Vanished

She closed her eyes, a tear leaking out. “I told Rachel what she was wearing.”

“Tell me again.” He pushed her bangs from her eyes. He hated adding to Kim’s pain by interrogating her. But it had to be done.

“She had on her blue jeans with the butterflies around the hem and her pale pink T-shirt and no jacket because it was warm.” Kim came to a shaky stop, blinking rapidly. “Do you think she’s cold? It still gets cold at night in May, Daddy.”

He ignored her question because he didn’t have a good answer. Instead he asked, “Which pair of shoes was she wearing?”

“Her black patent leather ones. That’s all she wears anymore. I caught her one night sleeping—” Kim brought her hand up to cover her mouth and her tears returned to flow down her cheeks. “But now she’s missing one,” she mumbled through her fingers.

He couldn’t hold his own sorrow back any longer. His tears left a wet track as they slid down his face. Hugging his oldest daughter to him, he cherished the feel of her in his arms. At least Kim is safe. She had been inside the house alone with the back door unlocked. What if whoever had taken—Don’t play the what-if game.

Except for the murder almost a year ago, Crystal Springs was a safe Illinois town. People left their doors unlocked. Kidnappings didn’t occur here. Not a lot happened here, and that was one of the reasons he had brought his family back to his hometown after he’d pulled his life out of the gutter.

Kim jerked away and shot to her feet. “I’ve got to do something to help. I want to search like Neil is. Please, Daddy.”

His son had accompanied Reverend Colin Fitzpatrick and a couple of men from the church while they searched the area around Faith Community Church and the lakeshore near it. He hadn’t let Kim go with them, partly because she was the last person to see Ashley and needed to be interviewed and partly because he wanted to keep her as close to him as possible. He could have lost her today, too.

“No.”

“But I need—”

He planted his hands on his jean-clad thighs and shoved himself to his feet. “I said no, Kim. It’s too dark and most of the teams are finishing up.”

“Tomorrow then?”

“We’ll see. I’m moving the command center to the station, and I want you to come with me.” Again he heard thunder in the distance and realized another storm system was moving into the area.

She opened her mouth to say something, decided not to and snapped it closed. After snatching up her jacket on the back of her desk chair, she stalked out into the hallway.

With a heavy sigh, J.T. followed his daughter toward the foyer. The doorbell rang. Kim rushed forward to answer it before he could stop her.

Standing in the entrance to his house was Madison Spencer. The sight of her in her FBI jacket thrust him back to the previous May when murder had come to Crystal Springs. The implication of her presence in town underscored the gravity of the situation and nearly destroyed all the control he had mustered.

TWO

Day one, 10:00 p.m.: Ashley missing three and a half hours

“Madison,” J.T. whispered in his entry hall, his voice a weak thread. Seeing the FBI agent jacket cemented in his mind that his daughter wasn’t likely to waltz into his house, wanting to eat dinner, anytime soon.

Madison stepped through the doorway. “I’m sorry we’re meeting again under lousy circumstances.”

Kim looked from Madison to him then back to the agent, her gaze glued to the yellow letters on the navy-blue jacket. “Dad?”

J.T. shook his head at Madison, hoping his brief expression transmitted the need to be careful with what was said. “Honey, the FBI is routinely called in when a child’s missing.”

But as usual his daughter was smart and observant. “Ashley isn’t just missing. Someone took her.” Kim’s voice and lower lip quivered.

Although it wasn’t a question, J.T. answered, “We don’t know for sure—” he stalled, wishing more than anything he didn’t have to say the next part of the sentence “—but yes, I think she has been kidnapped.”

His daughter bit down on her lip to keep it from trembling. Tears glistened again in her eyes. “Why? Who? We don’t have much money.”

No words came to mind as he stared at the pain in Kim’s expression. Her observation about their financial situation made the fear he’d kept suppressed in order to function effectively bubble to the surface. Financial gain could be handled. The other reasons a child was kidnapped were so much harder as a cop and a parent to deal with. He shuddered. He realized his daughter needed some kind of answer, but he didn’t know anything to say that would make the situation better for Kim.

Thankfully Madison stepped forward. “That’s what we’re going to determine.” She steered his daughter toward the couch in the living room. “I can’t believe how much you’ve grown since last summer.”

Alone in the foyer, J.T. dropped his head and stared at the ceramic tile. Visions of those other reasons swam around in his numb mind: someone who thrived on sexual exploitation, a person from his past while he was a detective in Chicago, or human traffickers. Another shudder passed through him.

Lord, please bring Ashley home. Protect her. I’m begging You. Help me! I can’t lose her. Where do I begin?

The sound of Kim and Madison talking in lowered voices drew him forward. If he was going to do a thorough job of finding his daughter, he had to shut down the thoughts that kept popping into his head. He couldn’t waste any more time on them.

“But there hasn’t been a ransom demand,” Kim said as J.T. entered the room. “There hasn’t, has there, Daddy?”

His daughter’s big blue gaze fixed upon him chipped away at the composure he had just shored up. “No. Nothing.” He instilled strength into his voice, a strength he had to maintain.

“Then, see, she’s probably just missing.”

“That’s a possibility, Kim, but we’re covering all the bases until we know something for sure.” Madison looked toward the kitchen. “I smell coffee, and I’ve been driving for a couple of hours. I could use a cup. Do you think you could get me one, Kim?”

“I guess so.” His daughter pushed to her feet and trudged across the room, her shoulders hunched.

When she was gone, J.T. came closer to Madison and sat in the chair next to the couch. For some reason her presence helped him feel as though he wasn’t totally alone in this. They had worked well last year on the murder case and she was very good at her job. That thought comforted him. “So you left the state police to join the FBI. Where’s the rest of the team?”

“They’re coming. Probably twenty minutes behind me. I think I broke a few speed limits getting here.” She tossed a wry half grin then sobered. “I know what you must—”

“Who’s the agent in charge?” He couldn’t take her pity and sympathy at the moment. He wasn’t that strong.

“Matthew Hendricks. He’s good at finding people. That’s why the Chicago office is handling this instead of the small one in Central City.”

Susan came into the living room with a mug. “I talked Kim into eating the ham sandwich I had for her earlier.” She handed the coffee to Madison. “Can I get you anything else?”

“No, thanks.” Madison sipped her coffee. “This is just what I needed.”

“J.T., we’ve almost got everything packed up to move down to the station. We should be ready to leave in a few minutes.” His secretary started back toward the kitchen. “Glad you’re here, Madison.”

Madison flipped open her cell phone. “I’ll call Matthew and let him know to meet us at the sheriff’s office on Lake Shore Drive.”

While J.T. listened to her talk to the agent in charge, a restless energy hummed through him. He shot to his feet and began to pace. When she finished her call, he stopped in front of her, hands stuffed into his pants’ pockets. He remembered her efficiency and professionalism and was glad to see a familiar face.

She took several more sips of her coffee, then placed it on the coaster on the table in front of her. “Okay. That should keep me going. Show me where Ashley was last seen.”

“Kim saw her on the swing last, probably right before she was—kidnapped.” The word stuck in his throat. Thinking about that shook him to his core. He could have lost both daughters today. Kim had been so close—an unlocked door away. He couldn’t get that realization out of his mind.

“What time was that?”

“Kim saw her at about five-thirty. I came home at six-thirty.” He recited the facts he’d learned earlier from his daughter as though this was just another case. If he let his emotions rule him, he would fall apart. He couldn’t afford that. Not when Ashley’s life depended on him keeping a level head.

“So she disappeared some time between five-thirty and six-thirty. We can start building a time frame.”

J.T. headed for the front door. “Let’s go around to the back this way. If Susan has finally managed to get Kim to eat something, I don’t want us to interfere by going through the kitchen.”

Madison stepped out onto the small porch first. “Any evidence at the scene?”

“We found one of Ashley’s shoes in the grass under a swing.” When he followed her, he saw a news crew from Central City setting up in the street behind the barricade his deputies had erected to keep people away from the scene. He had been to hundreds of crime scenes in his career as a law enforcement officer, but never at his own home.

“A tennis shoe? They don’t come off easily.” Madison strode toward the wooden gate at the side of the house and pushed aside the yellow tape slashed across it.

“No, a slip-on, so in a struggle it could have come off.”

“But Kim didn’t hear anything?”

“No. She said she checked on Ashley when she first went outside to play, then she moved back to the couch across the room to talk on the phone.”

Madison stared into space, a good minute of silence passing. “Still, if there had been much of a struggle, she should have heard something.”

“I particularly asked Kim about that. There wasn’t anything unusual. All she heard was a dog barking two houses down.”

“Which way.”

J.T. pointed east. “That way. The Morgans. They have an American Eskimo.”

“Maybe the abductor came that way and stirred up the dog. I’ll check on that when I interview them.”

“I already did. Or rather, I discovered neither Jill nor Ross Morgan were home at that time. Some of the people on the street work in Central City and hadn’t gotten home yet.”

“Convenient time to take someone.”

He massaged the taut muscles in his neck. “Yes, my thinking exactly.”

“Do you mind if I interview Kim later? Maybe she’ll remember something she’s forgotten in the trauma of finding out her sister is missing.”

“Sure. I know the drill. We’ll do anything to bring Ashley back.”

“Has the scene been processed?” She hung back, not going more than a few feet inside the gate.

J.T. came up behind her. “Yes, the crime scene unit from Central City finished about an hour ago.”

“That was fast.”

“I know the police chief, and I wanted them to start when they at least had some daylight. There wasn’t much we found except the shoe and a set of footprints behind there.” He indicated the group of trees and bushes along the chain-link fence at the back of the yard. “Most of the area is grassy except for a small spot.”

“What size?”

“Cowboy boots, size ten. It rained enough earlier today that it would have washed away any previous prints.”

“Did you take a casting?”

He nodded, then realized she couldn’t see his answer because she was facing away from him, surveying the yard. “Yes. Ashley had a fort in the bushes. She played there a lot. In fact, when I first came out that was where I thought she was hiding.” He gestured toward the largest one that served as Ashley’s fort, then toward a chain-link gate not five feet away from it. “There are two ways into the yard.”

“So if someone took Ashley, he probably used the back one.”

“That’s what I’d do. Less chance of being seen since the woods are directly behind my property.” A few raindrops spattered him. “Great, more rain.”

“Which doesn’t help.” Madison held her hand out flat as if gauging the intensity of the rain.

J.T. took a step toward the gate. “We fingerprinted the swing set and anything else we could.”

“Both gate handles?”

“Yes,” he answered in a tight voice as she walked past him. “I know my job. My deputies know their job.”

She turned then and stared up at him. “I know, but I still need to ask. You don’t want any mistakes in this case. Especially this one. You know how important the crime scene can be.” She again scanned the yard. “Even with the lights on, it’ll be hard to see anything tonight, especially if it starts raining harder. I’ll come back tomorrow. Did your next-door neighbors see anything?” Madison headed back around front, her short brown hair beginning to get wet.

J.T. hurried his steps. “Nothing. One wasn’t even home at the time and the other one is an older lady with a hearing problem. She was watching TV on the far side of the house from four until I knocked on her door at a little before seven.”

“So you interviewed all the neighbors on your street?”

J.T. opened his front door and let Madison go into his house first. “There was only one neighbor I didn’t talk to. I figured if anyone saw something it would be a neighbor, but no one did.”

“Not even an unusual car?”

He shook his head. “Not that anyone can recall. I’ll get you copies of the interviews.”

“Which neighbor did you not talk to?”

The muscles in his neck ached, pain radiating from his shoulder blades down his back. He again kneaded his nape, but nothing relieved the tightness. “Mrs. Goldsmith left for Central City a little before six to do some shopping and won’t be back until probably ten, according to her husband.”

“Mr. Goldsmith can’t reach her on her cell?”

“She doesn’t have a cell.”

“Oh.” Madison walked through the living room toward the kitchen. “We’ll need to talk to her as soon as she returns. She might have seen something and not realized its importance.”

“Yeah, I told Bob that. He’ll call when she comes home, which should be anytime now.”

While Madison went into the kitchen, J.T. hung back, watching her introduce herself again to Kirk and Rachel, even though they had all worked on last year’s murder case together. His daughter sat at the table, a couple of bites taken out of the ham sandwich sitting on a plate before her. Her pale features, too-shiny eyes and hunched shoulders revealed the strain the past few hours had taken on her. Unless Ashley was found soon, he knew the stress had only just begun.

“Besides canvasing the neighborhood, what other searches have been done?”

Although Madison had asked Kirk the question, J.T. moved into the room and said, “We have searched the usual places kids like to hang out and any place Ashley is familiar with. We have checked with all her friends and classmates.”

Madison turned toward him as a flash of lightning, followed almost immediately by a clap of thunder, rocked the house. “How about the area behind your yard?”

With a box in his hands, Kirk skirted around Madison and headed toward the front of the house. “I’m in charge of organizing a search of that area all the way to the lake and the lake itself first thing tomorrow morning. The terrain is rough and would be difficult to search properly in the dark even with lights. We’ve got some firefighters and police coming from Central City to help us. We’ll be using Central City’s K-9 unit along with some search-and-rescue teams. They should be here an hour or so before dawn. Hopefully the rain will let up by then. That’s what the weather report says.”

“Isn’t it likely if there was a kidnapper, that he took her out that way since none of the neighbors saw anything unusual?” Madison asked Kirk as she trailed after him.

In the living room away from Kim, J.T. caught Madison’s arm and halted her progress. Another rumble of thunder vibrated the air. Tension whipped down his length. “There’s no if in this. Ashley has been kidnapped.”

Madison glanced down at his hand on her then back up into his eyes. He instantly dropped his arm away as though touching her had burned him.

“I agree this is most likely a kidnapping, J.T. Until we discover otherwise, our standard procedure is to assume a child is in immediate danger and act accordingly. It’s better to do that rather than think she’s missing or a runaway. We don’t want to miss any clues.”

She was giving him information he already knew, but he realized it was her way of keeping a rein on his emotions, which could so easily run rampant if he allowed them. “I want to make sure we’re on the same page.”

She stepped closer and laid her hand on his arm, the touch meant to reassure. Strangely it did. “We are. I promise you we’ll do everything humanly possible to bring your daughter home.”

Day one, 5:00 a.m.: Ashley missing for ten and a half hours

Madison scrubbed her hands down her face. Her eyes stung from the sleepless night spent at the sheriff’s office, now the command center for the missing child case. The rest of the FBI agents had arrived right after they had moved to the station to set up the new command post away from the victim’s house.

Just the mere thought of the word victim, in reference to J.T.’s little girl, chilled Madison. She couldn’t even begin to imagine the anguish J.T. and his family were going through, and yet he was in the middle of the investigation as though the child missing was someone else’s. Professional. Staunch.

She’d tried to get him to back off and let his deputies and the FBI work the case, but he wouldn’t. Since he was the sheriff as well as the parent, he wanted to be in on it every step of the way. There was a part of her that understood his need, and yet she also knew the danger of being so emotionally invested in a case. Ashley wasn’t her child, but she knew the little girl from the summer before. J.T. and his family had made her feel welcome when she had been here with this department working on the murder. Her emotions were involved more than she wished.

Madison found J.T. standing in front of the time line her boss had constructed on a large dry erase board. At the moment there was little information about Ashley posted. The bleak look in J.T.’s expression spoke of how taxing the situation was for him. But he was going over the information on the board with Matthew Hendricks as though this wasn’t his daughter they were discussing.

J.T.’s faith was strong like hers. Was that what was holding him together? What a test of his faith! Throughout the past night she’d prayed silently on a number of occasions for Ashley’s safe return. From the distant look that would appear from time to time in J.T.’s eyes, she suspected he had, too.

Heavenly Father, give us some kind of direction. We’ve got everything set up and ready to go but no leads to speak of. Where do we start? Where do we go from here?

“I made some fresh coffee.” Susan placed a steaming mug in front of Madison. “That’s the least I can do since I returned to the station. There’s no arguing with J.T. when he sets his mind on something. I didn’t want to go home to sleep.”

“A few people needed to get some sleep. I hope you were able to.” Madison put her hands around the warm mug.

“Not much, but I did manage to close my eyes for a while. Then I’d see Ashley’s face and I just couldn’t get any sleep. She is so dear and sweet. J.T. dotes on her. You should see them together when she comes down to the station. Such patience, showing her what he does. I just don’t understand how someone could take—” Distress on her face, Susan shook her head. “Sorry. I shouldn’t go on like that. And certainly J.T. doesn’t need to hear me carrying on. He’s got enough to deal with.”

“I don’t see how anyone could ever take a child, but it happens and the parents’ lives are never the same.”

“Even when the child is found?”

“Their sense of security is stripped away.”

A thoughtful expression appeared on Susan’s face. “Ah, I never considered that.”

The aroma of the brew flavored the air and for a few seconds Madison shut her eyes and relished the smell. “Thanks for the coffee. I was about to tape my eyelids open.”

J.T.’s secretary chuckled. “I know the feeling. It’s been a long night for everyone here.”

“And today will be a long day.” Madison rose from the desk she had commandeered from one of the deputies. “How’s J.T. holding up?” She’d been reviewing the neighbors’ statements and had been working on a list of people to interview again while J.T., her boss and Kirk had finalized the search protocol and gone over the case to date.

“I don’t know how he keeps going. I would have fallen apart hours ago.” Susan walked to the next desk to hand one of the FBI agents a mug of coffee.

Madison again searched for J.T. in the large room, realizing that periodically throughout the night she had done that very thing. By the time she’d left last summer they had become friends. She hated seeing a friend going through such pain. She wished she could do more for him.

J.T. moved away from the dry erase board and stopped in front of a table where a map of the region was spread out. He pointed to an area and said something to Matthew. The lead agent nodded, then gestured to another place.

Exhaustion carved deep lines into J.T.’s face—a face that under normal circumstances had a lot of character. At the moment it just looked plain tired. Even in the middle of the murder investigation last year, J.T.’s gray eyes would sparkle with life and humor. What she saw now was a dull pewter color. A sudden urge to comfort him flooded her. Surprised by the emotion, she turned away and picked up her list to give to Rachel.

“These are the people I want to interview again, with Mrs. Goldsmith at the top.”

Rachel glanced up. “She usually gets up early.”

“So six-thirty won’t be too early then?”

“Nope, and knowing Mrs. Goldsmith, she wouldn’t mind being awakened—if she even got any rest.”

“I suspect there are a lot of townspeople who aren’t sleeping right now.”

“Yeah, J.T. is a good sheriff and friend to many.” Rachel clicked the computer program she was working in shut. “You aren’t going to participate in the search of the lake area?”

“Not until I’ve interviewed all these people. They may remember something they didn’t last night.”

“Do you want me to come with you?”

“No, I’m sure even with the added volunteers from Central City J.T. could use everyone possible to help in the search. He’ll need you there.”

“First, I’ve got to finish up here. Then I plan on being in the thick of things. I’d do anything for J.T. He believed in me when no one else did.”

“He did?”

“Yeah, I’d always wanted to be a law enforcement officer, but no one around here thought I would be any good. Too petite, not to mention the fact I’m a woman.”

“I always wanted to be in law enforcement, too.”

“It wasn’t easy at first. I had to prove myself, but each one of these guys is my friend now. Everyone at the station would do anything for J.T. and his little girl.”

She knew what Rachel meant. She could feel the respect and friendship when she watched J.T. work with his staff. She hadn’t been with the FBI long enough to form that kind of bond yet. She was the one who was the new kid on the block and had to prove herself.

Madison peered over her shoulder at J.T. He now stood at the window with the blinds open. With his coffee mug cupped between his hands, he stared into the dark, as though holding vigil until dawn appeared. His lonely vulnerability drew her across the room. They had less than an hour until the sun came up and everything that could be done had been done. Now they just had to wait for dawn.

His rigid stance told Madison more than words what a toll the past hours had taken on J.T. Susan might think he was holding himself together, but Madison knew it was a very fragile connection that any second could give way.