The one who had been invisible when she desperately wished someone would see her.
“Fine,” she said aloud. “Just do it. Then you’ll know.”
While her laptop booted, she turned on the air-conditioning unit even though she tried not to use it any more than she could, but today had been hot.
Then she perched on her cheap rolling desk chair, went online and, in the search field, typed Hope Lawson.
* * *
A MONTH LATER, Seth admitted, if only to himself, that he’d done everything he could think of to do to bring resolution to the Lawsons.
He had interviewed witnesses afresh, at least those who could still be found. He’d talked to the first responding officer and the investigator who’d pursued the case thereafter. He had tracked down neighbors of the Lawsons’, even those who had since moved. Hope’s teacher that year. He’d studied investigations and arrests made anywhere around the time of Hope’s disappearance, looking for parallels no one else had noticed. He’d read every scrap of paper in the box he recovered from the storage room in the basement.
Meantime, he’d made sure her DNA and a copy of her dental X-ray were entered in every available database, along with the two photos. He’d worked social media sites to the best of his ability.
The result? Something like a thousand emails, not one of which pinged. His best guess was that Hope had been raped and killed within hours of her abduction, and her bones were buried somewhere in the wooded, mountainous area bordering Puget Sound in northwest Washington state. Maybe those bones would be found someday, but given the vast stretches of National Forest and National Park as well as floodplain that would never be farmed, it was entirely possible no one would ever stumble on them.
Sitting at his desk, he grimaced. He owed the Lawsons a phone call. If he didn’t get on it, Karen Lawson would pop up, sure as hell, apologizing but still expecting an explanation of what he’d done this week to find her missing daughter.
And, if he was honest, he’d have to say, Nothing. I’ve done everything I can. I’m sorry.
If he was blunt, would she accept his failure and go away?
“Nope,” Kemper said behind him. “Not happening.”
“What?” He swiveled in his chair.
“You were talking to yourself. You asked—I answered.”
He swore. Good to know he’d taken to speaking his every thought aloud. Was he talking in his sleep, too? Wouldn’t be a surprise. He’d been having a lot of nightmares lately, too many populated by Hope. In the latest unnerving incarnation, she was a ghost. Sometimes a little girl, sometimes a woman, always translucent. Either way, he couldn’t touch her, couldn’t escape her no matter what he did.
The idea had apparently sparked his unconscious imagination—hey, pun! and not in a good way—because Cassie Sparks’s ghost had joined Hope last night. She’d seemed kind of protective of little Hope.
Hard to imagine, considering her dark path, which had turned out to be even uglier than they had known when they found her body along with her parents’. He and Ben had discovered what precipitated that hideous final scene, and part of him wished they hadn’t.
Shifting his thoughts back to Mrs. Lawson, he said gloomily, “She brought me cookies last week.”
Ben’s mouth quirked. “And they were good. Peanut butter cookies are my favorite.”
“She brings pictures, too.” He yanked open his center desk drawer and brandished the small pile. The one on top, the most recent, was a baby picture. First smile, someone had written on the back.
Radiant, open, delighted, it was unbearable to look at when he knew that baby’s fate. He’d shoved it into the drawer the minute Mrs. Lawson walked away. Angry at her unsubtle emotional manipulation, he wanted to throw them in the trash. Because he saw her pain, week in and week out, he didn’t.
His phone rang and he turned back around, reaching for it.
“Someone here to see you,” the desk sergeant said, his tone odd. “Her name is, uh, Bailey Smith.”
“Never heard of her. She say what she want?”
“To talk about Hope Lawson.”
Seth sighed. She looks EXACTLY like this girl I know, except...well, for her nose, chin, cheeks and eyes.
“Conference room empty?” he asked.
“Yes, Detective.”
“I’ll be right down.”
Ben had gone back to whatever he was doing, and no one else paid any attention as Seth walked out and took the stairs.
He emerged through the heavy, bulletproof door that led to the desk sergeant’s domain behind the counter, beyond which was the waiting room. As usual, half a dozen people slumped in seats, some sullen, some anxious. One woman stood, her back to him—and a very nice back it was. Interested, he enjoyed taking a good look. She was midheight, slender, with a tight, perfect ass and fine legs. Chinos cut off just below her knees bared smooth calves. One foot tapped, either from nerves or impatience. Nice foot, too, he thought idly; since she wore rubber flip-flops, he could see toenails painted grass green with some tiny decoration he couldn’t make out centered on each nail.
He lifted his gaze to her hair, bundled up and clipped on the back of her head. It was so pale a blond, at first sight he thought dyed, except it had some natural-looking striations of color in it.
Something inside him went still.
“Detective,” the desk sergeant said in an urgent undertone.
As if hearing his low voice, the woman turned to face the two men, pointed chin held defiantly.
Stunned, Seth couldn’t move, couldn’t speak.
Couldn’t breathe.
She was alive. And...damn. How could the artist possibly have got it so right?
THE MAN STARING at her in open shock was not quite what Bailey had expected, although she didn’t know why that was. She’d looked him up online and even found a newspaper photo of him taken as he left the scene of a recent, really horrible crime.
The coloring was the same—dark hair, worn a little longer than she thought cops usually did. Brown eyes. Broad-shouldered, solid build. She had been reassured by a hint of bleakness the photographer had captured on that hard face. He must be human, she had thought, although, really, she knew it wasn’t as if he mattered at all. If it turned out she really was this Hope person, he’d introduce her to her supposed parents, hold a press conference and bask in his victory as he sailed off to meet new challenges, while she was left to grapple with what, if anything, this meant.
Now, seeing the expression on his face, she felt like a fish in a very small glass bowl. She suddenly, desperately
