Where Missing Boys Go: Darke and Flare, #3

Chapter One

Flare

My slimline bulletproof vest was no protection against the chill. I flexed my hands in my fleece gloves to keep them loose and ready.

The Glock 19 under my jacket was ready too.

In January, most of the trees that lined the banks of the self-proclaimed world's shortest river had shed their leaves. I pictured green and gold when I thought of the Texas Hill Country, but today came in shades of gray.

Gray clouds in a gray sky. Gray tree trunks bending toward fast-running water that sang over gray stones.

I'd also expected country. Maybe Texas Hill Suburbs didn't have that same ring. The Comal River, what there was of it, seemed to run less than three miles from a large waterpark to the spot where it joined the Guadelupe River near the center of town.

Although the waterpark was shuttered for the season, summer's tubing tourists had been replaced by winter's snowbirds. No one was on the water, but there were plenty of people not too terribly far away. I couldn't see them from here, but I was keenly aware of them, those happy, clueless people who currently strolled the historic streets of old New Braunfels in search of post-holiday bargains. They'd make their mandatory stop for strudel at the oldest bakery in Texas.

The music of fast water is a screen against being overheard, but it also screens the sound of approaching footsteps. Anyone could stumble by at any moment. A good guy, a bad guy. But, most probably, an innocent bystander.

All in all, a bad choice for a meeting place if you liked your privacy. But nobody asked my opinion before they picked it.

My phone told me it was 11:10 AM. Which meant I was officially ten minutes late for my interview with the assistant to the deputy director of the FBI. Since said interview was scheduled to take place in the J. Edgar Hoover Building some sixteen hundred miles away, I was likely going to be a no-show.

A final glance around. I was still alone, as alone as I could expect to be around here anyway.

Clear, I said aloud.

Three dots told me the message was sending.

I stowed the phone without waiting for a reply.

The Glock was a personal weapon. Being here in Texas, instead of there in DC, might mean I'd never own another government-issued service weapon again.

Choices. We all make them. And maybe I'd made another bad one. But I couldn't let Darke face this situation alone and unarmed.

Claudia's all right. I trust Claudia. You go to your interview. I can take care of this.

I've seen the FBI files on her son. These are serious people.

He faked a smile that didn't reach his eyes. I'm serious people, too. And I'll be fine.

Motion from the direction of the otherwise empty shuttle parking lot. A glimpse of silver through the trees― the Lincoln Navigator we'd rented at the airport.

A chickadee scolded. Chicka-dee-dee-dee. The number of dees supposedly told you how dangerous the oncoming threat was. Darke Davis, it seemed, was a three-alarm threat.

Even at a distance, even in the shadow of some gloomy cloud, that tall, broad-shouldered figure made my heart sing. Was it superficial to be thrilled that your boyfriend was movie-star good-looking?

Up close, where you could study the sandy hair, sapphire eyes, and clean jawline, you realized he was the kind of star who'd never win an Oscar. He was a little too good-looking to attract those bravura roles where he needed to be filmed in an unflattering light.

There was no unflattering light when it came to Darke. He moved with the easy grace of a lion aware of his status at the top of the food chain.

Today, though, the lion's energies were on a tight leash. He walked even more slowly than I did, frequently coming to a full stop to raise a pair of binoculars to his eyes.

The trees along the water sparkled with tiny birds. Kinglets, gnatcatchers, titmice. Goldfinches who'd lost most of the gold they wore in summer. Another scolding chickadee. The birds explained the binoculars in case an explanation was needed. Somebody might be watching.

I didn't slow to let him catch up. He didn't speed up to join me. I resisted the temptation to glance back.

Better to track his progress by the sound of his footsteps.

We were two random strangers walking on a public path, nothing more. One a birdwatcher, one a... well, whatever I was.

Darke too was wearing a bulletproof vest. I'd insisted.

He carried no weapon. He'd insisted.

As an ex-con, he'd lost the right to carry. True, but he was also being stubborn. His crime was non-violent. He could apply to carry again. So far, he'd resisted the suggestion.

He seemed to believe that if he couldn't be a cop, he didn't deserve to carry a weapon.

Stubborn, stubborn, and more stubborn. Pointless to argue.

We wandered on, me a little faster so I pulled away from him. A teen girl in a pink coat came from the other direction. She was briskly walking a tall black poodle who looked like he'd been cut from a topiary hedge. His collar was pink rhinestone, and his dog tags were fourteen-karat gold. I looked at her face to assure myself she was the age she appeared to be, and she walked even more briskly.

An innocent bystander.

Who was soon gone.

We were alone again, although it wouldn't last. We were getting too close to the town center.

Claudia Konig is a no-show.

Did she ever intend to make this meeting at all?

Odd that she'd risk entering the United States. Too many people wanted her son, Bernard Konig. He'd disappeared with a few too many million-dollar diamonds. We'd have questions for Frau Konig, well, the FBI would have questions.

I might have blown my last chance to be re-hired by the FBI.

Can't think about that now.

I didn't trust Claudia even if Darke did. She had too many dollars and too many skills. Darke used cheap burners and switched his phone number frequently. Yet she somehow always knew how to get in touch.

The dollars, perhaps, were supplied to her because she was raising her son's two young children. The skills were harder to explain. Unless she'd been involved at some point in illegal enterprise herself.

The walk warmed me, thanks to the gloves and the layers of my two jackets. I paused to unwrap the wool scarf from around my neck.

Darke paused too.

We both looked back upstream. A dull gray kayak had appeared, its single occupant heavily swaddled in layers that concealed the paddler's body shape. A waterproof hoodie and wraparound sunglasses concealed most of the face. Supposedly, the Comal bubbled up from springs that kept the temperature at a steady seventy-two degrees, but this paddler seemed to doubt it. They were dressed for the cold.

The kayak moved toward us as smoothly and as easily as any swimming dolphin. It wasn't a colorful tourist rental. A local, probably. Someone who belonged. And yet I felt a sense of unease.

We were in no danger. Those gloved hands busy with the oars could never get to a weapon before I got to my Glock. Yet I was on high alert, all senses tingling, my muscles taut with readiness. My focus had become hyper-focus. My eyes registered the tiniest movement― the dance of a bright reflection on water, the spin of a single lazy leaf circling down from a branch.

The kayak must have once been expensive. The gray wasn't paint, but the silver of old wood. Somebody's hobby boat, long forgotten on some Texas bayou, found and restored enough to be river-worthy but not yet prettied up with a final splash of color.

It moved faster as it passed the spot where Darke stood watching. I studied the face openly as it drew nearer to me, but the hoodie and wraparound sunglasses kept the features obscured even at its closest approach.

It never slowed. If anything, it picked up even more speed.

As fast and silently as it had appeared, the kayak was gone.

Darke hurried on his long legs to catch up to me. Looks like she's going into town.

‘She?’

It's her. His sapphire eyes burned with certainty. Well. If he said he recognized Claudia Konig, he recognized her. They hadn't known each other long or even very well, but they had a kinship― the kinship of two people on the run because of somebody else's crime.

Should we go back and get the vehicle? I asked.

Faster just to walk. We're almost in town now.

Why do you suppose she's leading you on this merry chase?

You know why.

To see if you came alone. Which of course you didn't.

I wouldn't let you.

"A kidnapping isn't a one-man job, Darke. She should have reported it to the police. We should have reported it."

We don't know anything. We have nothing to report.

I couldn't let you do this alone. You're one man. I was repeating myself.

Other people appeared on this section of the path. A walker with six dogs on a string. A mother with a stroller. An older couple, the man stealing bashful looks at the woman― a budding late-life romance. Despite everything, I smiled. For some people, it's never too late.

Darke, not quite smiling back, touched a finger to my hand. A light tap that would go unnoticed by anyone else. It was Texas, after all, and we were strangers here. You should have been wrapping up your interview with the deputy director.

The assistant to the deputy director. I put in a request to reschedule. A request that had, thus far, been ignored. But there was no use bringing up that inconvenient fact.

Although not arm-in-arm, we walked together now. This portion of the riverside was town, not country. Shops and restaurants. Mysterious antiques and menus in the windows.

I expected to come upon Claudia Konig at any moment. Or at least to see some sign of where she put in the gray kayak. Darke stopped in front of a rare and used book dealer that sold artfully faded hardbacks about Texas history. He pretended to look at the window display while pulling out his phone one-handed to scroll through his call log.

No record of an UNKNOWN phoning on the morning of January 8, 2019. He flapped the screen at me without much surprise. Evaporating phone messages weren't anything unusual from Claudia Konig.

But it left us with no way to phone her back.

If something happens to those boys... His jaw was sculpted marble. If it's because of me... In Mexico, he'd worked, briefly, as a bodyguard for the Konig boys.

It isn't because of you. It's the father, I said. Bernard Konig disappeared with a lot of diamonds.

And Tyler disappeared with a lot of dollars. Tyler Acosta, Darke's ex, was the worst possible bad boyfriend, the kind who stole a lot of money and left you holding the bag. There are still people who believe I know where the money went.

The reflection of an older blonde flickered in the glass. I turned. Darke didn't. With its Germanic heritage, there were a lot of older blondes in New Braunfels.

He was right. It wasn't her. I turned back to help him study the old books in the window.

I could be in Panama City in a few hours. You can drop me off in San Antonio. His gaze was fierce enough to set fire to the 1937 second edition of Conrad Richter's The Sea of Grass. It can't be much more than an hour's flight to Houston, and from there it's a nonstop run to Panama City. The way he said it told me he'd already researched his options.

I'm not dropping you off anywhere. What part of this do you not get? You're not doing this alone.

Another flicker of blonde in the window, and this time we both turned. He might have even had a chance to get started on a welcoming smile.

A smile that vanished like a candle flame in a hurricane.

If she screamed, if she gasped, I never heard it.

Just the whistle of a silenced shot, and then the sudden collapse. It was the people around us who were beginning to scream.

Active shooter. I put all the FBI in my voice I could muster. Down, down, down, people. Get down. NOW.

Chapter Two

Darke

Two Days Earlier

Outside, the chill of a winter's rain. Inside, the smell of books and bacon. A line of people waited for a table in the backroom café. Everybody was happy or pretending to be, all these well-to-do smart people with hours free on a Tuesday morning to chat about books over brunch. How many of these happy people had been or were going to be in federal prison?

Maybe all of them. It was DC. Power corrupts, as they say.

Maybe none of them. Maybe I was the only criminal here― the only ex-con blending into the glossy crowd.

With much laughing and shaking out of damp hair, another group dropped their umbrellas and dashed inside. The crowd adjusted itself. Flare pressed against my back, his lithe heat delicious after our own rush for the door in the rain. His possessive hand clutched my right shoulder to keep me close even as I drifted in the direction of a shelf full of shiny orange hardbacks.

Some people's laughs were a little too shrill― team pretending to be happy. I knew the sound of that hollow laughter all too well.

Today I wasn't pretending. Not with Flare's sweet arm creeping around my waist if only for a minute. A simple pleasure that meant all the world. A decade ago, a stolen caress in a public place might have seemed impossible for the two of us, even here, a sophisticated bookstore in our nation's capital. January 2019 was the worst of times, or so people said, but there had been other hard times.

Whenever strangers found out I came from New Orleans, sometimes they still asked me, Wasn't that where...? Were you there...? How did you come out in the storm?

Fourteen years, and so many disasters later, even people who remembered to ask polite questions sometimes stumbled on the name of the storm. There had been so many now.

At some point, you blink away the past. There was too much of it.

The people in the line talked about their immediate choices. Coffee or champagne, yogurt or bacon. By unspoken agreement, people veered away from the subject of politics, although a few brave souls offered their opinions about who might make the Superbowl. New Orleans, I thought but didn't say.

The buzz of voices blurred around me. Yes, I was happy, and I had every reason to be happy. Warmth after cold January rain. A good man at my side after prison and suspicion.

I love you so much, Flare Greene.

But sometimes I wonder if I deserve you.

How long can I hold you? How much longer?

You are so far beyond me.

I hadn't known how rich he was when we met. How rich my parents are, you mean, he said. Flare insisted on making his own way. Still, a troubled ex-con couldn't be what the Greenes wanted for their son.

No matter how polite they were. No matter how welcome they tried to make me feel when we visited their sprawling home in Miami for the Christmas holidays.

Shopping was a nightmare when you want to buy a gift for a billionaire attorney and his socialite wife. Especially when I'd lost my family and forgotten how to buy gifts years ago. And everything in the Design District was far out of my price range anyway.

I'd walked and walked. Flare, patient, seemed happy to walk with me. After a time, he slipped an arm around my waist to guide me. Above us, the white sky of a chilly December afternoon. Around us, the trunks of the palm trees wrapped in twinkling lights. Even though the sun hadn't set, many of the little lights had already blinked on.

Red and green, the colors of traffic signals and also the colors of Christmas. Funny colors for a religious holiday, I thought. Especially green, the color of the money I didn't have.

In Upper Buena Vista, he led me into a little shop where he could buy a ribbon to wrap around the wishtree, a giant banyan that supposedly granted wishes for the price of a dollar or two. His destination all along, I realized.

As he picked up a pen, I snuggled closer, and he cupped his hand to conceal his writing.

Don't peek, he said. The wish won't come true if it isn't secret.

Would you like a ribbon too, sir? asked the clerk.

My wish already came true. I stole another look at Flare. His handsome face was serious. Too serious.

Flare didn't have to tell me his wish. I already knew.

Pushing a dark curl out of his warm brown eyes, he studied the wide trunk of the banyan tree as if it mattered where he tied the ribbon. And then it was done, the wish made, the two of us walking again in the colorful plaza.

His phone vibrated. I don't remember where or when. A few steps away, a mile away. All that blurred, as did the swirl of happy shoppers stepping around us where we made a roadblock in their path.

Was it my imagination, or did his knuckles go white from the force of gripping the phone?

He mostly listened. Said almost nothing of any substance. Yet I knew.

The phone vanished. He studied my face.

What do you say about a visit to Washington? He didn't mean the state.

Damn tree works fast. I struggled to keep my voice light. Be careful what you wish for. Special agents aren't getting paid. The federal government had shut down over a budget dispute, and nobody knew how long it would last.

Maybe that's why I'm getting this chance. Because most people can't work for free. And we're still all right for money.

I didn't ask the larger question. He'd resigned from the FBI under a cloud. Me, the cloud in question, was a bigger presence than ever in his life.

Why would they ever want him back as long as he was involved with an ex-con? Especially the ex-con he met when he was working undercover. When I'd been the subject of interest.

And the truth was I was still the damn subject of interest. I might always be the subject of interest.

My ex, the seductive Tyler Acosta, vanished into the night with a lot of millions. The FBI never forgives, and they never forget. And there were still elements in the FBI who were morally convinced I knew exactly where to find that man and where to find that money.

It's a chance for me to be FBI again, Flare said. Maybe not a serious chance, maybe they just want to take another look at me, but maybe...

Maybe.

I know what you're thinking. That they want to use me to get to you and Tyler. But they know better now, they know you don't know where Tyler is.

Maybe they knew that. And maybe they didn't.

Either way, the gold glint of hope in his warm brown eyes was hard to resist.

A lot of that was Lawrence's obsession anyway, he said.

Launce Lawrence. Flare's special agent in charge gone rogue. These days, though, there were a lot of people getting away with vanishing a lot of millions. With Lawrence gone, maybe Tyler's crime was finally lost in the crowded files called Open Unsolved.

A thin hope, but I couldn't be the one to crush it.

So. Here we were two weeks later. Waiting and wondering. The screening process to re-admit Flare to the FBI was opaque to me. There were crowded days of interviews that I suspected were more like interrogations. They were followed by empty days where he showed me around the town where we might or might not soon be living.

Today was Kramerbooks. Special Agent Flare Greene had lived in Washington for three years while he was working as an investigator in one of their financial crime units. It was easy to imagine the younger Flare on a rare day off, brunching with a friend in this DC institution.

He hadn't loved financial crimes, but he loved being a federal agent. They knew exactly what to dangle in front of him to pull him back to DC.

Not money, not power.

His job. That's all he wanted. A job where he could make a difference.

It hurt to see his hope. I couldn't make myself believe in the job offer. Considering the circumstances of his departure, it almost couldn't be sincere. They didn't want Special Agent Greene. They wanted the boyfriend of Darke Gauthier Davis.

The personal interviews, the personal background checks, were an excuse to snoop into what he'd learned from me over the last few months. We'd been road-tripping around the country, getting to know each other in ways we'd never had time to know each other before. They'd want to sift through that stuff for any little clues to the missing money.

And he didn't have any little clues to give them. They could ask, and they could dig, and they could snoop, but I still didn't know where Tyler had gone with thirty-nine million dollars.

I'd never known.

This close, I could smell Flare's expensive aftershave. He didn't just look like he belonged in a crowd like this. He smelled like it too.

I couldn't regret the choices that brought me to Flare. But soon, I feared, he'd regret the choices that brought him to me.

How long before they ask him to choose between me and the FBI?

FBI special agents can't be entangled in emotional and physical relationships with ex-cons. Particularly an ex-con convicted of destroying evidence in a federal investigation.

It had been a while since I'd been in any bookstore. An orange hardback turned to show its front cover caught my eye― The Dinosaur Artist: Obsession, Betrayal, and the Quest for Earth's Ultimate Trophy. The child inside of us loves dinosaurs, but I think it was the subtitle that called to the adult.

Obsession.

Betrayal.

How obsessed I'd been with Tyler. How easily he had betrayed me.

All water under the bridge. The only way to change the past is to lie about it. And I was beyond lies.

We're losing our place in line. Flare's soft chuckle felt good against the nape of my neck. Do you want the book?

A hardback book was an impractical thing. I owned nothing except a small duffel bag that could be easily carried from car to motel room. Once I'd had a house, but it was lost to paying lawyers after Tyler. Would I even read a book about dinosaurs? I surrendered that dream of being a geologist, of hunting treasure in a desert, when I was in