Want You (A Rylie Wolf FBI Suspense Thriller—Book Four)

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER ONE

FBI agent Rylie Wolf sat in her office at the Rapid City Headquarters, staring at the files and thinking about the conversation she’d had with her partner, Michael Brisbane.

“Okay, what is up with you? I mention dinner and you don’t jump all over that like a rabid dog? Are you feeling all right?”

He nodded. “Yeah, but Wolf…”

From the look on his face, she could tell it was something serious. “What is it?”

“Well… look. It’s like this,” he said, taking a deep breath. “What I said before about your sister was cruel and said in the heat of the moment. I didn’t mean it. And of course, if I can, I want to help you find out what happened to her.”

She smiled. “Oh. Well, I appreciate that. But don’t worry. I get the feeling you might be right. That it’s too far in the past, and it’ll be impossible to uncover anything new. So maybe—”

“But that’s the thing,” he said, swallowing hard.

She stopped. “What’s the thing?”

“I went in to the office today, and I thought I’d look into it on my lunch break. And you know, the new field office has an entire room of cold case files pertaining to this area, from all the other offices, that are sitting there in boxes. There are so many of them, it’ll take ages to go through, because they’re from years and years past, and they’re not in any order. It’s like the field offices just threw them together and shipped them off to us, to let us worry about them. Anyway, there was a bunch of stuff that was miscategorized and put in the wrong box, and this afternoon, I found it…”

He was babbling now, a mile a minute, and she wasn’t quite sure what he was saying. “Do you mean you found something pertaining to my case?”

He nodded and reached into his pocket, pulling out a thin, golden chain. Dangling from it was a small M in fancy script.

A sense of déjà vu flooded her. She hadn’t thought of that necklace in decades. But the second she saw it, she knew exactly where she’d seen it last.

On Maren’s neck, the night before she’d disappeared.

“Where did you get that?” she whispered, unable to take her eyes off it.

He reached for a chair to the dining set and pulled it out for her. “I think you and I had better sit down and talk about this.”

She nodded, stumbling to the kitchen table and sitting down, feeling strange and weightless, like she was watching this happen to somebody else.

“I found it in an envelope. There wasn’t much. Just a slip of paper that said it was found in Elephant Hole Well. That’s all.”

Elephant Hole. That wasn’t far from Story Creek, the RV park where they’d been staying when two strangers arrived, killed everyone at their campsite, and left with her older sister, who was just twelve at the time.

“There has to be more. Who found it? Was it near anything? What—”

He held up his hands. “I don’t know. I’m only telling you what I found.”

“Well, I need to look at it. Show me the box where you got it from.” She stood up. Maybe there was more evidence. Something Michael had overlooked.

“I was afraid you’d say that,” he said, standing and following her out the door.

Now, as she stared into the box, that familiar feeling of defeat crowded in. She’d spent six hours going over every last shred of evidence in the box. Michael had been right. It was a mishmash of stuff, terribly labeled and in no particular order. He’d been helping her, but even he’d had to go. It was after one in the morning now. He’d urged her to give it up, but she couldn’t.

After all this time, she had something new.

Shoving the box of odds and ends away, she turned on her computer and Googled Elephant Hole. Just as she’d thought, it wasn’t very far from where Maren had disappeared. A mile east. So that meant Maren had been taken east.

To where?

It was the smallest crumb of information. But it was better than anything she’d gotten in the past decades.

Though she’d just gotten back to town after the last big case, she couldn’t stay here and expect to forget that. Not now. Not knowing that there was a new lead in the case of her sister, who was now missing almost thirty years.

As she was sitting there, her phone rang. She looked at the display. Cooper Rich, her friend from the Seattle Field Office. He’d been calling her all evening, but every time he rang, she let it go to voicemail. Needing a friendly voice after weeding through such morbid files, she picked up. “Hey, Coop.”

“Hey, you. You avoiding me?”

She smiled. She and Coop had always flirted about, but never really gotten past a little bit of romantic tension. Bad timing. She was queen of that. “No. Just busy.”

“How you feeling? You had it pretty bad there for a while.”

“Oh, ship-shape. Everything’s on the mend. How are you? You said in your last message you had something to tell me?”

“Ah. So you did get my messages? And you weren’t the least bit curious what I had to say? Left Seattle behind for good, have you?”

She let out a short laugh. “No, I just really don’t care if Bill Matthews gets another award from his daddy.”

Bill Matthews was the special agent in charge of the Seattle unit, the man who basically sent her packing to the middle of the country just because he didn’t like her. Probably her fault for publicly telling him off one too many times, but the guy was a jerk. Matthews, the i***t with no real-world skills to be in the FBI, had gotten where he was by simple nepotism, and his high-ranking father always shielded him from any negative publicity.

“It’s not that,” Rich said, his voice low.

“Uh-oh. That sounds bad,” she murmured, wondering what on earth this could be about. She’d long since stopped caring about what was happening in Seattle. Ever since they declared they were done with her, she said the same of them, and meant it. Matthews may have hated her, but now he couldn’t touch her.

“Matthews is advancing some complaints about you to Jerry.”

She frowned. Jerry Matthews was the deputy director, and Bill’s father. He was a more sensible guy than Bill, but he still propped his son up, even though the man had no idea how to run a washing machine, much less an entire department in the FBI. “Complaints?”

“Yeah. Big ones. Remember Moses Bedelbaum?”

She snorted. Of course she remembered that guy. Posed as a mild-mannered English teacher in a downtown Seattle school, but apparently that hadn’t paid enough. He’d gotten into selling drugs to students, then used those drugs to ply some of the female students and deliver them into the s*x trade. The guy had been defiant, adamantly professing his innocence even while boxfuls of evidence were being pulled out of his apartment. She’d been pissed at him, yes, because one of the theories around Maren had been that she, too, had been delivered into s*x s*****y. She’d slammed the butt of her pistol into his face, giving him a killer black eye, but she hadn’t felt a single day’s remorse over the fact. That trash deserved it.

“What are you saying?”

“I know, it’s bullshit, but—”

“Just tell me what it is, Coop.” She didn’t have time for this.

“All right, all right. His case is coming up and there are a few other complaints, and they think it could spell trouble for you.”

She sighed. “Fine. Bring it.”

“You don’t care?”

She laughed mirthlessly. “Am I supposed to? Of course I’ll care if anything comes of it. But right now, I’m going to keep doing my job.” Something suddenly struck her. “So let me guess. Bill called you into his office and told you all this, right?”

“Yeah.”

She gritted her teeth. That was so like him, the scumbag. “You know why? I bet you he’s hoping I crawl into my little hole and go away. He read about the last case I was involved in and he knows he hasn’t beaten me. He wanted you to tell me, because he hoped it’d shut me up and get me to play nice. Well, you can tell him to go screw himself.”

“You think?”

“Coop. I know. That’s how he operates.” She looked around at the pile of files around her. “Look, I’ve got to go. Big case I’m working on. And I have to find a way to make waves with it.”

“Wolf…” His voice was a warning.

“Kidding. Bye, Coop, thanks for the info,” she said, ending the call.

But really, she wasn’t kidding. If Bill Matthews wasn’t going to let her go, she’d have to find a way to make him rue the day he ever thought he could play against her. He wanted her to go away silently? She’d find a way to make the loudest noise she could.

Somehow.

She powered off the computer. She’d have to wait for the morning, but once the sun came up, she’d call her supervisor, explain the situation, and head out. Elephant Hole, here I come.