His Personal Mission Read online

  L.A.P.D. That probably explained the world-weary look in the man’s eyes. Ryan held out his hand and the other man shook it firmly, but with no show of strength. But then, he supposed even an ex-cop had nothing to prove.

  “Barton,” the man said slowly. “Redstone?”

  Ryan nodded.

  “You’re the tech guy, aren’t you? That video enhancement, on Josh’s nephew’s case, right?”

  Ryan nodded again.

  “It’s your sister who’s missing?”

  For a third time, Ryan nodded.

  “We’ll find her,” Bedford said. Then, nodding toward Sasha, he added, “No one’s better at it than this one.”

  “I know that.”

  The man gestured at Sasha with the papers he held. “Fax came in. I grabbed it since it was obviously the companion to the one you gave me.”

  Sasha nodded. “Sheila called and said she’d found it.”

  Bedford stepped to the desk, laid the two pages down side by side. Ryan took a quick step forward; he’d stared endlessly at the one Trish had left at home, but he hadn’t seen the one she’d left at Safe Haven at all. It was a bit longer, but in tone, didn’t seem to him any different.

  “What’s your take?” Sasha asked Bedford.

  Ryan found himself holding his breath. Sasha said the guy had a knack for analyzing such things, seeing what wasn’t there. But he started with what was obvious.

  “They’re different. Personalized to each recipient. No way to be totally certain, of course, but the indication is that they’re real, not copies left by someone else.”

  And Ryan didn’t feel a hundred per cent good about that. It was a great relief that Trish had apparently done this herself, and hadn’t been carted off by some kidnapper—although they certainly weren’t a likely target; they were solidly middle class, comfortable but never going to be rich by any measure. At the same time, the thought that she’d done this on purpose, just vanished for reasons her family and friends didn’t know and couldn’t seem to figure out, was beyond unsettling.

  “Okay, so assuming she left of her own accord,” Sasha said, “what else do those tell you?”

  “Nothing,” Bedford said.

  Ryan blinked when Sasha laughed at this. “Ever the cop. Come on, Frank, this isn’t L.A.P.D., you don’t have to try and explain how you got there, show probable cause or make some D.A.’s case. Just give me your gut feeling.”

  Frank smiled, the bleakness in his eyes abating for a moment. “All right. You know all the usual disclaimers.”

  “I know your instincts are beyond sharp,” she said. “Tell me.”

  “All right. First, she left of her own free will. Second, she intends to come back. Those are obviously the two most important things.”

  “I’ll say,” Ryan said on a breath of relief; there was something about this man that inspired trust. He wondered if they taught cops how to do that, or if Bedford just naturally had it.

  But Sasha merely nodded, as if she’d already known that. Which, Ryan supposed, she likely had.

  “Okay, now give me the good stuff,” she said, with a smile at the older man.

  “All right. Third, she was happy about it. Fourth, she was also scared about it. Fifth, she didn’t like keeping it a secret. Sixth, she felt like the people she worked with would understand better than her folks would. Seventh, and here’s where it starts getting nebulous, she hadn’t done anything like this before.”

  “That’s not nebulous,” Ryan said. “She hasn’t.”

  “Well. There you go, then,” Bedford said.

  “And?” Sasha prompted.

  “Eighth, and more nebulous, she knew she was acting out of character, and it frightened her a little.”

  “She was out of her comfort zone,” Sasha said slowly, and Bedford nodded.

  “Ninth, and probably the most nebulous…she was excited about more than just a trip somewhere.”

  Ryan went still. Sheila McKay’s words echoed in his head, about the feeling she’d gotten from Trish. That there was more than just the trip she was looking forward to.

  He stared down at the second note, read it again, and then again. Finally the words burst from him.

  “I get that she did this herself, voluntarily, and it says here that she’ll be back and go back to work, but how the hell do you get the all the rest of that?”

  “Genius,” Sasha said.

  Frank snorted. “Most of it’s right there. The happiness, it’s in the energy in the second one. She’s almost gushing excitement. The fear, well, that’s two-fold, first that she knows her folks are going to be upset, that’s why the effort to reassure, this ‘please understand I have to do this,’ and second, here—” he pointed at a spot in the second note “—she says she can’t believe she’s doing this.”

  “And that’s where the ‘never having done anything like this before’ comes in,” Sasha guessed aloud.

  Bedford nodded. “And that alone scared her, but it also implies, I think, that she knew this wasn’t ‘her’ and that either bothered or worried her. Kids her age are focused a lot on who they are, finding themselves, whatever the current phrase is. And when they do something they can’t explain even to themselves, contrary to what adults might think, they do know it.”

  It all sounded so logical when he explained it, Ryan thought. “Where’d you get the idea she didn’t like keeping it a secret?” he asked.

  “Here,” Bedford said, pointing to a line in the Safe Haven note. “Where she swears she will tell all as soon as she can. It’s in the tone of an apology.”

  That made sense, too, Ryan thought. Sasha was right, the guy was good.

  “And that’s why you think she thought the Safe Haven people would understand better than her family?” Sasha asked. “Because she told them more, and promised to tell all when she could?”

  “You’re getting the hang of it, girl,” Bedford said.

  “But what about that last thing, that you said, and Sheila said,” Ryan asked. “About her being excited about more than just a trip?”

  “That,” Bedford said wryly, “I can’t explain. It’s just a gut feel. A hunch, if you want. I don’t expect you to believe it, since there’s not a damn bit of concrete evidence that I’m right.”

  “Sure there is,” Ryan said, earning him a startled glance from Sasha and a narrowed gaze from Bedford. He lifted one shoulder in a half shrug. “You’re right about all the rest. That’s evidence, isn’t it?”

  “Well, well,” Bedford said. “You’re smarter than I thought.”

  Ryan flushed, but the smile of approval Sasha gave him eased any embarrassment he was feeling.

  “Thanks, Frank,” Sasha said.

  “You need anything more, you let me know. We’re thankfully light right now.”

  “Let’s hope it stays that way,” Sasha said as the man headed for the door of her office.

  Bedford stopped in the doorway and looked back at Ryan. “Reason I didn’t think you were too smart?” He nodded at Sasha. “You let her get away.”

  He left, whistling a cheerful tune. And to Ryan’s surprise, Sasha seemed flustered, avoiding his eyes.

  “Don’t mind him,” she said. “He’s just jabbing at you.”

  “I didn’t let you get away. You left.”

  She did look at him then. Steadily, levelly, in that direct way that he both liked and was a tiny bit intimidated by.

  “My staying would have taken changes you weren’t willing to make. So did I just leave, or did you let it happen?”

  Ryan blinked. He hated conundrum questions like that. He hated the vagueness of them, the hidden aspects. With a computer, it did exactly what you told it to do, no more, no less, and the biggest puzzle involved was figuring out exactly what to tell it to get what you wanted.

  People were unpredictable, unique, like throwing two completely different operating systems together; they couldn’t even talk to each other, let alone accomplish anything.

  Sasha h
ad already turned back to her computer monitor, as if it had been merely a rhetorical question she’d never really expected an answer to. As, perhaps, it had been.

  And damn it, now he was going to be thinking about it for days.

  Chapter 8

  Sasha got up out of her chair, stretching muscles protesting at the long session at the computer. This was the heart of the Westin Foundation, what Zach called the “war room,” because that’s what he considered their work, a war against those who would do harm to innocent children. It was where they met, compared notes, compiled what they knew and tossed around possibilities, all of which were transferred to the huge whiteboard on the end wall, with different colored markers delineating what they knew, what they suspected, what could be and the things where they had no idea if they mattered. Yet. And all the connections between them.

  She guessed Ryan would think it an antiquated and inefficient process, but it worked. Something about running through all their data in a group, of putting it up where they could all see it at once, together, maybe even the physical process of writing it on the whiteboard, helped them work.

  But this corner of the war room, set up with several computer terminals and the latest in other electronics, courtesy of Redstone, was Ryan’s world. He was utterly at home here.

  “I don’t know how you sit at one of these for hours on end,” she said. “My eyes are crossing and my back hurts.”

  “I usually don’t sit so still,” he answered, almost absently, still focused on his own screen. At least he’d answered her this time; once or twice he’d been so intent he hadn’t even heard her.

  He was tracking down the screen names she gave him as she went through Trish’s pages, checking other sites and doing general searches on them, a task made more complicated by people using the same name, or a variation, everywhere, and different people using similar names in other places. It was a massive undertaking, and he was grateful Trish had landed on one of the smaller networking sites.

  After a brief stop for coffee out and coffee in, Sasha was pushed by his intensity to get back to it. Interesting, she thought. Usually people were telling her to slow down, but now it was he who seemed driven. She’d never pictured him like this.

  Of course, it was he who had the most to lose if they didn’t come up with something here.

  After another hour, even Ryan was starting to flag.

  “That’s something else to add to the program,” he muttered. “An option to search through all other social pages and databases for what it strips out of one. Automated,” he added sourly as he stood up and stretched.

  Sasha glanced up, realized with a little jolt that she was looking at a rather prime backside. But then, he’d always been the type she preferred, lean and wiry rather than bulky with carefully maintained muscles, like Russ.

  Two years ago, it had been when she’d found herself wondering about the rest of him, when she’d felt the heat of urgency to end the speculation and find out, that she’d realized she was well on her way to falling for him.

  But she’d seen too many women make disasters of their lives by rushing in, and had spent years now dealing with the fallout, both from inexperienced young girls who had been fooled into thinking infatuation was love, or women who should have known better making lousy choices where their own children paid the price.

  She was neither of those, she’d told herself firmly then. And she’d walked away.

  But she’d never forgotten.

  But you’d better forget now, she chided herself. Focus, woman. What is with you?

  “That would be great, if you could come up with that program,” she said.

  There was a moment’s lag time when he looked a little puzzled, and she wondered just how long she’d been lost in her own thoughts since he’d said that. But after a moment he simply answered.

  “I can. I will. I’d do it now, so we could use it, but it would take too long to get it tweaked and working.”

  “I understand. But just the thought of having something like that to do this kind of work for us makes my back feel better.”

  “I thought you didn’t like computers,” he said, turning to face her.

  “I never said that,” Sasha answered, a little sharply. “They’re tools, wizard tools. In a way, they can be weapons, too. In the right hands, like ours, they’re one of the best in our arsenal for good. In the wrong hands, they can be devastating.”

  He blinked. “I never thought of it like that.”

  “Our job would be immensely harder without them. Our lives would be harder without them—or easier, depending on how they’re working. But they shouldn’t be our lives.”

  He sighed, and looked away, and Sasha knew it was the unspoken equivalent of “Here we go again.”

  And he’d be right. They’d had this discussion before. And this was not the time, place or circumstance to have it again. It didn’t matter anyway. She’d walked away when it was clear he wouldn’t change. No matter how much she liked him, no matter how much she was attracted to him, she couldn’t imagine a long-term relationship with somebody who seemed to skate along so easily on the surface of life.

  But she’d gotten something out of it.

  Now she understood how some of those women ended up making those lousy choices.

  “I think we have to consider another possibility,” Sasha said briskly, gesturing at the screen that still held Trish’s brightly colored page, with her list of “friends” running down a column on the right side, apparently to indicate they were back to work.

  “What?” he asked, thinking he should be thankful they were out of that personal minefield. He hated that kind of discussion, and nothing made his stomach churn more than the girl of the moment telling them they needed to “talk.” So why was he standing here wishing they could thrash this out, get past it, find some common ground between them?

  “It’s true her attitude changed about the time she got her college acceptance. So maybe it was just stress over that that had her so…”

  “Bitchy?” Ryan suggested, accepting the shift back to work; he shouldn’t have been thinking about anything but Trish anyway.

  “Well, yes. That, and being a teenager.”

  “That’ll do it. But you think there’s something else going on?”

  “Take going off to college out of it. If you read her posts and looked at the pictures and things added since that time, looked at all that cold, without knowing anything else and saw the change, what would you think?”

  “That I’m glad I don’t have to deal with teenage girls anymore?”

  He saw her mouth twitch, but she wasn’t distracted. She’d been lost in thought a while ago, but now she was back on the scent, and as intense as he remembered. It had been one of the things that had drawn him. Her passion for what she did had been incredibly attractive.

  “In a way, you’re right.”

  “Huh?”

  “If I didn’t know what I know, if I just read this cold, I’d think she met someone.”

  “Met…you mean as in a guy?”

  Sasha nodded. “She started sounding like a girl in love. Or on her way to it.”

  “Trish?” he said, incredulous.

  “It’s just a feeling.”

  “Like Bedford’s hunch?”

  “Yes. And like him, I have no real evidence.”

  “Just the instincts that make you so good at this.”

  She blinked, looking startled. “Yes. Nothing I can point to, nothing these—” she gestured widely at the bank of computers “—could come up with.”

  She said it as if she expected him to discredit the idea because of that. He spent a moment wondering if he’d really come across that way two years ago, as if he thought computers could do everything.

  Then he realized it didn’t matter. What mattered was how he came across here and now.

  “But this one,” he said, reaching out to gently tap the side of her head, “did.”

  She drew back sl
ightly, clearly not certain how to take that comparison.

  “Isn’t that what it is? You’ve built up a database in years of doing this, and you’re drawing on it, looking for similarities, matches, to come up with possibilities.”

  Her eyes widened, and he knew he’d struck a chord. Encouraged, he went on.

  “Somebody said once that if the technology doesn’t seem like magic, it’s not advanced enough. And you do this so fast, and make these leaps, that it seems like that kind of magic.”

  A smile played around the corners of her mouth. “Did you just say I’m faster than a speeding computer?”

  He chuckled, glad she’d taken it that way. Progress, he thought. And he’d always admired, even been fascinated, by the way her agile mind worked. If you could build a computer to work that way, to make the kind of intuitive leaps she did, you’d really have something, he thought now.

  “Sort of,” he answered. “But more that your ‘feeling’ and Bedford’s ‘hunch’ are likely just as founded in empirical data, but a good human brain can…skip a few steps a computer can’t.”

  “Do I need a red pen to mark the day?”

  “The day?”

  “The day Ryan Barton admitted a computer can’t replace a human brain.”

  So much for progress.

  “I’ve never thought that,” he said, weary of the argument that had been going on most of his life. “After all, the human brain thought up computers. All they do is do things faster, in more depth and with greater accuracy. Until they learn to learn, that’s all they’ll ever do.”

  She looked thoughtful then. “And you think they will, someday? Learn to learn, I mean?”

  “Artificial Intelligence? Yes, they will.”

  “And that doesn’t bother you?”

  “It’s a natural progression.”

  “And there we are,” Sasha said softly. “You see progress, I see…a Terminator scenario.”

  “That’s because you’re a pessimist.”

  She blinked. “What?”

  “You’re always looking for the dark side.” He glanced around the room. “Doing what you do, how could you not?”