She’d vanished into thin air. Assumed kidnapped, then when she hadn’t been found after two years, presumed dead.
The possibility remained, albeit small and unthinkable, that Erin had simply left, but she’d had no reason to do that. She’d been a happy kid, loved her family, and, on the phone with Cam that afternoon, had been reticent to walk home alone. Those were not the signs of a runaway.
Unfortunately, there were few other signs either.
As he and Jamie filled in the suspect list next, their leads continued to dwindle. They cross-checked each potential suspect who’d been identified in the past investigation and crossed out more than half of them as dead or in jail, including several members of rival B&E crews. It was a harsh reminder of where Cam and Bobby could have ended up if they hadn’t gotten their shit together. By the time lunch rolled around, he and Jamie were eating white clam pizza and flipping through his mother’s books again, looking for any new leads. Most of her notes were information Cam and other detectives had collected and discarded over the years. Tips, interviews, wild shots in the dark. A mother, just like a brother, desperate for clues, but the tangential rarely connected to the concrete.
With a frustrated groan, Cam tossed aside the book in his hand and lay back on the floor, staring at the ceiling. “What did she think we’d find in these?”
When Jamie didn’t reply, Cam lolled his head his direction. All of Jamie’s focus was on the book in his hand. “What are these?” he asked, turning the book to Cam and holding open the front cover.
“Character names,” Cam answered. “From the book. She used to write them there so she could keep the family tree straight.”
“But these don’t match.” He tapped with his index finger, holding the cover open. “The listed names are not the characters’ names.”
“They can be for the series, not just that one book.”
Jamie shook his head. “Cam, listen to me, none of them match. And they’re all female.”
Cam righted himself and reached for the book he’d earlier tossed aside. It was the typical family tree sort in that one, but in the next book he grabbed from the stack, it was a nonconforming list like Jamie’s. “The names in this one don’t match either. And I recognize some of them.” Especially the ones that had been crossed through. “They’re missing persons cases that we evaluated and discarded as—” Cam froze at the name halfway down the page, a line struck through it.
“What is it?” Jamie said.
He turned the book around, open, and held it out to Jamie. “Anyone’s name look familiar?”
Jamie’s eyes widened at the halfway mark, same as his had. “Holy shit, Rebecca Wright? Is that the same Rebecca Wright from the case last spring?”
“I think so. I remember an old missing persons report in her file.”
Twisting, Jamie grabbed his laptop and brought it to his lap, fingers flying across the keyboard. Cam scooted to his side and waited for the search to run. Mentions of the heist case dominated until Jamie added “Boston or Massachusetts” to the search parameters. On page two of the refreshed results, they got a hit. A missing persons report filed in Waltham, and it was their Becca all right. Same jet-black hair, same dark eyes, same cocky, confident expression.
“Did you know she was from around here?”
Cam shook his head. “No, she didn’t have an accent at all.” That said, her ex-girlfriend was a linguistics expert. “She was reported missing when she was fourteen.”
“Only two years older than Erin. She didn’t ping the investigation?”
Cam shook his head. “We didn’t connect her to the case because she was found shortly thereafter. A runaway.”
“Well, your mother did for some reason.”
“Mom was making lists too,” Cam said. “Of similar cases.”
“And crossing out the names on girls who were found, like Becca. Do you recognize the other names? The ones not crossed out?”
Most but not all of them. And those were Cam’s first real lead in twenty years.
A stack of work was waiting for Nic when he returned to his office Monday morning—some of his own cases, some of Bowers’s—including a motion he had to argue on less than an hour’s prep. Even flying by the seat of his pants, it felt good to be back in his home courthouse, the judges and clerks happy to see him again.
Outside the courthouse though, he couldn’t say for certain whether the tall, suited Black man standing in the sun at the bottom of the steps was happy to see him.
But then that hard, take-no-bullshit scowl broke into a gleaming white smile and the man was transformed. Morphing from imposing federal agent to an absurdly attractive man who knew how to flash that smile to get exactly what he wanted, including a Bureau Assistant Director’s position. Helped that Elton Moore was also supremely competent at his job.
“You think they appreciate weather like this in San Diego when they have it year-round?” Moore spread his arms, showing off his massive wingspan.
The guy did not look like a bureaucratic desk jockey.
“You’re right.” Nic made his way down the courthouse steps. “This is something only us Bay Area natives can truly appreciate.”
