Agent to the Rescue. Lisa Childs
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on everyone. So we don’t know your identity. We don’t know anything yet.”
“We checked the missing person’s report in the area,” Agent Bell said. “No one’s reported a bride missing.”
She glanced at Blaine and then Jared Bell before focusing on him again. “None of you have any answers,” she said with a ragged sigh of resignation and weariness. “You don’t know who I am or why I was in the trunk of that car, either.”
“We don’t,” Dalton admitted.
“So what do I call myself?” she asked. And now her voice sounded weak, thready, as exhaustion threatened to claim her.
“Jane Doe,” Blaine suggested.
She wrinkled her nose in distaste. “That makes it sound like I didn’t survive. Like I’m a dead body.”
Dalton had another suggestion. But he didn’t want to upset her. “We’ll find out your real name,” he said. “And how you wound up in that trunk. I promise you that we will find out.” He squeezed her hand again.
While she wasn’t weak, she was exhausted, and her eyes closed again as sleep claimed her.
“You shouldn’t have made her any promises,” Jared Bell admonished him.
“Why not?” Because the profiler intended to steal the case from him?
“It isn’t like you,” Blaine agreed. “You always swear you’re not going to make anyone any promises. You’re never getting married.”
“I’m not marrying anyone,” Dalton anxiously corrected him. That was a promise he’d made himself long ago. “I’m just going to find out who she is and how she wound up in that trunk.”
“But if nobody reports her missing and she doesn’t have DNA on file, there might not be any way to find out who she is,” Bell cautioned him. “You can’t risk putting her picture out there. You can’t risk a news report about her.”
“I wouldn’t risk it,” Dalton assured him. He couldn’t risk kooks coming out of the woodwork trying to claim they knew her or cared about her—not in her vulnerable state.
“Why not?” Blaine asked. “Her attacker obviously knows she’s still alive, or he wouldn’t have tried running the ambulance off the road.”
Jared Bell shook his head. “The last thing her attacker needs is any publicity...”
Dalton wasn’t worried about her attacker; he was worried about her.
“But it might be the only way,” Blaine said, “since the doctors said she might never regain her memory.”
Even while his heart sank for her, Dalton shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I will still find out who she is and what happened to her.” And he would find out without putting her in even more danger.
* * *
SHE MIGHT NEVER regain her memory.
She had only closed her eyes to hold back more tears—not to sleep. So she’d heard what the agent had said.
She had already heard the doctor say it, too, though, so the pronouncement wasn’t a shock. But hearing it again made it more real. She might never remember her life before the moment that Special Agent Dalton Reyes had opened the car trunk and rescued her.
Her oldest memory was of him—standing over her looking all handsome in his black tuxedo with his bow tie lying loose around his neck. If not for the trunk and the concussion and the blood, it might not have been such a bad memory. He was such an attractive man. But he wasn’t just a man. To her, he had become a hero.
The FBI agents must not have realized that she wasn’t sleeping, because they spoke freely over her—as if she wasn’t there. Since she didn’t remember who she was, it was almost as if she didn’t really exist.
She had no name. No history.
“You didn’t find anything at the crime scene to reveal her identity?” It must have been the blond man—Agent Campbell—who’d asked, since he had been the one assigned to protect her in the second ambulance. Fortunately, the paramedics from the first ambulance had had only minor injuries from the crash. They’d ridden along with her, too, to the hospital.
“No,” Dalton replied. “The glove box was empty, and there was no license plate on the car. I’ll have to run the vehicle identification number to find out whose name it was titled in last.”
Hers?
She hadn’t even seen the vehicle. She had no idea in what kind of trunk she had been found.
“The car was hot-wired, though—like Trooper Littlefield’s patrol car had been,” he continued. “This guy’s a pro.”
“So you think he’s part of that ring of car thieves you’ve been tracking?” Agent Campbell asked.
“Definitely.”
“Have your car thieves taken a hostage before?” the other man asked. Back at the crash site Dalton had introduced him as Agent Bell. She could remember all of their names; it was her own she couldn’t recall.
Dalton said nothing in reply to Agent Bell’s question before the man asked another. “And would they risk returning to the scene to reclaim that hostage?”
Now Dalton cursed. “I know what you’re up to,” he said, as if he was accusing the other agent of something nefarious. “You’re going to try to make this your case.”
She almost opened her eyes then so that she could protest. She wanted Special Agent Reyes on her case—and not just because he’d promised to find out who she was and what had happened.
Maybe it was because her oldest memory was of him—maybe it was because he had saved her life—that she felt so connected to him. Even dependent on him...
She had no sense of herself. Her only sense was of him. But the only thing she actually knew about him was that he was an FBI special agent. She knew nothing of his life. She’d heard him say he was never getting married, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t involved with someone. That he didn’t have kids.
“I hope it’s not my case, Reyes,” the other man replied with grave brevity. “I don’t want to think that he’s back—that he’s killing again...”
“She’s not dead,” Dalton said.
“She would have been—if you hadn’t stopped him,” Agent Bell said. “But you didn’t really stop him. He came back and hot-wired the trooper’s car. He tried again.”
“But he didn’t kill her,” Dalton said. “It’s not him—it’s not your serial killer. Or she would be dead. Some of his victims may not have been found, but nobody’s ever escaped him. It’s not the Bride Butcher.”
Bride Butcher...
The words chilled her, but she suppressed a shiver and a shudder of horror and recognition. The name sounded vaguely but frighteningly familiar to her.
But why would the killer be after her? She was no bride. Then she realized there was a slight weight on her left hand, something hard and metallic encircling her ring finger. Was she engaged? Married?
“I hope it’s not him,” Agent Bell said again, “because if it is, he’ll keep trying until he kills her.”
So she might not have lost only her memory. She could still lose her life...
* * *
BY THE TIME he had made it to the hospital where she’d been taken, the place was crawling with FBI agents and state troopers—just as the crash site had been.
He had just about had those crumpled doors of the ambulance open when those other vehicles had arrived on the scene. He’d slipped back into the woods just as two men dressed in tuxedos,