Abandoned: A Thriller (12 page)

Tommy is working at the stove. He’s wearing a red-checkered apron, a look and design that remind me of Betty Crocker cookbooks. I first saw him wear it in his own apartment. It was all he was wearing, and we barely made it through breakfast before I attacked him.

I walk over, stand next to him, and place a hand in the small of his back, that comfortable spot. He moves some bacon over onto a paper towel to drain the grease. It sizzles deliciously. “How do you want your eggs?” he asks. “Fried or scrambled?”

“Fried today, I think.”

“We aim to please.” He nods toward the refrigerator. “Bonnie fresh-squeezed some orange juice this morning.”

“My favorite. Wow.”

He gives the slightest shrug. “She’s pretty helpful right now.”

“Did you guys talk about last night at all?” I murmur, low enough that Bonnie can’t hear me.

“Nope. I doubt we will either. But I think everything is okay, for now.”

I lean against the counter and sip my coffee and watch as she sets the table. She catches me watching and gives me yet another tentative smile.

“Yes,” I say to Tommy. “I think you’re right.”

“For now,” of course, remains operative, but that’s life.

“All ready,” he announces, using the spatula to scoop everyone’s eggs onto a serving plate. “Can you get the bacon?”

I transfer the now less-greasy bacon from paper towel to actual plate and carry it over to the dining table. Bonnie grabs the pitcher of OJ from the freezer. Tommy adds a plate of toast, checks everything over, and nods once, satisfied. “Let’s eat,” he says.

The room is filled with the sounds of people too busy eating to talk: clinking of utensils against china, the crunch of bacon being bitten into, the quiet slurp-and-swallow of orange juice and coffee disappearing into stomachs.

I’m on my second cup of coffee, and between the shower, the great breakfast, and the relative harmony of my home, I’m feeling awake and alert and refreshed. I eat the last of my eggs and push my plate forward.

I rub my stomach in an exaggerated way and roll my eyes heavenward. “Awesome.” I sigh.

“I agree,” Bonnie says. “You cook a good breakfast, Tommy.”

“Mom told me a man who can cook would always make a favorable impression with the ladies. I guess she was right.”

I check the clock. Bonnie will have to leave to catch the school bus in about thirty minutes. Time enough to tell them both about my offer from Director Rathbun. It’s a bit of a skydive, but scheduling, for this family, is difficult.

“I have something you guys need to know about,” I say. “Something I was offered.” I give them the full rundown, leaving nothing out. When I finish, both of them are quiet. I scan their faces nervously, looking for any signs of upset.

“Well?” I ask. “What do you think?”

Tommy wipes the corner of his mouth with the paper towel in his hand. “Bonnie’s the one with the time crunch,” he says. “You and I can talk after she catches the bus.”

I turn my attention to Bonnie. “So?”

“What would change?” she asks.

It’s the perfect question, really. The key one.

“Well … I guess not much in the beginning. We’d still be living here.” I frown. “No, that’s not right, is it? We’d be covering the whole USA, so I imagine even though we’d be living here, I’d be traveling more. Kind of like last year, when I had to go to Virginia. Later, if this becomes permanent, we might have to move to Virginia.”

She nibbles on her toast. “What’s Virginia like?”

I don’t have a detailed answer to this question. I spent twenty-one weeks in Quantico, Virginia, for my training, but I don’t think Quantico is a good demographic. It’s on 385 acres of woodland. Breathtakingly beautiful in the fall, surprisingly mild in the summer, at least when I was there. Humidity was higher than California, for sure, and rainfall was scattered but always welcome. I was gone before the winter.

“It has four seasons,” I say. “Snow in the winter. Trees with the red and yellow leaves in the fall. Nice summer. Beautiful spring, I guess, though I wasn’t there for that.” I struggle to put words to the faint memories. “Everything feels older, but not in a rundown kind of way. California has a newer feeling to it. The East Coast has more weight.”

“I’d like to see it,” she says.

“Of course, honey. I promise, if this all comes to pass, we’ll take a trip out there.”

She brushes her hands off over her plate. “Okay, Mama-Smoky.”

“Okay what, honey?”

“I’m okay if we have to move. And I think you should do this job.”

“Why?”

“What you do is serious. It’s important.” Her voice is grave. She means what she’s saying, maybe more than a thirteen-year-old should “mean” anything. “Your boss is right. You’re the best person for the job. If that’s true, then you have to take it. It’s your duty. And it’s my duty to help make it okay for you.”

I have no immediate response to this. Duty? She throws the word out with certainty and intensity. It’s another look into the direction her mind is growing, and it makes me wonder if agreeing to do this would be all wrong, after all.

“I haven’t decided yet, but I’ll let you know.” I check the clock. “Time for you to go.”

She collects her backpack and I walk her to the door. The bus stop is only a block away. She turns before she leaves and gives me a hug. “I love you, Mama-Smoky,” she says.

This I can handle. I hug her back. “I love you too, baby. Don’t forget what I said about the extracurricular activity.”

“I won’t, promise.”

Then she’s out the door and I watch until she disappears at the curve of our street. I close the door and sit back down at the table. Tommy has poured me another cup of coffee, bless him. He’s nursing his own and gives me a little smile.

“She’s something,” he says.

“Something? What’s with all the ‘duty this’ and ‘duty that’? Sometimes I think it would be better if I hung it up altogether. Quit the FBI and just concentrated on her.”

He studies the inside of his cup, takes a sip, then studies me. “I’ll back your play whatever you decide, Smoky. You want to quit the FBI and be a mommy? I’m with you. You want to head up this strike team? I’m with you. If you don’t want to work, we won’t need your income, and if we move, money won’t be a problem.”

One of the things I found out about Tommy as our romance progressed
was that he is, if not rich, financially stable. He isn’t cheap, but he is thrifty. He struck out on his own as a security consultant after leaving the Secret Service and has done very, very well for himself. We can’t rent private jets for weekend jaunts to Las Vegas, but money isn’t a meaningful issue. I have my own assets too. The house was paid off by Matt’s life-insurance settlement and is worth a lot more than what we originally paid for it, even with the current housing-market depression.

All of that is nice, but it’s not what I need to hear from him. “But what do you think I should
do
, Tommy?”

He smiles at me and reaches out a hand to stroke my cheek. “I think if you quit working you’ll go crazy. It’s still in your blood. One day it won’t be, but for now it is. When I first joined the service, and for a long time after, that’s how it was for me. I had to leave when I was ready. You’re not ready.”

“And Bonnie?”

He sips from his cup and looks off into the distance. “People don’t come in boxes with ingredient listings, Smoky, so we’ll never know for sure how Bonnie is going to turn out. That’s life. There are a few things I do think. I think she needs to go to therapy. I understand why you haven’t taken her there before, but it’s time. In my opinion.”

I sigh. “You’re right. I just have trouble trusting anyone else when it comes to dealing with her.”

“I know. But get over it.”

“You said ‘a few things.’ What else?”

“What you did last night was on the money, Smoky. As long as you’re on the case as her mother and don’t let that slide, I think you’ll be doing the right thing. I’m not convinced that it would be any better for Bonnie to have you around all the time, if you weren’t working. In some ways, it might be worse.”

“Why?” I ask, intrigued.

“She needs a balance. What happened to her, and to her mom, did happen. We can’t unmake that. On the one hand, exposure to what you do runs the risk of keeping her attention on it too much, leading to things like the cat incident.”

“But on the other hand?”

He shrugs. “On the other hand, I think watching you do what you do, seeing you put away the kind of men who killed her mom, is
therapeutic. Cathartic. It gives her a goal. It’s a balancing act, a darn shoddy one, but I think it’s more helpful than harmful as long as we keep that balance.”

I grin in spite of the gravity of the conversation; I can’t help it. “‘Darn shoddy’?” I tease. Tommy is a Boy Scout. Had literally been one. He never, ever uses profanity.

He doesn’t respond to the humor. My stomach flutters a little at the determination in his eyes.

“I’ll back you in either direction, Smoky, but I have one condition.”

“What’s that?” I ask, though I already know.

“If you decide to take the position, you tell them everything.”

You don’t even know what everything is, Tommy.

I keep this to myself. What he’s asking is fair.

“Deal.”

He shakes his head in the negative. “Don’t be flip. I want your promise. Your oath.”

Tommy flouts almost all of the Latin macho stereotypes, but now and again these oddities appear. Things like “your oath.” I’d crack a joke about it if he wasn’t so deadly serious.

Relationships are born of love but survive on compromise. Who was it who said that?

I reach over and take his hands in mine. Both are warm from our coffee cups.

“I promise.”

“We have a hit on her fingerprints, honey-love.”

It’s the first thing I hear when I walk into the office. This is one of the good mornings, the well-organized kind. I am already well caffeinated and awake.

“Tell me,” I say.

Alan and I had met in the parking lot and taken the elevator up together. James and Callie had arrived before us. Alan unscrews the top of his thermos and pours coffee into his mug. I gave him a coffee grinder for Christmas. He’d rolled his eyes at the time, joking that all the real cops grew up on Dunkin’ Donuts and 7-Eleven coffee, but not long after he’d started bringing the thermos.

“I’m a junkie now,” he’d confessed. “After fresh ground, everything else tastes like crap.”

“Her name is Heather Hollister,” Callie says.

I frown. “Why does that name seem familiar?”

“Because,” she continues, “Heather Hollister was a homicide detective. From our very own LAPD. She disappeared eight years ago, without a trace. No body was ever found.”

“I remember that case,” Alan says, nodding. “Eight years? Jesus Christ.”

I remember it too. “It was big news,” I say, “and not just in the law-enforcement community. She was married, right?”

“That’s correct,” James pipes in. “Husband worked for an Internet service provider. His name is”—he consults his notes—“Douglas Hollister. They had twin sons, Avery and Dylan. They were two at the time.” He looks up from his notes. “They’re ten now.”

It’s an unnecessary statement, but I understand why he says it. James is human, however hard he tries to hide it. The concept of this woman being held for eight years is difficult to grasp. Her children provide the necessary contrast.

Avery and Dylan were two when she went away. They would have been riding tricycles and speaking in small sentences, disobeying and acting out, like all two-year-olds. When she disappeared, they were still three years away from kindergarten. Now they’re closing in on the fifth grade or are already there.

I force myself to focus. “What do we know about the investigation that was done at the time?” I ask.

“Not much, I’m afraid,” Callie says. “The FBI assisted, of course, but the primary investigation was headed by LAPD.”

Of course it was. Heather was one of their own. No way they were ceding that to anyone else.

“Do we have any news on Heather’s status?” I ask.

“I called the hospital from home,” Alan says. “She’s quiet now, so they’re no longer sedating her. She still hasn’t spoken.”

I chew on a thumbnail, a bad habit that replaced smoking. I think it’s a pretty good trade.

“Callie and James, I want you to collect all the case files from that investigation. Do not, under any circumstances, tell anyone why we want them or release her name to the family yet.”

“Why?” Callie asks.

“Because,” James says, already keeping pace with me. “Everything points to either someone who knew her or collusion with someone who knew her. How else do you take a trained homicide detective without leaving a trace?”

“Understood,” Callie says. “What are you and Alan going to be doing?”

“We’re going to go and see Heather Hollister at the hospital. Maybe knowing her name will help us reach her. She’s the best witness we’ve got.”

James stands up and heads toward the door.

“Wait!” Callie cries.

Everyone stops.

She smiles a sly smile. “Aren’t any of you going to ask me how my honeymoon night went?”