PRAISE FOR IAN K. SMITH
“Ian K. Smith’s The Unspoken is the start of a big, bold, original new series. Chicago PI Ashe Cayne is the perfect hero for our times. I can’t wait to read his next adventure.
—Harlan Coben, #1 New York Times bestselling author
ALSO BY IAN K. SMITH
Novels
The Ancient Nine
The Blackbird Papers
Nonfiction
Clean & Lean
The Clean 20
Blast the Sugar Out!
The Shred Power Cleanse
The Shred Diet Cookbook
Super Shred
Shred
The Truth About Men
Eat
Happy
The 4 Day Diet
Extreme Fat Smash Diet
The Fat Smash Diet
The Take-Control Diet
Dr. Ian Smith’s Guide to Medical Websites
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2020 by Ian K. Smith
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN 13: 9781542025270 (hardcover)
ISBN 10: 1542025273 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9781542020855 (paperback)
ISBN-10: 1542020859 (paperback)
Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant
To Tristé, Dashiell, and Declan. Shimmering rainbows. Fearless adventures. Foreign lands. Picturesque sunsets . . . and tennis . . . of course.
CONTENTS
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
1
“MY DAUGHTER IS MISSING, and I want you to find her.”
The woman sitting across from me was beautiful in an aristocratic way. Her blonde hair had been perfectly coiffed and pulled back from her angular face; her enormous teardrop diamond earrings reflected light across my office like shards of glass stuck in fresh blacktop. She wore a formfitting French blue wool suit with a gold clasp on the blazer hooked by two Cs. Chanel. Everything about her reeked of wealth, including that clipped voice and its trace of venerable New England. She was old and young at the same time.
“Have you tried the men in blue?” I asked.
“I did,” she said, nodding her head about a millimeter. “And that’s why I’m here.”
I raised my eyebrows and opened up my hands.
“They’re the ones who told me about you,” she said. “They said they’d look into my daughter’s disappearance, but they weren’t convinced she was missing. I was surprised they said that. I thought if someone had not been in contact for forty-eight hours, they were officially considered a missing person.”
“That’s only in TV land,” I said. “In the real world, there are no hard rules. It could be several days; it might be just several hours. Depends on the officer taking the report. It’s usually based on a suspicious deviation from a person’s normal behavior or their typical movement patterns.”
“Such as?”
“Take a guy who comes home between five and six every day, and if he’s going to be late, he always makes sure to call his wife to let her know. One night he doesn’t come home, no one has been able to contact him for several hours, and none of his points of contact know where he is. If there’s a reasonable degree of suspicion that his routine has been interrupted involuntarily, then that person would be considered missing.”
The woman nodded. “One of the officers pulled me aside and said you could probably do a faster job than they could. That you worked with fewer restrictions. No red tape. He gave me your address.”
“The truth shall set you free,” I said, smiling with as much charm as I could muster. “But unfortunately, I don’t take on many cases this time of year. It’s my quiet season. About two weeks left before it’s too cold to play golf, three if I’m lucky. I’m still trying like hell to bring my handicap down a couple of strokes before the season ends.”
What I didn’t tell her was that I turned down a lot more cases than I took on. Thanks to an extremely generous settlement from Chicago PD upon my negotiated resignation and an Ivy League whiz kid who managed my money, work was now a choice, not a necessity.
“Mr. Cayne, my name is Violet Gerrigan,” she said, moving slightly in her seat but enough for me to see her legs. I didn’t think it was intentional. They were very nice to look at, however, and very tan, especially for this time of year. Given her $5,000 suit, I figured this hue was not the work of a tanning bed crammed into some second-floor salon in a walk-up in Wrigleyville. This was coloration earned on a yacht docked in the Mediterranean or lounging poolside in one of those ritzy gated Florida communities like West Palm Beach or Fisher Island.
“Money is no object,” she said firmly. She wasn’t boasting, simply proffering a statement of fact. “I have the means to pay you whatever it takes to find my daughter. I just want her home safely.”
I knew the Gerrigan name. You’d have to be living on the bottom of Lake Michigan not to know it. Randolph Gerrigan was a real estate mogul, second only to the city itself in owning the most real estate in Chicago. The family’s portfolio of properties was so large that when an interviewer asked how much of the city his family owned, Randolph Gerrigan replied, “Come to think of it, I have absolutely no idea, but I know it’s a helluva lot.”
“For the record, money alone doesn’t motivate me,” I said to Violet Gerrigan. “But it at least gets my attention. Tell me about your daughter.”
Mrs. Gerrigan reached into her blue snakeskin purse, which probably cost more than my yearly mortgage, and pulled out a four-by-six color photograph. She looked at it for a moment, then slid it across my desk. No one would
