His Personal Mission Page 6

  “I feel like one of those clueless parents you see on television, saying they never knew their kid was into drugs, or gangs, or whatever else,” Patrick muttered.

  “You’re not that way. Believe me, I’ve seen enough parents like that.”

  “But we are,” Joan said softly. “We missed it with Ryan, too. We never realized what he was doing, hacking into the school’s computer system, then the others.”

  “Mom,” Ryan began, but when she looked at him he subsided.

  “If it hadn’t been for Josh Redstone, you would have ended up in jail. For who knows how long. You were just lucky he’s such a generous man.”

  “I know that, Mom.”

  Ryan said it quietly, yet so intently that Sasha knew he meant every word. And she knew he did think the world of the man who had given him a chance where anyone else wouldn’t have exerted himself beyond testifying to throw the kid who’d hacked his corporate security straight into a cell.

  “And you should be proud of him now,” Sasha said. “He’s one of Redstone’s finest. It’s a perfect fit.”

  Ryan gave her a startled look at the compliment. His surprise made her wonder if she’d perhaps been too hard on him. Had she never paid him a compliment? Had she been nothing but critical? She tried to think back, but caught herself before she got lost in the morass of analysis of what had gone wrong. Right now, the thing that mattered most was finding Trish.

  She hadn’t thought she would have any trouble working with Ryan, despite the fact that they’d had an unsuccessful personal relationship. It had been two years ago, and it hadn’t gone on very long anyway. And she wasn’t finding it awkward at all, not really. But she was finding it a distraction, and one she wasn’t used to; usually on a case, her focus was laser-sharp and nothing could pull her mind away from the job for long.

  You weren’t in the market for a geek then, and you’re not now, she told herself. And that she remembered he preferred the term tech-head was merely irritating.

  She’d lectured herself, back then, that she wanted to live life to the fullest, and hours spent in front of a computer screen didn’t fit with that, not in her mind. Nor did skating along seemingly on the surface of that life, never delving deep, really understanding things. Or even trying to. Wanting to.

  But she’d had to admit that she liked Ryan. A lot. And the genuine concern he was showing now for his missing sister appealed to her. A lot.

  And there she was again, distracted.

  “How much is the fund? Is a thousand a big chunk of it?”

  “It was ten thousand,” Patrick said, rubbing a hand over his face in a weary gesture Sasha had seen in almost every parent she’d dealt with over the years.

  Traveling money, Sasha thought.

  “She didn’t clean it out,” she said aloud. “That’s a very good sign.”

  “Is it?” Joan asked, her tone hopeful.

  “It suggests she plans to come back,” Sasha said.

  “But she could access it from any other branch of the bank that administers the trust,” Patrick said.

  “Yes,” Sasha agreed, “but why bother? If she was there, at the bank, why not clean it out then, if she was going to do it? It’s not like she’d have to carry around a wad of cash. All she’d have to do is ask for a debit card, checkbook, something like that.”

  Joan seemed to take heart from that, and when they finally left, even Ryan seemed relieved.

  “Thanks,” he said as they got back in her car. “You really made them feel better.”

  “I don’t have a magic pill,” Sasha warned.

  “I know that. But you made them feel like something was being done, and that really helped.”

  “They’re nice people.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, they are.”

  “You sound surprised.”

  “It’s weird. They’ve always just been my parents, you know? But today, it was like they were…different.”

  “Or you saw them differently?”

  He nodded slowly as she slid the key into the ignition. “I guess I never saw them as themselves before. People. In their own right.”

  “It’s always a shock, to realize our parents are people, too,” she said, only half teasing. “We start out as babies seeing them as merely extensions of ourselves. The first shock is when we realize they’re separate.”

  “Good thing we can’t remember that, I guess.”

  “What we should remember is that they were kids, and grew up feeling the same things we did, that they had dreams, and plans, felt hope and pain and joy and frustration, just like we do.”

  “Almost as weird as thinking about them having sex,” Ryan said wryly.

  Sasha laughed. “And yet here we are, living proof.”

  “Yeah,” he said, but he was smiling, as if he was pleased that he’d made her laugh. “Now what?” he asked then.

  “I want to go back to Westin,” she said. “Check her Web page, see if there are any clues there. Did she have a blog?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Okay, you can look for one while I check out her page and linked friends and all that.”

  He nodded, seemed to hesitate, then said, “Thanks,” again.

  “For what?”

  “Letting me help.”

  “She’s your sister, and you’ve got the computer smarts,” she said. “I’d be crazy to turn down that help. Especially,” she said, eyeing him as she pulled to a stop at the corner of the quiet, pleasant cul de sac he’d grown up on, “when we may need to do some hacking.”

  He blinked. “Hacking?”

  “Without the weight of the police behind us, conducting an official investigation, getting permission to check, say, IM logs, or true addresses behind AKAs and screen names could be…problematic. I assume something like that is well within your fabled abilities?”

  His expression was an odd combination of pride and embarrassment. “Yeah. I can do that.”

  “I thought so.”

  “You’re okay with that?” he asked, clearly curious at her willingness to skirt some legalities.

  “It’s the joy of not working for the government. The focus is on getting the job done, not jumping through hoops and over obstacles put in our way by people who seem more focused on protecting the bad guy than saving the innocent.”

  “You sound like Reeve talking about why it’s good to be Redstone Security.”

  “Same principle, I’m sure.” She frowned as something hit her. “Wait, maybe you’d better not do this. I’ll get somebody else. I don’t want you getting in any trouble if somebody catches you. You’ve already got a record for that kind of thing.”

  He shook his head. “Josh had it expunged.”

  She glanced at him. “He did?”

  Ryan nodded. “As a gift, on my fifth-year anniversary with Redstone.” His mouth twisted wryly. “After I’d finished my punishment.”

  “Punishment?”

  “Josh made me go teach computer classes to inmates at the county jail. His not-too-subtle message being this could be my world if I didn’t straighten up.”

  Sasha’s eyes widened. She’d thought, all this time, that Ryan had gotten off fairly lightly for what he’d done. She hadn’t been sure she’d approved of that, the lack of consequences. She should have known, from what she’d heard of Josh Redstone, that he wouldn’t believe in that either.

  “Anyway, his guy St. John handled it. Now there’s a guy who gets the job done.”

  “So I’ve heard. Zach’s mentioned him. Said he wished he could recruit him for the foundation.”

  “He’d be an asset, that’s for sure. The guy knows scary people in very scary places, and they all seem to owe him.”

  “And sometimes the kids we’re looking for end up in scary places.”

  “Yeah.”

  He said it quietly, and there was a fear that was all too familiar to her in the single syllable. She’d heard it too often in her work, and she wished, for Ryan’s sake as she had fo
r others, that she had that magic pill that would put everything right. But she didn’t.

  And while she could work 24/7 to find her, there wasn’t anything she could say that could take away a fear that was too often founded in reality.

  Trish Barton could well be in a very scary place.

  Chapter 7

  “Was your sister unhappy?”

  “Not on the surface.”

  Ryan answered Sasha’s question as he paced the large room at the Westin Foundation, where they’d gone because there was a computer setup where they could both work. The foundation was in an old house that had been updated, yet still seemed of another era, with solid wood-paneled walls and dividers between spaces, and not a trace of modern chrome or glass.

  Sasha poured over Trish’s colorful Web page, complete with a long list of “friends” who had asked to be added to her list.

  “Underneath?” she asked.

  He let out a sigh. “I guess you know I have no idea. I should have been paying more attention.”

  She didn’t answer that, and Ryan guessed it was because the answer was “Yes, you should have,” and she didn’t see the point. She’d told him in essence the same thing two years ago, that he should be more thankful for his family, and stop taking them for granted.

  What she’d told his parents, about her family history, was clattering around in his mind. He’d known it, from before. Had even commented on it once, about how exotic it was to an umpteenth-generation American like himself.

  “My family’s history isn’t exotic, you doofus,” she’d snapped at him. “It’s ugly. Painful. Do you know the slightest thing about real pain, Ryan?”

  I do now, he thought wearily.

  He had taken them for granted, assumed they’d always be there, so they weren’t something he needed to bother about on a day-to-day basis. Now he knew better. And no matter how much he tried to tell himself that this was an aberration, that Trish would soon be back and everything would be back to normal, he couldn’t quite sell himself on it.

  And the dark-haired woman beside him was a big part of the reason why.

  Since they’d parted ways, he’d tracked the Westin Foundation, telling himself it was just curiosity, not a need to know where she was and what she was doing. And when an alert came through to his e-mail, sending him to read some news article about them, he scanned it quickly for her name—which didn’t appear all that often. Zach was the public face, arriving at his high profile in the field in the most painful way possible.

  So he knew what she and her colleagues dealt with on a daily basis. Knew that while their success rate was astounding by official measures, that sometimes that success came too late; they found the missing child, but what they found was a shell of what had once been an innocent life.

  Or what they found was a body.

  Ryan suppressed the shudder that went through him. He leaned forward and made himself focus on the page on the wide-screen monitor. Nice color saturation, he thought, sharp image, and no dead pixels. He made a note of the brand; Ian Gamble needed a new one, and it was up to him to pick it out and install it—Ian would never stop his work long enough to do it.

  I’m as bad as my mother, he thought, stalling.

  He made himself read over Sasha’s shoulder, dreading what he might find. But all he saw was more of why he’d avoided it in the first place.

  “Besides the fact that she says she’ll be away for a while, see anything that jumps out?”

  “You mean besides that damned provocative picture of her in that bikini?”

  “Not unusual, I’m afraid.”

  “Yeah, but it is for my little sister. She’s not that…bold.”

  “It’s easy to be more confident in cyberspace than you are in person. But is there anything, for instance, that you know isn’t true?”

  Ryan knew kids often lied on these pages, to make themselves or their lives seem more exciting. But after a few moments more of reading, he shook his head.

  “Nothing outright false, just…embellished. At least the stuff I know about. Most of it I don’t.”

  “I’ll make a note to ask your parents about a couple of these things.”

  He shook his head as he continued to scan. “When did she turn into such a drama queen?” he asked, more to himself than to Sasha, who obviously couldn’t know.

  But he saw now why she’d asked if Trish was happy; if you judged by the seemingly unceasing list of complaints about her life shown here, you’d have to assume her life was a living hell.

  “Hormones,” Sasha said.

  Ryan’s mouth twisted. “I’d get slapped if I said that.”

  “Yes, and you’d deserve it,” she said mildly.

  “You want to explain that one to me?”

  “Guys might be allowed to say it if you didn’t carry it way too far and attribute everything a woman does that you don’t like or that ticks you off to it.”

  “Oh.” He couldn’t think of anything else to say to that, and decided not to even try.

  “Of course, blaming every crazy thing a guy does on testosterone poisoning is just as bad.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “I think.”

  She smiled at that, then turned back to reading the page. He went back to it, too, but didn’t last long.

  “Girls,” he muttered. Sasha glanced at him again, her dark eyes full of amusement. “Sorry,” he said.

  “Don’t be. It even bores me after a while.” She made a wry face. “I don’t understand why people think they have it so rough when in reality they’re so lucky.”

  “Because they’re not dealing in reality?” Ryan suggested.

  She looked startled, then thoughtful. “Very astute, Mr. Barton.”

  “I’m sorry you’re surprised,” he said, feeling weary of being thought a lightweight by this woman.

  That she’d likely been right for too long was a reality he didn’t want to deal with. At least, not now.

  He was grateful when her cell phone rang. From her side of the conversation he deduced it was Sheila, from Safe Haven, and when Sasha gave her a fax number, he guessed she’d found Trish’s note. When she disconnected, Sasha confirmed his guess.

  “Emma sends her best, Sheila says,” she added. “And she said to tell you if there’s anything she or her husband can do to help, just ask.”

  With anyone else, Ryan guessed it would be just lip service. But when there was a Redstone connection, he knew it was genuine, and that if he made that request, he would get exactly what had been offered—whatever help they could provide. They were truly a family.

  Family.

  It hit him suddenly that perhaps he’d been appreciating one family while taking the other for granted.

  He made himself lean over and pay attention to what was going on, telling himself—not without the same mental comparison to his mother—he’d deal with that later.

  “You must have looked at a lot of these. It seems pretty average to me, but…”

  She accepted the change of subject, since it was back to the task at hand. “It is fairly typical. Until,” she said with a gesture at the screen, “here.”

  He looked, read from the point she indicated onward. After several weeks’ worth of entries, he was frowning.

  “She stopped complaining. At least about every little thing.”

  “Yes. After that point, her main complaint was how overprotective your parents are, something she’d mentioned before, but it was just one on her long list.”

  “What changed?”

  “Her attitude,” Sasha answered. “The real question is, why? What happened—” she scrolled back to where the change began to show “—in mid-May?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “When did she get her college acceptance letter?”

  He thought for a moment, then nodded. “About then,” he said. He dug out his smart phone, did a search, nodded again. “There. We all went out to dinner to celebrate on May 12. She’d just gotten her letter that we
ek. You think that’s it? Why it all changed?”

  “Maybe.”

  “But she’s so smart, and her grades were always really good, she had no reason to think she wouldn’t get in. I mean, schools came looking for her.”

  Sasha frowned as if that had put a kink in her theory. “Still, the stress of waiting to hear may have been why she was so…snarky.”

  “Nice dodge of the B-word,” Ryan said, earning himself a laugh. It was ridiculous, how that pleased him so much. Especially when he shouldn’t be thinking about any kind of laughter, not with Trish out there somewhere, maybe in trouble.

  Maybe he was the one not dealing with reality, he thought.

  Sasha was still reading, and making some notes. She went for the old-fashioned way, he saw, pen and paper as she wrote down some dates and screen names.

  “I should write you guys a program that would strip that stuff out of pages like this.”

  She stopped mid-note. “You could do that?”

  He lifted a shoulder. “Sure.”

  “Could you make it search for names, dates, references to things?”

  “Sure.”

  “And maybe make it sort by different parameters, like what names show up on what dates, or vice versa, that kind of thing?”

  “Easy.”

  “Ryan Barton, I and everyone in this office would kiss you if you could do that.”

  “I’ll pass on Russ, thanks,” he said. “But you…now that I’d take.”

  She truly laughed then, and he realized the sound of it soothed him like nothing else had in the past week since this had started.

  No, he thought suddenly, like nothing else had since the last time he’d heard that joyous sound, two years ago.

  “You two are having too much fun,” a stern male voice said from the doorway. Ryan whirled, wondering if he’d somehow conjured up the resident GQ cover boy by mentioning him. He relaxed when he saw an older man, maybe late-forties, with brown hair cut short and graying at the temples, holding some papers. The man looked pretty buff to him, and Ryan guessed anybody who let the gray in his hair fool him would pay a price.

  “Hi, Frank,” Sasha said, getting to her feet. She gestured at Ryan. “Ryan Barton, Frank Bedford, once one of L.A.P.D.’s finest, now, lucky for us, one of ours.”