by Donna Grant
“Makes sense,” Cooper said. “Then again, I have no idea how many children you were looking at.”
Marlee blew out a breath. “More than you can fathom. It makes my job even more difficult, and while I rely on my instincts and training, it’s more about the evidence. I know another investigator who works in the Dallas area. His infant grandson was kidnapped, and his daughter was killed. I asked him to watch Brice and Naomi. After they left the adoption office, John went inside to take a look around. He said he saw the same security guard who worked at the agency he believed took his grandchild. He left right away, but he’s sure the guy recognized him.”
Jace’s brows drew together. “Why would the security guard recognize John?”
“Because John went after the company with everything he had. Eventually, they shut down, but he’s always been convinced they just moved and changed names.”
Cooper set aside his plate, nodding. “He believes he found the place then. That’s good for him, I suppose. But how does that help you?”
“It didn’t, but it’s information I can use. Now that I know for sure that Nate isn’t the child I’m searching for, I have to go back over my evidence because I went wrong somewhere,” she said.
Jace sat back and rested a hand on his thigh while his other splayed on the island. “What if you didn’t?”
Marlee frowned as she swiveled her head to face him. “You think the tests at the hospital lied and that Nate is the baby I’m looking for?”
“No,” Jace said with a shake of his head. “I think your evidence led you to the wrong people, not the wrong area.”
Cooper lifted his hands, palms out. “Hold up. Jace. Are you saying that we need to look into every male infant around the same age as Nate and test them?”
“It wouldn’t work,” Marlee said before Jace could respond. “Whoever has the child would find out what was going on and run off. That’s why I need to approach things carefully.”
Jace rolled his eyes. “Guys, give me some credit. Of course, I don’t want us to bring in every male infant in the area. What we can do, though, is find out what children have been registered at doctors’ offices compared to those at the hospitals. No doubt there will be some discrepancies. Then, we can look into those.”
Cooper looked at Marlee to find her considering Jace’s plan. It was a good one, that was for sure.
“I’ve never done anything like that before,” Marlee said with hesitation. “Usually, that kind of information has to be obtained through the hospitals and doctors via the authorities. And that isn’t something they usually give someone like me.”
Jace flashed her a smile that usually made women swoon. “Good thing you know us then since we’re friends with both the sheriff and the chief of police.”
“I can’t let you do this,” Marlee said with a shake of her head.
Cooper laid his hand atop hers, drawing her attention. “You aren’t letting us do anything. We’re doing this to help you since this involved our friends. Trust me, both Danny and Ryan want to help. And … there might be someone else I can bring in.”
“Cash,” Jace said.
Marlee bit her lip and turned her gaze to Cooper. “The other investigator you told me about?”
He nodded. “I don’t want to step on your toes, bu—”
“Step,” she interrupted him. “I’d rather a child be found and returned to its family than worry about who’s getting credit for it.”
Jace stood and made his way over to the counter for another cup of coffee. “You’ve got to stop this, Marlee. Not only do I like you, but I’m respecting the hell out of you now. Keep it up, and we may never let you leave.”
It was said as a joke, but since Cooper and Marlee had briefly spoken about the future earlier, it made him look her way to find her staring at him. He saw something odd in her gaze, an emotion he didn’t quite recognize. This wasn’t the time to ask about it, so he let it go.
“All right. Let’s see what your friends the sheriff and chief say,” she told them. “Now, show me this map.”
Jace finished fixing his coffee and hurried back to the island. “This is what I put together in twelve hours yesterday.”
Cooper gazed at all the different-colored markings. “Twelve hours?”
“I pulled up all the reports of kidnapped infants and pregnant women who had been killed,” Jace said, his voice filled with shock. “Look at all of them.”
“I am.” How could Cooper look at anything else? The dots were everywhere, in every state. It boggled his mind.
Marlee finished her food. “I did one of those after my sister was killed. It’s what propelled me to do what I do now.”
“How can this continue to happen without the police catching anyone?” Jace demanded to know.
Marlee shrugged. “How do so many murders of any kind happen that are never solved? It is what it is.”
Cooper took her plate and set it atop his. “I’m having a hard time accepting that. I don’t like the idea of murder, but this is different. These are pregnant women who have their children ripped from them and are left to die. There should be something about this that hits the Feds’ radar.”
“It has,” Marlee told them. “I have a contact there. We met during my sister’s case. I wish I could tell you they are making headway, but they aren’t.”
Jace shook his head. “With all the equipment, manpower, and surveillance we have now, there has to be something.”
“It’s the same question I ask myself weekly, and there’s never any change.”
Cooper folded his arms over his chest. “Then let’s make sure there is some.”
“Now that’s what I’m talking about,” Jace said with a grin.
Chapter 23
Marlee stared with sickening dread at the explosion of marks on the map. So, so many more had been added in the ten years since she had done a similar one. She had hoped that by trying to locate the missing children, she could make a dent in all the chaos, but she didn’t think that was possible.
No matter how you looked at it, babies were thought of as a commodity, and people with an agenda were going to exploit that. Never mind all those in foster care or those in orphanages. For reasons she couldn’t even begin to fathom, so many ignored the babies and children in desperate need of homes and love. Instead, those same people wanted infants to raise as their own, babies who hadn’t seen the horrendous depths humanity could sink to.
Those people paid untold sums of money on the black market for babies. They didn’t ask where the infants came from, because they didn’t care. All that mattered was that they got what they wanted—a baby they could call theirs.
Macey’s daughter was somewhere out in the world. Marlee knew in the depths of her soul that her niece was alive. If not, Marlee would’ve found the body by now because she had left no stone unturned. At least in the States. She hadn’t looked abroad, but she wanted to. She’d always wanted to.
That cost money, however. Funds she’d been trying to raise for ten years. Every time she got a little bit saved, something came up, be it part of a job or with her parents. At this rate, she’d never be able to search the world for her niece.
Cooper’s words from that morning came back to her. The idea of having people working for her was something she wanted. Instead of hiring the first person she thought was a decent fit so she could hand off some work, she needed to approach it differently. First, they needed to have the kind of dedication to the job that she had. That was the biggie. If they didn’t, then it simply wouldn’t work.
She blinked and noticed that Jace and Cooper were staring at her. She’d been so engrossed in her thoughts that she hadn’t paid attention to them. “I’m sorry. I was lost in thought for a moment.”
“We can hold off,” Cooper suggested.
She shook her head and smiled at him. “I can handle it. I should’ve been doing this all along. That first year when more and more marks went on the map, and I didn’t make any headw
ay, it was…” She paused, looking for the right word.
“Daunting,” Jace offered.
Cooper then said, “Discouraging.”
“Both,” she replied. “I wanted to make a difference. Instead, more and more women were being killed, their babies taken. So, I stopped tracking then. It allowed me to focus on the cases at hand instead of all the ones out there suffering as my family did.”
Cooper ran a hand up and down her arm from across the space of the island. “That was probably a smart thing to do. Did you keep track of the cases you solved?”
“Oh, yes.” She smiled, thinking of the board her parents had created at the house. “I let my parents know, and they kept track of them, sending me pictures to help bolster me.” Marlee shook her head as she thought about that board. “For so long, I thought they did it for themselves. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I discovered they’d done it for me because they thought I needed to see how many I’d helped.”
Jace asked, “And did it help?”
“It did. I’m so glad my parents did it. They even kept a record of the cases I solved, even if I wasn’t able to deliver a child back to their loved ones alive.” Marlee took a deep breath and looked at Cooper. “However, I think it’s time to bring out the map again and track it. Especially if I’m going to hire people.”
Cooper’s smile was slow and so damn sexy that she wanted to go to him and kiss him. “Think what you could accomplish if you trained others in how you work. You could solve double the cases. Hell, triple.”
“That’s why I’m considering it. That, as well as the fact that I can’t keep running myself into the ground like I have been.” It was a big wakeup call. One she should’ve heard years ago but had ignored.
Jace rubbed his hands together. “So. Back to the map. You’ll see I used different colors. The purple ones are for locations where infants were kidnapped. I kept it to infants so we could see a correlation. The green ones are for pregnant women killed and the babies taken. The orange ones are pregnant women killed where the infants didn’t survive.”
“There are so damn many of them,” Cooper murmured.
Marlee’s gaze was glued to her little town in California. There were four green dots there. One of them was for Macey. While she mourned her twin as well as her niece, Marlee inhaled deeply and let her gaze move over the map. Every state had dots of all three colors. Still, there were a few states with more than any other—Texas, California, New York, Florida, Louisiana, and Nevada.
Jace pointed to each of them. “What makes these so special? Texas, I get. It’s vast with a lot of wide-open spaces.”
Marlee considered it for a moment. “There’s some correlation we’re missing, but I don’t know what it is. I know that while there are a lot of marks on that map, I’d guess we’re missing at least half.”
“Illegal immigrants,” Cooper said.
Marlee nodded. “They won’t tell the police anything. And if we don’t know about them, we can’t guess where they are.”
“Which means we can’t come up with anything to work with without all the data,” Jace said and ran a hand down his face. “This could be why the Feds haven’t done anything.”
Marlee shrugged, thinking of Stephanie. “Like I said, I made a friend in the FBI. I’d like to think she’s been honest with me, but I can’t be certain. For all I know, they aren’t doing anything. I don’t think that’s true, but I only have her word to go on.”
“Where does that leave us, then?” Cooper asked.
Marlee tapped her finger on the map as her mind raced through the different scenarios. She slid off the stool. “My evidence. It’s like the two of you said, it’s what got me here. There’s a reason for that. While I’d like to end the kidnapping of children and the killing of pregnant women, right now, I want to find the assholes who brought me here.”
“I’m willing to help,” Cooper replied.
Jace cracked his knuckles. “Try and stop me.”
Marlee winked at Cooper and went to get her shoes on. She didn’t care that she was in the same clothes she’d worn the night before. She was with someone she liked a great deal. That in itself was something new to her. For the most part, Marlee enjoyed being by herself. Few people understood her. Once they found out what she did for a living, they distanced themselves. As if it were too morbid or something. She didn’t know or care why they did it.
That wasn’t the case with Cooper or any of his friends, though. They wanted to help, and it wasn’t just because they wished to protect Brice and Naomi. It was because they genuinely cared. Which made her like Cooper even more.
The thing was, she really liked him. If she allowed herself, she knew that she could fall for him. That excited her for sure because she’d finally found someone she was attracted to, who treated her amazingly and kissed like he would die without her.
Then there was the fact that she wasn’t working alone. The one thing she’d done for most of the last ten years was the very thing she didn’t want to do any longer. She knew a lot of that had to do with Cooper and their attraction, but she didn’t care. All this time, she’d shouldered the load of her work herself, and she’d done all right. Nothing spectacular. She’d solved cases and managed to bring back a few babies to their families. But the toll had been severe.
Now that Cooper—as well as Jace—was taking some of the load from her, she realized how weighty it had been. With it gone, she wondered how she would ever shoulder it on her own again.
“Hey,” Cooper said as he walked into the bedroom after her and closed the door. “You can tell us to back off, you know.”
“I know. I’m actually looking forward to the help. I was just thinking about that, by the way. You two are looking at the same data as I am, but you’re seeing it differently. That is an asset I’ve been without—probably to the detriment of some of my cases.”
Cooper shook his head as he approached her and pulled her into his arms. “Don’t be too hard on yourself, especially with things from the past. It’s done and over. You can’t change it. All you can do is be in the here and now and change the things before you.”
“I want to change them. You’ve helped me see that. And, yes, I do regret taking so long to come to this realization. But now that I have, I’m going to make a change. Right after I finish this case,” she said with a flash of a smile.
His forest green eyes studied her for a moment. “You’re beautiful.”
Warmth spread through her at his words. “And you’re gorgeous.”
“I mean it, Marlee. You amaze me. The strength and courage it took for you to leave your job to become a private investigator is something few would do. That took drive.”
She laid her hands on his chest and shook her head before looking at him. “Actually, it was grief and the need to get answers. I had skills from the police academy that I used to get certified as a PI, but anyone could’ve done what I did.”
“You need to give yourself more credit. You’ve kicked ass.”
“Well, I’d like to kick some more. And I’d like for you and Jace and whoever else wants to help to join me.”
Outside the door, Jace said, “I was hoping you’d say that.”
Marlee and Cooper laughed before Cooper leaned down and gave her a long, languid kiss. When he lifted his head, he met her gaze. “I’m going to steal as many kisses as I can.”
“I expect nothing less.”
“And I’m going to taste that sweet body of yours again.”
Her nipples hardened at his roughened voice. “I’ll demand it.”
“Woman,” he said and rubbed his thickening cock against her. “That’s what you do to me.”
“It’s a good thing because you do the same to me.”
“You shouldn’t tell me such things. I’ll throw you on the bed and strip you bare.”
She rose up on her toes and whispered, “You shouldn’t say such things unless you plan to carry them out.”
“Guys!” Ja
ce hollered from the kitchen. “You got quiet. Please tell me you aren’t, you know … having sexy time. I’m waiting on you.”
Cooper grunted and pressed his forehead to hers. “He’s like a child.”
Marlee laughed. This time when her mind went to her niece, it wasn’t filled with as much pain as the last time.
Chapter 24
This wasn’t how Cooper had planned to spend the day with Marlee, but he wasn’t upset about it. The fact that he was with her was good enough for him. Her gaze sought him out as they walked to the motel room she’d rented. He reached for her hand, and she smiled as she linked her fingers with his.
Jace walked behind them. Cooper glanced back at his friend and found Jace’s gaze on the ground, a peculiar expression on his face. Cooper didn’t get a chance to ask him about it because they reached Marlee’s door. She used the key to get in and walked inside.
Cooper had gotten a quick glimpse of the room when he’d picked her up the night before, but his eyes had been more on her. Now, he got to see it all. The walls were covered with pictures of Brice, Naomi, and the rest of their group. There were pictures of the adoption agency in Dallas, of an older woman in her late fifties walking out of the office with her head turned to the side, and another of that same woman talking to a man with a baseball hat, who had his back to the camera. There were more pictures on the second bed and even some on the floor.
Jace let out a low whistle as he shut the door behind him. “Damn.”
“I like to see things set out,” Marlee explained. “Stuff can get lost in the shuffle in a file.”
Cooper spotted a picture of him and glanced at Marlee. “Makes sense. Tell us what all you have.”
She took a deep breath and went to the wall nearest her. “The first half of this wall is dedicated to the family of the missing infant. Including copies of a few of the crime scene photos.”
“Damn,” Jace said again when he looked closer at a picture of a body covered with a white sheet, blood pooled all around it. “That’s a lot of blood.”
