morningside Long-Term Care Facility in the city. The two weren’t necessarily connected, but it was more than he had before he’d been to her office. He quickly dialed the number on their website.
“Good morning, Morningside Long-Term Care, where we care for your loved one as much as you do. How can I help you?”
“My name is Westin King. I’m a Texas Ranger investigating a missing persons case.”
“Oh, how can I help you?” the lady on the other end of the line repeated, sounding more concerned rather than falsely chipper, as she had when she’d answered.
“Do you have any patients with the last name of Johnson?” As soon as he asked the question, he knew he was being too vague.
“Yes. But none of them are missing.”
“Let me be more specific. The woman who has disappeared is a realtor. The last time anyone heard from her, she was going to look at a property. We don’t know where the property is, or even whose it was. The only clue we have is the last name of Johnson written on her calendar ye
sterday, with Morningside written on the same date. I was hoping you might know of anyone who might be in your facility who’s putting their house up for sale? Or maybe their relatives are?” Wes knew he sounded desperate, but he couldn’t help it.
“I’m really sorry, I’m just the front desk person. I have a list of our patients, but I’m not close enough to them to know about their personal lives.”
Wes gritted his teeth, knowing every second that went by was a second that Laine needed him, and he wasn’t there for her. “Can you please ask around and call me back as soon as you can? The woman who’s missing is my girlfriend. This is personal for me. Please. Anything you might be able to find out could mean the difference between life and death for her.”
The sympathy Wes heard in the woman’s voice, even over the phone, was palpable. “Of course. We can’t tell you any medical information or anything, but I’ll check the patient list and see if I can talk to the nurses who work with anyone with the last name of Johnson. Maybe they’ll know more.”
“Thank you.” Wes gave the woman his number and clicked off the phone and tried to think. He’d asked Dax’s friend in the FBI, Cruz, to use his connections to trace Laine’s cell phone, but that hadn’t exactly been the home run they’d needed. The phone was now either turned off, dead, or destroyed. They had no way to tell, but the bottom line was that it wasn’t transmitting a signal, so it couldn’t be traced.
Cruz’s FBI tech contact had been able to tell him that it had last pinged at a tower south of the city, but the area was very rural, and there was no guarantee she was anywhere near there now. Wes wanted more information before he organized a huge search party of the area, which might end up being a waste of time. He needed to narrow it down, or at least have more concrete evidence on where she might be first.
His phone rang and Wes put it up to his ear after clicking the green talk button. “King here.”
“Have you found her?” Mack’s frantic voice echoed though his brain.
“No.”
“Where could she be? Daxton and I drove around a bit last night looking for her, with no luck. Cruz and Mickie got together with Calder and Hayden and searched around her house. No one they talked to had seen her. Even the guys who weren’t on duty at the fire station were out looking. Where’s her car? If we find her car, I bet we’ll find her. She has to be somewhere, Wes! Dammit! Where is she?”
Wes didn’t get upset at Mackenzie. He’d been around her enough in the last month or so to know how she was. She wasn’t accusing him and was obviously just as worried as he was about Laine. “I don’t know. But I’m following up on a lead. I’m going to find her. There’s no way I’ve gone forty-two years before finding my soul mate to lose her now.”
When Mack didn’t say anything, Wes said, “Mackenzie?”
Then he heard her sob. Shit. Dax’s voice came over the line.
“What? Did you find her? Is she hurt?”
“I haven’t found her, Dax.”
“Then why is Mack crying?”
“Because I basically told her how much I love her friend. Because she’s emotional. Because she wants to find her friend as much as I do.” His voice dropped in anguish. “Because I have no fucking idea where Laine is and it’s tearing me apart.”
“Dammit, Wes. This doesn’t make sense. Any leads on the BOLO?”
Wes appreciated his friend not commenting on his break in professionalism, instead focusing on the “Be On The Lookout” Wes had put on Laine’s car. He cleared his throat, got himself under control and answered. “No. Nothing. But that’s not too surprising. If it’s parked amongst other cars or otherwise doesn’t stick out, it could take days or weeks to find.”
They both knew her car could be anywhere. It could be at the bottom of a pond or lake . . . with Laine still inside. If she’d crashed, it could be years before anyone found it, or her. Or the car, and Laine, could be in Mexico . . . or another state. There were so many scary scenarios, it hurt Wes’s heart to even think about what may have happened to her.
“I called in a favor from a friend of a friend of a friend,” Dax told Wes in a serious voice. “Moose is a firefighter from Station 7 that I’ve worked with in the past. As you know, we’ve played Station 7 in those charity softball games for several years now. Anyway, one of his crew is the Army Princess—”
“The soldier who was rescued from the Middle East? The one held by ISIS?” Wes interrupted in surprise. He’d met the firefighters, but wasn’t close with them. But now that he thought about it, Penelope, the female firefighter, did look familiar. He vaguely remembered all the press coverage on her when she’d been held as a prisoner over in Turkey.
“Yes, that’s her. Anyway, somehow in all that went down with her, she met this man who’s a former SEAL and some sort of techy geek. Penelope heard from Moose that Laine was missing, and she knows she’s Mack’s best friend, and since Mack is my girlfriend . . . shit, it’s all so convoluted, but anyway, the bottom line is that this guy did some searching to try to help . . . and he came up blank.”
“What?” Wes asked in surprise, sure Dax had been about to tell him that this mysterious hacker had found Laine.
“Yeah, I think it stunned him as much as it did us. He told us the same thing Cruz’s guy did about the phone. He knows it pinged on that rural tower, but that doesn’t give us enough information to organize a search party or head down there to start looking in any constructive way. He couldn’t find any local surveillance cameras with her car or license on it. He’s been up most of the night searching databases, with no luck. He says that he could probably find her if he had more time and information, but we’re running low on both at the moment. I’m kinda at a loss.”
Wes knew the connection between Laine and this mysterious guy was tenuous at best, but he wouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. “Ask him to look into a property owned by someone with the last name of Johnson in that area. Also, Morningside. Both names were written on yesterday’s date on the calendar at Laine’s desk. I’ve searched through all of the MLS listings in her files, without success. I’m waiting on a call back from someone at a long-term care facility named Morningside, here in San Antonio, but I have no idea when they’ll get back to me, or if anyone will have anything that will be useful enough to find Laine. We know she was looking at a property, but not where or whose. I’m hoping this mysterious property owned by someone with the last name of Johnson was where she disappeared. If not . . . I have no idea where to go next.”
“Will do. Let me see if I can get Moose to ask Penelope to contact him again. Jesus . . . this feels like the telephone game,” Dax said in disgust.
“Give him my number. He can call me direct,” Wes demanded, thinking much like Dax, that they needed to cut out the middlemen.
“I will. Don’t give up, Wes. Remember, we found Mack when all the odds were against it. Laine comes from the same stock as Mack. She’s tough and I know we’ll find her.”
“I know. Thanks, Dax. I appreciate it.”
“Anytime. Not only because you’re my friend, but because if anything happens to Laine, it’ll devastate Mack.”
“She still there?”
“No, I sent her to the other room to lie down. She didn’t sleep at all last night and she’s stressed out to her breaking point.”
“Take care of her. I’ve come to like that woman of yours.”
“I will. Call me the second you have a lead. I’ve got a whole team of people ready to move at a moment’s notice. Firefighters, cops, paramedics . . . you name it.”
Not for the first time, Wes thanked his lucky stars he was where he was and he’d made the type of friends he had. It was as if Fate had made him wait as long as she did to find the woman meant for him, until he had exactly the right combination of friends around him. If anyone could find and save Laine, it was the army of law enforcement and firefighter friends who were on his side. “I will. Thank you. Seriously, you have no idea how much that means to me. I’ll be i
n touch.”
“It’s what Rangers do. And friends, Wes. Later.”
“Later.”
Wes was striding toward the front of the building before he’d finished speaking. He couldn’t just sit around and wait for a phone call. He didn’t know what he needed to do, but waiting idly was at the bottom of the list.
10
The dog was back. Laine looked up and saw her muzzle peeking over the edge of the hole, way above her head. “Hey, dog. You come back to laugh at me some more?” Sometime in the last two days, Laine decided that was really what the dog was doing. She was obviously wary of people and was probably thinking karma was getting back at the human race.
The first night hadn’t been so bad . . . she’d been sure Wes, or Dax, or someone would realize she was missing and track her down, and she’d be sitting at Wes’s house eating breakfast within hours. But as the second day came and went, she understood the trouble she was in.
Laine was thirsty. She couldn’t remember exactly how long it was before someone died from a lack of water, but she thought she could probably hold out a few more days. The fact that she was thinking about how many days she might have to live was absolutely terrifying.
She’d stopped sweating the day before and she was dizzy most of the time now. Her mouth felt as though she’d been sucking on cotton balls, but it was the confusion that scared her most of all. Laine had woken up a while ago and had no idea where she was. She’d stood up and tried to take a step and ran her face into the dirt wall. She’d fallen on her butt on the boards and it’d taken her too many minutes to work through in her mind where she was and how she’d gotten there. She was terrified that her body was shutting down on her.
