Lost Creed

  That’s when she realized she was no longer at the bottom of the stairs.

  A tinge of alarm slipped through her body. She could handle the predictable no matter how painful. Fear was the unknown.

  She sniffed the air. It smelled different. No damp, moldy concrete. There was something sweet like peppermint, only faint and dusty. A chemical scent lingered, too. Neither was unpleasant.

  Charlotte tilted her head to listen. In the distance she thought she heard a train whistle. That was new. Then closer, a dog was barking, and suddenly her insides cringed. Her body instantly balled up into a fetal position triggered by the memory. Her arms flew up to protect her head and face. In the panic, she no longer noticed the pain in her muscles. Her mind had launched into survival mode, and she could hear the dog’s fangs clicking and chomping at her. She could smell its hot breath, inches from her face. In seconds, she would feel those teeth sinking into the flesh of her ankle.

  She strained to listen, but all she could hear now were soft whimpers and gasps for breath. It took her several minutes to realize the whimpers and gasps were her own.

  She let her arms fall and her right hand jerked down to feel her ankle. There was no blood, but she knew exactly where the scar remained, though she couldn’t touch it because a black strap was wrapped tightly over her ankle. Iris’ tracking device.

  “Now it won’t matter whether the dogs can chase you down,” the woman had told her when she snapped the lightweight contraption into place. “So please don’t waste my time and your energy. Because Charlotte, I’ll be able to find you.”

  Of course, it didn’t stop her from trying again. And failing, again. This time ending up at the bottom of the basement steps. Her last chance. And now Charlotte remembered Iris telling someone she wanted her gone.

  But gone to where?

  They’d drugged her and moved her. It wasn’t the first time. In fact, it had happened so many times, Charlotte had lost track. Just like she’d lost track of so many other things like where she’d come from, who she even was.

  Most of the time it was punishment. But Iris had said this was the last mistake. She was finished with her, and Charlotte knew enough about the others before her to know that when Iris was finished with you, you disappeared.

  But where? Where had she disappeared to?

  Chapter 19

  Atlanta, Georgia

  Olivia James didn’t mind working the early morning hours, though some of her staff still groaned and guzzled coffee. Truth was, Olivia rarely slept at night, choosing early afternoon instead. There was something safer about closing her eyes and her mind while the sun was still present. Darkness always brought the nightmares.

  She walked into the studio, pleased to see everything set up correctly even as the final touches were being added. It had taken her years to find the right team. Those not up to her standards usually left on their own. Everyone in daytime television knew the business was brutal. Maintaining an Emmy Award winning show even more so. Those on her staff who stayed were rewarded with appropriate bonuses. Though Olivia admitted she wasn’t good at handing down praise or compliments. But why should she? Bottom line, she worked hard, and she expected the people around her to do the same.

  Her new assistant, Deena waved to her from behind the set’s kitchen counter where it looked like she was bossing around other staff members into finishing today’s setup. It had only been three weeks and already Olivia missed her old assistant. Stacy had been with her since the early days. She was the only person Olivia truly trusted and depended on. But suddenly, the woman was head over heels in love and moving to New York with her new beau. In a desperate attempt, Olivia had offered to double her salary, despite feeling betrayed.

  “Olivia, you’ll find someone to replace me,” Stacy had told her. “It’s not like you’re losing your best friend.”

  How was it possible that Stacy didn’t realize that she was Olivia’s best friend? That she was Olivia’s only friend.

  Now she was stuck with Deena, all five foot, five inches and no more than one hundred and ten pounds. Deena had presented an impressive résumé along with a confidence that was quickly revealing itself as arrogance.

  In the beginning, Olivia had admired that the woman had an uncanny ability to put out fires without a single line of worry on her brow. But now she was discovering that confident, know-it-all Deena could also be a bit cavalier and quick to cut too many corners. She also appeared to be a bit of a bully.

  Perhaps the tipping point was last week when the woman had tried to substitute margarine for butter.

  “What difference will it make?” she had asked Olivia. “We’ll shoot it from a new angle. The audience will never know.”

  “But I will know,” Olivia told her, putting an abrupt close to the issue.

  Now, Olivia was going through her notes when she heard Deena ordering someone else in her shrill voice.

  “Wait! Just a minute, you need to leave.” Deena was telling someone at the back of the studio.

  Olivia paid little attention. Despite their best efforts, fans of the show occasionally tried to sneak in and watch them film.

  “Sir, you can’t have that dog in here. You need to leave.”

  This time Olivia looked up. The lights were so bright she could barely see behind the cameras where a tall man and small dog stood. She took off her reading glasses, dropping them on the counter along with her notes, and she came around for a better look.

  Deena was standing directly in front of the pair now, pointing to the door. The man was trying to explain to her. He glanced over Deena’s shoulder and did a double take when he saw Olivia.

  Immediately, she felt her knees wobble and the heat of the stage lights made her dizzy. For a brief moment she thought she must be imagining things. It couldn’t be, and yet . . . she knew. He’d found something, and he was here to tell her.

  “Deena, it’s okay.”

  “But we can’t have dogs in the studio. This is—”

  “Ryder, how are you?” Olivia asked as she moved in front of Deena.

  “Hi mom.”

  Chapter 20

  She looked so much smaller . . . and older in real life. Creed hadn’t seen his mother in almost ten years. Her choice, not Creed’s. When he told her he was joining the Marines she said she couldn’t bare losing another child. Angry and hurt, she told him if he joined the military that he’d be as good as dead to her. And she was true to her word.

  At that time she’d told him that she’d already lost Brodie, her mother (Creed’s grandmother), and her ex-husband. But what his mother didn’t seem to understand was that Creed had lost all of them, too. Only two weeks after finding his father dead, he’d decided to join the Marines. Actually, he had gone over to talk to his father about the decision only to find his body on the living room sofa with a self-inflicted bullet wound to the temple. Creed thought joining the Marines might be an escape from the hell that was his life. Little did he realize that he had simply exchanged one version of hell for another.

  Creed’s way of keeping in touch with his mother was watching her on television. Her daytime lifestyle show was on for an hour every morning. He remembered being fascinated the first time he saw her on a TV screen. He’d just woken up in a hospital bed, and there she was. In his hallucinatory state from the pain drugs they’d pumped into him, Creed thought she was there in his room with him.

  It was after the explosion. After he’d been airlifted out of Afghanistan, going from hospital to hospital until he was back in the States. A young Afghan boy named Jafar had gained the trust of the Marine unit Creed had been assigned to. One day Jafar blew himself up. Creed was a K9 handler and his dog, Rufus had detected the explosives underneath the boy’s clothing. Rufus alerted to the kid. But it was too late. All Creed could do was yell to warn the others and throw himself on top of his dog.

  He didn’t rememb
er how many different places they’d taken him. He could hardly remember anything, except that each time he woke up, he’d asked for his dog. He could vividly remember the panic and the anxiety when he couldn’t find Rufus. It was the single question he’d asked over and over, again, until someone finally told him the dog was okay. Well enough, in fact, to be assigned for duty to another handler.

  Compared to Jason, Creed knew he was lucky, but sometimes he thought he knew what Jason had gone through, because waking up and not having Rufus beside him had felt as if someone had cut off his arm.

  His dog was gone from his life, and he was alone. Even his mother wasn’t really in his hospital room. She was on TV, telling him how to sort and polish cranberries to make a beautiful holiday wreath.

  Now, she was staring at him, looking him over as if seeing him for the first time in her life. She’d escorted him back to her office, leaving the studio despite the young woman trying to follow and throwing questions at her.

  She had ushered Creed and Grace into her office then stood in the doorway so the woman couldn’t enter.

  “Deena, please tell the crew that there’ll be a delay.”

  “But you know we only have the studio for a set amount of time and you can’t—”

  “Excuse me, but I can.” And she shut the door.

  To Creed, she asked, “Would you like some coffee? Tea? Or perhaps a soda?”

  It had been ten years, and she was playing host. Probably an occupational hazard, considering that’s the role she played every day.

  “No, thanks,” he told her.

  It took him a while to realize her intense gaze into his eyes was no longer disbelief in seeing him. It was curiosity. Still, he was surprised when the whispered question came, “You know something?”

  He knew she meant, you know something about Brodie, but she couldn’t bring herself to say her name out loud.

  He should have been hurt that she didn’t ask more about him or that she hadn’t even acknowledged Grace who scampered at their feet patiently waiting for attention. But this was simply a microcosm of what their relationship had become; their relationship from the time that Brodie went missing to when Creed joined the Marines.

  Every day had become an accounting of news and information, every week a sorting of details and a search for any last tidbit that may have been overlooked. She had dragged Creed from city to city. Someone would report seeing a girl with Brodie’s description at a bus station in St. Louis, so off to St. Louis they went. A waitress at a diner in Memphis was positive she’d served ice cream sundaes to Brodie and another little girl with long stringy hair. Both were accompanied by a strange man. So off to Memphis they went.

  Brodie disappeared October 13, 2001. Despite air travel resuming September 14, in the weeks after 9/11, the highways were filled with trucks and vehicles. Everyone was still on high alert, fearful of more Middle Eastern terrorists. A little girl missing from an interstate rest stop didn’t garner as much attention as she might have in the weeks before the attacks. Which only seemed to drive Creed’s mother to a new level of panic and urgency. No one seemed to be interested in helping her find her lost child.

  This woman standing before him, waiting with that familiar glint of desperation in her eyes, reminded Creed of the mother he had come to know. The mother he had to settle for. At the end of the day—at the end of another week, another month, another year—there wasn’t anything left for him.

  And in just those three words, you know something, the television celebrity—the matron of fine living who told viewers and fans how to enhance their daily lives with homemade macaroons and holiday wreaths created with fresh berries—this icon had been reduced to a desperate, helpless woman still clinging to even a scrap of hope.

  “I know what you do for a living,” she said when Creed had taken too long to respond. “I’ve followed your life.” She pointed at the Jack Russell as if seeing her for the first time, and she smiled. “This must be your Grace.” She reached her hand down for Grace to sniff then she looked back up at him with a sad weariness. “Tell me,” she said.

  “Someone found the Polaroid photo that Brodie used as a bookmark.”

  “A Polaroid photo?”

  “A couple of days before, you took three photos of Brodie and me with Gram’s camera.”

  “Did I?”

  “One for Gram. One for me. One for Brodie. We stuck them in the books Gram gave us. We used them as bookmarks because we started reading them at her house.”

  He couldn’t believe she didn’t remember the photos.

  The whole trip was so clear to Creed as though it had happened just last week. He and Brodie loved spending time with their grandmother. She had board games she played with them and homemade apple pie. And always she sent them home with a new book, something she’d selected especially for each of them. That fall she hadn’t been feeling well. That was the reason his mother stayed with her while Creed and Brodie and their father headed back home. Creed wasn’t sure what ailed his grandmother, but he never believed it was the cause of her death a couple of months later when she died two days before Christmas. In his mind—even his young teenaged mind—he’d always believed his grandmother had died of a broken heart.

  “Have you seen this photo?” his mother asked.

  He shook his head, surprised with the emotion that suddenly obstructed his throat. Thinking of his grandmother only reminded him of how much loss followed Brodie’s disappearance.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “How do you know it’s the same photo?” In a matter of seconds she had gone from needing to know everything to questioning what he told her, almost as if she wanted him to be wrong. Almost as if she was ready to dismiss what he had to say, so she could go back to her current life.

  He swallowed hard. Too much coffee on the drive up to Atlanta churned in his stomach. It was threatening to push back up. He looked down at Grace who was wagging at him and cocking her head to one side. She was worried about him.

  Emotion runs down the leash.

  He was starting to regret coming here. But then he remembered why he had.

  “It’s the same photo,” he said without any other explanation. Then he managed to add in a professional voice, “I need you to send me the box.”

  He knew he didn’t need to tell her which box. It was something they carried with them from city to city. It contained Brodie’s hairbrush, a couple of baby teeth, several items of unwashed clothing sealed in plastic, a pair of shoes and a few other things that might be used to extract a DNA sample or provide a scent. All were preserved as if prepared for a special time capsule.

  “Here’s the address, “ he said, handing her a business card. “If you can overnight it, that would help.”

  She was quiet now and nodded, a slight bob of her head, her eyes no longer on his. Instead, she watched out the window where the sky was starting to brighten with purple and pink hues of dawn. Creed avoided looking out, afraid he might see the ghosts of regret that she might be seeing. Whatever it was, it had transformed her physical being as well, even her shoulders now seemed to slump and curl inward. He wished he could access his military training and shove away the emotions. Instead, he relied on phrases from some of Hannah’s sermons and told himself, “what’s done is done,” and “it’s time to move forward.”

  To his mother, he said, “And I need to take with me a swab and get a saliva sample.” He handed her the small kit that included everything that was needed: cotton toothed swabs, cheek scraper and small containers with seals.

  “Of course,” she said. She barely glanced at him as she took it, already familiar with what he was asking her to do.

  Then without another word, she left through a door at the far corner of her office, what Creed guessed was her personal bathroom.

  And then he waited. He hated waiting. He stood in place, not daring to shift or
move or touch anything. He allowed only his eyes to search and examine the décor of the room. Of all the photos on the walls and the desk, none of them were of Brodie or him. They were all from her life as a celebrity with other guest celebrities. It was as if the life with Brodie and him had never existed. She had boxed it all up, and he wondered if she had bothered to keep anything from that period of her life.

  He felt a bit lightheaded. Too little sleep and too much coffee. That’s all it was, he told himself. And yet, he had never wanted to leave a place as much as he wanted to flee from here, right now, right this second. Instead, he took measured breaths and tried to concentrate on Grace.

  He reached his hand down to her and she licked his fingers, but her eyes were still intensely focused on him. He wasn’t doing a very good job of keeping calm.

  “Not much longer, girl,” he told her.

  That’s when it occurred to him that not once had his mother attempted to hug him. In fact, she hadn’t attempted to touch him. And not once had she asked if Brodie might still be alive.

  Chapter 21

  Omaha, Nebraska

  With Pakula now on Maggie’s side, a possible deal with Eli Dunn was moving through the official channels. Pakula was off talking to the Douglas County prosecutor while Maggie waited. She had expected to have more time with Agent Stevens, but he’d left earlier, headed to Kansas City to assist in another raid. Operation Cross Country was still underway for another two days in other cities. She had hoped Stevens could speed things up. Instead, he had passed it on to her boss. Now, she needed to convince Assistant Director Raymond Kunze.

  “You were supposed to be assisting in the profile and the raid,” Kunze told her when they finally connected. “That’s all.”