To the left of the Manchester Airport’s lower lobby stood three luggage carousels. Two of them whirled with activity. The closest one had nearly finished with its discharge of suitcases and boxes; the farthest one just beginning. Sunshine blasted through the myriad of glass windows and reflected off the light gray tiles of the floor. Laughter and excited voices echoed in the large open area. Juliana searched the passengers for Briana. She thought she spotted her, holding an old man’s hand, and sped toward her.
“Wait,” Lucas cautioned, but she ignored him.
“Briana!” She hurried toward the brown-haired girl. When the child turned to answer the old man’s question, her rush of happiness withered. Not Briana.
“Where is she?” Juliana rushed from one luggage area to the next.
“Wait!” Lucas caught her wrist and stopped her. “He’ll call. This might be just a distraction.”
She checked her watch. Eleven twenty-three. Eight more minutes before the Phantom made Briana disappear forever.
“I have someone covering the Chicago flight,” Lucas reassured. “Every exit is covered. We can’t miss her.”
Juliana nodded, hanging on to Lucas’s hand with crushing force.
Stay calm. This is almost over
. “She’ll be all right. I’ll get her back.” She shook the phone, checked the buttons to make sure the thing still functioned. “Come on, come on, call, you bastard, call!”
The crowd thinned. The belt to the right ground to a halt. She whimpered, bit her upper lip with her lower teeth, scanned and rescanned the area, then turned to face the far carousel, and watched helplessly as one by one someone claimed each of the suitcases, bags, and boxes. Soon no one remained, but her and Lucas and the rattling sound of the belt going round and round with its one lone soft-sided suitcase. She flicked her wrist to look at her watch.
“Eleven-thirty!”
“He’ll call.”
When the phone did ring, the noise startled her.
“Deposit the cat tote on the far belt, then step back.”
Extricating her hand from Lucas’s, she sprinted to the appointed rubber belt. Carefully, she set her red tote bag on the conveyor. Breath held, she watched the cat’s crooked grin disappear between the fat rubber fringes separating the lobby from the loading area.
Once the bag had cleared the opening, Lucas sprang onto the belt.
She lunged for him, clutched at his shirt. “Let it go, Lucas!”
Just as Lucas was about to launch through the opening, a gray bin came out the other side of the carousel. Inside was the curled body of a child.
“No!” Nausea swept through her. Both her hands lunged to cover her mouth.
Lucas surged forward and depressed the red emergency button, stopping the belt’s movement, then jumped across to the other side of the carousel.
“Surprise!” Briana exploded up, both hands in the air, a large grin lighting up her face.
Juliana gulped convulsively and raced around the conveyor to claim her child.
“Briana! Oh God, Briana!”
She lifted her daughter from the bin and hugged her tightly. Closing her eyes, she drew in Briana’s little girl scent. Her chest heaved with unexpressed sobs of relief. With shaking hands, she set Briana down and patted her body, checking her limbs as if she’d just fallen off her bicycle rather than been kidnapped. She rubbed Briana’s wrists looking for rope burns, pushed up the sleeves of her purple fleece jacket feeling for needle marks, stared into her daughter’s laughing eyes searching for signs of a drugging, of pain, of abuse. She found none.
He’d kept his word; he’d taken good care of her little girl. A wave of relief surged through her.
Briana giggled. “Mom! Stop! You’re tickling me.”
Her baby. She was here. She was real. She was safe.
Crushing Briana once more tightly into her arms, Juliana’s knees failed her and she crumpled to the ground. “Briana.”
Drawing Briana’s head against her heart, Juliana gave in to the tears she’d so long suppressed, and rocked her daughter back and forth.
“Mommy Mine, don’t cry.” Briana’s little hands patted Juliana’s back. “It’s a surprise. Willy said you’d love it. Mommy?”
A game. To Briana it had all been a game. How had the Phantom managed that feat?
“I’m fine, baby. I’m fine,” Juliana reassured Briana through the shaking of her limbs, the pounding of her heart, the tears which kept pouring down her face. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
Through the misty veil of her tears, Juliana saw Lucas approach.
“Briana.” He crouched on one knee beside her. One hand moved forward to touch her arm, hesitated, then fell back to his side. “Are you hurt?”
Briana shook her head, twining one arm tightly around Juliana’s neck.
“The man, he didn’t hurt you?”
She shook her head once more.
“Good, good.” He looked at Juliana. “I’ll be right back. Don’t move.”
A warning? Or a promise? On his face she could read no emotions, but in her heart, she understood her ordeal wasn’t over.
* * *
Lucas had known Briana was his daughter. But seeing her jump out of that bin, a wide smile on her face, had left no doubt. The shock of such blatant, living proof had knocked him back a couple of steps and paralyzed him.
Never had he felt so awkward as when he’d tried to talk to his own child. He’d wanted to touch her, to hold her, to hug her, but to her, he was nothing more than a stranger.
The airport’s noises faded under the buzz of his blood speeding past his ears. All-consuming fury, pride, nausea, love, hatred battered him from all sides. It was as if someone had ripped his heart right out of his chest, played soccer with it, then handed it back to him and asked him to run a marathon. He couldn’t keep up with the speed of his thoughts, with his conflicting desires to hold Briana and lash out at Juliana, with the insistent rational voice of training urging him to act before the Phantom was lost.
I would have stayed. I would have loved her. I would have been a good father
.
His child. His daughter. All those years lost to him, to her, to them. Gone forever. Juliana had stolen something from him more precious than the jewel used as ransom—even with all its history and all it had meant to his family. She had cheated him out of five years with his own flesh and blood, with his own family.
Her tear-drenched gaze met his. He couldn’t take the softness squeezing his heart at the bleak pain in her eyes, the disappointment weighing his shoulders down, the hurt so raw tearing through him, so he turned away.
He’d loved her. He would have done anything for her.
With sheer will, he suppressed the tornado of feelings whirling through him. Briana was safe. But his job wasn’t done. The Phantom was still loose.
First things first. The Phantom in cuffs to appease Regan. Then he would deal with Juliana and Briana. He could sort out his own emotions later.
This wasn’t over—not by a long shot.
He stumbled through the carousel opening into the loading area with the finesse of a raw recruit, but he was too late. The agents milling about like ants on a mission told him the Nadyenka Sapphire and the Phantom were both gone.
“Did anyone see him?” he asked Walters. Surveying the area, Lucas searched for motion of any kind. He recognized half a dozen agents, but no airport personnel.
“No one came through.”
“The red bag. You had to see the red bag.”
“It came out one end and went right back out the other. I watched it myself. A baggage handler put the bags on, but took nothing off.”
Lucas took out his frustration on his fellow agent, shoving him back a step. “That was him.”
Indignant, Walters stepped away, brushing the lapel of his jacket. “What the hell’s wrong with you? We covered the perimeter just like we were supposed to.”
“He walked right under your nose. The baggage handler. It was the Phantom.”
“No way. We checked him out. ID matched. The kid wasn’t with him.”
“She was in a duffel bag.”
Walters swore, then yelled orders into his walkie-talkie. “We’ll get him.”
“He’s gone.”
Lucas turned to head back to the lobby. Under the shadow of the conveyor belt he spotted Juliana’s discarded red tote bag, its rumpled cat smiling crookedly up at him from the dusty corner, mocking.
* * *
When Lucas realized the Phantom had escaped him for a third time, he quickly assessed the situation. To find the missing thief, they would turn to the only person who could help identify him—Briana. As good as some of the agents were at talking to victims, he didn’t want to leave Briana in their care. She was his; he would handle her questioning. He’d pay for his decision, but he wanted Briana to feel safe, and that meant taking her home.
He’d studied the law, become the law, could travel to its edges, yet remain within its borders.
Until now.
For his daughter’s sake, he was ready to push the rules past their breaking point.
In the bustle of activity, he spirited mother and daughter to the car, still illegally parked by the entrance. Before anyone could stop them, he headed toward Aubery and Juliana’s Victorian duplex.
“Lucas…,” Juliana said from the back seat. She still clutched Briana close her heart. Her eyes were impossibly wide. Her expression a mixture of fear and contrition. And God help him, he felt sorry for her. Then he remembered his anger, and closed off the tenderness creeping around his heart.
“I would have stayed, Juliana. If I’d known.”
“I had reasons.”
He sneered, a new stream of bitterness flowed into his mouth, poisoned his thoughts. “What kind of reasons would be good enough for this kind of cruelty?”
“I-I—” She glanced down at Briana, and he understood her torment. The child didn’t need to hear this. The problem was between him and Juliana. Briana was simply an innocent victim.
“Later,” he promised, and saw her flinch.
“It’s over isn’t it?” It took him a moment to realize she meant the kidnapping ordeal, not their relationship.
He snapped his gaze back to the road. “They’ll be looking for you, for Briana. They’ll want to question her.”
“No!”
“It’s going to happen, Jewel. There’s no avoiding it. This case is too important for a lot of people—not just me. But I’d rather it be me than some other agent in an interrogation room in Boston.”
She remained silent. He didn’t dare look at her. Too many feelings scrambled around his body like a pinball machine on tilt. He had to keep an emotional distance. He had to get his job done.
Once at the house, Juliana ignored the purple backpack tossed onto the wicker rocker. She spirited Briana straight to the kitchen. Lucas snagged the pack and followed. Juliana said not a word, but searched the fridge.
“This wasn’t here when we left,” he said, tossing the pack on the table.
“Willy brought it so I could have my things,” Briana said, sliding the pack towards her end of the table.
“Mind if I look at it?”
“Who are you?”
So, he’d have to introduce himself to his own daughter. The irony of that tasted sour and was hard to swallow.
I’m your father
, he wanted to say, but of course, that would have to wait. He would never do anything to hurt her.
“Briana—” Juliana started, gripping the refrigerator door with white-knuckled intensity.
“You can call me Lucas,” he interrupted. “I work with the FBI. I was helping your mother find you.”
“I wasn’t lost. I was with Willy.”
“May I?” he asked again, nodding toward the backpack.
She hesitated, then shrugged. “I got my things in there.”
He emptied the backpack and found a Skip-Bo box, a DVD of
The Princess and the Frog
, a crayoned picture with blue grass and purple trees, a stuffed white dragon and a stuffed frog, the remnants of peanut butter crackers, and an empty juice box. He smiled. Grape. Like mother, like daughter.
Briana studied his every move, pretending interest in the stack of mail on the table. With each envelope she lifted, she looked at the growing pile of her belongings. “What’re you looking for?”
“A clue.”
“What kind of clue?”
He couldn’t take his gaze off the little girl who was his, couldn’t stop marveling at the sheer life exuding from her, the mixture of his and Juliana’s features into a new, unique individual, couldn’t help but wonder at all the years he’d missed. His little girl. His child. His flesh and blood. His legacy. After he’d done his duty, would she accept him into her life?
“Something that’ll tell me who Willy is.”
“Oh, that’s easy. Willy’s my friend.”
* * *
Juliana drew out slices of turkey and leaves of lettuce from the fridge. She had to keep busy or she would crack. Plate. Bread. Her daughter was safe. She was home. That should end her worries. Signal the return to a normal life. But it didn’t. Turning around, for a moment she couldn’t seem to remember where she kept the knives.
She wanted to make things right. For Briana. For Lucas. She wanted to explain. But the words just jumbled inside her head. They all sounded lame. They would to him, too. Heading for the cutlery drawer, she tried to calm her racing mind, split between her debt to Lucas and her new worries for Briana.