Without Mercy (Mercy 1)

Even if he could identify the two people he heard outside the garage, so what?

“I’ll deal with Bernsen in the morning. He was the TA who should have been in charge.”

Another blonde. “Let me talk to him,” Trent said. “Most of the students he was overseeing were in my group.”

Flannagan was already walking to the door of the stable. “Fine with me. Just make sure he understands the severity of leaving a horse outside.” He grabbed his rifle at the door, then looked over his shoulder with some final, sage words of advice. “And don’t take any lame-ass excuses that he delegated the work. Doesn’t mean jack shit. He was in charge; it’s his ass on the line.”

CHAPTER 11

“Look, there’s nothing more I can tell you,” Cheryl Conway said over the wireless connection. Jules had tried one last time to reach the missing girl’s parents before leaving for work. Finally, Lauren’s mother, who lived in Phoenix, had taken the call. “Lauren’s still missing, but we’re holding out hope that she’s okay, that we find her soon. Oh, God.” Cheryl Conway’s voice broke at the thought of losing her child, and Jules felt like a real jerk for having forced the woman to talk about it.

“I’m sorry,” she said, gesturing with her free hand, though she knew the other woman couldn’t see her. “I hope she comes home soon.”

“We all do.”

“I’m calling because my sister’s a student at Blue Rock Academy, and I’m concerned about her.”

“I … I don’t know what to say.” Jules heard another voice—deeper and definitely male—say something in the background, but she couldn’t make out the words, just the admonishing tone. Was it Lauren’s father? Or an older brother? Some authority figure.

“Mrs. Conway?” she said.

“Uh … please … Look, I’m sorry …” Cheryl’s voice became a squeak as she tried to control herself and failed. “I … I really can’t talk about this. I shouldn’t. If you have any other questions, take them up with the sheriff’s department.”

Cheryl Conway hung up, and Jules stood in the hallway near her front door, her cell phone still clamped to her ear, feeling that she was missing something. Cheryl Conway had wanted to tell her more, but her husband had admonished her.

Why?

She slipped her phone into her purse.

What had she hoped to learn by tracking down beleaguered, frightened parents who, though “holding out hope,” were worried sick that their daughter was already dead? The phone call had provided little information. It just reaffirmed Jules’s fears about the school.

“Nancy Drew, I’m not,” she told Diablo. Aside from working for a collection agency as a file clerk while going to college, she had no skills at being a detective of any kind.

Still, she felt an urgency to spring Shay from Blue Rock, and some of her anxiety sprang from Shay. Lord knew she was manipulative. Jules snagged her keys and checked her reflection in the narrow mirror by the front door. Her hair was piled on her head, her white blouse pressed, black skirt straight. Her makeup hadn’t smeared, so she was ready for work at a job she really didn’t mind but wasn’t in love with. There was always Tony, the manager, with his sexual innuendos to deal with. Then there was Dora, a whiny waitress who loved to complain. “But it pays for Tasty Treats,” she told the cat before grabbing her coat for the night shift at 101. The hours were long, the crowd noisy, the prices steep, and the tips great. The best thing was that it was a night gig, so if a migraine interrupted her sleep, or the nightmare returned, she could ignore the alarm clock in the morning.

She was lucky to have the job. “I’ll see ya later,” she promised the cat, then, outside, waved to her neighbor Mrs. Dixon before dashing through the drizzle to her sedan. The car, sometimes stubborn, started on the first try, and she was halfway to work when her cell phone rang. She wouldn’t have picked it up and risked a ticket for driving while talking on a cell, but she recognized the out-of-area number as the one she’d last dialed—Lauren Conway’s parents in Phoenix.

“Hello?”

“This is Cheryl Conway again,” the woman whispered. “I couldn’t talk earlier, not really. My husband doesn’t approve. He wants to do everything by the book, but I can’t stand to think that someone else’s daughter might end up missing if I don’t help. The sheriff’s department … it’s not enough; they don’t have the manpower. Sometimes you have to do more.”

“Do more how?” Jules asked.

But Cheryl ignored her question and just kept talking. “I don’t know you or your sister, but trust me, something’s very wrong at that academy. They have a program that breaks kids down or builds them up or something, but the students are left alone in the wilderness to find themselves and learn to rely on themselves. Sometimes for days. You know, some of the schools do that, leave the kids to fend for themselves for twenty-four or forty-eight hours in the forest to teach them to survive. I … I can’t help but wonder if that’s what happened to Lauren. If she was left in the forest and there was an accident, and the school’s decided to cover it up.”

“They wouldn’t,” Jules said automatically, not really believing that the school would cover up something so horrid. Not the school, but someone in the school. It just takes one person with a secret agenda or an owner who could lose millions in a scandal and a lawsuit. Jules thought of the huge mansion on Lake Washington. Worth millions. Someone was living the high life and wouldn’t want to risk it.

Suddenly Jules felt as cold as death.

“Who knows what ‘they’ would do?” Cheryl said. “All I know is my daughter is missing, and the last time I talked with her, she confided that the school wasn’t what people thought it was, and she was going to prove it. She isn’t a teenager, you know. She was recruited, yes, but not to be a student; it was to be a part of some counseling program, a teacher’s aide of sorts. She’d get her college paid for while helping troubled kids, and she jumped at the chance.

“I tried to talk her out of it, to stay here at the university, but Lauren was always looking for an adventure, a challenge, pushing herself to the edge. That’s why she was recruited and I think … I mean, it’s possible that the very reasons she was chosen are the reasons she’s missing.” There was desperation in the woman’s voice. “Reverend Lynch insists that she left by choice, of course, but I know my daughter. She wouldn’t let us worry like this.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“We’re going to find her.” There was a renewed conviction in her tone. “No matter what it takes, we’re going to find her. I’m not trusting the sheriff’s department or that Reverend Lynch to do what it’s going to take. Just because Lynch is supposed to be a man of God means nothing these days.”

Didn’t Edie say the house on the lake was owned by a preacher? No, that wasn’t right. The school owned the property and a preacher lived there part-time. She’d mentioned Lynch by name.