Bonnie Read Free Page A

body and the man who killed her. Nothing is going to budge her until she does it.”
    Dickson muttered a curse. “Dammit, don’t you have any influence on her?”
    “Not enough to stop her from doing this.”
    “There has to be a way. Eve Duncan. Can you appeal to her?”
    “No, you don’t understand.”
    “Then make me understand, dammit. Why can’t this wait?”
    “Because she’d tell me it’s waited too long already.” He might as well fill him in though it probably wouldn’t help. “Eve Duncan had this child when she was sixteen, the father was a Ranger in the Army and was reported dead. She didn’t have an abortion or give the kid up for adoption. She kept her. Part of the time, her mother helped take care of her, sometimes Bonnie was in a United Fund nursery while Eve worked. She did correspondence courses at night. She was almost finished when her daughter, Bonnie, disappeared. The police became certain that she was a victim of a serial killer. In fact, they’d thought they’d caught and executed him. Ralph Fraser. He’d killed other children, but he hadn’t killed Bonnie. Which meant Eve had no closure. She had to find her daughter’s killer. She had to bring her daughter home. It’s been the guiding obsession of her life. She has a long-term relationship with Joe Quinn, a police detective, who has helped her search for her daughter. She has an adopted daughter, Jane MacGuire, who is now an artist. But it’s the search for Bonnie that’s the center of her universe.”
    “And she’s drawn Catherine Ling into that universe as a satellite,” Dickson said harshly. “Let her find her own kid.”
    “She never asked Catherine to help her.” To hell with diplomacy. He’d known Eve Duncan for years, and she’d done favors both for him and the agency. She deserved better than Dickson’s condemnation. “Look, Eve Duncan pulls her own weight, and she’d keep Catherine out of it if she could.”
    Silence. “You like her.”
    “You’re damn right I do. She loved Bonnie more than life itself. Having her kidnapped and murdered could have destroyed her. She didn’t let it. She went back to school and earned a degree in Fine Arts at Georgia State. She now has certification as a computer age-progression specialist at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Arlington, Virginia. She also received advanced certification for clay facial reconstruction after training with two of the nation’s foremost reconstruction artists. Do I have to tell you how many more degrees she’s earned since then? She’s world-famous, dammit. She’s an icon. Don’t you think she deserves to get this one thing she wants in the world?”
    Another silence. “Maybe. But if she’s been searching all these years, why does Catherine Ling have to be involved? What makes her think that she can help?”
    God, he was stubborn. But at least he was listening. That was a start.
    “Catherine started investigating Bonnie’s kidnapping and came up with a suspect that no one had uncovered. John Gallo, Bonnie’s father, had not been killed while in the Army as reported. He’d been captured and thrown into a North Korean prison, where he’d been subjected to seven years of starvation and torture. When he escaped from the prison and landed in a hospital in Tokyo, he was diagnosed with severe mental problems, blackouts, schizophrenia, hallucinations…”
    “Imagine that,” Dickson said sarcastically. “Poor bastard.”
    “But a prime candidate for a suspect if he bore resentment toward Eve. What better revenge than killing her child?”
    “Catherine’s reasoning?”
    “Yes, sound reasoning. You agree?”
    “Yes, so Catherine’s after Gallo?”
    “She was, but after hunting him down, she decided that she might be wrong. So she decided to go after the two very dirty Army Intelligence officers who sent Gallo to Korea. Nate Queen and Thomas Jacobs. They were into smuggling artifacts and drugs and sent Gallo to