Free Speaking in Tongues by Jeffery Deaver Page A

watched the sheets of rain roll across the brown fields.
    “What do we do, Tate?” she asked. “Where do we start?”
    Prosecutors know as much about criminal investigations as cops do. But those gears in Tate’s mind hadn’t been used for a long time. He shrugged. “Let’s start with her therapist. Maybe she said something about running away, about where she’d go. What’s his name?” Tate felt he should have remembered.
    “Hanson,” Bett said. “He had to cancel the session today—an illness or something. I hope he’s in town.”She looked up the number in her address book and dialed it. “It’s his service,” she whispered to Tate. “What’s your cell number?”
    She gave the doctor’s answering service both of their mobile numbers and asked him to return the call. She said it was urgent.
    “Try that friend again,” Tate suggested. “Amy. Where she spent the night.” He tried to picture Amy. He’d met her once. He’d counted nine earrings in the girl’s left ear but only eight in her right. He’d wondered if the disparity had been intentional or if she’d merely miscounted.
    Troubled, he thought again about her boyfriend. Well, she was seventeen. Why shouldn’t she go out? But with a college senior? Tate’s prosecutorial mind thought back to the Virginia provisions on statutory rape.
    Bett shifted and cocked the phone closer to her ear. Apparently someone was now home.
    “Amy? It’s Megan’s mother. Honey, we’re trying to find her. She didn’t show up for lunch. Do you know where she went this morning after she left you and your mom’s?”
    Bett nodded as she listened and then asked if Megan had been upset about anything. Her face was grim.
    Tate was half listening but mostly he was studying Bett. The tangles of auburn hair, the striking face, the prominent neck bones, the complexion of a woman who looked ten years younger than her age. He tried to remember the last time he’d seen her. Maybe it was Megan’s sweet sixteen party. An odd evening . . . For a fleeting moment, as he stood beside the girl andher mother, delivering what everyone declared to be a brilliant toast, he’d had a sense of them as a family. He and Bett had shared a momentary smile. But it had faded fast and the instant they’d stepped out of the spotlight they’d returned to their separate lives. When he’d seen her after that, Tate couldn’t remember.
    He thought: She’s less pretty now but more beautiful. More confident, more assured, her sunset-sky eyes were narrowed and not flitting around—coy and ethereal—the way they’d habitually done fifteen years ago.
    Maybe it’s maturity, Tate reflected. And he wondered again what her impression of him might be.
    Bett put her hand over the receiver and said, “Amy said Megan left about nine-thirty this morning and wouldn’t tell her where she was going. She was secretive about it. She left her book bag there. I thought it might have something in it that’d give us a clue where she went. I said we’d be by to pick it up later.”
    “Good.”
    Bett listened to Amy again. She frowned in concern. “Tate . . . She said that Megan told her somebody’d been following her.”
    “Following? Who?”
    “She doesn’t know.”
    Okay, hard evidence. The latent prosecutor in Tate Collier awakened a bit more. “Let me talk to her.”
    Tate took the phone. “Amy? This is Megan’s father.”
    A pause. The girl finally said, “Um, hi. Is Megan, like, okay?”
    “We hope so. We just want to find out where she is. What’s this about somebody following her?”
    “She was, like, pretty freaked.”
    Not real helpful, he thought and asked, “Tell me exactly what happened.”
    “I mean, her and me, we were sitting around watching this movie, I don’t know, on Wednesday, I guess, and it was about a stalker and she goes, ‘I don’t want to watch this.’ And I’m like, ‘Why not?’ And she’s like, ‘There’s this car with some older guy in it and I