The Missing

minutes, he was going to be plenty distracted. Sliding a look back at the house, she said, “Bad things happened in there, Jones. I can feel them pushing at me. Can’t fight it much longer.”

    He nodded. “I had expected as much.” He glanced around and finally cupped a hand around her arm, gestured to his car with his other hand. “I don’t imagine you want to sit down in that place.”

    No. No, I don’t, she thought grimly. Jones opened the back door and she crawled inside, cradling her injured hand to her belly. Curling into a fetal position, she stopped fighting and let the madness take her.

    Bad didn’t even begin to describe the torment that awaited her. Sheer hell didn’t describe it. It was an evil unlike anything she had ever felt in her life, and Taige had dealt with a lot of evil. She felt their presence screaming at her, felt their pain. The shock.

    Beatings, harsh and pitiless. Days of starvation and dehydration. The ugly blackness of despair as the mind finally accepted what the body had already known. Death waited, and the only question was when it would come and how painful it would be.

    The young children were the worst though. They never stopped believing that somebody would come for them. That they would be saved. But they weren’t. They died screaming, broken and alone.

    All until Jillian. Jillian broke the cycle.

    Taige came out of her stupor screaming and crying. Her entire body twitched and jerked. It was a familiar feeling, and one she didn’t really care for. The bastard had used a Taser on her again. Sending Jones a dirty look, she said hoarsely, “I think you like having a reason to zap me.”

    Jones cocked a brow. “Taige, I may be a bit of a bastard, but I have no desire to cause a woman harm.” Then he shrugged. “But you weren’t coming out of it. You’ve been under more than an hour, and you screamed for a good twenty minutes. You weren’t stopping.”

    Yeah. She knew that. But just because she knew a physical blow was sometimes the only way to bring her out, that didn’t mean she had to like it. Her limbs shook with exhaustion as she climbed out of the car. Glancing at the brightly lit house, she asked, “Have they started looking under the floorboards yet?”

    “No. There was a crawl space, but somebody sealed it with concrete. We won’t be able to do anything until we tear up the floorboards.” He looked back at her and said, “There’s nothing to be found in that house that will lead us to him, is there?”

    Taige shrugged. “You’d be better to ask one of your precogs that, Jones. But I really don’t think so. This guy, he’s too careful.”

    With a bitter smile, Jones muttered, “We’d noticed. They’ve been keeping me updated. We haven’t found a single hair. Not a fingernail. The one thing we did find was a receipt under the refrigerator, dated three years back. It was from one of those old-fashioned cash registers, didn’t have so much as an address on it. Just the date.” Shaking his head, Jones said, “What are we supposed to do with a receipt? Nothing but prices, a date, and a total.”

    “No fingerprints, I assume?”

    Jones’s flat look was answer enough. Sighing, Taige shoved away from the car. Her head was pounding, her throat felt raw from screaming, and she wanted to sleep so badly, she almost hurt from it. But instead, she locked her legs and said, “Before they tear it up, I want to go over it once more, okay?”

    He gestured to the house. “Be my guest.” As she walked off, he called out, “You need to give me an official report, Taige.”

    “I wasn’t here on Bureau business,” she said over her shoulder.

    Sliding in front of her, Jones blocked her path. “You look like hell, Taige. You need some downtime.”

    Taige shook her head. “No, I don’t. What I need is to find something that can lead me to the bastard who did this.” Then she walked off, her head down and her gut already churning. “If you’re smart,” she muttered to herself, “you’ll just stay out of this part.”

    But Taige hadn’t ever claimed to be a genius. Once more, she walked back into that hellish house, watching as the team went over everything with a fine-tooth comb. No, it was more detailed than that. They might as well have used X-ray vision, because they peered between the cracks in the floorboards, they checked out the walls, they moved out the few appliances and took them apart.

    She joined them, skimming the