Searching (PAVAD- FBI Romantic Suspense Book 18) by Calle Brookes (guided reading books txt) 📗

in her car,” Jac said quietly. “Maybe she’d already had them and was bringing them home when she stumbled on what was happening? Maybe the girls never got out of her car?”

Max nodded. It was certainly a possible scenario, could move into a working theory. Although midnight on a school night was extremely late for two little girls that age to have been with someone other than their mother or father.

They could have been asleep in the car. It would have been easy enough to carry them inside to their beds, even in the rain. He’d done it countless times, himself.

“So where were they?” Barnes asked, shifting close enough to Jac to touch.

“We don’t know, Barnesy. That’s kind of what we’re doing here, too,” Miranda said, coming up behind them. He’d thought she was at the bullpen. She deliberately stepped between Barnes and Jac. Protectively.

She always had been overprotective of Jac in some ways. He’d likened it to her being the eldest of so many cousins and sisters that she’d felt responsible for. Having now met those sisters and cousins—and seeing a superficial resemblance between some of them and Jac—he understood why she tended to watch over Jac.

Miranda missed home, and Jac was her best friend. They were as close as sisters. Miranda was used to being the leader, a protector, and she’d needed people to protect in St. Louis to feel subconsciously validated.

They might be PAVAD profilers and agents—but they were human, too. And this case was going to hurt them all on that human level.

There was no way that it wouldn’t.

“I don’t think forensics is going to tell us much more than it already has. Now, we need to build a profile. Two—one of someone who could do this, but didn’t know the family, and one where someone knows the family and took the girls.”

Jac took one more look around. Her attention stayed on the bank of windows above the front door. The girls’ rooms. They looked right out on the drive.

Had the girls been there? Had they seen what had happened? Max felt sick at the very idea.

Because he knew the truth—if those girls had been abducted by their mother’s killer, time was running out.

45

They spent a few more hours poking around the Sturvin home, trying to get a picture of who they were. Max spent half that time speaking with Marianna. When the head of forensics left to meet with her team, he went in search of Jac.

“Dani find anything out on that car?” Max asked, coming up behind Jac in Paul Sturvin’s home office after checking in with forensics about the search for the murder weapon.

Miranda was keeping Barnes distracted outside.

Miranda could handle that task just fine on her own. She’d probably enjoy it, as perverse as she could be.

“Not yet.” Jac shook her head. She had her phone out, snapping photos of Paul Sturvin’s desk calendar. “Dani’s checking traffic cams, but at the distance they are from here, there’s no guarantee that it even had anything to do with the Sturvins’ case. All she has so far is one Pontiac driving at an erratic rate of speed at approximately 12:15. That’s it. Nothing probative.”

“Do they think it’s the killer?” Barnes asked, almost too enthusiastically, as he came up behind Max.

Apparently, Miranda hadn’t been as good at distracting Barnes as Max had thought.

“Dani’s going to keep looking. Seeing what she can find. She’s trying to track the Pontiac now. Last I spoke with her, she was trying to isolate a still of the license plate.”

“We need to go on the assumption that this mystery woman is the third victim. And boys, there was enough blood that she’s bound to turn up sooner or later. It didn’t look good. Shayna called; a third of the blood samples inside the hall came back to the mystery woman,” Miranda said.

“Dani’s calling around to the hospitals and the local law enforcement posts to see what we can find,” Jac added. “She’s pulled four from Lytel’s department to help.”

“If that woman has the children with her...well, she’d be in no condition to care for two children,” Max said as images of the girls popped into his head. “If she is in need of medical help, that leaves the girls with her alone. Call Dani again. See if there’s been anything new, anything at all, that we can possibly roll on. We can’t just stand around here doing nothing.”

46

Todd had always loved the smell of women. He probably always would. Miranda Talley smelled like warm vanilla. Just his luck, he’d gotten sent back to the PAVAD building with her. She’d insisted on driving, even though he’d offered, since she was in that cast. He’d been trying to be helpful.

The woman had just smirked at him and said she could handle it.

Talley had serious control issues, that was for sure. He studied her, making no bones about what he was doing.

She smirked at him again. Taunting him.

Damn, she was a looker. No wonder she strolled around the place like she was hot shit.

She was. As far as he knew, she’d been in St. Louis for years. She wasn’t all that old—a good seven or eight years younger than he was, but she’d gone far.

With PAVAD.

He wondered who she’d screwed around with at the academy to get to where she was. There were a few names he could think of, including old Dennis himself—even if she was younger than the director’s daughter. There was no other explanation why she would have gotten into PAVAD so quickly.

No reason she’d have gotten in and not him. He’d probably been on the job five years before she’d even started at the academy.

One look at her made it clear just how a woman like her had gotten so far in the bureau. The women who’d been in his cohort at the Academy had all been dog ugly. Or married. Three of them had been married—two of them had been married and dog ugly.

He didn’t mess