Save Me Once

CHAPTER

CHAPTER

Drisklay took a sip of cold coffee. He’d stayed up late working at the hotel last night and was paying for it this morning. It might be easier if this blasted conference speaker wasn’t so boring. Drisklay would never be a vocabulary expert, but whatever the opposite of the word misogyny was, this guy had it.

Men, you must make certain that your wife feels completely safe with you. Safe and protected. She’ll open up to you sexually if you open up to her emotionally.

Ha. If there was one thing Drisklay absolutely didn’t need from a beta-male like this guy on the stage, it was bedroom advice.

Good grief.

So he gave himself permission to tune out from the conference and focus on his case.

Missing girl. Young teen. Pretty, blonde, suburban type. Which is why she was getting more media attention and fanfare than other runaways in his jurisdiction.

That and the fact that her mother was relentless. Drisklay had dealt with distraught parents throughout his career on the force, but Mrs. Linklater was a special breed. Voicemail messages every hour on the hour. Letters to him, to the department, to the editor. That woman would probably hand-write a ten-page treatise to the President of the United States every single day if she thought it might possibly help locate her missing daughter.

Well, what do you expect when you bring helpless creatures into a world as sick and twisted as this one? Drisklay felt bad for the girl, but all it took was one quick perusal of her cell phone records to figure out what happened. It was a clear-cut case of predatory grooming. An adult man posing as her teen boyfriend, expressing his undying love. She bought it hook, line, and sinker. And now she was gone.

Well, what did anyone expect? Why couldn’t parents keep better track of their kids these days? And who in their right mind would even think of giving a junior-high girl a cell phone of her own? When Drisklay asked Mrs. Linklater if she ever checked her daughter’s messages, she acted as if he’d insulted her.

“Becky’s a good girl. I can trust her completely.” Says the mother of the girl who ended up abducted by a child predator.

The boyfriend wasn’t in Drisklay’s database, at least not by the name he’d been using with Becky. But there were hundreds of men just like him out there. Thousands of Xaviers.

And thousands of Becky Linklaters, unfortunately.

He shook his head. Glad he and Caroline never had children of their own. Glad he’d never have to go through the guilt Mrs. Linklater was feeling now, knowing how pathetically she’d failed to protect her daughter.

The child was almost certainly out of state. Maybe even out of country, but that was unlikely. Why risk getting caught crossing borders when you can throw a girl in your trunk and drive unchecked from one coast to the other?

Becky Linklater was now one of the hundreds of thousands of child victims of human trafficking, whether or not her mom was ready to wake up and face the ugly truth. If the girl was still alive, she was living in a hell that a suburbanite like Mrs. Linklater couldn’t possibly begin to imagine.

Mrs. Linklater went onto all the major news outlets, spouting off how she was holding onto hope of finding her daughter safe and alive. What she didn’t realize was that some horrors were worse than death.

Drisklay knew that better than just about anyone.