More than once he’d sensed someone out in the alley, but there wasn’t a backstreet in New York that didn’t host someone who didn’t want to be seen. “I haven’t seen her face, but I think I know who you mean.”
“I’ve taken some food out to her a couple times, and tried to talk to her, but she always takes off.” She plucked at one of the buttons on his shirt. “I think she’s about sixteen, same age I was when I finally ditched the foster care system for good. I want to tell her I know how she feels, maybe help her find a safe place to stay, but she won’t let me get near her. She grabs the food and runs.”
“You’re helping her by feeding her,” he pointed out.
“It’s not enough. Kid like that, she needs a home, a real bed, clean clothes, and someone to take care of her. Hell, if I thought I could get away with bringing her up here and having her stay with me, I would.”
“And she’d probably knock you over the head and clean you out while you were unconscious,” he predicted.
“I guess.” She yawned. “You should go to bed.”
She felt good against him, warm and soft, like a long, sleepy cat. “I should.”
“But not with me,” she murmured, closing her eyes. “I’m not sleeping with you, you know.”
She was asleep a moment later.
Meriden sat and held her, content to wait until her breathing slowed and deepened before he lifted her and carried her carefully back to her bed.
She stirred briefly when he laid her out, but only flung an arm out before she went back to dreamland. Meriden considered curling up beside her for a couple of hours—he could think of some great ways to wake her up in the morning—but reluctantly decided against it. When he had sex with Rowan, which he fully intended to do sometime in the immediate future, he wanted her fully awake, completely willing, and one hundred percent aware of him and what they did to each other.
He pulled up the linens around her, but when he lifted her arm to tuck it under he saw something dark just above her wrist, too dark to be a bruise. He turned on the lamp beside the bed, angling the shade so the light didn’t shine on her face, and then rolled back her sleeve.
An intricate, densely inked tat of a black dragon with red eyes stretched from just above her wrist to the inside of her elbow. He put her arm down and tugged the covers away from her to have a look at the other forearm, which sported a mirror image of the same dragon. The light caught something else, a faint patch of glowing blue, and when he checked the other tat he saw the same.
The black dragons weren’t the first images tattooed on Rowan’s arms. There was something else, an older tat, under each one.
She can’t be, he thought, sitting down on the edge of the bed. His weight depressed the mattress, causing Rowan to roll over toward him. He stood up quickly, standing over her for a long moment before he reached into his pocket and took out his mobile phone. After snapping a photo of her face, he turned off the light and left.
He had no choice. He would have to run her.
He locked Rowan’s door, pocketed the spare key, and returned to his apartment, where he took out the file on Alana King. Rereading the medical reports didn’t convince him; the color of the tattoos on the girl’s forearms was not listed. They were not described as dragons, either. Everyone had tattoos today; even little old ladies.
He also didn’t believe that Rowan was only sixteen years old. She might have a young face, but her eyes belonged to someone older, a traveler who had maybe seen too much of the world already. She also had none of the awkwardness of an adolescent girl who had just gone through major body changes. A kid wouldn’t be as at ease as Rowan was in her skin.
Still, there was a remote chance that he was wrong, and the girl he had to find to save his own life was sleeping across the hall.
He took the laptop out from his desk and booted it up, accessing a face-morphing program he’d gotten from a medical examiner in exchange for some bodywork on a Dodge Charger the examiner had been lovingly restoring. The program, which was not available commercially, was used by several agencies and organizations involved in missing persons cases. Any photo loaded into the program could be virtually aged to any point in that person’s life, a technique used primarily to help identify children who had gone missing for several years.
Meriden uploaded the photo he’d taken of Rowan with his phone into the system, and pulled it up alongside the school photo of young Alana King. He saw no resemblance between the two faces, but entered the formula to age-progress Alana King’s features to what they would look like at age sixteen. The little girl blossomed into a pretty teenager, but she still looked nothing like Rowan. He advanced the progression a few more years, and got a look at how Alana would appear as a grown woman, but struck out a third time.
She could have altered her coloring with hair dye and colored contacts, he thought, and removed the age progressions of Alana, restoring her photo to its original appearance. He then changed Rowan’s hair color to blond and her eye color to blue, and had the program age- regress her one year at a time. Although Rowan grew younger and more childlike with each new regression, she still bore no resemblance to the other girl.
Whoever she was, Rowan Dietrich had never been Alana King.
Chapter 14
Delaporte drew Nella’s arms from around his neck and got up, taking his pants from where he had draped them over the end of her bed. She had suffered from insomnia most of her life, she’d told him, but after a few hours in his arms she would fall into a deep, unmoving sleep that lasted until her alarm clock went off. Sometimes, she confessed wryly, she would even sleep through that.
After he checked the living room and kitchen, he unlocked the back sliding door and went out onto the small deck. Stepping outside to call in was an unnecessary precaution—she wouldn’t rouse unless he shook her—but Delaporte didn’t care to be anywhere near his girlfriend when he spoke to Genaro.
His girlfriend. He lit a cigarette, inhaling deeply. Nella Hoff had several PhDs, all of them in subjects he didn’t understand and never would. He liked that she never referred to her education or his lack of it. It would have been much harder to be with her if she’d been a snob.
He dialed Genaro’s private line, which Genaro answered at once.
“You’re late,” the chairman said. “What is your status?”
“I’ve completed a sweep of the apartment, but she isn’t keeping anything here,” he said. “The phone she planted on Kirchner was a throwaway paid for with cash, so there won’t be any paper on it.”
“What about her phones?”
“I’ve installed tracers in the landlines. I think she’s keeping her mobile in her vehicle.” He turned so he could watch the dark interior of the apartment through the window. “Unless there is something else you want, I’m finished here.”
“I’ve just received a report from the New York branch,” Genaro said. “Our team has disappeared.”
He went still. “All of them?”
“Yes. New York will monitor the morgues, but I think it unlikely that King would leave any corpses to be found.” Genaro sounded tired. “I would like to know how he identified the members of the team and their location.”
So would Delaporte; he had personally trained the team, and several of the men on it had been his most dependable hunters. This changed everything. “Do you want me to finish here?”
“No. Until the female is found, Hoff still has some value.” Genaro paused as if thinking. “We’ll take her tomorrow in the lab. Kirchner will need your assistance. Report to my office first thing in the morning.”
“Yes, sir.” Delaporte ended the call.
Engaging in an affair with an enemy of the company had been distasteful to him, as had the role he had taken on—to appear to Nella Hoff as a potential blackmail target. He understood the psychology behind posing as a would-be pedophile in order to intrigue her, but he hadn’t cared for having his background records salted with indications of a predilection he personally despised.
But the disgust he had expected to feel when he was with her had never manifested when they were together. It was true that he preferred women who had an open, mature attitude about sex, but something about Nella Hoff had made the role-playing less of a chore. He’d enjoyed her submissiveness, even if it had been self-serving.
The sex itself had been unnervingly erotic.
That part of his assignment had come to an end now. Tomorrow when Nella went into work, she would be drugged, removed discreetly from the lab, and installed in one of the “treatment” rooms, where he and Kirchner would begin a lengthy and painful interrogation. From what Genaro had said, Delaporte imagined he would be called upon to sexually abuse her. It was always more emotionally effective when the captive was subjected to repeated violations by a former lover.
He walked back to the bedroom to look at her one last time, so that he could remember her as she had been.
Delaporte registered that the bed was empty a moment before the lights snapped on and a gun barrel pressed against the base of his skull.
“You really should look inside the tampon boxes and under the trash can liners, Daddy,” Nella said in a mocking, girlish voice. “You wouldn’t believe how much you can hide in those little places.”
“So it seems.” He felt almost proud of her. “What are we going to do now, Nella?”
“You’re not going to move, because I know the information in your records about your skills as a soldier and a mercenary wasn’t complete bullshit,” she said. “And as much as I’d like to pull this trigger, I need some information from you.”
He smiled. “Then go ahead and pull the trigger.”
She slid the gun around as she came to stand before him, until it rested under his chin. “Let’s clear the air first. You’re not a pedophile in the making, and I’m not a Daddy’s girl.”
“Does it matter now?”