Full Tilt Read Free Page B

stalls that someone converted to small rooms, confinement cells.”
    “How can you tell? It’s such a mess.”
    “We found heavy doors with locks, metal shackles and hardware anchored in the walls and floors, remains of mattresses, at least half-a-dozen cells so far. Somebody was definitely using the place, possibly for porno movies, for bondage, for torture. God only knows, Ed.”
    Brennan felt the hairs on the back of his neck rising.
    “Mitch, over here!”
    One of the forensic technicians was on his knees delicately brushing the ground with the care of an archaeologist. Another technician was recording it.
    “Look,” the technician said while clearing the small object, “we can run this through missing persons databases and ViCAP.”
    Rising from the grave of sooty earth and ash was a fine chain and a stylized charm of a guardian angel.

5
    New York City
    K ate Page, a reporter with Newslead, the global news service, blinked back tears as she consoled the anguished father, who she’d reached on his phone in Oregon.
    The man on the line was Sam Rutlidge. His eleven-year-old son, Jordan, had vanished six years ago while walking to the corner store, two blocks from his home in Eugene, Oregon. Kate was writing a feature on missing persons across the country, on the toll cold cases exact on the families.
    “I accept that he’s gone,” Sam said, “and before cancer took my wife, she told me she’d accepted it, too, that she’d see our boy in heaven. But I need to know what happened to him. Not knowing hurts every day, like an open wound that won’t heal, you know?”
    Kate knew.
    She underlined his words in her notebook, the quotes she’d use in her story. Her heart ached for Sam, a haunted trucker. She asked him a few more questions before thanking him for the interview.
    After hanging up, Kate cupped her face in her hands and let out a long breath. Then she walked from her desk across the newsroom to the floor-to-ceiling windows where she looked at the skyline of midtown Manhattan.
    It never gets any easier.
    A part of her died each time she talked to a grieving mom or dad. It always resurrected her own pain. When Kate was seven years old her mother and father had died in a hotel fire. After the tragedy, Kate and her little sister, Vanessa, lived with relatives, then in foster homes. Two years after their parents’ deaths, Kate and Vanessa’s foster parents took them on a vacation. They were driving in the Canadian Rockies when their car flipped over and crashed into a river.
    The images—hell, that moment in her life—were fused into her DNA.
    The car sinking...everything moving in slow motion...the windows breaking open...the freezing water...grabbing Vanessa’s hand...pulling her out...nearing the surface...the icy current numbing her...her fingers loosening...Vanessa slipping away...disappearing... Why couldn’t I hold you? I’m so sorry, so sorry.
    Kate was the only one who’d survived.
    Her sister’s body had never been found. Searchers reasoned that it got wedged in the rocks downriver. Still, in her heart, Kate never gave up believing that Vanessa had somehow gotten out of the river.
    Over the years, Kate had age-progressed photos of Vanessa made and submitted them with details to missing persons groups. She drew on her contacts with them, with police and the press, and she looked into open cases. But any leads always dead-ended.
    It had become her private obsession.
    Why was I the only one of my family to survive?
    Wherever Kate went, she secretly looked into the faces of strangers who might now resemble her sister. For twenty years, Kate’s life had been a search for forgiveness.
    I know it’s irrational, I know it’s crazy and I should just let it go.
    But she couldn’t. It’s the reason she’d become a reporter.
    “Kate, are we going to see your feature today?”
    She turned to see Reeka Beck, Newslead’s deputy features editor, and her immediate boss, standing behind her.
    Reeka