Chapter Two
“Tell me you didn’t.”
Meredith Sardana unlocked her car doors with a blip of her key fob and motioned at Taylor to get in.
The Special Agent in Charge of the East Coast Missing Persons Unit was a legend in the FBI. A legend who’d done a lot for Taylor’s career and appeared to be priming her for even greater things.
“Didn’t what exactly?” Taylor dared ask, cringing at the multitude of things Mer might be referring to as she slipped into the passenger seat of the woman’s white Taurus.
Blowing off Leo?Check.
Sleeping with Matt?Check.
Missing that morning’s last panel of the conference on Human Remains Detection and DNA Laws?Check.
That last one could be lumped in with sleeping with Mad Dog Stephens. They’d stayed up most of the night exploring each other’s bodies and Taylor hadn’t gotten more than a few hours of sleep. She’d managed to call her mom during a brief intermission when Matt had fallen asleep, but she’d forgotten to set her alarm, which for her, never happened.
Never.
She never missed work, never came in late. She racked up sixty-hour workweeks on a regular basis, especially when she was deep in a case.
And she was always deep in a case. Mer loved her for it.
If you want a replay, Matt had said,you know where to find me.
Boy did she want a replay, but that might be a really bad idea.
Meredith started the car and didn’t wait for Taylor to click her seatbelt in before she took off. Sunlight bounced off the US flag pin on the lapel of her jacket and Taylor couldn’t help but notice her dark red lips were tight and unforgiving. “A little bird told me you reached out to Justice Greystone this morning.”
Ah,that. “He and his partner, Mitch Monroe, were lead on this case when it went down eight years ago. I thought it would be beneficial to have Grey’s input on whether or not he believed the senator might be guilty of killing his wife.
“Oh, please. You want Greystone involved because you know the Jarvis case was one of the few he never solved. You’re pandering to him.”
“I am not!” she lied. Time to change the subject. “Who is this little bird, by the way?”
“I have eyes and ears everywhere, Taylor.” Mer waved her off and shot out of the parking lot and into traffic. “I don’t give a rat’s ass what Greystone believes, and do not even mention the name Mitch Monroe to me. He Who Shall Not Be Named is nothing but a smartass boat anchor and you know better than to tie him around your ankle. If they’d done their job and analyzed the kidnapper correctly when Felicity Jarvis disappeared, the team of agents working her case might have caught the guy and we wouldn’t be here, on our way to break the news to Senator Jarvis that his wife’s remains have been found in a scrapyard six miles outside of the city.”
“Mayhave been found.” Taylor knew better than to correct Meredith, but she couldn’t help it. “All we have are a few articles of evidence suggesting it’s her. Until we get DNA—”
“Do not school me on procedure and evidence, Agent Sinclair. They found her engagement and wedding rings with the bones. Rings that have Felicity and Senator Jarvis’s initials inscribed on them and the date of their wedding.”
“Those rings might have been stolen. If she ran away, she may have sold them herself. Grey thinks—”
Mer’s look stopped her cold. Yep, she was pushing it, but one thing Taylor had learned in her time working cold cases was that proof wasn’t proof until she had a definite match between remains and the victim. DNA, dental records, facial reconstruction…something more than a couple of rings.
Which her boss had drummed into her head a million times. So why was Meredith insisting the bones found at the Drummond scrapyard had to belong to Felicity Jarvis?
Meredith’s lips tweaked with a patient smile. “You’re right. It’s just…”
“Just what?”
Meredith had been with the FBI for twenty years and had mentored Taylor for the past five since being assigned as SAC of Missing Persons. Women and minorities within the Bureau weren’t rare anymore, but they weren’t common either. There was still a good-ol’-boy system in place. Meredith ticked off some important boxes—female and a minority. A third generation Hispanic American, her ethnicity had played a role in her getting a job with the Bureau in the first place, according to the man who’d hired her. Her boss at that time had made it clear to her he didn’t want her. Didn’t want women, period. But she’d had the ambition and tenacity to work for him anyway, and work her ass off besides, as evidenced by the fact Meredith was still at the FBI, while her original boss was long gone.
Mer’s knuckles were white from gripping the wheel as she took a turn. “There’s already a lot of heat on this, Taylor. Mrs. Jarvis, the baby, the media spin when it happened. Cunningham is all over my backside about it. It’s all going to come back around, and if we don’t solve it and put this case to bed for good, the Bureau is going to end up with another black eye over it.”
Assistant Director Cunningham would never stand for that. “I understand.”
Taylor had still been finishing her degree in criminal justice when Felicity Jarvis had disappeared. Her husband claimed she’d been kidnapped, that she’d noticed a man in a truck following her for several days before it all went down, and had actually called him from a store to say the man in the truck was outside in the parking lot. The senator had told her to stay inside and he would come get her, but by the time he’d arrived, she was missing.
