1.1
Morgan jerked awake out of the same old nightmare. Hands where she didn’t want them, a mouth trying to arouse her. No matter how she fought, she couldn’t escape them. He wouldn’t take no for an answer. What a way to start the day. Well ahead of the alarm, she was wide awake and knew there was no way she was going back to sleep. She looked at the rumpled sheets and punched her pillow. It wasn’t fair! Why the hell did a dream have the power to wake her up continually? Every damn night for a week, it was getting old. Rest was out of the question now.
“Might as well review the file then,” she muttered. This new missing persons cold case was proving as frustrating as her repeated nightmares. The question was how to find a child who went missing over twenty years ago, vanishing in a tight-knit small town.
“Barely more than a baby,” she thought. Six years old and oh-so-innocent. Detective Wilcott had contacted her and asked her to help again.
The only thing available to identify the child was an old school picture taken at the beginning of first grade. She sat at the computer and scanned it into her state-of-the-art software and aged the child from six to 26, capturing each year as it morphed by.
Pretty little thing.
Little Margaret Elizabeth McIntosh was an adorable doll-like child. She had strawberry blonde hair, slanted down turned eyes, and milky white skin with the faintest blush of rose on her cheeks. Short for her age, at just over three feet, the finely shaped fingers of her right hand rested under her chin. The photographer had done a competent job of fine focus. The details of the little rose-bud mouth and pale eyelashes were there. So was the incredibly pale green of her irises.
The computer estimated her height as a grown woman at five foot four inches and gave her a weight of 115 pounds. Not bad. Those eyes were startling in the sharper planes of the aged portrait. She would be 26 years old now. I wonder if you survived it all, Morgan thought, and ran her hands through her sleep tousled hair. Cut short, it stood up in spikes all over her head, dyed all the colors of the rainbow. Her niece had chosen the shades and the daringly short haircut during their last spa day.
Morgan paced through her dining room, into the kitchen, around through the TV area, and back to her minuscule home office. Her apartment was roomy by most standards, but when she was restless, the walls constricted. Her long legs ate each segment of her laps in a few steps.
No need for coffee to wake up, Maggie my girl, I’m going to find you and bring you back to your family. It won’t be easy, but I’m compelled to do this. Damn it all. She has me already. Jimmy knows there’s no way for me to resist.
She stripped off the thin grey T-shirt and strode into the shower. Hopefully, the hot water wouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes to kick in or she’d be even more awake. Her eyes closed under the low pressure of the water conserving shower, she grabbed the shampoo and squirted the all-purpose cleanser into her hand. Frugal with her own beauty needs; it doubled for body wash and conditioner. Five minutes later she was out and toweling dry.
Morgan went over to her closet, grabbed fresh sweats and a bright blue T-shirt, and she was on her way to the door. After pulling on her high-tech running shoes, she clattered down two floors and out the back entrance. Leaning against the wall in the apartment parking lot, she began a quick series of warm-up stretches and then took off running.
Blank your mind and just enjoy the sensation of your body adjusting to the pounding speed of your workout. Come on, Morgan, let it all go. Just breathe and feel your heart thumping and your lungs working overtime.
After her initial sprint, she settled into a ground eating jog and would cover the three-mile run in just over twenty minutes.
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At the police station, Detective James Wilcott sat looking at the like crimes files and picked out six more children who had disappeared without a trace in the same two-year period. All of them girls, around six years old. They had come from all over the northern states and Canada. They could have been sisters, judging by the similar descriptions coming up in the files. Morgan wouldn’t be happy when she saw the other files he had culled out. There seemed to be no connection between them except age and the same general description, all of them doll-like, blonde and tiny for their age. He felt guilty dragging Morgan in again, but her special talents were just the ticket for getting these cold cases closed.
He leaned back in his ratty old office chair, pressing his fingertips together in front of his chest and pursing his lips. His suit always had a slightly rumpled quality to it, rarely freshly pressed. He preferred to be comfortable. Slate grey eyes half closed. He put the timeline together and found the children had gone missing on an average of every two months over a twenty-six-month period starting in 1998. Margaret Elizabeth was the first and little Dahlia Anne Grover was the last.
I wonder if there is enough in the budget for us to get to all of them, not one of them is too far from a major city. Small tidbits, but at least it was somewhere to start. If this gets put together into one crime spree, going across international borders, interstate, and interprovincial in Canada, it’s going to get really messy.
He grimaced, thinking of the inevitable involvement of the FBI. At least he knew the Canadian cops would be far more interested in solving the kidnappings than getting credit for the arrest.
Parents will need to be contacted, and in three of the cases one or the other passed away. Might as well get down to putting a travel plan together, because knowing Morgan, she would want to get to the homes of the children involved. They could start with the local one. Margaret Elizabeth McIntosh had lived in the tiny town of Laurel, Montana. Not too far outside of Billings, it would be a relaxing drive into the country.
“Damn it!” The detectives sitting at the battered desks looked up.at his disgusted exclamation.
One of them was in Quebec, language barrier too. Where the hell would he be able to find a translator on the fly in the middle of nowhere, Canada? He looked up and out across the bullpen. Maybe Jackson… New Orleans, French, right? No point in worrying about it yet. First, we need to establish connections between these cases. Time to put the research in. There had to be more in common between them if he was going to persuade anyone this was an international kidnapping spree.
He stood up slowly and made his way toward the Captain’s office. Knocking on the door, he pushed it open.
“Captain, can I have a moment of your time?” he said.
“Make it quick. I just got a call on a developing domestic hostage situation,” snapped Captain Grant.
“I have a group of kidnappings, which might be connected to the cold case you handed me the other day. Permission to request files from the locals in each case?” asked Jimmy, hoping he would get away without telling the boss about the international nature of what he was looking at.
The Captain waved him away. “Get on with it. Have you called Morgan in on it yet?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Get it together and start working your way through it. Now scram.” The Captain turned to answer the radio call and waved him out. Jimmy retreated and breathed a sigh of relief. No point in complicating things until he had to.
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Margaret caught her breath as she climbed up the side of the mountain above the ranch. The hillside was steep, and the path zigzagged up toward the high meadow. It was fall, and the meadow was deep green, grasses nodding with heavy seed buds. She could see wild asters budding everywhere. She desperately wanted some time alone, away from her sisters.
She was the oldest and detested the responsibility for keeping the peace and making sure they kept their husband happy. Bloody bastard got mean, and she took the beating every time. She barely remembered her birth parents. She was raised on the ranch owned by her husband’s parents. He was one twisted asshole of a father! She knew there had to be some way to rescue them all. Six sisters had joined her over the first two years, and all of them had been told they were incredibly lucky to be chosen for a special mission. They were to be the wives of an important man. He was only 10 when she arrived but spoiled rotten and demanding. She found the log that was her habitual resting place and eased down.
Alone for a change, she sat and breathed slowly, trying to calm herself. She came here to remember the before time. When she went to school and was happy. She had an older brother, and parents who adored both their children.
“God, if you can hear me, help me.” There has got to be some way to get away from here and get word to the outside before another one of us dies giving birth with no medical aide.
Two of her sisters rested across the meadow beneath the pines with their tiny babies. Their screams still echoed through her mind. One had bled out after giving birth to a perfect baby boy, except he wouldn’t breathe, and a crude cesarean had delivered the other after she had expired, trying to push a monster baby through her narrow hips. The child had also been still born but considered more of a loss because she was a girl.
Somehow, she was going to get them found. She wasn’t going to let her son grow up here and she knew this one was a boy. There had to be a way.
