flowers along its perimeter.
The employees must park in another area, and there must be no guests, Gabriel thought, for the parking lot in front of the house was empty. He pulled the car to a halt and shut off the engine. At the same time, the front door opened and a woman stepped out on the porch.
With the sun sparkling off her short, curly blond hair, creating a halo effect, she looked like a slender angel. Her long bare legs exposed by a pair of white shorts and her shoulders by a pink tank top, she looked like a very hot angel.
“Sweet,” Jackson muttered from the backseat.
“On the job, not on the prowl,” Gabriel reminded his fellow agent, who had a reputation around the office as a ladies’ man. Still, he was shocked by the quick, visceral warmth that swept through him at the sight of her. Her eyes had to be blue, he thought.
She started down the steps as if unable to wait for them to join her on the porch. As she drew closer, the men exited the vehicle.
Two things occurred at the same time: Gabriel flashed his official identification and noted that her eyes weren’t blue, as he’d expected, but rather an electric green. She was more than pretty with her slender face, wide eyes, straight nose and generous mouth, but at the moment all of her features were radiating an emotion somewhere between panic and unadulterated fear.
“Thank God you’re here,” she said after Gabriel had introduced himself and his two men. “I’m Marlena Meyers, the manager here, and I’m the one who sounded the alarm this morning. I called the sheriff first, but he was afraid to get involved in what might be federal business, so he said I should contact the FBI. I found Sam’s contact list in his bedroom and called his former director with the Kansas City field office.”
“And Assistant Director Forbes contacted our field office in Baton Rouge and here we are,” Gabriel replied. Despite the fact that the sun was slowly sinking in the west, the mid-July heat and humidity made it difficult to breathe. “Can we go inside?”
“Oh, of course.” She whirled on the heels of her white sandals to lead them back to the house. Gabriel couldn’t help but notice the shapeliness of her butt in the tight shorts as she walked ahead of him—and that irritated him.
It had been a long time since a woman had attracted his attention in any way, and the last thing he needed was to be distracted by this blonde bombshell. He just wanted to get inside, figure things out and get back home as soon as possible.
She led them into a great room, obviously a place decorated for guests to hang out. Besides a couple of couches and chairs, there was a flat-screen television and a bookcase full of paperbacks and puzzles.
She paused in the center of the room, and her gaze shot from Andrew to Jackson and then finally landed on Gabriel. “They’re gone.” Her voice was a tortured whisper as her eyes became shiny with unshed tears. “When I got up this morning, I knew that something was horribly wrong.”
“And how did you know that?” Gabriel asked.
Her eyes darkened, and she twisted her ringless hands together. “You need to see the kitchen.” Once again she turned and walked out of the room. The three men exchanged curious glances and followed.
“This is the guest dining room,” she said as they entered a room with a table big enough to seat a dozen. A sideboard held an industrial-size coffee brewer, but no scent of coffee lingered in the air.
She paused at the door on the opposite side of the room, her eyes still shiny. “There,” she said and pointed into the room. It was obvious she had no intention of going inside.
As Gabriel swept past her, he caught a whiff of her scent, a clean floral fragrance he found instantly appealing, but the allure of her perfume immediately died as he walked into the kitchen and saw the table before him.
The small round wooden table on the far side of the roomy kitchen held the remnants of what appeared to be an evening snack. Three glasses of milk sat next to three small plates with cookies. Milk was missing from all of the glasses, and there was one cookie on one plate and two each on the other plates. A single chair was overturned on its back on the floor, as if the person seated in it had jumped up so quickly that it had flipped over.
“The back door looks like it’s unlocked,” Jackson said.
None of the three men had taken more than two steps into the room. “Has anyone been inside here besides you?”
She shook her head, her blond curls dancing with the movement. “No. We don’t have any guests right now, and I’ve made sure the other help have stayed out of the kitchen all day.”
Gabriel frowned. “Before we do anything more here, I’d like to see their bedrooms.”
“They live in the two-bedroom suite upstairs.”
“Are they the type of people to take an impromptu trip somewhere?” Gabriel asked as they all followed her up the wide staircase.
“Not at all. If they had planned anything, they would have let me know, and they would have never taken off in the middle of the night.” Her voice was laced with a simmering frantic worry. “Something bad happened last night. I just know it. Now they’re gone, and nobody has seen or heard from them all day.”
Gabriel had known the moment he had stepped into the kitchen that he wasn’t going to make it into his own bed tonight. Although his gut told him they’d just looked at a crime scene, he didn’t have enough information to fully embrace that as a certainty.
Upstairs there were guest rooms on either side of the hall. Gabriel paused at each doorway to look inside. The first was decorated in blue and white and held two double beds, a dresser, a small table and chairs next to the window.
The second held a king-size bed and was a study in lavender and lace, with the same type of furniture again. There appeared to be nothing amiss in either of the rooms.
“The guest rooms have their own baths, and there are three more rooms in the carriage house,” she said, flipping on lights, even though night wouldn’t encroach for a couple of hours yet.
“Where does this go?” Gabriel asked, referring to a closed door in the hallway.
“It leads to an old servant’s staircase that goes down to the basement and outside. Nobody uses it anymore, and the door is kept locked.”
Gabriel nodded, knowing before the night was over that the door would be unlocked and the basement thoroughly checked.
“These are Sam, Daniella and Macy’s rooms.” The door was already open, and Marlena paused in the hallway and gestured the men in.
The initial space was a large bedroom/sitting area. The king-size bed was neatly made with a black-and-white spread. At the foot of the bed was a settee in front of a wall-mounted flat-screen television. A set of bookshelves held games and books, and it was easy for Gabriel to recognize that this was the family getaway from a houseful of paying guests.
The bathroom was also neat and clean, with no indication that anyone had been there during the day. The smaller bedroom was an explosion of pink with a single bed covered with stuffed animals and dolls.
Gabriel returned to the main room and opened the closet doors as Jackson and Andrew checked the bathroom and Macy’s bedroom
