Racing Against Time

by Marie Ferrarella

  This time she did write. “Ex-wife wants no part of child.” She looked up at Brent. “All right, if it’s not about your housekeeper and it’s not about your ex-wife, there are still two ways to go here. Someone is trying to get revenge against you, or—” and this was a very big or “—someone wanted to kidnap your daughter.” She had a feeling Brent already knew this, but she made it a point to lay out the foundations for every parent whose child had been kidnapped. “Other than parental snatchings, kidnappings occur for four reasons. To get a ransom, to replace a lost child, real or imaginary,” she tacked on, knowing that one was just as strong a reason as the other, “to sell the child, although those are usually younger than your daughter.”

  “That’s three.”

  Was he asking her about the fourth? Or did he just want it out of the way? “The fourth is for reasons of pedophilia.” But even as she stated it, she ruled it out. At least, for now. “This was too awkward, too difficult to be a random snatching by a pervert who just happened to see your daughter and had something triggered inside of him. That would have been more likely had he been driving by your house or walking by the schoolyard and seen her playing outside.”

  He wanted to believe that, to believe that his child wasn’t in any more danger than her kidnapping already placed her in. “What do your instincts tell you?”

  “Since there haven’t been any ransom phone calls, I’m inclined to agree that this isn’t about money. I’m more inclined than ever to think that this might be about revenge. Which brings us back to you.” She looked at him pointedly. “Has anyone threatened you in the past year or so, Brent?”

  Threats were part of the territory. He could still remember how unsettled the first one had made him. It was only after three that he began to shrug them off. Until now.

  “I’ve been a criminal court judge for five years, Callie. It would be unusual for me not to have been threatened.”

  “All right, anyone in particular stand out in your mind?” Before he could answer, she quickly added, “This isn’t to say that it might not be someone who has just quietly plotted revenge, but odds are, the vocal ones are more likely to carry out a threat.”

  But why drag his daughter into this? “Wouldn’t a threat mean they’d tried to kill me?”

  She could see he was struggling to suppress rage. “You kill someone, it’s over. Taking your daughter promises the kidnapper that you will be suffering for a very long, long time.”

  He hated admitting it, but she was right. Brent shook his head, hoping he would be able to get five minutes alone with the kidnapper. Even just three. “You have a very logical mind, Callie.”

  She blew out a breath. At times she was too logical. If she hadn’t been so, she and Kyle would have been married; then they couldn’t have been on the same squad and he wouldn’t have taken that bullet meant for her.

  “Yeah,” she agreed quietly, “it’s a curse.”

  Chapter 5

  Brent’s chambers at the courthouse seemed somehow more somber than they had before, as if the weight of what he was enduring had permeated his surroundings. Working with the vibrations coming off the man, Callie felt as if the very walls of the room had darkened and were closing in.

  Without waiting to ask, Callie walked over to the curtained bay window behind Brent’s desk and drew back the drapes. The late-afternoon sun immediately brightened the room tenfold.

  Brent held his hand up before his eyes. In his present frame of mind, he felt the room had far too much light in it. “What are you doing?”

  She moved away from the window. There were filing cabinets all along the adjacent wall. Oak, to match his desk. No one had to tell her that he had brought in his own cabinets. Standard issue was gunmetal gray, emphasis on the metal.

  She wondered if they were for show, or if they were filled. “You need light.”

  He had thrown the light switch on when they’d walked in. “That’s why they invented electricity.”

  Callie deliberately stood in front of the drawstrings on the drapes, blocking his access. “We’ll use that, too, but nothing beats sunlight when it comes to illuminating and to buoying up.”

  He frowned at her. The last thing he wanted was a cheerleader. He wouldn’t have said she was the type. But his judgment wasn’t exactly on target right now. “Do I look as if I want to be buoyed up?”

  “No, but you need it.” Her voice was nonconfrontational, but firm just the same. He had the feeling that she was accustomed to taking charge. “You can’t give up hope. All we have is our faith and our hope to see us through.”

  There was that word again, hope, both his enemy and his friend. “I’m not giving up hope, I just don’t believe in using crutches.”

  Her eyes held his for a long moment. It was a visual tug-of-war and for the moment, it was a draw, but one grounded in respect. “Sometimes crutches are all we have until we can stand up on our own again.”

  Impatience clawed at him. Brent blew out a breath, trying to maintain control over his emotions, which threatened to burst out and go all over the board. “I know you mean well—”

  She placed a gentling hand on his arm. He looked down at it, then at her. Callie kept it where it was. “I mean more than that, Brent. I mean to find her.” Withdrawing her hand, she let it drop to her side. “Now, shall we get started?”

  Brent squared his shoulders, telling himself to focus on the task ahead and not what it might ultimately mean. That one of the people within the case files had his precious girl. “Right.”

  They’d been at it for hours, sorting through files, with Brent first making a judgment call and then Callie considering it. The list of people to investigate began to form.

  The filing cabinet drawers had turned out to be crammed full of cases. She’d discovered to her amusement that Brent preferred to deal with paper rather than computers, opting to make his notes in pen rather than type them on a keyboard, to be printed out. In a high-tech world, he was still, at bottom, an old-fashioned guy.

  The stack of viable contenders who might want to exact revenge on him had grown steadily over the past four hours.

  Leaning back in her chair and rubbing the bridge of her nose, Callie willed away the headache that threatened to overtake her. For the moment it appeared to listen. Or maybe it was just lying in wait for an opportune moment to strike, announcing its presence with a chorus of drums throbbing at her temples. She’d take what respite she could get.

  She glanced at the file opened on her lap. Brent’s handwriting was a challenge at times. “You know, this might have been a lot easier if all this was on your hard drive.” She indicated the dormant computer on his desk, which she was beginning to suspect was nothing more than a glorified, overly large paperweight on steroids.

  He looked in the direction of the machine with something less than respectful regard. Carmella had spent hours trying to get him to at least learn the basics. It wasn’t that he couldn’t; he wouldn’t. There had to be a place for the human touch in this high-tech world of theirs. In his opinion, people relied too much on computers. If there was ever a power shortage, the entire world outside the Australian outback would grind to a sudden, jarring halt.

  He shrugged. “My eyes get tired, looking at the screen. I’ve never been much of an electronics junkie,” he confessed in a moment of honesty. He knew most men thrived on the things that left him cold. Brent reached for the cup of coffee that had long since passed the point of lukewarm. “An embarrassment to my gender, I suppose. But the sight of a fifty-inch screen never turned me on.”

  Her energy level was ebbing away quickly. Since he had opened up this avenue of conversation, she decided to draw him out a little. Remind him that he was not just a judge and a justifiably concerned parent, but a human being with likes and dislikes, as well.

  Still leaning back in the chair, she studied him. He had the face of a leader and the soul to match. But even leaders had outside interests. “Just for the record, what does turn you on?�
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  The answer came as if it were part of a word-association quiz. “Tulips.”

  The last thing she expected to do sitting here, looking through five years’ worth of files for a possible kidnapper, was grin. The headache circling her head hovered somewhere between oblivion and attack as she looked at Brent.

  “Excuse me? Did you just say ‘tulips’?”

  He’d never seen her grin before. It made her seem younger than her years, as if she was just playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes and was really still just a young girl instead of a police detective. Was he placing his faith in the wrong person? God, he hoped not.

  “You find that amusing?”

  She lifted a shoulder, letting it drop carelessly. “That depends on whether you like growing them or getting them.”

  A smattering of a smile, far smaller than anything gracing her lips, emerged on his. He hadn’t thought he was capable of smiling after this morning.

  “Growing them. It relaxes me.” Jennifer had thought he was crazy, telling him gardening was a hobby for boring housewives and old men. But Rachel had liked sitting beside him, digging in the earth with the small shovel he’d gotten her. “There’s something very basic about getting back to nature, about getting your hands dirty and nurturing seedlings along until they germinate into something beautiful.” He looked at her, half expecting a sarcastic comment. “Does that surprise you?”

  She debated a polite answer, but knew that he would respect honesty more. So she was honest. “Frankly, yes. I wouldn’t have thought of you as the kind of man who liked ‘getting his hands dirty.’ I pictured you with a squadron of gardeners to get dirty for you.”

  He didn’t have far to look to know the origin of that image. He was well acquainted with it. Had been schooled in it when he was young.

  “Ah, yes, the good old Montgomery legacy.” It was said that none of his recent ancestors actually knew the meaning of an honest day’s toil. They’d all been lawyers to the rich and celebrated. He doubted if any of them even knew the first name of any of the people who worked for them. “We’re not all cookie-cutter identical.”

  She could hear the annoyance in his voice. At least she’d momentarily redirected his attention from the kidnapping, although she hadn’t meant to get his annoyance focused on her. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “No, I’m the one who’s sorry. I’m usually better at keeping my temper in check.” Unable to remain seated any longer, he got up, shoving his fisted hands deep into his pockets. Hitting nothing. Wanting to hit something. Wanting more than anything to hit this man who had destroyed his world. “It’s just that I feel so damn helpless, so damn impotent.” He stared out the window. It had long since gotten dark outside. Evening shadows sat where cars had been parked earlier. Brent’s voice was small, tight, as he added, “There’s nothing I can do.”

  Rising, she came up behind him. Feeling for him. “You’re doing it,” she contradicted. “You’re going through cases, looking for a possible suspect.”

  It was beginning to feel like an exercise in futility. He turned to look at the piles on his desk. “About twenty percent of these cases represent possible suspects.” His words were dressed in frustration. He gestured toward the filing cabinets they had emptied. “I really doubt there are many people in there who wish me well.”

  But that was exactly why they were going through the files in the first place. “Wishing and doing are two very different things.”

  He turned completely around to face her. Surprised at how near she was. “So, in your opinion, wishing isn’t the very first step toward doing.”

  “A lot of times, no.” She laughed softly, a tired, resigned laugh that had somehow not gotten lost amid the exasperation she had faced today. “Otherwise, there’d be a lot more dead people out there for the police to process.” The scent of his cologne seemed to descend on her out of nowhere. Callie remembered the electric charge she’d felt when she’d danced with him that night. It was so vivid, she could swear she felt the remnants now. “There’d also be a great many more infidelities.”

  Callie raised her eyes to his as she said the latter, not completely sure of just what she was doing. Or why.

  Maybe it was the hour and the fact that when she was tired, her defenses, always so rigidly in place, tended to slip just a little. Enough to make her think of herself as vulnerable.

  It was the last thing in the world she wanted to be. And he was the last man on earth she had a right to be feeling this way with. The man was fighting desperation, trying to find his daughter before it was too late. He needed a crack detective at the top of her game helping him, not a woman who was feeling odd stirrings in his company.

  Yet there it was. She was feeling something.

  She was feeling.

  The realization slammed itself against her like a loose newspaper page suddenly being blown against a windshield.

  It took her breath away.

  She hadn’t felt anything for a very, very long time.

  He laughed shortly. “Not everyone subscribes to your theory.”

  Very few times did she speak before her brain was engaged, but this was one of those times. “You mean your ex-wife?”

  When Brent looked at her, his eyes somber, she realized that she’d crossed some line she shouldn’t have, but there was no way to retreat gracefully to the other side.

  She shrugged in what she hoped was a casual manner. “There were rumors.”

  Yes, he damn well figured there would have been. Not because he was a judge, but because he was a Montgomery. “What kind of rumors?”

  She blunted the edge. And gave it her own spin. Not just to be kind, but because it was what she believed. It was one of those nonsecret secrets that Brent Montgomery’s wife had been unfaithful to him. “That your ex-wife didn’t know what she had. That she didn’t belong in your circle.”

  One minute the woman before him was coming across tough as nails, the next minute she was soft. Brent couldn’t exactly read her. But he knew what she was doing now.

  “You’re making that up to spare my feelings. I know what they said. That I couldn’t keep Jennifer satisfied. That she found me boring.” The latter had been an accusation she’d hurled at him when he’d confronted her with the name of her lover.

  Jennifer Montgomery needed her head examined and her eyes checked. And an MRI to find her missing heart wouldn’t have been out of the question, either, Callie thought.

  Knowing that this had to make him feel uncomfortable, she took it out of the realm of personal. “I read somewhere that Taylor Madison’s first wife said the same thing about him.” She shrugged, mentioning the latest Hollywood heartthrob to grace the fantasies of women everywhere. “Go figure. Me, I think that he’s one of the nicest men in the world.”

  Brent raised an eyebrow, mildly surprised. “You know him?”

  Callie shook her head “Just what I read.” She didn’t want to sound like some mindless fan. It was her instincts that came into play here, just as they did with him. “Sometimes you don’t have to know a person inside and out to have an educated opinion.”

  Suddenly she realized they were standing so close there wasn’t enough room for a whisper between them now. Another moment, and—

  What the hell was she doing, her brain thundered, finally ushering in the hovering headache full force. This was the parent of a kidnapping victim, not her latest date she was talking to.

  Maybe that was the problem. She didn’t have a latest date. Hadn’t had any date at all, not since Kyle was killed. Her family had been urging her for the past six months to set her grief aside and begin going out again, but she just couldn’t get herself to do it. Couldn’t gather up the will, the courage, to get back on a horse that could possibly throw her again. Or maybe even get stuck at the starting gate.

  And yet…

  And yet she was a normal woman with hormones that reacted to a good-looking man. Like the man standing right before her. But on
e didn’t live by hormones alone, she argued fiercely.

  Her temples throbbing, her pulse inexplicably scrambling, Callie pulled back, stumbling inwardly as she retreated. Her eyes never left his face even though she wanted to look away. “It’s getting late. Neither one of us is thinking clearly.”

  Was she talking about his daughter’s case, or what had almost happened here? Because if she hadn’t had the sense to pull back, Brent knew he would have kissed her. Kissed her because he needed the comfort of a human touch, of compassion turned his way.

  Of he didn’t know what.

  He’d always been the strong one, no matter the situation. The one who, though not overtly an optimist, had always held things together by sheer grit. Because he had to. It was a matter of honor. He hadn’t allowed himself to get swept away by his family’s name or his family’s wealth, the way his cousin Hamilton had. At thirty-eight, Hamilton had yet to grow up, yet to become a responsible adult. Brent had always been determined to make something of himself even if he didn’t have to. Not for the family name, certainly not for his distant parents, who only required from him a lack of scandal, but for himself.

  And, for a time, for Jennifer.

  But now the focus of his world was Rachel. And she had been stolen from him.

  “No,” he agreed slowly, “we’re not.”

  He dragged a hand through his hair as he put space between them. Space because that vulnerability, that weakness that had made him want to kiss her was still there. Begging for companionship, for fulfillment. For all the earthly emotional comforts that seeking solace from someone in the most intimate fashion created.

  Feeling uncharacteristically unsteady, Callie finally looked away.

  “Do you mind if I take these?” She nodded at the stack of possible suspects they had compiled. “I want to go through them more thoroughly, see if anything further leaps out at me.”