The Missing (16 page)

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Authors: Shiloh Walker

Tags: #Contemporary, #Romantic Suspense, #Romance Suspense

BOOK: The Missing
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Jillian might not have that kind of time.
SIX
“
I
’M telling you, the dad hired somebody.”
Jones glanced up from his file with a frown. He had to admit, it was suspicious, Cullen Morgan disappearing the way he had.
But he didn’t get that vibe off the man. Morgan wasn’t just upset about his daughter’s disappearance; he was nearly sick with it. Jones had spent more than enough time with guilty people recognize them a mile away. Morgan didn’t have that guilt inside him.
All he was carrying around was grief.
But they had yet to discover why Morgan had disappeared. It hadn’t taken long to find him, but by the time they found out he went to the airport, he was already en route to Birmingham.
“Doesn’t fit, Murphy,” he said to the young agent he’d brought with him. Grace Murphy was the eager type, very ready to pin this on the most likely suspect. Jones could argue with her all day long, but Murphy was going to have to learn the hard way, the way most of them did. It was good for her, the way he looked at it. She’d learn that the easiest answer wasn’t always the right answer; in fact, it rarely was. After she made enough mistakes, she’d start developing some instincts.
She would need them.
He tapped his pen on the file in front of him, and when the phone rang, he continued to study the lists of names and descriptions of people seen in the water park. Hot summer day, dead of summer, it had been so crowded, it didn’t seem possible that a girl could just disappear like this. Didn’t seem possible at all.
And that was why he’d been called in. While Jones had none of the unique skills himself, he had a knack for knowing when to call in one of the special task forces. This was going to be one of them, he knew. He was already debating over who to call in. He skimmed the lists and, seeing nothing, started to flip through the grandfather’s information.
Whatever had happened in the Morgan family, if it had ever been committed to paper or put out into cyberspace, Jones now had the information. There were holdings all over the world. The grandfather was going to leave Cullen and Jillian a couple of very rich people. Not that Cullen didn’t do well on his own. The man was a very popular fantasy author with a huge online following. Internet searches had revealed message boards, MySpace pages, and entire fan Web sites dedicated to the guy’s books.
Money. It was always a possibility that somebody had grabbed the girl to use her in some money scheme, but that didn’t feel right to Jones. He turned the page, continuing to skim over the Morgan family assets, and a familiar zip code caught his eye: 36547.
He knew that zip code. Taige Branch, a huge asset to the Bureau and a huge pain in Jones’s ass, lived in Gulf Shores. “Hmmmm . . .” Without looking away from the file, he punched the address listed into his computer, pulling up a map. Less than four miles from where Taige had grown up.
Jones knew very little about Taige’s childhood. She was remarkably closemouthed about her life, and there had been precious little information he could gather on her that wasn’t public knowledge.
That information was pretty much all he had about her formative years. After she’d started college, there had been a decent amount of information, but before, very little. Only that she’d been orphaned at a young age, that she did well in school, and that she had gone to work part-time at a small, locally owned seafood restaurant. She’d lived with her only known relative, an uncle who preached at a nearby church, and she had very much kept to herself.
Coincidence?
Jones didn’t believe in coincidences.
“Sir?”
He looked up to find Murphy watching him with a wary gaze. “It’s Special Agent Hensley out of Birmingham.”
“Do they have Morgan?”
She shook her head. “No, sir. Nobody matching his description got off the plane, although surveillance clearly shows him getting on in Atlanta.” Her eyes were wide and glowing with self-satisfaction. Clearly, she thought this was more evidence to her theory that the dad had something to do with Jillian Morgan’s disappearance.
Jones was far from convinced, though. He was no psychic. He employed more than a dozen specially trained, highly skilled psychics. While he might not have their abilities, he had damn good instincts. And right now, as he studied the financial data before him, his instincts were singing. He reached for his own phone to call the grandfather, a Robert Morgan. Robert had told his son he’d be waiting at Cullen’s house, and Jones had given his men orders to make sure the grandfather remained there for the time being.
In case an attempt at ransom was made, they needed a family member at the house. Since Morgan had pulled his disappearing act, the grandfather was the only option. At the moment, Jones was damn glad he had the grandfather so readily accessible. It answered several of Jones’s more pressing questions.
“No coincidences,” he murmured as he disconnected from his conversation with Robert Morgan. Sitting back, he studied the board before him while his fingers beat out a tattoo on the table. It had an eight -by- ten picture of Jillian Morgan and below it, pictures of her father, grandfather, and the Paxtons, the people who’d been watching Jillian before she disappeared.
Murphy ended her conversation with Birmingham, and Jones looked her way as she put away her phone. “They found him—well, at least they found out how he ditched them. Guy’s clever, we got to give him that. Disguised himself. They’re faxing the pictures now. We’ll have to . . . What?”
“Morgan had nothing to do with his daughter’s disappearance.” He glanced down at his notes and then flipped them around for Murphy to read. “The Morgans purchased a condo in Gulf Shores, Alabama, sixteen years ago. They went down there fairly regularly until Cullen’s mother was killed twelve years ago, and then the condo was used as rental property for a time. Past few years, the grandfather has taken to going down there more often. They’ve got great fishing,” Taylor mused.
Murphy continued to stare at him, not following. Jones pushed his notepad closer to her and said softly, “Would you like to guess who Cullen dated on his summers in Gulf Shores, Murphy?”
She looked down at the pad, and her eyes widened. “Branch.”
Jones nodded. “Taige Branch. He has a history with her, and I’ll bet you anything that he’s gone looking for her.”
SO damn restless, Taige slept fitfully, tossing and turning. She couldn’t sleep for the life of her and hadn’t been able to for nearly two months now. Ever since Chicago, but Chicago didn’t seem to have anything to do with her insomnia.
It was something else. Something new. She was waiting, but she didn’t know what for. Mumbling in her sleep, she rolled onto her belly. A jarring pain shot up her arm, and she groaned, automatically cradling her injured right wrist against her chest.
The soft cast that went from her hand halfway up her forearm immobilized her wrist and hand, but it didn’t keep it from hurting when she moved wrong. The pain was enough to bring her completely out of sleep, and she lay on her back in the dark room, staring up at the ceiling. She could finally open her left eye again, but it still hurt like the devil. Taige lay there debating between getting up and finding one of the bottles of pain meds the doctors had prescribed or just finding a book and reading until morning.
Wasn’t like she was going to be working for the next few days. Before that thought even made a complete circle through her mind, a chill streaked down Taige’s spine. Her breathing hitched. In a smooth, unconscious movement, she rolled out of bed and grabbed the jeans lying on the floor with her left hand. She shimmied into them without hurting her hand much, but she had to lie back to zip and button them, and that hurt.
She shrugged the pain off and grabbed a tank top from the basket of clean clothes she hadn’t ever gotten around to putting up.
Hurry hurry hurry.
The words seemed to echo all around her, whispering to her in the dark. She didn’t turn on any lights as she moved through her house. Instead, she took up position staring out the huge picture window that faced the front yard.
When the headlights cut a swath through the darkness, Taige held herself still. She didn’t recognize the truck, but that was little surprise. Very few people had ever come looking for her. Jones with the Bureau, Dante, Rose before she died; once upon a time, her uncle had sought her out, but that was out of a desire to hurt and torment her just a little more.
But it wasn’t any of them.
Taige couldn’t have explained how she knew any more than she could explain quantum physics. But she knew. Her breathing went shallow, her heartbeat started to pound, and although she didn’t possess much vanity, she ran a hand over her hair. She generally didn’t spend too much time messing with her hair, just securing it in a French braid or a ponytail, but with her hand messed up, she wasn’t going to be doing too much on her own, and braiding her hair was definitely a two-handed task. So yesterday, tired already of trying to keep it halfway neat, she had spent hours getting the curly mess woven into a series of tight braids. That would keep her from having to mess with it for a while.
Still, she couldn’t help but wonder how her hair looked as she stood there, fiddling with her shapeless tank top and fighting the urge to go and change. She pressed gentle fingertips to the nasty bruise ringing her left eye and grimaced. After all these years . . . she’d known she’d see him again. Even when she drove away from Cullen Morgan’s home in tears, she’d known it wasn’t over between them.
Why he was coming to her now, she didn’t know and honestly, just then, she didn’t care.
She was so desperate to see him again, it was almost pathetic.
No, it was pathetic. It had been twelve years, and she was all but panting at the thought of seeing him, of staring into those amazing eyes and standing close enough to smell him. How much had he changed? Taige wondered. Instinctively, she knew that Cullen would be as devastating at thirty-three as he’d been at twenty-one. The truck came to a stop close to the house. She couldn’t see anything beyond the back bumper, and when the tail-lights went off, she jerked as though somebody had used a Taser on her.
She took a deep breath and then groaned as her shirt dragged against her nipples. They were stiff and erect, throbbing under the thin layer of cotton. Embarrassed, she folded her arms over them and wished she could manage to get a damn bra on. Her hand hurt too much to manage it, though.
Facing Cullen braless and in her bare feet: how much more disconcerting could it get? She held herself stiff as the knock came, pounding on the door as though he wanted to tear the door from its hinges. It came a second time, and third. Finally, she made herself move, shuffling through the dark living room with her arms crossed over her breasts, the wrap on her cast abrading the bare skin of her left arm and rubbing against her nipples.
Nerves jangled in her belly. No butterflies; this felt more like she had giant gryphons taking flight inside her, gryphons with knife-edged wings. She reached out and closed her left hand around the doorknob and slowly opened it, half hiding behind the door. She kept her gaze focused straight ahead so that all she saw was the way his white T-shirt stretched across his wide, muscled chest.
Through her peripheral vision, she saw that he held something in his hand. Something clutched so tight, his knuckles had gone white. She hissed out a breath and forced herself to look upward, up, up, up until she was staring into his eyes. It took a little longer than it should have; he was taller than he had been. At least by an inch. She was five foot ten—she didn’t have to look up to many people, and she decided then that she didn’t care for it at all.
“Taige.”
She didn’t say anything. She couldn’t. Her throat felt frozen, and forcing words past her frozen vocal chords seemed impossible. She just stepped aside to let him come in, and when he did, his arm brushed against hers. She flinched and pulled away, backing away until a good two feet separated them. Once he was inside, she closed the door and leaned against it, resting her left hand on the doorknob and holding her right hand against her belly and studying the floor.
He turned to stare at her. From under her lashes, she watched as his shoulders rose and fell, his chest moving as he blew out a harsh breath, almost like he’d been holding his breath the same way she had.
“God, Taige . . .”
His voice sounded almost exactly like it had in her dreams—no, exactly. In the dim light, she couldn’t see his face very well, but she had a bad, bad feeling that her dreams had been pretty damn accurate in that aspect, too. Shoving away from the door, she kept her head down as she moved around him and headed into the living room. He followed behind her slowly. She heard a click, and light flooded the room. She shot him a look over her shoulder, just a quick glance, enough to tell her just how dead-on her dreams had been.

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