Gone (Deadly Secrets #2)(7)
No matter how much Alec wanted to ignore that fact, he couldn’t. He couldn’t because he knew as soon as John Gilbert was free next week, he’d be involved in some other child’s abduction before long.
Raegan sat at the desk in her cubicle at the KTVP studio, scanning reports of missing children in the Portland metropolitan area.
She’d spent the first two years after Emma’s disappearance scouring the web for similar cases. Many had seemed promising, but none had panned out. There were always inconsistencies . . . the manner in which the kids were taken, the circumstances of the families, even the ages of the children. She’d passed all the information off to Jack Bickam at the FBI, and he’d checked into each and every one, but none had ever been linked to Emma’s case, and after a while, when Raegan had realized her searches were getting her nowhere, she’d spent less and less time looking and more and more time trying to adjust to her new life alone.
But this girl—the one she’d seen today in that hospital—was eerily similar to Emma. Not just because of her hair color or because she’d sort of looked like Emma, but because she’d shown up in a park near where Emma had disappeared.
Raegan’s fingers stilled on the touch pad of her laptop when she came across a case from two years before. The boy had been two years old, African American, living with his parents in northeast Portland. He’d disappeared on a field trip with his day care center. Nothing about the case was at all the same as Emma’s. Nothing except one small detail Raegan might have missed if she hadn’t read the whole report: the fact the boy had disappeared in the same area where Emma had gone missing, at the same park where the girl today in the hospital had shown up.
Raegan’s heart beat fast as she scrolled through the article, searching for a photograph of the boy. There wasn’t one. She’d known there wouldn’t be one. But she scrolled back up and stared at the name of the day care center anyway.
The Giving Tree Center.
Emma had never gone to day care. Raegan and Alec had hired a private nanny who’d looked after Emma at their home in the Pearl District when they’d been at work. But that park . . . the connection to Emma’s disappearance and to that girl today was too much to ignore.
Raegan hit “Print” and gathered the article from the printer on the corner of her desk. Excitement pulsed inside her, but as she looked down at the papers in her hands, uncertainty rolled through her belly. More than anything, she wanted to show this to Alec, wanted to know what he thought, but part of her already knew what he’d say. He’d tell her she was reaching. That she was making connections that weren’t really there. That she was getting her hopes up for nothing. He believed Emma was dead. He wouldn’t want to hear any of this.
But still . . . If he saw this, maybe he’d—
“There’s my girl.” Jeremy’s voice made Raegan jump, and she quickly flipped the papers over and set them on her desk as he came around the corner of her cubicle. “All set?”
Raegan blinked several times, unsure what he meant. Then it hit her. Their dinner plans with Greg Jamison, the five o’clock news anchor, and Chloe Hampton, his current flame. “Oh. Um, I lost track of time.”
Jeremy stepped into her cubicle and brushed a hand over her hair. “Are you alright, darling? You look rattled.”
Of course she was rattled. Her emotions were on a whiplash roller coaster today, and now she’d just found what could be a lead. She was just about to tell Jeremy that when she remembered the look on his face as they’d left the hospital together earlier in the day. An emotion she could only define as relief.
Jeremy Norris had no use for children. He made it clear that kids weren’t welcome in the building during working hours. Oh, he loved to run a tearjerker piece now and then because a good human-interest segment on kids boosted ratings, but his career was center stage in his life, and according to him, it should be in each and every life of the people who worked for him as well.
Raegan slowly closed her laptop. No, she couldn’t tell Jeremy what she’d found because he’d see it as reaching as well, but for very different reasons than Alec. And as much as she wanted to just head home and keep researching, she knew if she bailed on this dinner with Jeremy and his friends, he’d get suspicious. The last thing she needed was a lecture about not doing her job during normal business hours.
Great move there, dating your boss.
“I’m fine,” she said, shaking off the thought. She pushed to her feet and tucked the papers she’d printed into her bag along with her laptop. “Just a long day.”
Jeremy smiled and squeezed her shoulders when she turned. “Then this dinner out is perfectly timed, because it’ll take your mind off everything that happened today.”
Raegan doubted that. Looking into Jeremy’s dark eyes, she knew she wasn’t going to be able to stop thinking about Alec tonight or tomorrow or even next week.
Or how much today had to have affected him.
Standing in the middle of a big family party was the last place Alec wanted to be tonight.
With a bittersweet longing, he watched his parents, Michael and Hannah McClane, on the far side of the private dining room in the trendy Portland restaurant, shaking hands and doling out hugs to close friends who’d come to help celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. His own marriage hadn’t made it three full years before it had crashed and burned, and he had no one to blame for that but himself. Clearly, he hadn’t been paying attention to his father’s shining example of what it took to make a successful husband.