“Is there anything you want to tell me?”
“I’m fine.” Erin slung her purse over her shoulder. “Who was that man?”
“Just some homeless guy.”
Erin raised her left eyebrow. “You didn’t give him money, did you?”
I shrugged.
She shook her head and walked toward the back door.
This is how we communicated lately. With body language instead of honest words. Sometimes I felt more like her child than her husband.
“You sure you’re okay?” I called after her. She still looked a little pale, and it worried me.
“Yeah, of course.”
I felt my concern ease a little. It seemed she wanted to pretend things were normal as much as I did.
“I need to drop off a painting with someone at Antoine’s on the way home if we have time.”
“Do you need me to grab it from the studio?”
“I can get it.”
Fifteen minutes later, we were on our way to the city park. As we drove down St. Charles Avenue, I looked for Moses, but didn’t see him. I thought about his white smile and unusual name.
Practice went well, as usual. But the whole time, I couldn’t get Moses out of my mind. The more I thought about him, the more I was sure that I knew him from somewhere. I didn’t think he
was a past client, but O’Malley Bail Bonds had helped thousands of people and I couldn’t remember all of them. We had what my brother termed “frequent flyers”—those people who we’d bail out of jail on a monthly basis—and I was pretty sure Moses was not one of those.
On the ride home, Chris called to see if we needed anything from the store. “Baking potatoes,” I told him after consulting with Erin. I let Chris know that we’d be running a few minutes late since Erin needed to drop off a painting to a client.
After stopping at a gas station to fill up the Durango, we headed for the French Quarter. Antoine’s was a popular French Creole restaurant for tourists and locals alike. I knew Erin was excited to finally get her artwork displayed there. As we were on the outskirts of the Quarter, I heard a thump come from the back of the truck and felt the vehicle become suddenly unsteady on the road.
“Damn. I think we have a flat.” I pulled the Durango over in an empty parking lot that faced the area known as the Riverwalk. “Stay here, I’ll check it out.”
I got out and inspected the rear tires. As I’d suspected, the left rear tire was flat, and I could see a gaping hole in it.
How the hell did that happen?
I thought to myself. Just as I was getting up, I felt a hand on my shoulder. For the second time in the space of a couple of hours, my heart thumped loudly in my chest and an uneasy feeling washed over me and made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.
I slowly turned and came face-to-face with the figure standing behind me. “What the hell are you doing here?”
R
achel Scott let her paddleboard drift through the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. She felt the stress slowly melt away the farther she got from the shore. The search for her daughter, Mallory, had been fruitless so far—she could hardly believe it had been almost five years. All traces of her daughter being a part of a child abduction ring had amounted to nothing. She had come to Mexico to follow a new lead on the case, but after more than two weeks, she had little to show for it. Rachel dipped her paddle into the water, adjusted her stance on the board, and expertly turned the board around to head back. Glancing at the shore of Cozumel, she realized she had gone out farther than she’d intended to. When Rachel was on her paddleboard, time always seemed to slip away. She was a little more than a mile offshore, and it would take a good fifteen minutes or so to paddle back.
Mallory, her only child, had been just three years old when she’d mysteriously disappeared. Rachel remembered the day clearly, her pain and frustration never fading, always fresh in her mind. That morning had been hectic. She had been married to Rick at the time of her daughter’s disappearance, and they’d lived in Bal Harbour, an exclusive gated neighborhood near Miami.
Rick had just left for a business trip to Orlando to oversee the opening of his new luxury-car dealership. Mallory’s nanny had called in sick, leaving Rachel with no choice but to work from home that day. Rachel, who was a top real estate broker, had sat on her front porch crunching numbers, while Mallory had played on the lawn with her dolls. Rachel was working contentedly amid the familiar sounds of suburbia—dogs barking, lawn mowers roaring to life, the occasional fluttering of a passing hummingbird—when a ringing telephone had taken her away from her daughter for about two minutes. In that time frame, Mallory had disappeared.
Rachel still remembered clearly how that day had unfolded: how law enforcement questioned her for hours until Rick made it back home, how helpless she felt as she waited by the phone for the detective to call her with updates. She had walked around the subdivision calling Mallory’s name until her throat was hoarse, then driven all over Bal Harbour, stopping at all the playgrounds and studying the faces of all the children.
Eventually, Rachel’s obsession with tracking every possible lead to find her daughter caused her relationship with Rick to fall apart. He failed to understand the depths of her grief. They decided to separate, and ultimately divorced.
Several months after Mallory’s disappearance, Rachel had seen on the local news that another toddler had gone missing in the Miami area. She’d reached out to the boy’s mother, Janine Jensen, and they’d formed a tight bond. Using nothing but her instinct, Rachel had helped Janine rescue her son, Jack, from Janine’s estranged husband. Then they’d decided to team up and form a search-and-rescue operation for missing persons; thus, Florida Omni Search was born. Since the company’s inception, they’d helped locate over a hundred missing people. Red Cooper, who was the lead detective on Mallory’s case, kept in touch with Rachel and decided to join the Florida Omni Search team after he retired from the police force.
Ironically, it was Janine’s former husband, Scott Jensen, or Scotty, as he was called by family and friends, whom Rachel had come to Mexico to find. She’d received a tip while she was in Florida wrapping up another missing-persons case that Scotty had been linked to a child abduction ring that was busted in Cozumel. After the FBI seized computers belonging to members of the ring in a warrant search, they’d combed through all the files—and found a picture of Mallory along with several other photos of young children. Rachel had demanded to see the photo and had started to sob at the image of her round-faced toddler with large green eyes and red hair in pigtails. All the data they’d found pointed to the fact that the children in the images had been kidnapped and put up for illegal adoption.
When Rachel arrived in Cozumel, she met with the FBI agent in charge, Hammond Lewis. He’d told her how everything transpired. It all started when a family on vacation in Cozumel reported that their toddler girl was missing. When the FBI was called in to investigate, fingers started pointing toward a housekeeper and her son who worked at the hotel where the girl’s family had been staying. After obtaining a search warrant, the FBI found the computer in the housekeeper’s cottage with pictures and profiles of children who were allegedly kidnapped. There were also files on the families who were looking to adopt—and from the looks of it, most of them were quite wealthy. The housekeeper was arrested along with her son. The son wasn’t talking, but the housekeeper was denying any involvement. One good thing came out of it: the little girl who’d been kidnapped had been found safe in a nearby house and was reunited with her family. Two women who were found in the house taking care of the girl were also arrested. In the investigation, it was found that the house was deeded by a dummy corporation that the FBI traced to a couple from Miami: Helen and Dirk Amsel. Rachel thought back to her first meeting with the FBI when she came to Cozumel, still paddling back toward the coastline as she went over all the details in her head.
“So how exactly is Scotty Jensen involved?” Rachel had asked Agent Hammond Lewis.
“We believe he is the mule of the operation.” Lewis had explained to her again how the FBI believed the illegal adoption ring was formed. “Helen and Dirk Amsel were the masterminds of the operation and may have recruited Scotty to find potential children to kidnap. Those children were kept in a ‘safe house’ until they were adopted by unsuspecting wealthy families who would do anything and pay an absurd amount of money to adopt a child. Several e-mails between Scotty, the Amsels, and the housekeeper’s son were found on the same computer that held Mallory’s photo.”
“Did any of those e-mails mention Mallory?” Rachel had asked him.
Agent Lewis had shaken his head. “So far, no. We just have her photo.”
Rachel recognized the photo found on the seized computer as one of the many pictures of Mallory that was taken during a birthday party for a mutual friend the weekend before Mallory disappeared. She had given the FBI the details of the party and who had attended. “It was held at a local public park,” she’d told Agent Lewis, trying to hold back tears. “Anyone could have taken the photo.”
Over the course of the two weeks that Rachel was in Cozumel, she’d had two more meetings with the FBI. She had told them that she didn’t know Dirk or Helen Amsel or any of the other parties involved in the kidnapping ring that had been arrested so far. She explained to Agent Lewis her seemingly coincidental relationship to Scotty Jensen.
“Shortly after Mallory went missing, I met Janine Jensen. She was separated from Scotty and was trying to get full custody of their son. During the investigation of her son’s disappearance, I found out that Scotty had previously worked for Rick Scott Imports, my ex-husband’s car dealership, as a mechanic. However, Scotty was fired before Rick and I were even married.
Anyway, after we found that Scotty had kidnapped his own son to get back at Janine, I realized there could be a possible connection to Mallory’s disappearance. I talked with Rick about it at the time, but he dismissed the idea that Scotty could be connected to Mallory’s kidnapping.”
“He showed no interest in following up on it as a lead?” Lewis had asked Rachel.
“Not really. Rick said he just couldn’t imagine that Scotty had been involved. He said that Scotty had been fired because he never showed up on time and his work was suffering.”
“What department did he work in?” Lewis had asked, taking notes on his legal pad.
Rachel didn’t remember ever meeting Scotty during the many company functions that she attended with Rick. Of course, Rick Scott Imports employed over a hundred employees. It was hard for Rachel to keep all the names straight.
“Scotty was a mechanic. Rick said he was a model employee for a few months. Then Scotty started showing up late or not at all. His coworkers also mentioned to management that Scotty was driving a new BMW and flashing lots of cash. Rick suspected a gambling problem. Eventually Scotty was fired.”
“Do you think he would’ve kidnapped your daughter to get back at Rick for the firing?” Hammond had asked.
“I asked Rick the same question. He didn’t think so. Scotty was long gone from the dealership before Mallory was even born.”
“What do you think?” Hammond had asked her.
“I think anything is possible. Scotty kidnapped his own son to get back at Janine. He wasn’t happy about the pending divorce and he wanted revenge. He was mad that Janine was trying to get full custody and he thought he could take care of Jack better than she could.”
“It’s possible that Scotty was involved in the child abduction ring while he was working at the dealership. It wasn’t a gambling problem. He was getting money from the child abduction ring.” Lewis had continued to write notes on his pad. “We need to take
another look at child disappearances in the Miami area around the same time that Mallory disappeared.”
“Red Cooper, who was the lead detective on Mallory’s case at the time, did take a look at Scotty,” Rachel told him. “He didn’t find anything suspicious when he questioned him, although Scotty couldn’t provide a solid alibi for the time frame that Mallory disappeared. He’d claimed he was out of work at the time and was probably home the morning Mallory vanished.”
“We have a warrant out for Scotty’s arrest,” Hammond had assured Rachel. “We are also looking for the Amsels. They have a residence in Miami and one in Germany, but so far they haven’t shown up at either place.”
Rachel finally got to the shoreline and dragged her board onto the soft sand, feeling happy that she’d been able to get out on the water to clear her head. She located the backpack she’d left behind on a beach chair and pulled out a plastic hair clip. She took her long auburn hair and fashioned it into a messy bun, securing it with the clip. Taking a long sip of bottled water from the backpack, she tried to gather her thoughts. It was time to figure out her next move. As she stared out at the blue water, she asked herself the questions she’d asked Hammond several times during their meetings.
If Scotty or the Amsels were found, would the FBI uncover new clues to find Mallory?
Was Scotty the person who kidnapped Mallory? If so, was it revenge for being fired from the dealership or just a coincidence?
Tonight Rachel would be flying home to Miami. She wanted to start from scratch and retrace Scotty Jensen’s every move from the day Mallory disappeared. Rachel also planned to find out everything she could about Helen and Dirk Amsel. She would also talk to Rick again about Scotty’s employment history with the dealership. They could be overlooking some significant clue. Rachel knew that Rick wanted to find his daughter just as badly as she did and would be willing to help.
She was close to finding Mallory. She could just feel it.
O
nce Rachel was back in Miami, she involved herself in finding out more about Scotty Jensen and the Amsel couple, hoping it would bring fresh leads to finding Mallory. At the same time, she was fielding calls on other cases. Her second morning back, Red Cooper called her from Baton Rouge.