If the girl was there, I was sure she’d be safe.
I found myself hoping she was there. Kyle cared about Millie, and he was too honorable to hurt a child. It would have been the perfect scenario, a quick and easy conclusion.
Sometimes cases are solved quickly and easily, but in my experience those are rare indeed. Most often they are long and messy and people get hurt along the way.
I looked in his truck and found nothing, no sign of the girl, before handing the keys back into the front desk, saying that he’d left them in the gym.
Kyle was still a suspect—he had the means to take the girl—and the motive too, although he clearly didn’t have her with him, that didn’t preclude the possibility that he was holding Millie elsewhere.
Chapter 13
Generally speaking, I hated the modern phone apps.
But I must admit, there was something appealing about using them that I found hard to resist. There was a highly addictive nature to them and once hooked they could be really hard to quit. They became a habit, often used without a conscious decision to do so.
Casey was always trying out the latest apps, research she said, but I knew it was her way of letting her brain relax and go someplace other than work, to put that stress on hold, at least for a while.
Why she had to share them with me though, I didn’t know.
The latest fad was an app that showed what children would look like based on uploading another person’s face into it – either a real person you know or, more often than not, a fantasy celebrity. It then mixed up a selection of facial features from both your picture and the other person and, voila! Out popped an offspring. I’d heard about it, I’d seen others using it—often resulting in a lot of laughter—and up until this point I’d done my best to resist it.
But sometimes resistance is futile.
Casey had tried it with Ed Sheeran, Damian Lewis and even Prince Harry, apparently she had a bit of a thing for ginger haired Englishmen, and she was pretty happy with the results. And for a laugh she paired me with Beyoncé, Hillary Clinton and the Queen of England, but I didn’t stick around for the results. My chance for kids had gone. Gone with Claire.
But sitting in my office, with two days down, just three days to go, Millie’s disappearance was weighing heavily on my mind, and I couldn’t resist downloading the app. I uploaded a picture of my face, I’d like to say a good picture of my face but then in truth they ranged from bad to not quite so bad, and then I uploaded a picture of Claire’s face. Any picture would do, Claire always looked beautiful; was beautiful, inside and out: face like an angel and a heart like a saint.
And dammit, the picture of our potential offspring was gorgeous.
But more than that, more than the features, was the fact that our downloaded offspring looked like she could be a cousin of Millie Martin. Blonde hair, blue eyes, soft smile. So damn cute. Clearly the app used more of Claire’s photo than mine.
I had to do everything I could to protect that child. I couldn’t let her be hurt, or that would weigh on my mind for the rest of my life.
I’d already lost Claire. I couldn’t afford to lose Millie as well.
Something shifted inside of me, a subtle change in my perception of things. A determination to find Millie, to save Millie, no matter what, began to take ahold of me as if she were my very own child, Claire’s own child, the daughter we never had.
Turning off the app, I looked around my office. It was just as well that we didn’t have a child before Claire was taken from me, I couldn’t imagine a child growing up in this world. My world was filled with crimes, hatred and anger, and there was no way to avoid it. But Millie was real and alive somewhere. The thought of her fear and possible suffering ate a hole in me. I was going to rescue her and to take down anyone who got in my way, so help me God.
This was the only work I knew, the only thing I was good at, and the thought of giving it up to work in a respectable office would’ve killed me. I couldn’t imagine sitting in front of a computer for hours on end, slugging away on a keyboard to make money for someone else’s business.
However, an office job would’ve been a thousand times better than a customer service role. I would be lucky to last a morning before I got fired. If there was one thing I hated, it was when people complained. Worse still was the thought of smiling meekly in response to a customers’ complaints. I liked to hit back, both figuratively and literally. I wouldn’t be able to hold back on my advice about where these people could file their complaints.
I opened a news website. Another kid missing in Florida. The FBI said that they were copycats, and had high hopes of getting the child back this time. I didn’t have any hope for that kid. If the gangs were evil enough to kidnap a child, then they were evil enough to pull the trigger. They weren’t messing around, and fear was spreading through the country. ‘Keep your kids safe,’ the Governor said. ‘Don’t let them wander the streets alone.’
I read the article on the kidnapping and then turned to the local news on the site. Hugh Guthrie made a headline. He would love that.
The article talked about the lack of justice for newscaster Brian Gates, who Guthrie murdered. There had to
