by Casey Hagen
She greeted her listeners, but held off on taking any calls just yet. She needed to play a few favorites first in an effort to find her groove.
Whatever her groove was now.
She’d just planned out how to start the show, when in the middle of song three, a rap on the window of the booth made her jump. Startled, she yanked her headset from around her neck and shot a look at whatever jerk just scared her half out of her mind.
Two uniformed police officers wore stern expressions with their hard mouths and cool stares as they watched her, their left arms hanging to their side, their right hands on the heel of their weapons. Nate was giving them an earful if the way his mouth moved and his hands flailed about was any indication.
She gulped. This is what she got for opening her mouth. She selected and old show from the computer files and set it up to play out for the rest of the night. The intro played all over again, but she was powerless to do anything else. If she didn’t open the door, they were going to open it for her.
She made sure not to grab her sweater or purse and keep her hands visible as she opened the door to the booth. “Can I help you?”
“Lily Ashmore?” The blond cop asked.
“Yes.”
He held up his badge. “Officer Taskin. I’m going to have to ask you to come with us and answer a few questions?”
“Am I under arrest?”
“Should you be?” The dark-haired officer asked.
“Of course not,” she said with indignation and an air of confidence she didn’t feel.
“If you could just grab your things and come with us, please?”
“Okay,” she said, her voice cracking. She hadn’t done anything wrong, so she’d be fine. But she’d never been questioned by police before.
What if they found some way to hold her or press charges? Word would get out and she’d lose her fans and her job.
Eventually she’d lose her new home in the city she’d fallen in love with. The one she had told her best friends, Jasmine, Ivy, and Sage, she planned to live in until she was dead.
Lily would be lost…right after she had been found.
Chapter 2
Mason Devlin shot his brother, Luca, a hard glare when he barged into his office and tossed a manila envelope on his desk, sending his current project scattering in three different directions.
“We’ve got another case and you’re on deck,” Luca said. He dropped into a chair meant for clients and bit into his apple. Mason shook his head when Luca swiped his sleeved-forearm across his mouth.
The kid had no manners.
Mason slid the folder aside long enough to right his papers before grabbing it again and flipping it open.
“How old?”
“Nine. Female,” Luca said.
“How long has she been missing?”
“Five days.”
Marcus frowned. Five days. A whole lot could happen in that amount of time. He scanned the details: typical white-collar family, typical American suburb, and heartbroken parents to whom money was no object, and as such, wanted to hire the best.
That’s where Mason, Luca, Garrett, and Talon came in. When they had formed Alegra, a specialized division of The Phoenix, the goal had been simple: Recover missing children.
The motivation for Mason and his brothers: The unsolved mystery of their own sisters’ disappearance when she was eight.
The underlying goal all four men pretended didn’t exist: Continue to gather clues that might help them solve her case and bring their sister home, one way or another.
Every time he opened a file for a missing child he scanned the photo first. Despite the fourteen years since their sister, Alegra, had disappeared, Mason remembered every detail of her elfin face and searched for it in the faces of others.
The only similarity between his sister and this girl, Mara, was the innocence in their eyes. The way Mara stood, her arms relaxed, her chin thrust up as if they’d caught her mid laugh, and her huge, toothy grin told Mason that this girl had been made to feel safe and loved. She’d remained open to the world around her, not yet tarnished with the realities of life. The dangers.
At least until five days ago.
What kept the ache in his chest, day in and day out, despite the recoveries they made, was being forced to accept that no matter what they did, no matter how many they found alive, he could never give them that look again.
They’d forever be touched by what happened to them.
“Who called in?” Mason asked.
“The father. The mother, well, uh,” Luca cleared his throat and rubbed the back of his neck. “Let’s just say, she’s not doing so hot.”
Which could mean a lot of things. When calls came in and clients contracted their services, they gathered as many of the facts of the case as possible and reviewed them on paper. He’d meet the family soon enough. They always did, but in the first moments, they needed to examine what had been done thus far, make note of all the clues available, and they needed to do so without emotions involved.
Well, other than the emotions that boiled under the surface of all of them from their own personal pain.
Mason was the oldest of the five. He’d been seventeen years, four months, and three days when his sister disappeared without a trace. He’d promised to take his brothers fishing and told her she couldn’t go. It was a trip for just the boys. How he regretted that.
He shook off the memory and renewed his focus on Mara. No matter how many times he walked that jagged cobblestone road of memory, the end result remained the same.
Mara had been on the sidewalk in front of her house. One witness, not to her abduction, but to seeing a black sedan turn the corner onto Oak Street at what was believed to be the approximate time of the crime. No model or make. No plate number. No real guarantee that it was the car.
Under persons of interest, there was but one, a stranger, a woman, who warned the mother of the abduction a week earlier. “What’s the deal with this Lily Ashmore?” Mason asked Luca. The name sounded so familiar, as if he’d heard it before, and it should mean something.
Luca tossed the apple core into the trash from across the room and propped his worn-boot clad-feet on Mason’s scarred, circa 1960’s desk. “That’s the part you’re going to hate. She claims she’s clairvoyant.”
Mason cracked his neck and clenched his jaw.
Sure she did.
“And what is it she wants from them?” Mason asked.
“Well, that’s the thing…as near as I can tell, she just wants to be left alone.”
“Right,” Mason gritted his teeth. “That’s what they all say, but if that were the case, she would have kept her mouth shut and never gotten involved to begin with.”
Luca scratched his chin. “Leanne, Mara’s mother, said that she came out of nowhere one day while they were at Patterson Park. She didn’t have specifics, but she begged Leanne to be careful and keep Mara from going out alone in the near future. The police interviewed her, but she provided an alibi. Still, they asked her to stay in town for the time being.”
“As they should. She could be waiting for the dust to settle so she can get something out of the family. Even if the alibi checks out, it doesn’t mean she wasn’t involved, it just means she didn’t physically abduct Mara herself.” Mason scribbled notes on a pad of paper, just the important details, none of the opinions of the parents that had been noted.
“You’re a cynical one, bro.”
He kept his head down, scrawling the ballpoint of the Bic across his yellow, legal pad. “You don’t remember Cybill McGraw the way I do.”
She had approached their parents within hours of their sister’s abduction going public. She’d knocked on their door and offered their parents false hope. She’d strung them along, using bits and pieces of information she had obtained from a dirty cop with loose lips.
While she did that, she had strung Mason along in a much different way. Nine years older, and a knockout, Mason fell hard for her at
tention. Whatever she hadn’t been able to get from the evidence, she got from Mason while he was in her bed.
The way she’d spoken, the purr in her voice, the undivided attention she lavished on him, the fake concern and heartbreak she’d pretended to be consumed with, it conspired to cast him under her spell.
And yeah, he had been a horny and heartbroken seventeen-year-old and the lure of smokin’ hot twenty-six-year-old wanting him couldn’t be denied.
She’d toted those pseudo discoveries both through the cop and Mason, to build her popularity and gain clientele. Eventually, she’d worked his parents over for twenty grand while she built fame on false instances of success with an offhanded, “Oh well”, the one time she couldn’t bring about concrete results.
He didn’t know how she did it, and he didn’t want to know. He just wanted her to stay far, far away from him so he wasn’t tempted to wrap his fingers around her neck and throttle her.
“So, what’s Lily’s deal? What does she do?” Marcus asked as he shuffled through the file. Only about twenty percent of the intake form was filled in to begin with, their investigation would fill in the rest. In this case, since a suspect had been interviewed, they’d have to reach out to Jeff Clare, a lieutenant in the Baltimore police department, to pave the way for clearance in the investigation and the sharing of evidence.
So far, they’d been able to work with the authorities with no issues. Team Alegra respected the boundaries of authority, and when necessary, they tapped into the resources of The Phoenix and worked around it. Mason suspected Jeff knew, but overlooked it.
“That’s the funny part. You know that show you like to listen to on the radio?”
That again. He’d never live down the moment his brothers walked in on him cooking a late-night omelet, belting out John Legend’s All of Me. They’d razzed him so bad, he’d confiscated their keys to his condo for six months.
He raised his eyebrows and adopted what he hoped was a bored stare. “Get to the point before I’m forced to kick your ass.”
Luca dropped his feet to the floor and leaned toward the desk, his eyes danced, a grin split his face. “Lily Ashmore is the host.”
The vixen that wielded what he had come to think of as, “the sultry voice” of radio. The words tumbled out of her the way hot fudge, at just the right temperature, caught the top of the ice cream for a fraction of a second before making a slow slide down the side and pooling into a thick, chocolate moat of pure awesome at the bottom.
What guy didn’t dig a good moat?
He sang along with the song, yes, but he was there for the voice. Always the voice.
And now, it looked like he’d get to hear that voice in person, not that it mattered. Just knowing what she was would be motivation enough to keep his hands to himself.
No way was he falling for a woman like Cybill again.
“We don’t have an address for her,” Mason said.
“Not yet, give me a minute and I’ll have it for you.”
“Good.”
“So, you want company when you go over there?”
“Fuck no. I want you to work on getting every last bit of contact information on the names we have. I want financials for the parents. Put in a call to Jeff, see what we can get from the police. Oh, and I want performance reviews for the parents at their places of employment and get me coworker contact information.”
Luca opened the door for Mason. “Careful, I’m going to start feeling like Cinderella here.”
“You’re happy to do busy work and you know it, because it means you don’t have to make any of the big boy decisions this time around.” Marcus snatched his jacket off the back of his chair and headed out the door into the main part of the office he shared with his brothers.
They each had a corner office that opened into a large, central room shared by their four assistants. They worked there now, situated at cubicles. Whether they had a hot case or not, they worked a regular forty hour week. Days like today, with having no active cases, they worked on gathering intel from closed cases.
New information was logged into a database where they could access it in future cases. One never knew if what seemed to be a lone abductor had other ties. No aspect of a kidnapper’s life was off limits. With the police, the case ended once the perpetrator was found and arrested.
With Alegra, the cases, although resolved, never really ended.
Their goal had been to build enough information into their program that they could plug in what seemed like inconsequential details for analyzation and have the computer generate possible suspects based on acquaintances and coincidences in a six degrees of Kevin Bacon way.
Everyone was connected somehow. At some point their database would be so sophisticated, it would figure out how at lightning speed.
Callie, Brenda, and Dante worked their magic with words. They ruled in the art of communication and could talk the pope himself out of his ring if given the opportunity.
They’d put together their own network of informants throughout the country and in Dante’s case, throughout the world.
Jasper was their information guy and computer guru. What he couldn’t find in public records, he extracted from private ones. At twenty-two, he had a disturbing ability to get into every system they’d asked him to infiltrate. Garrett made a comment about how Jasper’s limit was the government defense system.
Jasper had raised a brow, gave them a smirk, and said, “You wanna bet?”
He didn’t actually hack into it, but the confident air about him left no question that he could.
“Hey, Jasper. Do me a favor, man. I need an address on Lily Ashmore here in Baltimore.”
“You got it. Sixty seconds.”
“Why does he have to show off like that?” Luca asked.
Mason stuffed his arm through the sleeve of his jacket. “Watch. It’s not showing off. He’s challenging himself to get faster.”
Jasper clicked way at the keys, his eyes followed the information rolling out before him. “I got it.” He glanced down at his phone. “Ha, forty-eight seconds.”
“See,” Mason said.
“Huh. What else do you know that I don’t?”
“Everything. I’m the smart one, remember?”
“And the one in touch with your feminine side. Don’t forget that. You might even have a better handle on All of Me than Legend himself,” Luca said as he rocked back on his heels, a smug smile firmly affixed to his asshole face.
“Bite me.” Mason snagged the piece of paper Jasper held in the air. “Thanks, Jasper. Do me a favor while I’m gone…keep this pain in the ass in line,” Mason said, hitching a thumb in Luca’s direction. “He’s got the attention span of a gnat.” With that parting shot, Mason ducked out of the office and hopped in his car. He typed in the address on Waze. Sixteen minutes.
Lily Ashmore had some explaining to do, and Mason wasn’t leaving her house until they got a few things straight.
Chapter 3
The police let Lily go with the understanding that she’d stay local and they’d verify her presence at those places through security cameras. Lily hadn’t wasted a moment getting out of the dank, gray station reeking of frustration, stale coffee, and bargain-basement, diluted disinfectant.
She should feel relieved.
Instead, she felt violated.
She had no way to explain why she knew Mara would be kidnapped. She didn’t even have enough of an imagination to make something up. Instead, she admitted the truth.
And they’d laughed at her.
Worse, they put her through her paces by treating her like a gypsy with a hobo bag full parlor tricks.
What’s my middle name?
What month was I born?
Hey, who’s going to win Thursday night football tonight?
She thought after all these years, she’d built an impenetrable wall around her. Okay, maybe not that strong of a wall, but a respectable barrier to prevent people she didn’t even know from hurting he
r.
She hadn’t.
And despite how they had treated her, she thought of the dingy station, the stench of desperation and defeat, and all the cases they likely never solved, and a seed of sympathy for the toll their environment took on them rose inside her.
Well, she knew what to do with that little seed. She’d bury it under a glass of fabulous wine.
She carried the glasses to her living room and dropped down onto the couch next to Jasmine, her spirit animal, handing her one of the glasses.
Jasmine hadn’t even been home an entire day before Lily called her and she headed right back to Baltimore from Virginia. She hadn’t been gone long enough for Lily to even get to the store to replenish her wine supply, but Jasmine took care of that by stopping at the liquor store on their way back to Lily’s from the police station.
Jasmine might just be her spirit animal.
Jasmine arrived at the police station and told them that she had been with Lily the day of the kidnapping. They’d gone to the mall that day to get some early Christmas shopping done, caught a movie, and had an early dinner.
Jasmine, being an organized little thing, had every receipt.
Lily did not. This living room had always soothed her with its soft blue walls on three side and exposed brick on the other. She turned on her sconces and let her ivory sectional deliver a gentle hug every time she sat down. Often, she’d sit there, with the gas fireplace flickering its glow, and let her mind settle.
Only today, the room looked like an oddly familiar stranger, someone you swear you knew or who reminded you of someone you know, yet you can never quite place how. The room stood as a strange reminder of her life, her safe haven, before she’d exposed herself.
No matter how magnificent the room, it had nothing on the day she’d had. Pffffttt! The week she’d had. A bottle of Xanax couldn’t touch the anxiety coursing through her.
“Girl, when you step in it, you really step in it,” Jasmine said before taking a generous gulp of wine without taking a single second to appreciate the nuances.
