tourists or newshounds. We were treated like lepers when we started nosing around town. Your best bet, if you’re determined to go this route, is to be discreet and look sophisticated, which shouldn’t be too difficult, given your worldly, cosmopolitan air. It’s a small town and none of the streets have names, so there’s no point in looking at a map. On the plus-side, though, his place lies at the end of a gravel road running directly west of the post office, so you’ll find it easily enough. But for what it’s worth, if you do find him—”
“When,” Linda corrected her. “I will find him, Melissa. I have to. June can’t go on like this and neither, come to that, can our mother. She’s been sick with worry for weeks now and the stress…well, you know how much she has to put up with already. This could be the last straw for her.”
“Then when you find him, don’t rush your fences.”
“Why not? This is an emergency and time’s of the essence. What’s wrong with being up-front about that?”
“Trillium Cove isn’t Rome or Paris—or even Vancouver. Things don’t happen at breakneck speed around there just because you want them to—and Mac Sullivan’s definitely not someone to be pushed. You can’t go hammering on his door and expect the only thing he’ll ask is ‘How high?’ just because you tell him to jump. If there was one thing which came across loud and clear during the brief interview he granted us, it’s that his priority these days is completing the book he’s writing on criminal profiles, and he resents anything which takes time away from that, although he did admit to doing a bit of police consulting on the side, once in a very rare while.”
“He’ll make an exception when I explain what happened. He has to.”
“Uh-uh!” Melissa scooped up a forkful of pasta and shook her head decisively. “He doesn’t have to do anything. This is a man who values both his privacy and his freedom to pick and choose how he spends his time.”
“He’ll choose this case when he finds out how much I’m prepared to pay.”
Again, Melissa shook her head. “He’s also filthy rich. It takes more zeroes than I earn in three months to pay the taxes on that property of his, let alone afford all the other little perks he enjoys. No, kiddo. To get him to take an interest in your case, you’re going to have to adopt a sneakier method and be very persuasive—if you get my drift!”
Linda’s stared at her, affronted. “I hope you’re not implying I come on to him?”
“I wouldn’t have put it quite like that, but since you did, then yes. In a way.”
“Fat chance! The day has yet to dawn when—”
“I’m suggesting you stroke his ego, not show up stark naked and offer to give him a full body massage, for heaven’s sake!”
“No!” Linda was adamant. She’d fended off romantic overtures from infatuated master chefs and five-star restaurateurs with equal dispatch during her years of training abroad, and wasn’t about to compromise her standards now for some small-town ex-police officer with an overblown sense of his own importance. “Apart from the principle of the thing, I can’t afford the time for those kinds of games.”
“You can’t afford not to! And if appealing to his vanity gets the results you’re after, what’s another couple of days?” Melissa’s tone softened. “Look, Linda, I know better than anyone that this isn’t how you usually operate. You’re the most straightforward person I’ve ever met—to a fault, sometimes. But there’s nothing usual about what’s happened to your family. It’s cruel and heartbreaking and scary beyond any normal person’s wildest imaginings, and if you want to put an end to the misery, the only thing you can afford to focus on is bringing your niece home safely and seeing that Kirk Thayer is brought to justice.”
Linda chewed on that for a while, then sighed deeply. “Loath though I am to admit it, I’m afraid you might be right,” she said, not much liking it but realistic enough to recognize there was no getting away from the truth of Melissa’s analysis. “If flattery will bring Mac Sullivan on board, I’ll butter him up one side and down the other so thoroughly, he’ll glow. I’ll do whatever it takes, and worry about my methods when that baby is back in her mother’s arms where she belongs.”
“And I wish you luck. Because, believe me, you’ll need lots of it.”
Even in mid-August, after weeks of hot, dry weather, the ocean was cold. Enough that Mac wore a wet suit when he rode the Windsurfer, though not enough to keep him from his early-morning swim. He needed that bracing dash into the icy waves to clear the cobwebs from his brain and prepare him for the day’s work. One thousand words minimum before four in the afternoon, fifteen hundred if he was lucky—and that didn’t count the research, or the pages of notes he compiled before he tackled the latest chapter.
The surf was wilder than usual that day, requiring he keep his attention on what he was doing, which probably explained why he wasn’t aware someone had invaded his section of beach until he practically stepped on her as he waded ashore.
Still half-blinded by the glare of sun on water, Mac detected the visitor was a woman only by her voice. Clear, bossy, cultured, it accosted him as he hoisted the Windsurfer under one arm and prepared to climb the steps to the house. “Watch what you’re doing with that thing! You just about took my head off!”
“A danger you could have avoided if you’d paid attention to your whereabouts,” he informed her murky silhouette. “You’re on private property, lady.”
“How am I supposed to know that?”
He jerked his head to indicate the signs nailed to the twisted trunks of the scrub pines edging the low-rising dune. “You could try reading—assuming you know how.”
His vision clearer by then, he watched with grim amusement as she reared back in outrage. “I’d heard you were a bit short on social graces,” she huffed, “but I’d no idea you were such a Neanderthal.”
“Well, now that you’ve been enlightened, why don’t you go back to wherever you came from and leave me to grunt in peace?”
“Because,” she said, and faltered into silence.
She had wide-spaced blue-green eyes almost the color of the sea close-in to shore. Blond hair framing a heart-shaped face in a halo of short curls. Full, stubborn mouth, dimpled chin. Slight build, shapely legs, about five-four in her bare feet, and weighing around a hundred and ten pounds. Fingers braided so tightly together it was a wonder they didn’t dislocate. Twenty-sixish, possibly a bit younger. A very uptight woman.
He noticed all that not because he gave a damn but because he’d been trained to observe. Eleven years on the police force stayed with a man, even after he turned in his badge.
“‘Because’ isn’t a reason,” he said.
She looked down at her knotted fingers. “I’m sorry if I’m trespassing. I really didn’t notice the signs.”
“I don’t see how you could miss them. They’re in plain enough sight.”
She took that under consideration for a minute, then drummed up an obsequious smile and said, “But so were you. And I was captivated watching you on the Windsurfer. You’re amazing.”
“So I’ve been told—by women a lot more subtle than you.”
