The Missing

by Shiloh Walker

  “But I’ve had it with this. Jillian has been missing for five hours. Have you done a damn thing to find my baby, or are you going to grill me for another five hours?”

  “Mr. Morgan—”

  The agent’s patient expression cracked as somebody new intruded on the scene. Cullen sized him up as another fed in about three seconds, although the man’s suit was a little more pricey than what his associates wore. Armani, Cullen knew, and he figured it cost what some agents made in a month. The shoes were Italian leather, and somehow the agent had managed to keep them relatively clean as he made his way through the sand. He had perfectly groomed hair and a smooth, even tan. Considering the blond hair and blue eyes, Cullen was willing to bet the man’s tan came from a bed rather than being outside. The new guy didn’t much look like the outdoor type.

  There was also something vaguely familiar about him, but Cullen was so sick of agents, he couldn’t think straight. “Great,” he muttered as he stomped away from the agents, not stopping until he reached where the sand gave way to pavement. He stared at his car, wondering if, by some miracle, he could climb in and drive, just letting his gut lead him to his daughter.

  But while he had decent instincts, they were just that. It wasn’t a gift. He had no way in hell of finding Jilly on his own. There was a flash, a flicker of knowledge dancing just at the edge of his mind, like the first sparks before they gave way to wildfire. Even as he tried to reach out and wrap his mind around it, somebody came up from behind. He turned to meet the steady, congenial gaze of the new agent.

  He had friendly eyes and the kind of face that most people would trust. Cullen wanted to hit him until that understanding left his expression. The bastard couldn’t understand. Voice harsh with fury, Cullen said, “I can’t do this again. I have to do something.”

  “The only thing you can do is work with us, Mr. Morgan. Look, why don’t we go sit down inside? Management has given us use of their offices. We can cool down a little, get something nice and cool to drink—”

  Cullen slashed a hand through the air. “This isn’t a barbecue. I don’t give a damn about cooling off or getting a damn soda. I want to do something to find my baby.” His voice cracked again, and Cullen knew he had to get out of there, had to do something. “Oh, God.” He covered his face with his hands and sent up another desperate prayer. He hadn’t prayed since before his mother had died and he hadn’t set a foot in church. But he’d do whatever God wanted if He would just bring Jilly back safe.

  “I know this is hard. I can’t imagine the hell you have to be going through right now.”

  Something in the man’s voice had Cullen looking back at him. He dropped his hands and said flatly, “No. You can’t imagine it. So do something to help me, damn it. What are we going to do to find my daughter?”

  THE bastard, Special Agent Jones, made Cullen go through it another three times. When he finished detailing his afternoon and explaining, “No, I don’t have any enemies that I know of, and I can’t imagine who could have done this,” he looked at the agent and said, “Now do you want to know what I ate for dinner last night and what kind of pajamas Jilly wears?”

  With a pleasant smile, the agent murmured, “No. That isn’t necessary.” He flipped through a rather official-looking file, pausing here and there. “You’re a writer. Perhaps you have a rather devoted fan . . . ?”

  Cullen shook his head. “I don’t have much of a relationship with readers. I don’t even have an address where they can write me.”

  “You never do signings or anything?”

  Cullen curled his lip. “I’m sure you have all of that information in your file there.” A rather impressive file, considering the short amount of time that had passed since the FBI had shown up on the scene. It felt like years had already passed, but it had only been a few hours since that panicked, terrified call from Kelly had come in. He ran a hand through his hair and tugged on it absently, thinking back to the Q and A he’d done in Lexington a month or so back. It had been right after their trip to Atlanta. “I do a few signings a year. Yeah, I have some persistent readers, but nothing stalkerlike that I can think of.”

  “What about your dad? He’s a successful businessman. Went from working for a CPA firm to being some big-time stock wizard. Surely he’s stepped on a few toes.”

  Cullen shook his head. “Everybody likes my dad. He’s just one of those people who doesn’t really make enemies. Even his competition likes him. Besides, if this was some kind of vendetta thing or ransom deal, wouldn’t we have heard something by now?”

  A faint smile curled up the agent’s mouth. What in the hell was his name again? Cullen wondered. He’d already forgotten it. “You’re a quick one, Mr. Morgan, aren’t you?”

  Shrugging restlessly, Cullen replied, “Research.” He folded his arms across his chest and pinned the agent with a flat stare. “This was a stranger abduction, wasn’t it?”

  Finally, the agent’s polite, professional demeanor cracked just a little. He jerked at his tie to loosen it and then reached for his cooling cup of coffee. “It’s too early to say for certain, but it is starting to look that way.” He leaned forward, lacing his fingers together. “Mr. Morgan, I’m going to be blunt here. I don’t think you had anything to do with this. At all. I think some stranger took your daughter. Nobody other than the Paxtons knew she was going to be here, and although we’re looking at them, I don’t think they had anything to do with this, either. But, regardless, I need you to be honest with me. You can’t hide anything.”

  “Like what?” Cullen demanded, his aggravation coming through loud and clear.

  “Like your daughter’s . . . unusual abilities.”

  Cullen froze. When he spoke, his voice was rusty and hoarse. “What are you talking about?”

  Holding Cullen’s gaze, the agent lifted up the file, revealing a thinner one, one that Cullen hadn’t even seen. Without saying anything, the agent opened the file and revealed the contents. There was precious little. A few pieces of paper and a picture. Braden Fleming’s picture. Cullen hadn’t wanted anybody to know about Jillian, so when he’d made that phone call to the police’s anonymous tip line, he’d done it from a pay phone on the other side of town.

  He took the file and was gratified to see that his hands weren’t shaking. Damn miracle because on the inside, he was shaking so hard, he thought he might fall apart from it. He didn’t want people knowing this about Jilly. He managed to flip through the papers and then give the agent a quizzical glance. “I’m not sure what this is about.”

  “It’s about some statements taken from some nurses at the county hospital where Jillian was treated after she collapsed at school. She spent two days catatonic, and then suddenly, she woke up and told you that she knew where Braden was, according to these nurses who were outside your daughter’s room while she was crying about it. Tell me, Mr. Morgan. How did Jillian know about Braden?”

  Cullen closed the file and tossed it back on the table. The pages and pictures inside spilled out, but Cullen kept his gaze on the agent’s face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Agent . . . Sorry, I forgot your name.”

  In response, he flipped his name badge around. He said something else, but Cullen couldn’t hear it for the roaring in his ears. Taylor Jones.

  Like he was watching a slide show that only he could see, Cullen suddenly saw all the pictures and articles over that past year that he had collected about Taige. Most of them made little mention of the feds she worked with, but here and there were a few times somebody within the Bureau had been mentioned. Taylor Jones’s name had come up more than once, and there had even been a couple of pictures where both Taige and Jones’s face had shown up in the paper together.

  A hundred memories rose up to haunt him, to taunt him, and he was suddenly having a hard time breathing. Must have had something to do with the fact that his heart was pounding a mile a minute.

  Taige. All that restless, useless energy pulsating through him suddenly sharpen
ed, focused. Finally—son of a bitch, this was something he could control.

  IT was eleven o’clock before the agents decided that he should go home, try to get some sleep, and wait for them to call—and they’d call with an update just as soon as they could. If he hadn’t been waiting for just this opportunity, Cullen was pretty damn sure he would have been arrested for attempted murder when he tried to strangle one of the bastards for handing him that line.

  “Go home.”

  “Get some rest.”

  “We will call you. There’s nothing else you can do here.”

  The dumb shits that came up with that BS ought to have the daylights knocked out of them. His daughter was missing—and they were suggesting he take a fucking nap.

  The exit to his house was coming up, and he started to slow down, hitting the turn signal. But at the last second, he shot back onto the freeway, watching as his escort ended up blocked in by an eighteen-wheeler with a rebel flag emblazoned across the grill.

  He watched from his rearview mirror to make sure he wasn’t being followed, and then he shot off the next exit so he could get back on the interstate, heading north. He wasn’t sure if he could make it to the airport and get on a flight to Alabama without the feds catching up with him, but there was no way he was going to drive the six hours to Gulf Shores.

  Jillian might not have that kind of time.

  SIX

  “I’M telling you, the dad hired somebody.”

  Jones glanced up from his file with a frown. He had to admit, it was suspicious, Cullen Morgan disappearing the way he had.

  But he didn’t get that vibe off the man. Morgan wasn’t just upset about his daughter’s disappearance; he was nearly sick with it. Jones had spent more than enough time with guilty people recognize them a mile away. Morgan didn’t have that guilt inside him.

  All he was carrying around was grief.

  But they had yet to discover why Morgan had disappeared. It hadn’t taken long to find him, but by the time they found out he went to the airport, he was already en route to Birmingham.

  “Doesn’t fit, Murphy,” he said to the young agent he’d brought with him. Grace Murphy was the eager type, very ready to pin this on the most likely suspect. Jones could argue with her all day long, but Murphy was going to have to learn the hard way, the way most of them did. It was good for her, the way he looked at it. She’d learn that the easiest answer wasn’t always the right answer; in fact, it rarely was. After she made enough mistakes, she’d start developing some instincts.

  She would need them.

  He tapped his pen on the file in front of him, and when the phone rang, he continued to study the lists of names and descriptions of people seen in the water park. Hot summer day, dead of summer, it had been so crowded, it didn’t seem possible that a girl could just disappear like this. Didn’t seem possible at all.

  And that was why he’d been called in. While Jones had none of the unique skills himself, he had a knack for knowing when to call in one of the special task forces. This was going to be one of them, he knew. He was already debating over who to call in. He skimmed the lists and, seeing nothing, started to flip through the grandfather’s information.

  Whatever had happened in the Morgan family, if it had ever been committed to paper or put out into cyberspace, Jones now had the information. There were holdings all over the world. The grandfather was going to leave Cullen and Jillian a couple of very rich people. Not that Cullen didn’t do well on his own. The man was a very popular fantasy author with a huge online following. Internet searches had revealed message boards, MySpace pages, and entire fan Web sites dedicated to the guy’s books.

  Money. It was always a possibility that somebody had grabbed the girl to use her in some money scheme, but that didn’t feel right to Jones. He turned the page, continuing to skim over the Morgan family assets, and a familiar zip code caught his eye: 36547.

  He knew that zip code. Taige Branch, a huge asset to the Bureau and a huge pain in Jones’s ass, lived in Gulf Shores. “Hmmmm . . .” Without looking away from the file, he punched the address listed into his computer, pulling up a map. Less than four miles from where Taige had grown up.

  Jones knew very little about Taige’s childhood. She was remarkably closemouthed about her life, and there had been precious little information he could gather on her that wasn’t public knowledge.

  That information was pretty much all he had about her formative years. After she’d started college, there had been a decent amount of information, but before, very little. Only that she’d been orphaned at a young age, that she did well in school, and that she had gone to work part-time at a small, locally owned seafood restaurant. She’d lived with her only known relative, an uncle who preached at a nearby church, and she had very much kept to herself.

  Coincidence?

  Jones didn’t believe in coincidences.

  “Sir?”

  He looked up to find Murphy watching him with a wary gaze. “It’s Special Agent Hensley out of Birmingham.”

  “Do they have Morgan?”

  She shook her head. “No, sir. Nobody matching his description got off the plane, although surveillance clearly shows him getting on in Atlanta.” Her eyes were wide and glowing with self-satisfaction. Clearly, she thought this was more evidence to her theory that the dad had something to do with Jillian Morgan’s disappearance.

  Jones was far from convinced, though. He was no psychic. He employed more than a dozen specially trained, highly skilled psychics. While he might not have their abilities, he had damn good instincts. And right now, as he studied the financial data before him, his instincts were singing. He reached for his own phone to call the grandfather, a Robert Morgan. Robert had told his son he’d be waiting at Cullen’s house, and Jones had given his men orders to make sure the grandfather remained there for the time being.

  In case an attempt at ransom was made, they needed a family member at the house. Since Morgan had pulled his disappearing act, the grandfather was the only option. At the moment, Jones was damn glad he had the grandfather so readily accessible. It answered several of Jones’s more pressing questions.

  “No coincidences,” he murmured as he disconnected from his conversation with Robert Morgan. Sitting back, he studied the board before him while his fingers beat out a tattoo on the table. It had an eight -by- ten picture of Jillian Morgan and below it, pictures of her father, grandfather, and the Paxtons, the people who’d been watching Jillian before she disappeared.

  Murphy ended her conversation with Birmingham, and Jones looked her way as she put away her phone. “They found him—well, at least they found out how he ditched them. Guy’s clever, we got to give him that. Disguised himself. They’re faxing the pictures now. We’ll have to . . . What?”

  “Morgan had nothing to do with his daughter’s disappearance.” He glanced down at his notes and then flipped them around for Murphy to read. “The Morgans purchased a condo in Gulf Shores, Alabama, sixteen years ago. They went down there fairly regularly until Cullen’s mother was killed twelve years ago, and then the condo was used as rental property for a time. Past few years, the grandfather has taken to going down there more often. They’ve got great fishing,” Taylor mused.

  Murphy continued to stare at him, not following. Jones pushed his notepad closer to her and said softly, “Would you like to guess who Cullen dated on his summers in Gulf Shores, Murphy?”

  She looked down at the pad, and her eyes widened. “Branch.”

  Jones nodded. “Taige Branch. He has a history with her, and I’ll bet you anything that he’s gone looking for her.”

  SO damn restless, Taige slept fitfully, tossing and turning. She couldn’t sleep for the life of her and hadn’t been able to for nearly two months now. Ever since Chicago, but Chicago didn’t seem to have anything to do with her insomnia.