A Hero in Her Eyes Read online

  The guilt that came in the wake of her suicide was almost too much for him to handle. He’d been forced to bottle it up in order to go on.

  Now, the amount of pent-up emotion that poured out astounded him, dragging the very air out of his lungs. Walker felt like a man who had just parachuted from a plane, only to discover that the plane was traveling a great deal higher than he’d first thought and that there was, in actuality, no parachute strapped to his back. As he moved his mouth over hers, there was a feeling of free-falling.

  That, and a sense of extreme exhilaration.

  She’d seen it coming. Not in any vision, or because some premonition had found her a second before, but in his eyes. Eyes the color of shamrocks at dawn. The second before it happened, he’d looked at her and she’d known what he was going to do. Even if he didn’t.

  Eliza let it happen, giving herself up to the unexpected rush that found her, the rush that took her prisoner, placing her in the first seat of a plunging roller coaster.

  It was a hell of a ride.

  There was no thought of being unprofessional, no sudden recoiling at the action. She recognized the kiss for what it was: a veiled cry for help. Walker needed comfort and she needed to give it. More than that, she needed to be the one he was kissing.

  She didn’t know why yet, but the answer would come.

  For the moment, all she could do was to receive and to give. Rising on her toes, letting him pull her to him, she did both. Willingly and gladly.

  The consequences would be taken into account and dealt with later. For now, she allowed herself to feel what he was feeling, and made herself one with him.

  It had never happened to her quite this way before, and she doubted it would ever happen again.

  Chapter 7

  Sanity returned.

  His complete loss of control appalled Walker. How could he have done such a thing? What the hell was he thinking?

  Dropping his hands from Eliza, Walker stepped back, unable to think of what to say to her that could begin to express his sincere apologies.

  The words that came out were weak when measured against the feelings involved.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She wasn’t and she didn’t want him to be. Not for kissing her. Certainly not for needing to make contact with another human being and seeking momentary comfort in that contact. Even now, as her blood was settling back in her veins, she could only call what she’d just experienced one of the more pleasurable events of her life. His kiss had made her forget herself and think only of him. She rather liked that.

  Eliza smiled at him, hoping to convey with a look what would probably be too embarrassing to Walker for her to express in words. “Don’t be.”

  Suddenly restless, Walker raked his hand through his hair, moving about the room. “I’m not sure what came over me, I don’t usually act that way. I certainly don’t give in to—”

  Eliza placed her finger to his lips, silencing him. “It’s okay, really,” she told him quietly. “I understand. This is an emotional situation, and sometimes we channel our emotions in different directions than we’re normally accustomed to.”

  She wanted to touch his cheek, to run her hand along it and soothe him somehow, but she knew that to do so would only agitate him further. So she resorted to what he knew: logic.

  “I’m not offended, shocked, harassed or any of the other reactions you think are going through my head,” she assured him. The look on his face told him she’d guessed correctly. “You’ve been through a great deal today, revisiting places in your memory that give you both joy and pain. I shouldn’t have let you watch the videos with me.” That had been an error in judgment, made in part because she found herself enjoying his company more than she should. She was going to have to watch that. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to go through the photo albums alone.” She nodded toward the stack on the coffee table behind her. “I’ll take them with me and return them to you tomorrow.”

  He hated being a coward, and this was cowardly: retreating from looking over Bonnie’s photographs. But Eliza was right, it would be better this way. He knew that. Why else had he taken down Bonnie’s photographs from around the house?

  Still, he didn’t like the idea of the albums being out of his possession. Walker gave in with noticeable reluctance. “All right, if you really think it’s necessary.”

  She was determined to be honest with him at all times. Otherwise, when she needed him to trust her, he wouldn’t be able to. “At this point, I’m not sure what is necessary—other than finding Bonnie.”

  He liked the way she kept making that the bottom line. He could feel his hope attaching tiny grappling hooks to things she said, and he prayed that he wouldn’t live to regret it.

  “Do you want me to come to your office tomorrow? Or will you come here…?” He left the sentence unfinished, letting her complete it.

  She thought it would be better all around if they didn’t meet at his house again for a little while. It would remind him of his moment of weakness, and that wouldn’t do him any good. Until they found Bonnie, their relationship had to remain professional. Afterward…

  Afterward, she would probably never see him again, she surmised. Seeing her might make him uncomfortable. She’d had that happen before, too, and had made her peace with it.

  “The office,” she responded. “Nine o’clock, if you’d like.”

  He thought an earlier hour might be better, but right now, he didn’t feel like arguing the point. He needed some time alone.

  “I’ll be there.”

  After placing the albums into a large box, Walker had helped her carry them to her car. There were six in all. Six large, white albums containing four-and-a-half years of a life.

  It hardly seemed enough, Eliza thought later that evening as she sat on her bed with the albums spread out around her like a magic semicircle. She flipped a few pages of each, going from one to another, trying to discern why this child had reached out to her. It was enough that Bonnie had, that the child had been kidnapped and had somehow managed to contact her via her dreams—but Eliza wondered if there might be more.

  If there was, she wanted to uncover what that more entailed. Why had Bonnie reached out to her and not someone else? Why Bonnie and not some other child?

  Eliza sighed. Maybe all this mattered and maybe it didn’t. There weren’t always answers, and this was getting to be far too philosophically involved for her.

  “What you need is a cup of tea and a nice hot bath,” she told herself.

  What she really needed was to relax and not allow tension to distort or inhibit anything that might be trying to get through. The visions that came to her were difficult enough to perceive without her getting in her own way, she thought.

  Almost involuntarily, her mind turned to Walker, and she felt a smile forming. The man probably thought she was half fraud, half witch.

  “Not unlike you, eh, Dad?” she murmured, glancing at one of the framed photographs on her bureau.

  There were three in all. One of her and her mother, one of her and her great-aunt, and one of her father by himself. That was the way she remembered him. By himself. Even when he was with her, he really wasn’t. He was always removed from her. By choice.

  She’d tried so hard to breach that wall he had constructed between them, but he had manned the parapets diligently and she had never been able to find a way to break through. Not even when he was dying.

  Her father had called her to his bedside, and in his own way he had attempted to make amends. But the effort, even the words, had been entirely without conviction. He’d summoned her because he’d wanted to die with a clear conscience. But there was still no understanding, no acceptance of who and what she was. With his dying breath, he’d thought of her as an oddity with which he had been cursed.

  It hadn’t been easy on him.

  Or on her.

  Suppressing another sigh, Eliza rose from the bed and went to get her tea. She needed something to
do other than think.

  That night, she dreamed. Not of the little girl—not at first—but of a man with broad shoulders and arms that could break through the barrier that surrounded her, the barrier that separated her from the rest of the world. Dreamed of a mouth that was firm and hard and yet capable of melting her.

  He came to her across the sea of time, with no name, no face. A feeling rather than a form.

  Yet he was real and her soul knew him.

  Slowly, the dream broke up, dissolving in the heat the man generated within her.

  And then she saw the child again.

  This time, it was clearly Bonnie. Bonnie with her light-green eyes like her father’s, staring at her, calling to her, as she ran through the tall grass, now withered and burned by the hot sun. There were tears streaming down her small, sad face, though her eyes remained clear.

  Bring my daddy. Make him find me. Hurry!

  Eliza heard the words though the child’s lips never moved. They echoed in her brain, growing progressively louder until they sounded like a death knell rung from a church steeple.

  Gasping for air, Eliza sat bolt upright. Perspiration lined her brow and she shook from the cold. Rubbing the back of her neck, she realized that she’d fallen asleep next to the album she had been poring through.

  Her brain fighting its way out of the fog, she reached for her alarm clock—the one she never bothered setting—and read its face. Iridescent blue lights winked flirtatiously at her.

  Four-thirty.

  Eliza deposited the clock back on the stand. She supposed that four-thirty was as good a time as any to get up.

  Sliding off the bed, she moved the albums into a small pile, closing each carefully before going to take her shower.

  She couldn’t shake the feeling of urgency that surrounded her. It had become part of her since yesterday when it had slipped over her while she was talking to Walker at his house. A tiny burst of a vision she couldn’t make sense of yet.

  She’d come to the office right after getting dressed, letting herself in with her key. Nursing the cup of coffee she’d brought with her in a lidded travel mug, she’d sat down by her computer and had begun searching the usual Web sites, though deep down inside she had a feeling that none of them would ultimately bear fruit. Not if she were to believe the vision she’d had when she’d held Bonnie’s stuffed animal in the attic.

  But to be on the safe side, she accessed a Web site listing of registered child molesters in the area. Carefully, she checked out their whereabouts and printed out the results to review later. Of the six known felons at the time of Bonnie’s disappearance, three had moved in the past two years, one had violated his parole and was back in prison, and one had recently died. Only one remained in the area.

  She supposed that she or one of the others at the agency could go and question the one in prison while tracking down the other three, but deep down she knew it was a dead end. Whoever had taken Bonnie was someone who wanted her. Specifically. Wanted her because she looked like a child they had lost—

  “What are you doing here?”

  Lost in thought, Eliza looked up to see Savannah Walters peering into the room. She glanced at her watch and saw that it was a little after eight-thirty. She’d been here over three hours.

  “Trying to find a needle in a haystack.” She rubbed the bridge of her nose, closing her eyes briefly.

  Savannah stepped into the room and leaned against Eliza’s desk. “What do you need?”

  Eliza glanced at the notes she’d made to herself. “Hacking ability, as near as I can figure out.”

  “Go on—so far you haven’t mentioned anything that might not be in my realm of talents.”

  It wasn’t something Savannah would broadcast, nor would she do it for any sort of gain. But if it aided in finding a lost child, she was more than happy to bend the rules a little and access systems that were ordinarily closed to outsiders. Having gone through the gut-wrenching terror of having her daughter kidnapped, there was nothing that Savannah felt was out of bounds when it came to recovering a missing child.

  Eliza knew she was giving the other woman a tall order, but if anyone was equal to it, it was Savannah. “I need you to access hospital records and county coroner’s files. I need to know the names of families who lost a child two to three years ago. Specifically, a female child aged three or four.”

  The number of hospitals in the Southern California area was staggering. Getting into each of their records was not going to be an easy feat. “Boy, you don’t ask for much, do you?”

  “If it’s too difficult—” Eliza began.

  “I didn’t say it was too difficult,” Savannah interrupted before Eliza could go any further. “Granted, it’s not a piece of cake, but give me some time and I can round up the information for you.” Curiosity highlighted her eyes. “Does this have anything to do with those dreams you’ve been having?”

  Eliza nodded. “Yes.”

  “And that man who came to see you yesterday—is he the father of the child in your dreams?”

  Eliza smiled. She liked the way Savannah accepted all this as if it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. As if it were normal to dream of kidnapped children who called out to you. She’d never felt as accepted as she did here at ChildFinders.

  “You’d make a pretty good investigator yourself. Yes, he’s the father of the child in my dreams. His name is Walker Banacek. His daughter, Bonnie, was kidnapped two years ago from a crowded parking lot.”

  “And I’m looking up families who lost their daughters because…?” Savannah asked.

  “I think Bonnie was taken by a woman who was struck by the similarity she saw to her own dead daughter.” Eliza realized that the smile had left Savannah’s face. The other woman looked as if she’d suddenly come face-to-face with a ghost. “Is anything wrong?”

  “Déjà vu,” Savannah replied softly. “My daughter Aimee was taken by someone who wanted her to replace the daughter she’d lost in a drowning accident. It turned out to be a woman I actually knew.” Savannah began to back out of the room. “I’ll get right on this,” she promised.

  “Wait—” Eliza flipped open to the last page of the top album on her desk, then turned it around so that Savannah could see the photograph. “This might help you. Bonnie looks like this.”

  Savannah took the album and looked at the little girl. Her mother’s heart melted and constricted with pain at the same time.

  “She’s beautiful.”

  “Exactly,” Eliza said. And that was what might help them find her. People would remember seeing a little girl this attractive. If Bonnie was even allowed outside. “Bonnie Banacek would catch anyone’s attention. The problem is, she caught the wrong person’s attention.”

  Savannah looked at Eliza. “Why don’t I widen that time frame to go back four years instead of three, just to be on the safe side?”

  Eliza nodded. “Can’t hurt. But it’s more work for you,” she felt compelled to point out.

  Closing the album, Savannah held it against her chest. “It’s not work, it’s a mission.” With that, Savannah walked out.

  Mentally, Eliza crossed her fingers.

  When Walker came into the office promptly at nine o’clock, he tried very hard not to arrive with raised hopes. After all, the FBI had placed their best people on it and failed. The case still remained open with them, joining so many other open cases. Nothing short of a miracle was going to lead them to Bonnie.

  He found himself hoping Eliza was that miracle.

  Knocking once on Eliza’s office door, Walker entered without waiting to be invited inside. It was difficult bridling his impatience, having finally unleashed it after all this time.

  There were papers all over Eliza’s desk. He would have thought her to be one of those painfully neat women who had to have everything methodically organized. Showed him what he knew.

  “Anything?” he asked.

  There were computer printouts everywhere, thanks to Savanna
h. Lost in her work, trying to feel her way through the myriad names before she undertook the monumental task of seeking out the people on these lists, Eliza hadn’t even heard Walker knock.

  His face looked more drawn than it had yesterday, she noted. She wondered if he’d gotten any sleep, and then decided that he probably hadn’t. He had that slightly haunted look that defined the faces of the parents who came to them with checks and prayers.

  Maybe it was unreasonable, but she felt a touch of guilt for doing that to him, for jolting Walker’s hopes out of their holding pattern without having anything more substantial to offer him than the recurring dreams that filled her nights.

  She half rose in her chair, greeting him, then indicated her desk. “Leads to follow up.”

  Walker raised a quizzical eyebrow. “Leads, as in sightings, or people to question…?”

  He’d run the gamut when they’d gone through this the first time, he and Rachel. It got to the point that he’d had to almost forcibly drag every word out of the mouths of the special agents who were handling his daughter’s case. None had been forthcoming about any leads that came in, and there had been many—all going nowhere.

  Eliza could feel the frustration he’d gone through. It amazed her how in-tune she seemed to be when it came to Walker.

  She told him the news as succinctly as she could. “We have five registered child molesters, four no longer in the area for one reason or another, to question, as well as a great many bereaved families to talk to.”

  Most, if not all, of whom were going to have their emotions bandied about for the sake of beating the bushes for one person. A person she might not find.

  But it had to be done, and she just hoped the parents she would speak to would understand the necessity of questions that might come across like accusations, in order to find one missing child.

  Walker picked up several sheets and scanned the page that was on top. “I can understand questioning the molesters.” Understood and abhorred the reasons that were behind it. The very thought of needing to talk to these people made his skin crawl. “But why question the bereaved families?”