Bonnie (2 page)

“That’s what he told us, too.”

“Someone else must have seen her.” The panic was rising. “Talk to everyone. Find her.”

“We’re trying,” he said gently. “We’re questioning everyone. I’ve sent men to search the entire park.”

“They won’t find her here. Do you think I didn’t do that?” she asked fiercely. “I ran all over the park, calling her name. She didn’t answer.” The tears were beginning to fall. “I called and called. She didn’t answer. Bonnie would answer me. She would answer—”

“We’ll try again,” the detective said. “We’re exploring every possibility.”

“There’s a lake. I taught her to swim, but what if—”

“It’s an ornamental lake, just a man-made token. It’s only a drop of four feet in the deepest spot. And we’ve interviewed a father and son who have been sitting on the bench by the lake all afternoon. They would have seen her if she’d fallen into the water.”

“She has to be somewhere. Find her.” That’s the only thing she could say. That’s the only thing that made sense in a world that was suddenly drowning in madness. Bonnie had to be found. All the radiance and love that was Bonnie couldn’t be lost. God wouldn’t let that happen. They all just had to search harder, and they’d find her.

“We’re sending out another search party,” Detective Slindak said quietly as he gestured to the officers starting out toward the trees in the distance. “We’ve put out an all-points bulletin. You can’t do anything more here. Let me have an officer drive you and your mother home. We’ll call you as soon as we hear something.”

“You want me to go home?” she asked in disbelief. “Without my little girl? I can’t do that.”

“You can’t help more than you have already. It’s better that you leave it to us.”

“Bonnie is
mine.
I won’t leave here.” She whirled away from Slindak. “I’ll go with the search party. I’ll call her name. She’ll answer me.”

“She didn’t before,” Slindak said gently. “She may not be there to answer.”

He hadn’t said “or she might be unable to answer,” but Eve knew it was in his mind. Cold fear was causing the muscles of her stomach to clench at the thought. Her heart was beating so hard that she could barely catch her breath. “She’ll answer me. She’ll find a way to let me know where she is. You don’t understand. Bonnie is such a special, loving, little girl … She’ll find a way.”

“I’m sure that you’re right,” the detective said.

“You’re not sure of anything,” she said fiercely. “But I am.” She started at a run after the search team of officers heading for the trees. “This is all a mistake. No one would hurt my Bonnie. We just have to find her.”

She could feel the detective’s gaze on her back as she caught up with the search team. She knew he wanted to make her stop. He wanted her to behave sensibly and let them do their job. But it was her job, too. She had brought Bonnie into the world. In the end, that made it only her job.

I’ll find you, baby. Don’t be afraid. I’ll fight off anything that could hurt you. Wait for me. I’ll always be there for you.

No matter how long it takes or how far I have to go, I’ll bring you home, Bonnie.

CHAPTER

2

Present Day

“THE DIRECTOR IS ON THE PHONE,
Agent Venable.” Harley’s tone was hesitant. “He sounded a little—”

“Pissed?” Venable said. It didn’t surprise him. Dickson was not known for his patience, and Venable hadn’t been jumping through his hoops on this assignment. “I don’t want to deal with him. Tell him I’m—”

“It’s the third call,” Harley said.

“And you’re afraid he’ll shoot the messenger,” Venable said.

“I’ll give him whatever message you want me to give him,” Harley said. “But this time he asked me to give him Agent Ling’s cell number.”

Shit. “And did you?”

“I said I’d have to look it up.” He paused. “But he’ll get it.”

Venable knew that Hal Dickson, as Director of the CIA, would get any info he wanted if he went to the trouble. But the people who made him go to that trouble would suffer for it.

“Why does he want Agent Ling?” Harley said. “I told him that she was on another assignment.”

“And you think he cares? Some of those South American countries are on the verge of revolution, and the situation is getting critical. Catherine Ling spent several years serving in the jungles of Colombia and Venezuela. She has contacts, and people trust her all over South America. She can get information when no one else has a chance. Dickson knows that, and he wants her down there.”

“Are you going to order her to go back there?”

Order Catherine Ling? he thought sourly. He could ask her, but he hadn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of getting her to leave her son, Luke, whom she had just rescued from years of captivity. She’d tell him to go to hell.

Unless he could find a way to stall the director until he found a way to manipulate Catherine into doing what he wanted. At present, he had no hope because Catherine was on a private mission of her own, helping Eve Duncan find the body and the killer of her murdered daughter, Bonnie.

Not easy.

Okay, explain, stall, and maybe he’d get through with this without incurring Dickson’s anger. The director wasn’t a bad guy if you didn’t piss him off. Venable had known him before those politicians in Congress had made the Company the bogeyman in everyone’s eyes. Hell, let those jokers try to keep to their lily-white rules when every other country played dirty. He knew what pressure Dickson was under. Besides, there were times when he needed the bastard, and he wouldn’t have Catherine make him lose that influence if he could help it.

And he wouldn’t let Harley take the flak.

“I’ll talk to him.” He took out his phone and dialed Dickson while he pulled out Catherine Ling’s file from his desk. He probably wouldn’t need it. He had recruited her when she was seventeen, and if anyone really knew her, he should.

He gazed at her photo as he waited for Dickson to answer. This one was taken on the streets of Hong Kong, where she had grown up. Part Caucasian, part Asian, she was incredibly stunning, with her dark hair, gold skin, and faintly slanted eyes. But it wasn’t her looks that made her invaluable. She was one of the finest CIA agents Venable had ever recruited: smart, tough, deadly.

And loyal. Which was going to be the sticking point in getting her to leave Eve Duncan and Joe Quinn at this time.

“Where’s Catherine Ling?” Dickson demanded the moment he picked up the call. “I told you a week ago I wanted her in Peru.”

“She’s on another assignment.”

“Screw her assignment. Replace her.”

“That’s not exactly possible.”

“You’re refusing me.” Dickson was silent. “You’re not a fool, Venable. Sometimes I think I’m surrounded by fools, but you’re not one of them. Which means you have a reason to take a chance like that. Has Ling gone rogue?”

“No way.” He hesitated, then told the truth. “She thinks she has a debt to pay. Eve Duncan and Joe Quinn helped her to save her son, Luke. Now she’s trying to give Duncan what she wants most in life. She’s trying to find Bonnie Duncan’s body and the man who killed her. Nothing is going to budge her until she does it.”

Dickson muttered a curse. “Dammit, don’t you have any influence on her?”

“Not enough to stop her from doing this.”

“There has to be a way. Eve Duncan. Can you appeal to her?”

“No, you don’t understand.”

“Then make me understand, dammit. Why can’t this wait?”

“Because she’d tell me it’s waited too long already.” He might as well fill him in though it probably wouldn’t help. “Eve Duncan had this child when she was sixteen, the father was a Ranger in the Army and was reported dead. She didn’t have an abortion or give the kid up for adoption. She kept her. Part of the time, her mother helped take care of her, sometimes Bonnie was in a United Fund nursery while Eve worked. She did correspondence courses at night. She was almost finished when her daughter, Bonnie, disappeared. The police became certain that she was a victim of a serial killer. In fact, they’d thought they’d caught and executed him. Ralph Fraser. He’d killed other children, but he hadn’t killed Bonnie. Which meant Eve had no closure. She had to find her daughter’s killer. She had to bring her daughter home. It’s been the guiding obsession of her life. She has a long-term relationship with Joe Quinn, a police detective, who has helped her search for her daughter. She has an adopted daughter, Jane MacGuire, who is now an artist. But it’s the search for Bonnie that’s the center of her universe.”

“And she’s drawn Catherine Ling into that universe as a satellite,” Dickson said harshly. “Let her find her own kid.”

“She never asked Catherine to help her.” To hell with diplomacy. He’d known Eve Duncan for years, and she’d done favors both for him and the agency. She deserved better than Dickson’s condemnation. “Look, Eve Duncan pulls her own weight, and she’d keep Catherine out of it if she could.”

Silence. “You like her.”

“You’re damn right I do. She loved Bonnie more than life itself. Having her kidnapped and murdered could have destroyed her. She didn’t let it. She went back to school and earned a degree in Fine Arts at Georgia State. She now has certification as a computer age-progression specialist at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Arlington, Virginia. She also received advanced certification for clay facial reconstruction after training with two of the nation’s foremost reconstruction artists. Do I have to tell you how many more degrees she’s earned since then? She’s world-famous, dammit. She’s an icon. Don’t you think she deserves to get this one thing she wants in the world?”

Another silence. “Maybe. But if she’s been searching all these years, why does Catherine Ling have to be involved? What makes her think that she can help?”

God, he was stubborn. But at least he was listening. That was a start.

“Catherine started investigating Bonnie’s kidnapping and came up with a suspect that no one had uncovered. John Gallo, Bonnie’s father, had not been killed while in the Army as reported. He’d been captured and thrown into a North Korean prison, where he’d been subjected to seven years of starvation and torture. When he escaped from the prison and landed in a hospital in Tokyo, he was diagnosed with severe mental problems, blackouts, schizophrenia, hallucinations…”

“Imagine that,” Dickson said sarcastically. “Poor bastard.”

“But a prime candidate for a suspect if he bore resentment toward Eve. What better revenge than killing her child?”

“Catherine’s reasoning?”

“Yes, sound reasoning. You agree?”

“Yes, so Catherine’s after Gallo?”

“She was, but after hunting him down, she decided that she might be wrong. So she decided to go after the two very dirty Army Intelligence officers who sent Gallo to Korea. Nate Queen and Thomas Jacobs. They were into smuggling artifacts and drugs and sent Gallo to retrieve an incriminating journal held by the North Koreans. He was just a patriotic nineteen-year-old kid at the time, and he thought he was doing his duty to his country. As I said, he was captured and thrown into that prison. It was years after he escaped and fought his way through a hell of a lot of mental problems that he became suspicious of Queen and Jacobs. He went after them.”

“I can see why he’d want to put them down for setting him up and letting the Koreans get him. But what the hell did that have to do with the killing of Eve Duncan’s little girl?”

Venable could understand Dickson’s impatience. The search for Bonnie Duncan’s killer had become as complicated as a spiderweb. Keep it as simple as you can. “Queen and Jacobs wanted to get rid of Gallo and remove a possible witness against them. They hired a contract killer, James Black, to go after him. But Gallo is very, very tough, and Black ended up with Gallo’s knife in his belly and egg on his face with his employers. Black was furious, and after he recovered, he started planning on hurting Gallo in any way he could.”

“So Black killed the kid?”

“That’s the way it looked, that’s what Gallo and Eve Duncan, Joe Quinn, and Catherine thought. They hunted him down in the Wisconsin woods.”

“And put him down? So what’s the problem? Catherine should be free now.”

“Except that Black swore before he died that he hadn’t killed Bonnie Duncan, that John Gallo had done it.” He paused. “Evidently he was very convincing. Both Eve Duncan and Gallo believed him.”

“Shit. You mean because Gallo had been having mental problems? You said he was experiencing blackouts.”

“Yes. Gallo thought he might have had one at that time and killed his daughter. He almost went crazy. He took off into the woods after he killed Black. Catherine went after him, hunted for weeks, and tracked him down.”

“But you said she changed her mind about Gallo’s killing the kid. Why?”

“How do I know? It was a judgment call. She just said that Eve and Gallo had been stupid to take the word of a murderer even if every instinct told them that he was telling the truth. They should have looked in another direction. The other direction was Queen and Jacobs. Black had been hired as a contract killer many times before by them. It wasn’t logical that they wouldn’t have known his intention to kill the little girl. Queen and Jacobs were regarding Gallo as a threat, and he had a history of mental problems. Kill the child and send him over the edge? There was a possibility that they’d been involved or hired someone else to kill Bonnie. So they went after them.”

Venable could almost feel Dickson’s frustration and impatience at the other end of the line. Well, suck it up, big man. He was almost finished.

“Nate Queen was killed over a week ago, and that left Thomas Jacobs. Catherine and Gallo tracked him to New Orleans, and she’s hoping either to force Jacobs to confess or get info from him about who did kill Bonnie Duncan. Gallo has rented a house on the bayou across the Mississippi, where they’re going to take Jacobs to interrogate him.”

“Then she should be able to tie this up soon,” Dickson said. “How soon?”

“I don’t know. The last I heard, Catherine had told Eve Duncan and Joe Quinn about Thomas Jacobs, and they were on their way to join Catherine and Gallo in New Orleans.”