ANOMALY.MIL (The Conspiracy Series Book One): A Romantic Suspence Novel Read Free

cleared the master closet.
    "Catherine!" his brother-in-law yelled from downstairs.
    "She's not here, Dave," Ansel shouted back, holstering his pistol out of sight before walking downstairs to interrogate his brother-in-law. "She hasn't called you?"
    "No!" Dave ran his hand through his sandy blond hair. "I've been calling her on my car phone the whole way home," he said, on the verge of panicking.
    "Okay." Ansel looked down and gave him a job to do. A task to distract Dave's active mind, which was undoubtedly imagining all sorts of horrible things. Ansel's only problem was that he did not have to imagine those things. He had seen them, and he was finding it difficult not to place his sister in the scenes he tried so hard to forget. "I want you to call all of her friends. Maybe she turned her phone off when she went to lunch."
    "Shouldn't we call the police?" A glassy sheen covered Dave's dark blue eyes.
    It stabbed at his chest, but Ansel had to tell him the truth. "It won't matter. They won't do anything for at least twenty-four hours." But he would . "Do you know what article she was working on? Was it dangerous?"
    "Dangerous!" Dave scoffed. "She writes a magazine about food and wine in Seattle. How on earth could that be dangerous?"
    "There's a lot of money to be made in those industries." Not to mention jealousy and pride. "Did she review restaurants, vineyards, that sort of thing?" He was reaching and he knew it, but Ansel could not bring himself to think about the reason most thirty-two-year-old women were kidnapped, in broad daylight, from their own homes.
    "Yeah, she just finished a review yesterday." Dave was nodding, clutching at the lifeline he had just been thrown. His brother-in-law walked over to the coffee table and grabbed the latest issue of Cat's magazine. He flipped through the glossy ads until he got to the credit page, and pointed at a name. "Seneca Reed. She's Catherine's photographer." And his blind date . "She'll know what reviews Cat was working on for the current issue." 
    "Great," Ansel smiled, helping Dave to the sofa. "You call her friends. Cat might have just gone out with one of them."
    "Okay." Dave nodded, thankful to have something to do.
    "I'm going to have a quick look around the house, before I go see Ms. Reed." He walked off before Dave could ask uncomfortable questions that he would not answer.
    Ansel started his search in the kitchen. The coffee pot was on, and her cup sat half full on the counter, neither of which was a good sign. His sister would have finished her coffee then rinsed it out, placing it in the dishwasher, or…she would have set it down with the intention of coming back.
    A knot started forming in the pit of his stomach as he walked into his sister's study. Her laptop was open, and perfectly parallel to the edge of the desk. Papers were stacked neatly to the right of it, with her cell phone weighing them down.
    He froze.
    Ansel picked up his sister's phone, which he suspected Cat silenced when she wrote. Having borrowed her phone, he tapped out her birth year on the security screen and the screen sprang to life. He glanced down at the phone icon, and could see the seventeen calls she had missed over the last thirty minutes.
    He closed his eyes, knowing from the evidence that his sister had been taken against her will.
    "No one's heard from her," Dave said, coming down the hall toward the study. Ansel slipped his sister's cell phone in his back pocket. "Have you found anything?"
    "No." Ansel shook his head. "Just looks like she went out." He tried to smile. "We don't know that she didn't. I'll go talk to Seneca Reed, and you wait here until Cat comes home."
    "Sure." Dave looked calmer. "And you'll call me—"
    "The second I hear from her." Ansel placed his hand on his brother-in-law's shoulder. "I promise."
    That was all he could promise. He left his sister's home with a sinking feeling. Cat was the only family he had left, and he was lucky enough to like her as well as