Ghosts (4 page)

Vance regarded her, holding his gaze steady until she shifted uncomfortably. “Somehow I don’t think that’s entirely true.”

Before he could press her for more information, the manager stepped out of his office, his unhappy scowl landing on Vance. “Can I help you?”

“Colby Henderson? Is that you?”

Confusion skittered across the man’s face, followed by recognition. “Vance Davis. Never thought I’d see you in these parts again.”

“I’m here looking for the Barnetts’ foster daughter. I don’t suppose you could help me with that one?”

Colby shook his head. “It’s too bad about Nikki. She’s a good kid.”

The girl behind the counter let out a half snort before catching herself. Vance’s gaze shifted to her. He raised an eyebrow in a silent request to expound on that opinion. The girl shrank into herself and Vance let it go, his attention returning to Colby. “Henry and Martha are beside themselves. Is there anything at all you can tell me that isn’t in the police report?”

The man thought for a moment before shaking his head slowly but definitively. “Naw, I can’t think of anything. I didn’t realize you were still in touch with the Barnetts.”

“I’m not. The file found its way to my desk.”

“He’s with the FBI,” the girl supplied at Colby’s questioning look.

“Well, a consultant for them,” Vance corrected before the rumor mill got out of hand.

“I didn’t know consultants had badges.” The girl was wary again.

Vance gave her a shrug, the picture of innocence. It was a look that always got him out of trouble with Jessie. With Harmony, though, it had usually backfired.

“That badge was a fake, wasn’t it?” The girl’s dark brown eyes sparked with something he assumed to be irritation. She brushed her dark bangs from her forehead in a gesture that was more mechanical than necessity.

“It seemed the most appropriate way to convince you to talk.”

“Vance…” Colby protested, only to be interrupted by the girl.

“What other ways do you have? To get me to talk, I mean.” She leaned toward him and cocked her head to the side.

Realization settled over him that it wasn’t irritation smoldering in her eyes. “I really can’t say. The Geneva Convention frowns on most of them.”

Her unsure laugh told him she didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. Colby most likely did because he chose that moment to end the conversation. “It was good seeing you again, Vance. I hope you have better luck elsewhere.”

He knew that was his clue to leave. He couldn’t help being mildly amused at Colby’s reaction and considered staying longer just to goad the man, but he knew it would be a better use of his time to drop his things off at the hotel and check for an email from Rick before going to find Nicole’s friends.

Vance made it to his truck, the lock chirping in response to his key fob, when the girl popped out of the door, slightly winded as she shielded her eyes with a slender hand. “Hey, fake FBI-man.”

“Vance,” he supplied for her.

“Yeah, whatever. You know, if someone like Nikki wanted to find trouble, she could do it at the old city park pretty much any night.”

“Any particular kind of trouble?” he clarified, mentally noting that some things didn’t change.

“Any kind you want.”

VANCE WAS NERVOUS
for the second time in the same day, and he wasn’t happy about it. He was much more accustomed to making people feel nervous than he was to entertaining the emotion himself. He wasn’t a fan of being on this side of the equation.

It had taken him longer than planned to get out to the Donaldsons’ farm and back, and then Rick had called just as he’d stepped out of the shower. Both the trip and the call—and admittedly even the shower—had been beneficial, but now Vance was running behind. It was only two minutes, but given the nature of the visit, he suspected two minutes would be enough.

The pinch to Allie’s eyebrows confirmed his suspicion: He was in trouble for being late. What was it about this town that stripped away over a decade of manhood and left him a pensive schoolboy? That thought led him to greet Allie with more growl than he’d intended. The look on her face changed from irritation to uncertainty, and he instantly regretted his tone.

“Sorry,” he corrected himself as he slid into the booth across from her. “Long day. I don’t know what it is about this town that brings out the worst in me.”

“I like this town,” Allie defended as she motioned for the waitress to bring her another bright pink concoction. “What are you having?”

“What is that?” He motioned to her drink.

“A margarita.” She took a long sip through the stir straw and sighed.

“It’s hot pink.”

“Don’t judge.”

He raised his eyebrows in response, looking from the drink in question to the waitress. “I’ll take a beer. Domestic. Whatever you have is fine.”

She nodded, her eyes flicking across his face as she did. Vance wondered if she recognized him or if she was trying to figure out who he was and why he was with Allie. He didn’t recognize her, but surely he hadn’t known everyone in his class. Then again, maybe he had. It was a small town.

Allie must have guessed his train of thought because she explained once they were alone. “Lea’s a transplant.”

He raised his eyebrows in response, prompting further clarification.

“She moved here from the city.”

“So people are moving into town instead of out now?”

She frowned at him. “That was mean of you. I like it here. It’s a good place to raise my kids. Not all of us like living in a big city, you know. And yes, people are moving here a lot lately. I think the economy is sending folks our way—families are consolidating, people are coming home. Although not everyone’s happy about it. Some resent all the newcomers, think they’re upsetting the way of things.”

Vance swallowed his reply, not wanting to further sour the evening with his opinion. Instead he replied with a knowing “ah, I see” and asked what she thought of the fish and chips. After that, they kept to safe subjects for a while. Allie told him about her job at the grocery store; he avoided questions about the past decade of his life.

After he dodged yet another question about himself, she finally threw her hands up in the air before resting them palm-down on the table, fixing her fiercest glare on Vance. “Fine. I give up. You win.”

“Win what?” He laid his fork down and met her gaze. “What do you want from me?”

“I don’t even know anymore.”

“You must have had some intent for tonight, Allie. I thought it was your chance to tell me what the hell I’d done to make you mad at me, but now I realize you were expecting something from me—only nobody clued me in to what that was, so I’ve only succeeded in pissing you off even more. If you’re not going to give me an instruction manual, at least give me a hint, because I’m trying.”

“Trying? Really? Name one thing you’ve said tonight that wasn’t asinine.”

“Ouch.”

“No, really. Just one thing about you, about your past—”

She seemed to want to say more but stopped herself.

Vance wasn’t going to let it go that easily. “There—there it is. On the tip of your tongue. You were about to say it and didn’t. What is it, Allie girl?”

“Why’d you leave? Where have you been all this time? Did you ever fall in love, let someone in? Why are you really back?
Are
you really back?” The questions tumbled out, jarred loose by his gentle prompting.

Vance realized with a start what he’d done to anger her: He’d broken her heart. He stared at her a moment more, processing this new piece of information before leaning forward and lowering his voice. “Why did I leave? Because I was a kid with more anger than brains. Where have I been? To hell and back again. Did I ever fall in love or let someone in? Yes, but she died, and I’ve spent the past year of my life wandering around aimlessly trying to figure out how to move on from something like that, without her. The world isn’t supposed to go on without her, but it is. Why am I here? Because the Barnetts need me, and I owe them this. Am I really back? No. This isn’t my life anymore. It’s not who I am.”

As he ended his speech, it occurred to him that it was more than not belonging in Buffalo; he really did have a purpose and a plan for his life. All of the crazy, mixed-up mess that was Vance Davis made him uniquely suited to save the kids nobody else would fight for. As badly as it hurt to continue that work without Harmony, he had to. She’d be furious with him if she knew he didn’t.

Allie reached across the table to tentatively take one of Vance’s large hands into her own delicate grip. “I’m so sorry. How did she die?”

Vance’s throat constricted. He coughed to clear it, hoping his voice didn’t sound as pathetic to her as it did to his own ears. “She was my partner. We worked together to recover kids from traffickers, to find runaways, foster kids at risk, that sort of thing. She, uh, she was undercover when things went south. I’m still not sure how our cover was blown, but they figured out who she was and shot her in the gut. I was monitoring from our surveillance van. I tried to save her, but I wasn’t fast enough. I wasn’t there for her when she needed me most.”

“I am so, so sorry for your loss—and for thinking ill of you. I guess it made it easier to assume you were a terrible person. I couldn’t have been further from the truth.” Allie’s hand moved from his hand to cup his face.

There was a piece of Vance that wanted to lean into her touch, to seek comfort from an old friend. Instead, he captured her hand and shook his head. “I’m not a good man, Allie. When I left here, I landed with some pretty bad people. I’ve done things I can’t erase.”

“But you do good things now. It sounds like you’re a hero.”

“Not a hero, just a man grappling with ghosts.”

***

The conversation with Allie was one of many things bumping around Vance’s brain as he sat in his truck at the old city park, waiting for the evening’s nefarious dealings to commence. Every town had their version of the city park, that place where those looking for trouble could find their pleasure. One of the last cases he’d worked with Harmony had involved a town struggling with drug deals becoming commonplace in school bathrooms. Kids in junior high were dealing prescription drugs they’d pilfered from their parents’ bathroom cabinets. By high school, they’d graduated to the big time and were selling cocaine and the latest designer drugs.

Sometimes Vance felt like he was fighting a losing battle, that there were more evils waiting to gobble kids up than he had the capacity to fight. But then he reminded himself that it wasn’t up to him to win the whole war, just to fight for one kid at a time. He hoped he wasn’t too late for the current kid.

A shoddy maroon four-door sputtered into a parking lot on the far side of the park. Moments later, a shadowy figure emerged from the car, leaning casually against the hood as if waiting for someone. From his vantage point across the park, Vance snapped pictures and watched, observing details and taking mental notes. He didn’t have to wait long for another car to pull up alongside the first.

There was a time when he would have strode into the meeting and busted heads together until he got answers. He’d since learned it was more effective, if less cathartic, to figure out who the players were, then stalk them patiently online until one of them let something slip. By “patiently,” he meant a day or two. If somebody hadn’t said something by then, Vance would get his chance to bust heads together. And as much as he enjoyed that pastime, it was better for everyone if they talked sooner. Every day mattered exponentially in the world of missing children, and information gathered from online chatter was more reliable and more admissible in court than information gathered from hanging a trafficker off a building or beating his face in.

He sat there for hours, snapping pictures and studying the seedy underbelly of his hometown before a police car rolled in, busting up what they suspected to be a party—or maybe they knew very well what they were breaking up and preferred to simply send those involved on their way. Either way, Vance figured he wouldn’t get much else that night, so he headed back to his hotel room to process the information he’d gathered.

He downloaded the pictures and did what he could to enhance the images before putting his computer to work running the images through a face recognition database. While he waited for that to do its thing, he changed into a pair of sweatpants and threw his clothes into a pile in the corner, making a mental note to hit the laundromat soon. He’d declined Jessie’s offer to do his laundry, so the vast majority of his clothes were in an embarrassing state of disarray. He tried to wait for the software to find a match but eventually dozed off sprawled across the top of his bed.

The first hint of sunlight was sneaking through his window when his computer chirped. Through his sleepy haze, he registered that it had found a match. He sat up, rubbing his eyes with the palms of his hands and yawning noisily. It had been a while since he’d kept the kind of crazy hours required by his job; his body was protesting getting back into the groove.

He ran his hand over his hair in an attempt to curb the bedhead as he studied the computer screen. Now he had names to go with the park’s late-night clandestine activities. Hopefully one of those names would lead him to Nicole. He went to work finding his leads online until his rumbling stomach and the sunlight now streaming through his window told him it was time to go out in search of food.

Prowling through his bags turned up zero clean clothes, so he put on the least offensive T-shirt he could find, tossed his clothes in a bag, and snagged his laptop off the table before heading for the laundromat he’d noticed while at the coffee shop the day before.

Vance tried not to notice the stains trailing down the front of the washing machine or the mystery sludge lining the soap dispensers. If he noticed them, he might question how clean his clothes were at the end of his ten dollars. As it was, he’d content himself with the illusion that the smell of Gain equated to cleanliness.