LITMIR.BIZ

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she wasn’t at all sleepy. With her mind racing now, she knew trying to sleep would be futile for some time.

      She would go down and make some tea, she decided, and perhaps grab her knitting bag and knit a few rows on her latest project to calm herself and relax enough to go back to sleep.

      She walked down the stairs and out of habit checked the dead bolt and the security system.

      She started for the kitchen then paused, something niggling at her. The nightmare she couldn’t even remember now had left her unsettled, uneasy. She frowned and turned around, some motherly instinct guiding her back up the stairs to Cameron’s room.

      She had learned not to question that intuition. More than once she had been guided to drop whatever she was doing to search for him, only to find him in the grips of a seizure.

      His epilepsy had been under control with medication for some time and he had been sleeping soundly five minutes ago, but she knew that could change in an instant.

      She studied the shape on the bed under that Army green blanket. Something was off. Though she hated to wake him, she reached for the blanket and tugged it down, then felt her whole world turn ice-cold.

      Instead of Cameron’s tousled blond hair and freckled nose, she found a rolled-up sweatshirt. She yanked the blanket off and gasped at the pillows stuffed there to approximate a nine-year-old boy’s shape.

      Her son was gone!

      4:45 a.m.

      “You sure you’re up to this again so soon? I can find somebody else.”

      FBI Special Agent Cale Davis turned off his electric razor and flipped up the lighted visor mirror of the agency SUV. “I’m good,” he answered. “I’m glad you called me.”

      His partner frowned at Cale’s assured tone as he drove through the predawn darkness through a sparsely populated region of Utah.

      “I should have tried a little harder and found someone else.” Gage McKinnon gave a heavy sigh. “Allie’s going to skin me alive when she finds out I called you. You only had two weeks off and you need at least double that after what happened.”

      “Leave it, McKinnon. I’m fine. Two weeks was more than enough.”

      Gage looked as if he wanted to argue, but he didn’t, much to Cale’s relief. He would prefer talking about anything else but his last case and its horrible ending.

      “What else can you tell me about this missing kid?” he said to turn the subject.

      The SUV’s headlights illuminated a carved and painted wooden sign for Moose Springs, population three hundred and eleven. Probably some overachieving Boy Scout’s Eagle project, he thought.

      The town was about an hour east of Salt Lake City, bordering the Uinta National Forest. He’d been here only once before in an official capacity, in a case involving a good friend, Mason Keller. Unofficially, he had been here many times. Mason and his wife Jane lived on a small ranch nearby and the town had always struck him as clean and friendly. Mayberry R.F.D. in a cowboy hat.

      He didn’t want to think something dark and sinister might lurk here. Yet when the FBI called out its Crimes Against Children unit, chances were good all was not as picture-perfect as he wanted to believe here in this quiet community.

      “Cameron Vance, nine years old,” Gage answered him after a moment. “Father, Rick Vance, killed in action in Afghanistan. Mother Megan, thirty-two, works out of the home as an accountant. Mom puts the boy to bed at usual time. Goes in to check on him around two and finds him gone, a blanket rolled up to make the casual observer think he’s sleeping away. There was no sign of forced entry and the alarm system was engaged and undisturbed, but there was also no obvious escape route either from the second-story window. No dangling bedsheets, no convenient awning. It’s fifteen feet to the ground, heck of a leap for a nine-year-old kid.”

      Not if the kid was a limber little monkey like Charlie Betran, Mason and Jane’s adopted son, Cale thought.

      “What compelled the mother to check on him? Does he make a habit of wandering?”

      “According to initial reports from local authorities, Megan Vance said she had a nightmare around that time and checked both children out of habit.”

      “Any idea what time he disappeared?”

      “We’ve got a four-hour window between ten when Mrs. Vance checked on him before going to bed and two when she awoke again.”

      “She didn’t hear any suspicious noises?”

      “Nothing, just the wind.” McKinnon studied the GPS coordinates on the dashboard unit, then turned at the next street and headed out of town again before going on with his narrative. “After she finds him missing, the mother spends a little time looking around the house and yard, then calls local authorities around oh-three-hundred, who immediately issue an Amber Alert and call us.”

      “What makes anybody think a crime has been committed here? Sounds like the kid just sneaked out. It seems a little early in the game for Amber Alerts and calling in the FBI.”

      “You’d think,” Gage said, “but this has the potential to be a high-profile case and I think the local authorities want to make sure all their bases are covered from the beginning. They’re running it as a crime scene until they have evidence that it’s not.”

      Another high-profile case. Great. Cale closed his eyes. The image of two pretty little girls with dark curls instantly burned behind his eyelids and he jerked them open again.

      He wasn’t sure he had the stomach for this again.

      “I’m not seeing it from the information you’ve given me. What makes this case stand out?”

      “Besides the fact that his father was a national hero who died serving his country, the kid has epilepsy. There’s an urgency here because the mother’s terrified he’s had a seizure somewhere.”

      If anyone could find the boy, Gage was the man. His partner was known as The Bloodhound and he specialized in missing children cases. He had an uncanny knack for finding lost kids.

      Cale had often wondered if his partner’s own history gave him some kind of sixth sense, some inner eye that guided his actions.

      On the other hand, he had his own grim history and his past usually seemed more of a hindrance than a help.

      “What do you see as our role here?”

      “Purely advisory at this point, providing assistance to the local investigators as needed.”

      Judging by the bright flash of emergency vehicles against the night sky, they were approaching the boy’s house. Gage climbed a slight grade and the whole chaotic scene stretched ahead of them.

      In the strobing glow from a dozen cop cars and search and rescue vehicles, Cale saw the house was a two-story log structure with a steeply pitched gable on one end and a wide porch along the front.

      A basketball standard hung from the detached garage, and two bikes were propped against the porch.

      Most of the vehicles were parked some distance from the house. He saw this as a good sign that local authorities had been careful to protect the scene as much as possible.

      Gage pulled in next to a van with the logo of one of the local TV stations emblazoned on the side. Then the two of them headed for the house.

      They showed their badges to the uniform cop at the door. Once inside, Cale’s gaze was instinctively drawn to a woman on the couch. Though she was surrounded by a bevy of uniformed personnel, somehow she seemed alone in the room.

      The mother. It had to be. She was small and red-haired, with a wispy haircut and delicate features that just now looked ravaged.

      He could fill a chapel with the faces of all the grieving mothers he’d had to face in his career, but somehow each one managed to score his heart anyway.

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