Forbidden (Southern Comfort) by O'Neill, Clark (free ebook reader txt) 📗

“Oh my goodness.  You’re the… uh, artist?”

“Guilty.”

Tate decided she didn’t like the taste of having her foot in her mouth.  “I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean to imply –”

Deputy Harding waved her apology away as he sat down.  He smelled good, like quality bath products and a light dash of cologne.   “Don’t worry about it.  My dad – who was sheriff until about three years ago, when they practically had to pry his behind out of that chair in there to get him to retire –  had a similar reaction to the idea of me becoming an artist.  So we compromised.  I got to do a few years at the Savannah College of Art and Design on his dime, and I then had to put in my time as a sheriff’s deputy.”  He smiled at her, showing a row of perfectly aligned teeth, and then tapped his pencil on the sketch pad.  “It came as a surprise to both of us to learn that I could find a way to combine the two.  In a couple weeks I’ll be starting with the Charleston PD, doing this kind of thing on a regular basis.  So when you see the wanted posters of Sponge Bob hanging around, you’ll know who did them.”

Tate laughed, charmed and chagrined, and the deputy smiled back.

CLAY heard the burst of mingled laughter that erupted from the interview room, and turned away from the report he was studying to see what the hubbub was about.  Through the open blinds he could see Deputy Harding leaning close to Tate as they consulted.  They’d been at it for about thirty minutes, and this was the second time they’d broken out in giggles. Clay had no idea why trying to put together the sketch of a suspected child abductor should be so amusing, and frankly, it was beginning to piss him off.

Blocking out the sound of that thrice damned laughter, he returned his attention to the report.

It was a missing persons from a county just west of Charleston, involving a fourteen-year-old girl who’d run away from her third foster home just last month.   The story was pretty unremarkable – kids ran away from bad home situations all the time, and an unfortunately high number of them were never heard from again.  In this case, the girl had an older sister – pregnant and living in a state-run home – who told the police that her sister was trying to make it to their cousin in Florida.

She never arrived.

And the case would have gone very cold, very fast, if it weren’t for the fact that an on-the-ball service station attendant had noticed a girl matching the teen’s description sleeping in the back seat of a late model BMW.  Apparently the car had blown a tire and pulled into the station’s lot to change the spare.  The driver of the BMW – a large, muscular blond man between approximately thirty and forty years of age – had politely refused offers of help, explaining that he was trying to get the whole thing taken care of as quietly as possible so as not to disturb his sleeping daughter.

The attendant bought the story and didn’t give the matter a second thought.

Days later, when the local authorities had gotten around to making some inquiries about the missing girl, the attendant put two and two together and gave them the lead. No BMW matching the description had surfaced, but it at least gave the authorities a place to start.

And Sheriff Callahan, smart man that he was, remembered that case after Casey was reported missing.   He’d gotten a copy of the report, as well as any others involving missing girls in the Charleston area, after Clay told the deputies that he believed that they were dealing with an experienced offender.  Clay now had a stack of files about six inches thick, entailing over twenty young women who’d gone missing over the past six months.

Clay was sure a couple of the cases involved family abductions, and a few more were simply disgruntled teens running off with the boyfriend of the month, but there were several that struck him as warranting further attention.

There was no proof of foul play involving any of the girls, and without a body or a crime scene it was difficult for Clay to learn much about an offender’s behavior. But by studying the victimology – supposing the missing young teens were victims – he was beginning to glean an overall pattern.

And the pattern reminded him of a conversation he’d had the previous week.

On a hunch, he retrieved his cell phone from his pocket and put in a call to Kim O’Connell.  Kim was an agent with the Atlanta field office, as well as one of Clay’s best friends.  She’d been struggling with a nasty case involving young girls who disappeared, reappearing on some very bad porn sites on the web, or in one case as a murdered truck stop prostitute.  But it was the snuff film her team had gotten their hands on that came to Clay’s mind.  She’d called him to pick his brain about some of the behavioral idiosyncrasies, and a couple of the points they’d discussed sounded disturbingly familiar.

The phone rang four times before it was answered by an out of breath woman.

“O’Connell.”

“Did I catch you in the middle of something?”

“Ha!”  Kim exclaimed when she recognized Clay’s voice.  “You caught me running to catch the elevator, but I failed to make it there in time.  And of course the team of defense lawyers who just piled onto it weren’t about to hold it for me, considering I gave the testimony that drove the final nail into their client’s coffin.  But enough about us lowly working stiffs.  How’s life treating you in the Big Easy?”

“I’m in Charleston, Red.  The Big Easy is New Orleans.”

Kim snorted.  “Honey, anyplace that’s not here is the Big Easy in my book.  So are you gloriously drunk and half naked on some lounge