The Missing

home.”

    “Get some rest.”

    “We will call you. There’s nothing else you can do here.”

    The dumb shits that came up with that BS ought to have the daylights knocked out of them. His daughter was missing—and they were suggesting he take a fucking nap.

    The exit to his house was coming up, and he started to slow down, hitting the turn signal. But at the last second, he shot back onto the freeway, watching as his escort ended up blocked in by an eighteen-wheeler with a rebel flag emblazoned across the grill.

    He watched from his rearview mirror to make sure he wasn’t being followed, and then he shot off the next exit so he could get back on the interstate, heading north. He wasn’t sure if he could make it to the airport and get on a flight to Alabama without the feds catching up with him, but there was no way he was going to drive the six hours to Gulf Shores.

    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