High-Risk Affair. RaeAnne Thayne

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СКАЧАТЬ painful to see this shrine to his father’s memory. Navy recruiting posters covered all the walls and Cam had hung one of Rick’s SEAL T-shirts in a place of honor, along with his father’s picture and the many medals he’d been awarded, both before the Afghanistan helicopter crash that killed him and posthumously.

      Her sister thought Megan shouldn’t encourage his obsession with all things military. With his epilepsy, he could never be able to serve in any branch of the service, let alone a physically demanding special forces unit like the SEALs.

      But Megan hadn’t the heart to take this away from him, not when it was the only way he knew to connect with the father he had idolized.

      With one more look at the bed, she closed the door and walked across the hall to check on Hailey.

      Unlike her brother, who liked to sleep like a potato bug all curled up under his covers, six-year-old Hailey sprawled across her bed, her quilt thrown off and her pink ruffly nightgown riding up to her knees.

      Her bedroom was like her—pink and girlie, with a cupboard full of Barbies and her American Girl doll on the nightstand, standing guard over the only discordant element in the room, Hailey’s pet rat Daisy.

      The rat blinked at her, turned around once in her cage, and went back to sleep. Megan shuddered. She hated the darn thing and had lobbied hard to leave her behind with a classmate back in San Diego, but Hailey wouldn’t be swayed.

      She tucked the blanket back up over her daughter, knowing it would be down again in a few moments, then left Hailey’s door ajar.

      In the hallway, she contemplated going back to bed but she wasn’t at all sleepy. With her mind racing now, she knew trying to sleep would be futile for some time.

      She would go down and make some tea, she decided, and perhaps grab her knitting bag and knit a few rows on her latest project to calm herself and relax enough to go back to sleep.

      She walked down the stairs and out of habit checked the dead bolt and the security system.

      She started for the kitchen then paused, something niggling at her. The nightmare she couldn’t even remember now had left her unsettled, uneasy. She frowned and turned around, some motherly instinct guiding her back up the stairs to Cameron’s room.

      She had learned not to question that intuition. More than once she had been guided to drop whatever she was doing to search for him, only to find him in the grips of a seizure.

      His epilepsy had been under control with medication for some time and he had been sleeping soundly five minutes ago, but she knew that could change in an instant.

      She studied the shape on the bed under that Army green blanket. Something was off. Though she hated to wake him, she reached for the blanket and tugged it down, then felt her whole world turn ice-cold.

      Instead of Cameron’s tousled blond hair and freckled nose, she found a rolled-up sweatshirt. She yanked the blanket off and gasped at the pillows stuffed there to approximate a nine-year-old boy’s shape.

      Her son was gone!

      4:45 a.m.

      “You sure you’re up to this again so soon? I can find somebody else.”

      FBI Special Agent Cale Davis turned off his electric razor and flipped up the lighted visor mirror of the agency SUV. “I’m good,” he answered. “I’m glad you called me.”

      His partner frowned at Cale’s assured tone as he drove through the predawn darkness through a sparsely populated region of Utah.

      “I should have tried a little harder and found someone else.” Gage McKinnon gave a heavy sigh. “Allie’s going to skin me alive when she finds out I called you. You only had two weeks off and you need at least double that after what happened.”

      “Leave it, McKinnon. I’m fine. Two weeks was more than enough.”

      Gage looked as if he wanted to argue, but he didn’t, much to Cale’s relief. He would prefer talking about anything else but his last case and its horrible ending.

      “What else can you tell me about this missing kid?” he said to turn the subject.

      The SUV’s headlights illuminated a carved and painted wooden sign for Moose Springs, population three hundred and eleven. Probably some overachieving Boy Scout’s Eagle project, he thought.

      The town was about an hour east of Salt Lake City, bordering the Uinta National Forest. He’d been here only once before in an official capacity, in a case involving a good friend, Mason Keller. Unofficially, he had been here many times. Mason and his wife Jane lived on a small ranch nearby and the town had always struck him as clean and friendly. Mayberry R.F.D. in a cowboy hat.

      He didn’t want to think something dark and sinister might lurk here. Yet when the FBI called out its Crimes Against Children unit, chances were good all was not as picture-perfect as he wanted to believe here in this quiet community.

      “Cameron Vance, nine years old,” Gage answered him after a moment. “Father, Rick Vance, killed in action in Afghanistan. Mother Megan, thirty-two, works out of the home as an accountant. Mom puts the boy to bed at usual time. Goes in to check on him around two and finds him gone, a blanket rolled up to make the casual observer think he’s sleeping away. There was no sign of forced entry and the alarm system was engaged and undisturbed, but there was also no obvious escape route either from the second-story window. No dangling bedsheets, no convenient awning. It’s fifteen feet to the ground, heck of a leap for a nine-year-old kid.”

      Not if the kid was a limber little monkey like Charlie Betran, Mason and Jane’s adopted son, Cale thought.

      “What compelled the mother to check on him? Does he make a habit of wandering?”

      “According to initial reports from local authorities, Megan Vance said she had a nightmare around that time and checked both children out of habit.”

      “Any idea what time he disappeared?”

      “We’ve got a four-hour window between ten when Mrs. Vance checked on him before going to bed and two when she awoke again.”

      “She didn’t hear any suspicious noises?”

      “Nothing, just the wind.” McKinnon studied the GPS coordinates on the dashboard unit, then turned at the next street and headed out of town again before going on with his narrative. “After she finds him missing, the mother spends a little time looking around the house and yard, then calls local authorities around oh-three-hundred, who immediately issue an Amber Alert and call us.”

      “What makes anybody think a crime has been committed here? Sounds like the kid just sneaked out. It seems a little early in the game for Amber Alerts and calling in the FBI.”

      “You’d think,” Gage said, “but this has the potential to be a high-profile case and I think the local authorities want to make sure all their bases are covered from the beginning. They’re running it as a crime scene until they have evidence that it’s not.”

      Another high-profile case. Great. Cale closed his eyes. The image of two pretty little girls with dark curls instantly burned behind his eyelids and he jerked them open again.

      He wasn’t sure СКАЧАТЬ