The Lost Girl (A Mickey Keller Thriller Book 1) Read online

  Melissa started to cry.

  “It’s okay, honey. It’s okay. Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  “But you’re not my mommy.”

  “Enough,” Keller said firmly. He shoved the cuffs in his pocket and grabbed Melissa by the arm, but Amy maintained a vise-like grip on the girl.

  Amy cried—wept—repeating “No, no, no,” over and over.

  Keller was about to use force to end the stalemate when his gaze caught a photo on the wall a few feet away across the table. He recognized one of the women: Loren Ryder—former colleague, longtime nemesis. And Amy Robbins, standing beside her holding a girl, a little younger than Melissa. Who looked very much like Melissa.

  What the hell’s going on?

  Keller shoved his pistol against the back of Amy’s neck. “Who’s in that photo behind you?”

  “What?” Amy struggled to compose herself and speak clearly.

  “That photo. Is that you?”

  “Yes. And my—my daughter. And my brother and sister-in-law.”

  “Your daughter?”

  “Lindy. She and my husband were—” Amy swallowed deeply and whimpered as she fought to form the words. “They were killed in a car accident. Melissa’s my daughter. The Ellises took her from me. Stole her. Please don’t take her. Please don’t hurt me.”

  AMY’S HEART WAS POUNDING so hard she felt it physically striking her chest wall. She struggled to think clearly while cuddling Melissa beneath her. The child was shaking in fear, not moving. Not saying a word. Amy was using all her motherly strength to form a protective shield.

  She braced for—well, she did not know what.

  But there was silence.

  And then she felt a draft of cold air slither around her neckline. She lifted her head slightly and peered through perspiration-soaked strands of hair. The front door was swinging slowly open.

  What just happened?

  She started to get to her feet—but Melissa grabbed her shirt. “Don’t leave me.”

  “I’m not, honey.” Still on her knees, Amy helped her up and gave her a hug. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m just—I’m just closing the door.” And locking it.

  “Who was that?”

  Amy knelt in front of Melissa. Good question. Another one I don’t have an answer for. “I don’t know.”

  “Was he a policeman?”

  “He said he was. But I don’t think so.”

  “You mean he was lying?”

  “Yeah.”

  “’Selle says people who lie are bad.”

  Amy found it hard to argue with that but knew that in an adult world the issue was a great deal more complex. After all, she had been lying to Melissa all day. “It depends who they are and why they’re lying. Sometimes you tell a little fib because it’ll make someone feel better. Because the truth might hurt them.”

  Melissa looked at her. Amy knew it was probably a concept with too many gray areas for a child to be able to process effectively.

  “Like you don’t tell someone they’re fat because it’ll make them feel bad. That’s what ’Selle said. A really fat girl at the lake has a fat dog and ’Selle said I should say the dog is cute.”

  Amy lifted her brow. “Exactly.”

  She helped Melissa to the couch. They both sat down and fell silent. Melissa took Amy’s hand.

  Her touch felt good and natural—but at the moment Amy had to figure out who that man was. He had obviously come to take Melissa back to the Ellises. So he was working for them. A private investigator. But then why lie about being a cop? Why go through the charade of arresting her?

  And why didn’t he take Melissa—after all that trouble to find her, and the girl, why would he leave without her?

  Did he believe me, that Melissa was my daughter? Felt sorry for me?

  He saw the photo. That’s when everything changed.

  Why?

  It did not matter. They knew who she was and where she lived. The guy might come back—or someone else could be sent in his place. Either way, she was not going to hang around to find out.

  Every minute they remained there, they were in danger.

  “We have to go,” Amy said. “Give me a minute to get some things together. Okay?”

  Melissa looked up and nodded, her grip tightening around Amy’s hand.

  24

  Keller needed a place to stay for the evening and booked a motel online. Low-key was best, one less likely to monitor his comings and goings. He could put a do not disturb notice on the knob, slip out the door, walk a few steps to his car, and be gone with few, if any, people being the wiser.

  He opened his laptop, turned on the VPN to mask his internet address, and started poking around to see what he could learn about Amy Robbins—and Loren Ryder, her supposed sister-in-law.

  He should have done this before diving in head-first, but that was the job, handed to him at the last minute with the orders to hit the ground running. But after what he had seen, he needed to take a step back. And a deep breath.

  Keller knew Ryder going back almost fifteen years when he was a detective with the LAPD and she was a relatively new agent stationed out of the Wilshire Boulevard federal building. They collaborated on a number of cases—or, rather, clashed over a number of cases. Although they had their share of disagreements, he respected her and her integrity. And he got the sense she respected him.

  Ryder was one of those women he found himself attracted to and had a tendency to open up to more than he should.

  That relationship took a turn for the worse when Keller got involved with a Russian mobster. Not him, per se, but Bill Tait. Tait took the man on as a client to broker an under-the-radar arms deal and Keller was assigned the case to make it happen. The NSA caught some chatter about it, turned it over to the CIA—until a connection was made to an American player—and then the FBI stepped in. Loren Ryder was one of seventeen agents working it.

  As (bad) luck would have it, she ended up following her gut and finding a thread that led, unfortunately, to Keller. But she did not have enough to charge him with anything.

  When he had first seen her walk into the interview room, he professed surprise—which was genuine because he had no reason to know she had been transferred from the Bureau’s Los Angeles field office to San Francisco’s.

  “I’ve heard some things about you,” Loren had told him.

  “Oh yeah? Like what?”

  “Like you’re now involved with some bad actors.”

  “Don’t believe everything you hear.”

  “Of course. Except that the people telling me this are people I trust. Like I used to trust you.”

  “Past tense?”

  Loren shrugged. “Like I said. I’ve heard some things.”

  “You know who I am. That Tarzana case? We trusted each other, depended on each other. For our lives.”

  “I remember. And I also remember that you had my back and got me out of a jam.”

  Keller nodded, maintained eye contact with her. “That bond is deep, Loren. I’d never do anything to hurt you.”

  “Hurting me includes breaking the law. Did you break the law here?”

  “We’ve already been through this. I’m up here meeting with a company in Silicon Valley.”

  “My partner’s making that call right now, checking it out.”

  “Good. Then maybe we can get back to trusting each other again.”

  Loren frowned.

  “I’m sorry we lost contact.”

  Loren looked at him. “Me too. And I hope to god the rumors I’ve heard aren’t true. Because you were a damn good detective and a really nice guy. You’re no longer a cop, but I sure hope you’re still a good person. Because it’d piss me off big time to have to arrest you. Ex-cops don’t do well in prison.”

  “
No, they don’t.” He smiled and winked at her—the same wink he had given her on more than one occasion when they had worked together.

  The door swung open and Loren whirled. Her partner nodded his head. Keller’s story checked out.

  “Okay then,” Keller said as he held up his handcuffed wrists. “I’ll be going. I don’t suppose you’re available for a cup of coffee?”

  “Maybe next time I arrest you.”

  “There won’t be a next time.”

  Loren frowned. “Let’s hope not.”

  Before leaving, Ryder did her best to make him feel shame at “going over to the dark side,” as she had put it, and Keller had to admit—to himself, at least—that he did feel shame. She was right. He had become one of the perps he had chased as a detective. And for what?

  Well, for the money.

  It really was that simple. He rationalized it well enough—as a public servant he was paid poorly and he was not getting any younger. He had made a bad investment with a friend and he ended up losing his house in the Great Recession. He needed a job with a robust salary where he could right his financial ship as quickly as possible.

  Enter Bill Tait and Tait Protection Services. Tait served under Gen. Lukas DeSantos, a decorated war hero who, like Keller, had served his country. Though Tait and Keller were in the same outfit and became fast friends, they chose different paths upon leaving the Army and entering the private sector. Tait started a company and found enormous financial success. Keller joined the police force and that did not go as smoothly for him.

  He enjoyed the work and did well organizationally, making detective—but living in Los Angeles in a decent neighborhood that did not require a two-hour commute left little in his bank account.

  Tait checked in on him one day when he was in town on business and read Keller’s face perfectly. He offered him a job that Keller initially declined—but ultimately accepted after falling behind on his new mortgage. Walking away from the loan was not his preferred way of doing business. And it would have damaged his credit substantially.

  At first, Keller refused to work a case for Tait where he did anything illegal or caused harm to others. Tait accepted that arrangement for a while. But when a couple of Tait’s key employees left and started a rival firm, Tait took on some marginal clients who paid exceptionally well.

  He needed someone he could trust to handle the case professionally and responsibly, so he turned to Keller.

  That meant Keller needed to modify his code of conduct a bit, moving it farther from his comfort zone. His edict of not doing “anything illegal that caused harm to others” became “not doing anything illegal that caused direct harm to others.”

  For his part, Tait understood and was selective of the cases he gave Keller. But after the third year, Keller having repeatedly proved he was better than most of Tait’s other fixers or cleaners or wet operatives—whatever it was they were called that week, depending on the job—word got around and requests for repeat business started coming in from Tait’s less legally inclined clients.

  Keller thought long and hard about his personal conduct code when he was given more complex (or “murky”) cases, where it was not entirely clear that the client was involved in a criminal enterprise. But like a skilled defense attorney, you did not have to ask—and often did not want to—to know your client was guilty.

  By year four, it got to the point where he had direct contact with the client, and any pretense of only working with law-abiding citizens on legal cases evaporated. After one particularly difficult case where Keller could no longer look the other way, he took an extended vacation and told Tait he was not sure if he was coming back.

  Tait the businessman took this to be a shrewd negotiating tactic. The ploy-that-wasn’t worked, however, and Tait tripled his salary to seven figures. For someone who had earned $95,000 as an LAPD detective, it took him 144 months to make the base pay of $1.5 million Tait offered him in a single year. It was a dream, like flying to the moon. You might fantasize about it, but you could never see a viable way of making it happen…so it did not occupy your thoughts for more than a fleeting moment.

  The lifestyle Mickey Keller never envisioned for himself—which he thought he was incapable of having as a public servant—was providing him almost anything he wanted, whenever he wanted. Financial stability. Two impressive homes, one on each coast, a Tesla in each garage, and most important, peace of mind relative to his future…if he continued to work for Tait.

  Tait had identified Keller’s price for willingly, though reluctantly, compromising his morals. They had come a long way from their days eating MREs and lugging gear around in desert-hot Middle Eastern locales.

  Keller told himself he would only do it for a few years and then quit and find something else to occupy his time.

  But the trappings of wealth were difficult to give up. And a million dollars did not go nearly as far as it used to. He decided not to get ahead of himself. Take it a day at a time, don’t worry about making big decisions. And in the meantime, do as little damage as possible. Break as few laws as possible.

  He knew this was one oversized rationalization, but it enabled him to wake up every morning and look himself in the mirror.

  Working for nefarious individuals, however, did take a toll. He would grit his teeth, remind himself he had made a commitment to his former unit mate, and fool himself into thinking he was taking one for the team.

  When Tait told him about the case in which he was to track down and recover a kidnapped young girl, he jumped at the opportunity to do something wholesome, to again be the champion of the right side of the law.

  He would be able to feel good about himself for a bit.

  But.

  Now he was not sure what he had gotten involved in.

  He took a drink of high octane cold brew and tapped his screen. The link opened and told him that Loren Ryder was still in the Oakland Resident Agency of the FBI working in the Crimes Against Children Squad. He found a photo of her. She looked good. A little more mature, a little older than he had last seen her…than the photo hanging on Amy Robbins’s kitchen wall.

  He scanned a couple more articles, then shifted to Amy, her sister-in-law. He read a couple of news pieces about a fatal motor vehicle accident involving Robbins, her husband, and daughter.

  Keller leaned back to think. Why would a woman whose relative is involved with crimes against children kidnap a young girl? Was it as she had said—that Melissa Ellis was really her daughter?

  Keller was staring at the screen but seeing nothing. Could he take Robbins at her word? She could be delusional. If she were mentally unstable, she could believe the child was hers and that people were conspiring against her. She endured a terrible tragedy, if true.

  It was true. That newspaper article mentioned their deaths…

  He huddled over the keyboard and found something mentioning a trial for the truck driver who had struck the Robbins’ vehicle. This provided a little more background: they had used IVF to get pregnant. Robbins took their deaths very hard, suffering from severe depression and leaving her lucrative law practice.

  He kept reading and compiling information. Finally he sat back and thought for a few minutes, absorbing what he had put together.

  She said the Ellises stole her daughter. Why would she say that? Why phrase it that way?

  What did he know about the Ellises?

  He took a long drink of coffee then hit the keys again. An hour later, he glanced over his notes. The photo of Melissa Ellis, the girl he was supposed to recover and the one he had seen in the apartment, stared at him from the screen.

  Keller thought a moment, then opened a picture of Christine and Brandon Ellis from the LifeScreen promotional brochure. Then he located a better image of Lindy Robbins and arranged it alongside the one of Melissa. The girls were fairly close in age. The resemblance was unquestionable.
And uncanny.

  Sisters. Lindy—and therefore Melissa—bore a strong likeness to Amy Robbins. And other than blonde hair, Melissa looked nothing like Christine—a somewhat attractive, though awkward-featured woman.

  Robbins claimed the child had been stolen from her. An adoption by the Ellises, if legal, would not be considered theft…unless Robbins was emotionally damaged and viewed anything that “took” her child from her as a criminal act. Accessing adoption records would be near impossible, especially when up against the clock.

  But Amy Robbins had IVF.

  A medical clinic was a soft target. He could more easily get at that information. If it did not bear fruit, he would have to find an illicit way of getting at the protected custody data he needed.

  He could go to Lira, but not without explaining why he was asking such questions rather than focusing on tracking down the girl.

  Taking the path of least resistance, Keller started calling fertility clinics in the Boston area, where Amy and Dan Robbins had lived at the time of the accident. There were three, but one was not in existence when the couple sought treatment.

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Keller dialed Boston Fertility.

  “Yeah, this is Dan Robbins. My wife and I were patients there several years ago, and we had a beautiful daughter—but I need to know the last date Amy was seen there. I’m having an issue with the insurance company.”

  “I can give a look,” the woman said, the sound of keys clacking, “but if it was more than three years ago, the files will be archived. Last name again?”

  “Robbins. Dan and Amy.”

  “Which doctor?”

  Keller laughed. “Signs of age. Can’t remember. Nice guy, though. Spent a lot of time with us going over all our options. Made all the difference in convincing us we were in the right place. A positive attitude—well, I’m rambling. Sorry. We were just so happy with the results.”

  “No, no, I understand. But all I have are dates of service. The file was purged a couple of years ago.”