High-Risk Affair

Chapter 4

She had nothing to do with her son’s disappearance.

Cale wasn’t sure exactly what convinced him in her impassioned speech. He only knew that as he listened to her, he realized he could never believe she was hiding anything about her son or her treatment of him.

Megan Vance was exactly as she seemed—a frightened mother worried for her child. He would bet his reputation on it.

He had put his trust in the wrong people a few times before. He didn’t know anybody in the Bureau who hadn’t made some mistakes. But something told him, without any shadow of doubt, that this wouldn’t be one of those times.

He believed her. Though he had tried to keep an open mind and consider the possibility that she might have harmed her son and filed a false missing persons report, he just couldn’t buy it. Nothing in her background or in her behavior set off any red flags.

Not only did he want to trust her, he wanted to help her find whatever measure of peace might be possible under the circumstances.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Vance,” he said quietly. “I know this is terrible for you. But there are hundreds of people out there doing everything possible to find your son before that happens.”

She nodded tightly and let out a shaky breath. “I know that. This waiting is just so horrible.”

He had seen it in every one of those seventy-nine missing child cases he had worked. Sometimes parents only had to wait and hour or two. Others waited days, holding out a frantic hope only to see it cruelly dashed when their child’s body was found.

He thought of Lynn and Sam McKinnon, the parents of his partner Gage. Their daughter Charlotte had been stolen from them at age three from their Las Vegas front yard. For nearly twenty-four years, they had never given up hope of finding her, though the girl’s disappearance had haunted the family every day for decades.

And then, when they should have lost all hope, Charlotte had been miraculously returned to them.

The McKinnons had lost their daughter’s childhood, but they had her back with them again. He knew plenty of parents who still waited and would probably never find the answers they sought.

He could only hope Megan Vance wouldn’t be one of them.

“You shouldn’t be waiting alone. Isn’t there someone who could sit with you?”

Someone besides me, he thought. An FBI agent who had spent years slogging through the absolute worst humanity dished out against the innocent was probably not the most comforting companion for a parent in crisis looking for hope and encouragement.

Her lovely features twisted into a grimace. “I sent everyone away. I swear, if one more person pats my hand and asks me how I’m holding up, I’m going to rip somebody’s eyeballs out.”

He blinked rapidly, surprised to find himself smiling a little. After the last two weeks, he hadn’t been sure he would be able to find anything to smile about again. How strange that he should find it in the frustrated words of a terrified mother.

He leaned a hip against the counter. “Do me a favor and keep your hands in your pockets, then, just in case I happen to forget that I’ve been duly warned.”

Though she didn’t smile in return, the tightness of her features eased a little.

They lapsed into silence and he sipped his water, wishing he had some comfort to offer. His mind pored over the facts of the case, his working theory right now that the boy had climbed out on his own.

She might be able to shed some light on a few inconsistencies in the case.

“Mrs. Vance—”

“Megan, please,” she said.

“Megan.” It was a lovely name, one that, combined with her green eyes and vibrant hair, made him think of fairy sprites and rolling fields of clover and…

He broke off the thought. Where the hell had that come from? He was here to do a job, not suddenly wax poetic over a woman’s name.

Annoyed at himself, his voice came out more brusque than he intended. “I know Cameron had epilepsy. Do you think that hinders his physical abilities at all?”

Her brow furrowed. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“How athletic is your son?”

She sighed. “More than I have ever been comfortable with, if you want to know the truth. Because of his condition, I’ve always been a little overprotective, afraid he’ll have a seizure in the middle of doing something physical and hurt himself. It’s easy to forget that beyond his epilepsy, he’s just a typical boy who loves sports. Everything physical—soccer, basketball, baseball. You name it.”

“I noticed your son has some pictures in his room of your late husband in climbing gear.”

She smiled, though it didn’t quite reach her eyes. “I guess you could say Rick was an adrenaline junkie. He always skied black diamond runs, kayaked Class Five rapids and climbed any route above a 5.8.”

There were some who would put Cale in that same category. When he wasn’t working, he was usually heading to southern Utah to bike the slickrock or go canyoneering through the slots. Adrenaline junkie was probably an accurate term.

“What about you?” he asked Megan.

A corner of her mouth lifted, though the worry in her eyes robbed the expression of any semblance to a smile. Seeing her halfhearted effort still gave him a catch in his chest and he was astonished to find himself wondering what a full-on smile from her would look like.

“I knit, Agent Davis. That’s about as exciting as I get.”

“You never joined your husband when he climbed?”

She shrugged. “I went along a few times when Rick and I were first dating. Trying to be a good girlfriend, you know, interested in the things he liked to do. But I’m not crazy about heights, and he figured that out pretty quickly and wouldn’t let me harness up anymore. After that, I just took along a book, found a shady spot and tried not to get too nervous about watching him conquer some tricky cornice or something. Why are you asking about climbing?”

He trusted her, he thought again. She deserved to know the direction the investigation was taking them. “Can you come outside with me to take a look at something?”

She looked puzzled but rose immediately and followed him out the back door and around the side of the house toward Cameron’s bedroom.

“You told Sheriff Galvez the alarm system was set and the dead bolt was locked on the outside doors, correct?” he asked as they walked.

“Yes.”

“Are you positive about that?”

“Absolutely. I double-checked them when I woke up, before I found Cam missing. I always do when I wake up in the night. I’m still a city girl at heart, I guess.”

“If that’s true, the only other exit is out the window. You told the sheriff that when you found Cameron wasn’t in bed the window was open but the screen was in place, right?”

“That’s right.”

“The state crime scene detective has determined the screen was in backward, as if someone replaced it from the outside. That’s consistent with the window-as-exit-route theory, but we can’t find any evidence on the ground of ladder impressions. It’s always a possibility the rain may have washed it away. Or Cameron may have taken another route down.”

“Like what?”

He pointed to the discovery he’d made earlier with Wilhelmina Carson. “Take a look at those holes there. What do they look like?”’

She frowned. “I don’t know. Termites?”

He caught his smile before it could even start. If those were termite holes, the whole house was in serious trouble. “Look at how uniformly round they are, and the placement of them.”

She stuck a finger in the lowest one, the same one he had used to launch upward. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

He sighed, his shoulder already crying out in protest at what he knew he would have to demonstrate again. He slipped off his shoes and socks again and used the finger holes to scale the wall, stopping a few lengths below where he’d climbed with Willy.

When he dropped to the ground, she stared at him as if he had just stripped naked and cartwheeled across her flower garden.

“You can’t honestly believe Cam used those tiny holes to climb out of a second-story window?”

“The crime scene investigator dusted for prints. She found several sets of prints inside the holes. All of them consistent with what we believe are Cam’s from the evidence in his bedroom.”

“He’s nine years old, for heaven’s sake. And small for his age!”

“How much climbing experience has he had?”

She shivered, though the hot wind still blew out of the mountains. “Some. Okay, quite a bit. We had vaulted ceilings in our house in San Diego and Rick…Rick built a climbing wall in the playroom. Cam loved it, probably because it made him feel closer to his father.”

She stared at those holes, her delicate features troubled. “Suppose I buy your theory that he climbed out of his room on his own. Why on earth would he do such a thing in the middle of the night? Where would he go? Cam didn’t have friends around except his cousins. He wasn’t happy about moving away from San Diego, but he had no reason to run away!”

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