LITMIR.BIZ

      After Tara locked up behind Nick, she went to her office and called local ob-gyns until she found one who could see her today—thank heavens for a cancellation in just a couple of hours. She called Dr. Holbrook’s office to arrange to pick up her medical records. Then she tried to get herself back on track with her caseload. Despite getting up now and then to look out her window for Nick, she forced herself to concentrate.

      She always treated her open cases with respect—even keeping the folders clean, unbent and neat. To her they symbolized the heartaches and hopes of those who were missing their children. As she handled each and added more information, she knew they were trusting her to find them.

      One case, which she could now happily put in her inactive file, lay on top of the cabinet she unlocked. Like Nick, her client had served her country despite great hardships at home. When Susan Getz’s National Guard unit had been sent to Iraq, the divorcée had left her three-year-old son, Bryce, for whom she’d been given legal custody, in her mother’s care. Her ex-husband, Dietmar Getz—a U.S. citizen, though he’d been born in Germany—had moved to California and seldom paid child support or even saw little Bryce. But, while Susan was deployed in Iraq, Dietmar returned to Denver and snatched the boy, sending an e-mail that he could take better care of his son than that old woman, the mother of a woman who put war first.

      Tara had a copy of that e-mail; the whole case had really upset her. Dietmar knew his wife was in the guard and could be called to active duty when he married her, just as Laird had known she was dedicated to Finders Keepers when he proposed. Tara was proud she’d located Dietmar. Since his passion was extreme biking, she had traced him through rally events for that sport. The result had been great for Susan, who was reunited with her son, and terrible for Dietmar. He’d paid heavy fines, had been incarcerated for a while and lost his job at a bike shop. Susan’s Denver lawyer, through whom Tara had been paid, told Tara that Dietmar was furious with both his ex-wife and Tara, whose name he’d gotten off court papers.

      With another sigh, Tara filed the folder in the Inactive/Resolved section of the drawer and hoped the case would remain that way.

      She took out the folder of a new case, a fascinating one. The left-behind, Myra Gavin, was convinced her ex had not only abducted their fourteen-year-old son, Ryan—Tara didn’t take cases where the child was eighteen or older—but that her ex had faked his own death. His car had gone over a cliff into a swollen river, and though there was no body found, the police believed the body had washed downstream, just as they believed Ryan, who had been a troubled kid, had run away. Myra wanted Tara to prove a case not of suicide but of pseudocide, as the lawyer who had hired her had called faking one’s own death. And, of course, to locate Ryan so he could come home.

      Though Tara took any case where she thought she could help, she liked working for law firms rather than for emotional, distraught individuals directly. Like Claire’s mother, they could get in the way of ultimate success. Lawyers remained calm and controlled, mostly, and she knew she’d get paid. If Laird had not left her a decent financial settlement—as Jen had hinted this morning—Tara could not have afforded to take on some cases where she knew she’d get little or nothing for her efforts.

      The other case she needed to review today concerned a biological dad, Jeff Rivers, who had kidnapped his own nine-year-old son from a couple who had adopted the boy over eight years ago. Tara was working hard to locate the man. Usually, she wanted a biological parent to have a child, but in this case, the more she learned about the skip, the more she realized he was a horrible person. So far, she’d had no luck finding him.

      But she’d had great successes from other difficult cases, which encouraged her to keep going. Carla Manning, one of her first clients, whom she’d known from her old neighborhood when she was single, had not only gotten her daughter from an abusive husband, but she’d gotten her life back. Carla had returned to college and was now an attorney and child-rights advocate in Seattle. Tara would love to visit her someday, except that’s where Laird had moved, and she couldn’t bring herself to even be near the same area.

      Tara sucked in a big breath and got up to look out the window again. No Nick or Beamer in sight. It was as if the forest had swallowed them. She crossed her arms over her stomach, feeling it cramp. It was almost time for her period to begin, but she knew it was more than that. It wasn’t worry about Nick; if there was anyone who could take care of himself, it was him, though she still wasn’t convinced he could take care of Claire. No, this was because of what the doctor had said yesterday. And nerves about seeing another doctor for a second opinion—actually, a third, counting Jennifer’s—so soon.

      Tara sat down so hard in her chair it rolled away from her desk. She had felt all uptight like this in the weeks before Clay killed Alex, almost as if she sensed something would go wrong with one of her cases. Did that mean she was sensing something like that now, or was she just getting paranoid because of how tracking Clay had ended up? No, too much was going on in her life right now, that was all.

      But her stomachache had triggered a memory. A couple of weeks before her coma, she’d had what she thought was a virus, with nausea and cramping. She wasn’t due for a period then, not until a week later. On the Pill, she’d been so regular. Surely she could not have had morning sickness that week! She bent over her knees, agonized, feeling she’d be sick right now. She wanted to get what the doctor had said out of her head, but it kept coming back to haunt her. It would be hard not to blurt it out to Dr. Bauman today, and demand that he disprove it.

      “Listen to yourself!” she scolded aloud and sat up. “You just have a stomachache. You certainly aren’t pregnant now, and you weren’t pregnant then!”

      But what if? What if?

      She reached for her cell phone. Though the last thing in the world she wanted to do was contact Laird’s family, she was going to call his mother, Veronica. If she had any chance of getting a straight answer from Laird’s family about whether she could have been pregnant during her coma, it would be from her.