Vanished

But the few—

He shook the thought from his mind and pivoted toward Kim. “I’m going to check with the neighbors. You need to stay right here and wait for my deputies. Don’t open the door to anyone else. Understand?”

With tears still streaming down her face, Kim nodded. “Daddy, I didn’t want…”

Hearing her call him Daddy tore at his fragile composure. She’d stopped using it several years ago when she’d informed him she was too big to call him Daddy. He pulled her to him for a quick hug. “Everything will be all right, honey.” When he opened the back door, he said, “See if you can get hold of Neil at the baseball complex and have him come home.”

“Hey, maybe Ashley went to see Neil practice.” She grabbed the phone.

“Maybe. If so, I’ll be next door. Lock the door after I leave.”

He waited on the patio to hear the lock click into place. J.T. hated to quench Kim’s theory. But Ashley disliked anything to do with sports and didn’t even like to go to her brother’s baseball games. So Ashley going there didn’t seem likely.

At a jog he headed toward his nearest neighbor whose view of his backyard was blocked by his six-foot wooden fence down both sides of his yard that the previous owner had erected because he had wanted some privacy. That very privacy could have made it easier for someone to come onto his property undetected.

Day one, 9:30 p.m.: Ashley missing three hours

“Kim won’t come out. She refuses to eat.” Susan grabbed the pot of coffee and began to refill everyone’s cups as distant thunder rumbled.

Exhausted, J.T. pushed himself to his feet, his muscles protesting the movement after the hour spent sitting at his kitchen table mapping out a strategy to find Ashley. “I’ll talk to her.”

The blaring of the phone cut into the silence. Its sound jarred J.T. He whirled around, reached across the glass table and grabbed the receiver before it rang again. “J.T. here.”

“Sir, we checked all the places you gave us and found nothing,” Deputy Derek Nelson said, frustration marking each word spoken.

All energy drained from J.T. His eyes squeezed shut for a second as he leaned against the table for support. “Go back over every square inch a second time. The church. The school. The park.”

“Yes, sir.”

J.T. slammed the phone down. “Derek reported nothing.”

“We still have four more teams who haven’t called in yet.” Kirk Carver studied the map of the town and the surrounding countryside. “Maybe she wandered off and lost track of time and they’ll find her.”

Lost track of time? Three hours? After dark? J.T. faced his deputy and wanted to laugh. He knew in his gut that Ashley hadn’t walked away from the yard willingly. Someone had taken her. What little evidence they had pointed in that direction. He needed to be searching like his sons. “As soon as I talk with Kim, I’m going back out. All this planning isn’t doing my daughter any good.”

“We need to coordinate where people look. We need—”

“I don’t. You can,” J.T. interrupted his deputy. “There’s got to be something—some kind of evidence that will tell us what happened, where to look.”

“We scoured your backyard before it got dark. Except for her shoe there was nothing.”

“And those footprints by the bushes.”

“We’ve taken a casting. There’s still a possibility—”

“What possibility? That Ashley is at a friend’s playing? That someone opened my back gate and innocently wandered into my yard to stand by the bushes and face the back of my house?” All his anger and frustration—held at bay while he’d focused on planning—swamped him. “Nothing about this feels like a missing person. No one has wanted to say it, but I think Ashley has been kidnapped.”

Susan gasped, bringing her hand up to her mouth. “Why?”

J.T. swung his gaze toward his secretary. “If I knew that, I might know who.”

“Are you sure?” Her eyes wide, she dropped her arm limply to her side.

“Don’t you think with practically the whole town out looking for the past couple of hours we’d have found Ashley by now?”

“Sir, we still need—” Kirk paused a few seconds “—to drag the lake and search the surrounding woods. Your house isn’t too far from it. The two teams checking all the places around the lake haven’t reported in yet.”

His deputy’s statement hung heavy in the sudden silence. J.T. lowered his gaze to the tile floor, his hands clenching at his sides. “I know we’ll have to drag the lake if she isn’t found soon,” he finally managed to say, though his throat closed around each word.

“She could have gone to the lake. Had an accident.” Kirk downed the last of his coffee and stood.

J.T. didn’t know which was worse: thinking Ashley was at the bottom of the lake or she was kidnapped. At least if she had been taken there was a possibility she was still alive. Is that why I’m insisting she’s been kidnapped?

No, he knew the reason. The evil he had encountered in Chicago nearly destroyed him to the point he had tried to forget the ugliness by drinking. Now he felt in his gut his past had come back to haunt him.

“We’ll do it first thing tomorrow morning if we haven’t found her by then.” J.T. scanned his kitchen. “And we need to move the command post down to the station.”

“J.T.,” Rachel Altom, another one of his deputies, said from the doorway, “I’ve cataloged everything in Ashley’s room and secured it. You need to go through it and determine if anything is missing.”

Only an hour ago he’d briefly checked Ashley’s room to see if her favorite doll or stuffed bear was missing. Both had been on her bed in their usual place, mocking him with their presence. The rest of his survey of his daughter’s belongings had been quick. He’d barely held himself together and didn’t know how he was going to do a more thorough search.

“I didn’t see anything earlier, but I’ll do it again.” J.T. didn’t say it was a waste of time. He knew in his heart his daughter hadn’t run away, but this investigation needed to be by the book and he was the only one who could do the search.

“I need to talk to Kim again.” Rachel took a mug of coffee that Susan handed her. “Now that she’s had time to think, I want to make sure she’s positive about what Ashley was wearing.”

J.T. shook his head. “I’ll do it. But unless Ashley changed after school, what Kim told you was right.” He remembered his oldest daughter fleeing to her room an hour ago, refusing to talk to anyone. The longer Ashley was gone the more silent Kim had become.

J.T. plodded across the kitchen and passed Rachel at the doorway. The hallway to the bedrooms lay before him. The sight of Kim’s and Ashley’s closed doors tightened his chest, making breathing difficult. As he approached Kim’s room, he drew in one shallow breath after another but nothing alleviated the pressure. It felt as if his heart had broken into hundreds of pieces.

For the first time in years, since his time in Chicago, he wanted a drink. He wanted to drown his pain in a bottle of alcohol, to forget that evil existed. His hand shook as he reached for the handle.

Lord, I can’t go back to that kind of life. Help me! Bring Ashley home safely.

He knocked softly on Kim’s door, then pushed it open. Kim sat trancelike in front of her small TV set, listening to the Amber Alert broadcasted over the Central City television station. He moved closer as his daughter rewound the tape and began to play it again. He touched her shoulder and leaned forward to switch off the TV.

“Kim—”

“Daddy, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” She spun toward him and threw her arms around his waist.

Although she buried her face against him, he heard her sobs and the tightness in his chest expanded. Stroking her hair, J.T. fought to keep his own tears under control. For the past few hours they were ever present, a huge lump in his throat.

He swallowed several times. “Honey, you’re not at fault.” He managed to kneel next to her and cup her face, forcing his daughter to look at him. “Do you hear me? You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“You paid me to look after her, not talk on the phone. I told her to go out back and play. If she hadn’t, she would—”

He pressed his fingers over her lips. “Shh. Ashley played out back all the time, often by herself. You had no idea this would happen to her.” He regretted his admonition of Kim earlier, but there was no way he could take it back. His words uttered in frustration would be with both of them for a long time. He knew what guilt could do to a person. He’d dealt with it six years ago with his drinking and his wife’s death.

“What if she ran away because of me?”