Don't Lose Her Read Free

tracks or bridges. Do that, Diane. Come on, you’re a federal judge, you’re smart, you don’t panic, you think. Come on, girl.
    She feels the van sway again, making a wide turn—left? How many turns is that now? Two rights and a left? Shit. She doesn’t know. How long has it been? Five minutes? Thirty seconds? She tries to roll, to fold her knees up to her stomach, trying to protect her unborn child.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” she sputters, spitting the cloth out away from her mouth as she yells. “Do you know who I am? I’m not just some woman on the street. Do you know what you’ve done? You will bring a lot of shit down on your heads if you don’t …”
    A hand clamps down on her mouth over the fabric, not just covering, but clamping, the palm and fingers gripping her lips, chin, and nose and squeezing them painfully together. She gasps for breath and gets only a partial draw of air. She struggles to wrench her head away, but the grip is strong.
    He’s cutting off her oxygen. Again, she tries kicking, but he holds on, squeezing and crunching the flesh of her face together. She’s suffocating. Oh God, my baby, she thinks. She begins to gag at the loss of air and then stops struggling. Only then does the hand relax, letting her breathe again.
    No one says a word. The message is clear: struggle or attempt to speak or yell, and I will kill you and your child.

Chapter 4
    I am on I-95 heading north into Palm Beach County, driving at an unsafe speed, running in the far left lane and racing up on the back bumper of anyone in my way, flashing my lights. These are acts that I would despise from anyone else, but now I am driven by the unmistakable sound of panic in Billy’s voice on the cell phone.
    â€œShe didn’t come back to her office after lunch. The staff got worried because they knew she was resuming a hearing at one, and she is never, ever late.”
    His words were tight and succinct, even more so than they usually are. Billy Manchester is naturally not a man to waste words, but I could almost feel his vocal cords tightening in his speech.
    â€œThey sent an aide out to the restaurants that she goes to and talked to the managers and waitresses who know her by sight. Nothing. No one had seen her during the lunch rush.”
    I knew Diane was a creature of habit. She ran her life like clockwork. As she’d risen in the ranks from West Palm Beach lawyer to statewide prosecutor and then on to the federal bench, she prided herself on efficiency, keeping ahead of the docket, taking on the toughest cases with the clear-eyed view of justice that her father, a lifelong judge himself from a prominent, third-generation Florida family, had instilled in her practically from the womb.
    The only time she’d blinked in her life was when she fell in love with Billy, an equally prominent attorney in his own right. But Billy was a black lawyer from Philadelphia who, though brilliant, rarely tried cases and preferred to work behind the scenes, juggling law and investment work for a bevy of clients. Their mixed-race marriage had ruffled the feathers of Palm Beach society, but they had weathered the initial storm. The more they acted as if it didn’t matter, the more their friends adopted the same attitude. When Diane announced her pregnancy, the family finally softened. A grandchild will do that.
    â€œOne of her aides came across an officer on the sidewalk in front of Nature’s Way, where Diane goes for salad. The patrolman was taking a report from a bystander,” Billy had said.
    â€œThe woman said she’d seen someone pulled against their will into a white van and she’d called 911 on her cell.”
    â€œIt was Diane, Max. Same clothes, same description, same timeline. Someone abducted her. I need you at the scene. I’m at her office. The FBI is already setting up a tap on all the phones here in case a ransom demand is made. But I need