He scrubbed a hand through his hair and sighed. “She’s gone, Raegan. I know you want to believe otherwise, but I can’t. Not if I have any hope of making it to tomorrow. Because the alternative . . .” His throat grew so thick he had to look away from her. “The alternative is something I can’t think about.”
Silence spread between them like a vast, empty chasm. And when the wind blew Alec’s hair away from his forehead, a shiver rushed down his spine, reminding him it was still close to thirty degrees, in the middle of winter, and that he was wearing nothing but jeans, a black long-sleeved T-shirt, and boots, laying himself bare before the only person he’d never wanted to hurt.
“Okay,” she said quietly, still staring at the steering wheel. “I get it. I—I won’t bother you with any of this again.”
She reached for the drive stick, and knowing she was about to leave pushed him right back into urgency mode. He slapped a hand on her window so she couldn’t roll it up and shut him out. “That doesn’t mean I want anyone else to go through what we did, though.”
Her gaze lifted to his, and in her soft green eyes he saw surprise and doubt.
Do it. Make amends for all the shit you put her through. Set at least one part of this nightmare right.
“I’ll help you,” he said before he could come up with an excuse. “With these cases. There might be some similarities. Something the cops are missing. If you want my help looking into them, I’ll do it.”
Their eyes held. He didn’t have a clue what she was thinking or feeling. All he knew was a burning desire to help her.
“Are you sure?”
“No.” His stomach tightened. “But it’s the right thing to do for those kids.” And for you.
Her gaze drifted back to the steering wheel. Slowly, she nodded. “Okay. I—I appreciate the help. You have a good eye for research. That’s part of the reason I wanted you to see the files.”
He wanted to ask what the other part was but forced himself not to. As much as he wanted to hear that she still cared about him, he knew it would be too much.
Letting go of her car, he stepped back. “You have to go to work, and I have a few things I need to do here. Let’s meet tonight. You can show me what you’ve found, and we can go from there.”
She nodded, bit her lip. Looked up as if she wanted to say something more but held back.
Finally she nodded again and reached for the drive stick. “My number’s the same. Text me later and we’ll set up a time.”
“Okay.” He watched as she slid the window up and carefully pulled out onto the road. As her brake lights faded in the distance, shining red over wet pavement, he couldn’t help but notice they looked like two giant warning beacons.
And like the fool he’d always been where she was concerned, he was about to ignore them and charge headfirst into something that just might kill him.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The coffee shop where Alec suggested they meet later that evening wasn’t at all what Raegan expected.
The chic establishment on the west side of the city, a twenty-minute drive from her apartment in the Pearl District, sported trendy purple couches, gold chairs, and low tables. It also included a long bar, displaying rows of wines and craft beers.
Wine and beer had never been Alec’s vices. He’d liked the hard stuff—Jack, Jim, Johnnie, Jose, even Captain Morgan when he’d been in the mood. But alcohol was alcohol, and Raegan’s nerves kicked up as she watched patrons sipping from wineglasses or pilsners, wondering if he knew the place he’d picked wasn’t just a coffee shop but also a wine and beer bar.
She pulled her phone from her jacket pocket and was just about to text Alec when the door opened behind her, and a wave of cold rushed down her spine.
“Did you get a table yet?”
Startled, she turned, heart pounding, fingers tingling, and stared up into Alec’s blue eyes.
For a moment, she was blinded by his beauty. Those mesmerizing eyes, his shaggy blond hair, and the two days’ worth of light stubble on his square jaw. Then he lifted his brows, and she realized she was staring. Heat rushed down her cheeks, forcing her to glance quickly away. “Um, no. I wasn’t sure if—”
“Hey, Alec.” A cute twentysomething brunette walked up to the check-in table to their left, winked Alec’s way, and reached for two menus. “Don’t usually see you in here this late.”
“Hi, Molly. Working tonight.” He held up two fingers. “Two of us.”
The brunette gave Raegan the once-over and turned. “This way.”
Raegan followed the brunette, weaving through tables toward the back of the restaurant, and didn’t miss the way the girl kept glancing back past Raegan, smiling at Alec as if the two were close friends.
“Here you go.” The brunette stopped at a table near a purple velvet drape and set out both menus. “Your regular table.”
“Thanks,” Alec said with a grin.
Irritated for reasons she didn’t want to admit right now, Raegan moved around the girl and pulled out her chair. On the other side of the table, Alec did the same, but the waitress’s hand on his arm stopped him. “Can I get you a beer? Or maybe some wine? We have a new pinot from Ribbon Ridge that’s fantastic. I sampled it last night.”
“Not for me.” Alec’s smile was warm and friendly, and he didn’t make any move to dislodge his arm from the girl’s grip. “Just coffee.”
“Decaf or regular?”
“Regular, please. Thanks, Molly.”
The brunette grinned and squeezed his arm. “You are so predictable.” She finally looked toward Raegan. “And you?”
“Coffee’s fine for me too. Black.”
The girl let go of Alec—finally—and turned without another word. Even though Raegan tried to stop the burst of jealousy, it bit her just the same.
Alec peeled off his leather jacket, slung it over the back of his chair, and sat. “Since when do you drink black coffee?”
“Since I became single.”
His hand stilled against the napkin.
And, dammit, knowing that had come out just as bitchy as she suddenly felt, she relaxed her jaw and told herself not to get worked up. They were no longer married. He could flirt with and date whomever he pleased.
Just please don’t let it be that skinny tart.
She cleared her throat and reached for her bag from the floor, working for nice. “There’s never any creamer or half-and-half in the break room at work. I started drinking black coffee there. Besides, I hate to go—”
“You hate to go to the store alone after work. I remember.”
He laid the cloth napkin over one thigh and rested his muscular forearms on the table. “Okay, show me what you’ve got.”
For a second, she studied his arms, the thick blond hair on his tanned skin, his wide palms and long fingers threaded together in front of him. Then her gaze lifted to the light-blue T-shirt that matched his eyes stretching over toned shoulders and chiseled pecs. And in a rush, she remembered how good it had felt to be surrounded by those arms only last night.
“Raegan?”
“What?”
“The papers?”
“Oh. Right.” Her cheeks heated, and she looked quickly away, searching through her bag for her research. God, she’d been staring. And he’d noticed. “Yeah. Here they are.”
She pulled out a stack of papers, more than he’d seen this morning, and set them on the table.
Unease passed over his features, and she remembered his admission out by her car about hitting rock bottom. About not being willing to go back there. She’d known he was talking about his drinking then, but now she couldn’t help but wonder if he’d meant something more.
She wanted to ask about it. Wanted to know what had happened in the time they’d been apart. Wanted to know why he’d turned to alcohol instead of to her. After they’d lost Emma, all she’d wanted was him. But he’d needed the bottle. She’d tried to tell herself it had nothing to do with her, that his addiction went back years,
but she’d never truly believed it. In her heart, she’d always felt as if he’d made a choice, and it hadn’t been her.
He scanned the first page, then flipped to the second. “How’s your leg?”
Chitchat. He was making chitchat. She could do that too. She focused in on a young couple laughing over a bottle of wine. “Fine.”
“Did you have someone take a look at it?”
“No, it’s better today.” That wasn’t exactly a lie. It was still sore but definitely better. God, she remembered laughing like that with Alec. Remembered smiling. Remembered so many things. Did he remember any of them?
From the corner of her eye she watched as he frowned and flipped to the next page.
Silence stretched between them. An uncomfortable silence she hated. “How often do you come here?”
“Whenever I can,” he said without looking up. “They have the best coffee in town.”
Raegan frowned as the bubbly brunette with eyes only for Alec headed their way with two steaming mugs.
“Here you go.” The girl set Raegan’s cup on the edge of the table and placed Alec’s directly in front of him so she could lean way in and brush his arm with hers while drawing attention straight to her breasts, which were practically falling out of her low-cut, black, V-neck T-shirt. “Anything else I can get you, Alec?”
Raegan rolled her eyes. Across from her, Alec leaned back and smiled. “No, thanks, Molly. We’re good for now.”
“Okay.” The girl rested both hands on the table, leaning in a little too long, then finally winked and turned, never once looking Raegan’s way.
Jealousy came roaring back, a jealousy Raegan knew she shouldn’t be feeling, considering she was—or had been until this morning—dating someone else.
Not wanting to think about the awkward conversation she’d had with Jeremy at the station or about the fact he hadn’t seemed too upset when she’d told him she thought it was best they stopped seeing each other, she glared after the brunette. “I’m surprised you come here, considering the atmosphere.”
Alec lifted his coffee and sipped. “You mean the booze? They don’t serve it in the mornings, and wine and beer don’t tempt me.”
No, of course wine and beer didn’t tempt him. Because obviously the tight-assed, big-boobed brunette distracted him from the alcohol around him.
She crossed her arms over her chest, her taste for coffee long gone.
Alec shuffled the papers in his hands, then laid them on the table in front of him. He handed three across to her. “These I think we can disregard.”
She took the papers with a scowl and scanned them.
“The first looks like a classic custodial abduction to me. Separated parents, kid is picked up at day care and disappears. The description the day care provider gave is way too similar to the father. The second we can disregard because the kid was too old. He was snatched from an elementary school. That puts him at five or six, maybe even seven. It’s outside the age range for the rest of these cases.”
“And the last?” Raegan flipped to the bottom paper.
“Geographically, I don’t think it fits. The kid went missing from a farm in the Coast Range. Unfenced yard, property bordered by woods. Kids wander. Even toddlers. You hear about it all the time. I bet they’ll find that boy in the spring after the snows melt.”
Sickness rolled through Raegan’s stomach. If Alec was right and that child had simply wandered off, she couldn’t imagine the guilt those parents would feel when he was finally found.
Actually . . . her gaze lifted to Alec seated across from her, sipping his coffee once more. Memories flickered behind her eyes, all the times she’d told him what had happened to Emma wasn’t his fault, and the guilt that had lingered in his gaze.
Yeah—she swallowed hard—she could imagine it. She’d lived it. Was still living it.
Looking back down, she set the papers aside and reached for the ones he’d laid out in front of him. “So why these? What about them caught your attention?”
“The kids are all young enough not to communicate well.”
Raegan’s brow lowered. The ages varied by case. Some were as young as one, others as old as four. A one-year-old she could buy as not able to communicate, but a four-year-old could definitely talk . . . and in some cases never stop talking. “This one here is very verbal.” She held up a page. “She was three when she was taken, and her parents reported she started talking at eleven months.”
“True, but even a highly verbal three-year-old kid isn’t going to be able to articulate well. You asked me why these. I look at these cases and see a pattern. Remember that story you were researching a few years ago? The Coast Killer? The one who was murdering all those girls?”
“Yes.” Raegan glanced down at the papers again. The Coast Killer, as the news had labeled him, had murdered five young women in a six-month span and dumped their bodies in the Coast Range. It had been one of the biggest stories in the area when Raegan was first starting with the station.
“You have to think of these cases like that. There are patterns if you look hard enough.”
“Are you saying you think these cases are linked? If they were linked, the police would have picked up on that.”
“Not if they weren’t looking deep enough. And isn’t that what you think? That they’re linked? Isn’t that why you asked me to look into them with you?”
His eyes were as clear and focused as she’d ever seen them. He spent his life photographing others. Saw things most people didn’t. He could do the same with a case file, which was exactly why she’d wanted to show him all this. But thinking the cases were connected and hearing that stated out loud were two very different things.
“So what’s the connection?” she asked. “If we’re saying these cases are linked, there has to be something more than just the fact each of these kids were young at the time of their disappearance and likely didn’t communicate well. The Coast Killer went for blonde-haired, blue-eyed, early-twenties women. Most he met in bars. One he picked up on the side of the road when her car broke down. I don’t see those kinds of similarities here.” She held up a paper. “This boy is African American, this one Hispanic, this girl is Caucasian, and this one’s Korean.”
“Yeah, I noticed that.” He shifted in his seat, rested his elbow on the table, and brushed a hand over his mouth, looking uneasy. “It’s almost as if . . .”
“As if what?”
Frowning, he dropped his hand. “It’s a stupid thought.”
“There are no stupid thoughts when we’re brainstorming, remember?”
Something in his eyes told her he did remember the often-used phrase from when they’d worked on something together in the past, but he clenched his jaw and looked down at the papers before she could tell what he was thinking. “On the surface, race could seem random. But something tells me it’s not. It’s almost as if someone’s targeting certain kids for a reason. Like whoever’s doing this is going shopping. One African American kid here, one Korean kid there. It’s very specific, almost like someone’s checking off a list.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. But I bet if we get a map and plot where each of these kids lived, we might see other similarities.”
Raegan looked back down at her paper, confusion wrinkling her brow. “They all came from urban addresses, I see that, but these are all over the Northwest.”
“Right. A couple of these kids went missing in Seattle, a few right here in Portland. There are two from Spokane. They’re all metropolitan areas, like you noticed, but look at the Portland addresses.” Raegan’s gaze followed his finger to an address listed on the paper. “You know where that is, don’t you?”
Yeah, she did. One of the worst neighborhoods in the city.
Alec leaned back in his seat. “Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think race is the link here. I don’t even think it’s age so much as it is the parents. How they lived, what kinds of neighborhoods they lived in. I bet if we searc
h deeper we’ll find that each of these kids came from low-income families. Maybe noneducated or drug-addict parents. People who don’t have the resources or connections to support a lengthy search for a missing child.”
Like the resources they’d had when they’d searched for Emma.
Raegan swallowed hard as she stared at the papers. The police would have looked into the possible links between these cases. They would have checked race and age and location. Would they have seen what Alec saw, though? That it wasn’t just the location but type of location that could link these kids together?
Alec reached across the table and pulled three papers from the stack still in her hands. “These are the ones I say we start with. All three kids went missing here in the Portland area. They’re local. Should be easy enough to check out. Neighborhood alone isn’t going to tell us anything. We should interview the parents to see if our hunch is correct and if there are any other similarities between the kids we’re missing. After that we can widen our search and look into the others.”
“And what about the other two. The kids who were found yesterday? The girl in the hospital and that little boy found in a car on the side of the highway?”
“They may or may not be connected. We can find out pretty quickly, though. Remember my friend Hunt?”
Hunter O’Donnell. Of course she remembered him. Hunt and Alec had gone to college together. “Yes.”
“I’ll give him a call and see if he can look into those two for us. He has a way of digging up things even the press can’t.”
Hunt was a former-military man who now ran his own PI and securities firm somewhere in Portland. Raegan had never approved of some of his questionable methods of obtaining information, but she’d been willing to look the other way when Emma had disappeared, and she was willing to look away now. “Okay.”
Alec finished the rest of his coffee. “Why don’t you pick which one you want to start with tomorrow and we’ll set up a meeting with the parents.” He pulled his phone from his pocket and checked the screen. “I have a conference call about an upcoming assignment in the morning, but I could meet you around one o’clock if that works for you.”