Page 77 of Honor ’N’ Duty

“Honey, look at me.” When she didn’t, he pulled away enough that he could tip up her chin. “We will find her. Do you hear me? I’ll do everything in my power to find her, and I won’t stop looking until I do.”

Over her head, he took in Jamie’s grim expression. Slipping into Army Ranger mode, he locked eyes with Jamie first, then the Manasquan sergeant. “What do we know?”

“I was in the shower when this happened.” Jamie shook his head. “I’m sorry, man.”

“Not your fault,” Kade reassured him.

The sergeant, whose name tag said K. Malloy, looked at his pad. “Ms. Velez and her daughter were on the beach when Ms. Velez went to the aid of another woman who was being roughed up by her boyfriend. When Ms. Velez turned around, her daughter was gone.”

“I searched the house, the garage, and my next-door neighbor’s property,” Jamie said, again shaking his head.

Kade hated what he had to ask next, but there was no getting around it. “Laia, is there any chance Rosa went into the water without you?” No matter how hard he tried not to imagine it, awful images of Rosa’s little body floating somewhere out there in the ocean or sinking to the sandy bottom only to be found days later came to him.

“No!” She shook her head adamantly. “Rosa wouldn’t do that, she wouldn’t! We come to the beach all the time, and we have strict rules about not going in the water alone. She’s a good swimmer. Besides, I would have seen her. I was standing right at the water’s edge. If she had gone into the water, I would have seen her. I would have.”

“Okay, okay.” Which brought them full circle back to the only remaining possibility. Rosa really had been taken.

“Ms. Velez told us her daughter has never run off before and has no history of disappearances,” Sergeant Malloy said. “We have officers searching the beach and the Coast Guard’s been notified. We secured the girl’s last known location for forensics to process the scene. I also have a request in for a county search dog.”

“We can help with that.” Kade tipped his head to Smoke. “He knows Rosa. If she’s out there, he’ll find her.” To Laia, he said, “Tell me about that couple.”

“They were arguing. I thought he was going to hit her, so I ran over to help. As soon as I got there, things seemed to have calmed down. When I turned around, that’s when I couldn’t find Rosa.”

“What did that couple have to say? Did they see anything?” he asked Sergeant Malloy.

Malloy shook his head. “We couldn’t find them.”

“I looked for them, too,” Jamie said. “No sign of them anywhere. I don’t have any cameras facing the beach. Neither do most of my neighbors. Most cameras are aimed at the road in front of the houses.”

Kade clenched his jaw. “They were a decoy.”

“A decoy?” Laia’s voice cracked. “You mean they set me up so someone could take Rosa?”

“Looks that way. Did you see where they went?”

She pressed her lips together, looking more distraught by the second. “Back down the beach in the other direction, but I didn’t see where. When I ran back to the water to look for Rosa, I wasn’t paying attention to anything else but finding her.”

“That’s okay, honey.” He stroked her hair. “You were distracted. That was their intention.”

Through the windows facing the beach, Kade saw half a dozen uniformed officers combing the beach. Beyond, the kiddie carnival Ferris wheel spun round and round.

Kade looked at Jamie, then nodded to Sergeant Malloy. “Did you tell them everything?”

Jamie shook his head. “That’s your call.”

While he’d planned on keeping Laia and Rosa’s location a secret from everyone, including the local PD, the plan had changed. Drastically. “We don’t know for certain,” he said to Malloy, “but we have reason to believe that Rosa Velez was kidnapped by Fernando Colon.”

Malloy had been taking notes, but at the mention of Colon’s name, his pen froze over his pad. “The Fernando Colon?”

“Yeah.” Sonofabitch. “The only question is how he found them here.”

“You want me to call in the FBI?” Malloy asked. “If it’s a kidnapping, they’ve got jurisdiction.”

Jamie pulled his phone from his belt. “I’ll take care of that.”

Meaning, Jamie would call Dayne Andrews, a close friend of theirs and a top-notch FBI K-9 agent. Dayne and his fiancé, billionairess Katrina Vandenburg, lived in a castle—literally—just over an hour away. All Jamie had to do was say the word, and Dayne would be here in a heartbeat.

And in the meantime, Kade was seriously contemplating his backup plan—a little unexpected visit to Colon’s house. Confronting a drug lord on his own turf and accusing him of kidnapping a little girl might not be the smartest move, and his agency would probably shoot him down, calling it way premature without any substantial evidence pointing directly at Colon. Kade didn’t give a shit.