Pine took the credit card out of her pocket. “Or how about I treat you to dinner instead? Or at least Jack can.”

  The building concierge gave them several recommendations, and they decided on a French bistro within walking distance of their building.

  They ordered a bottle of wine and their meals and spent two hours at a table in the back mostly talking about innocuous things. It felt refreshing to Pine, but she also felt some remorse. Pretty much every waking moment lately had been devoted to finding her sister. Deviating from that, even for a little bit, felt like a betrayal of Mercy.

  “We are making progress, Agent Pine, but we do need to take a break every now and then,” said Blum, apparently reading Pine’s thoughts.

  Pine nodded and then glanced around the restaurant, eyeing people who she was sure had their own share of problems, maybe not as dire as hers, yet problems still. But she was afraid, despite the “progress” Blum had mentioned, that either her problem would never have a resolution, or the conclusion would be finding her sister’s body.

  Can you handle that, Lee? You told yourself you could. But were you lying?

  They were walking back when Blum said, “Will you read the letter tonight?”

  Pine nodded. “Yes. I have to, although part of me is dreading it.”

  “I can understand that. Although there might be some clue in there.”

  “Maybe,” Pine said doubtfully.

  Back in the apartment, Pine took a long, steaming hot shower, put on a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt, and climbed into bed.

  She took the letter out and stared at the envelope for a little while. With her finger she traced her mother’s lovely cursive handwriting, which was quite familiar to her. Pine sat back against the pillow and then abruptly stood, grabbed her phone, left her room, and walked down to the wine cellar that Lineberry had shown her on their previous visit. She snagged a bottle of Italian wine. It was the same vintage that he had served Pine here before. She’d decided she needed some more alcohol to make it through the reading of her mother’s letter. A lot more.

  She went out onto the terrace that wrapped itself around three sides of the penthouse. There was a glass wall rising nearly chest high enclosing the space. All-weather wicker furnishings and exquisite plantings and fountains and a large fire pit surrounded her. It really was a paradise. And she felt enormous guilt.

  I wonder where Mercy is right now. I seriously doubt in a place like this.

  Pine opted to just sit on the floor after using a remote control to ignite a gas fireplace enclosed by stone and textured ceramic tile. She moved closer to the flames and set her phone down, then opened the wine bottle, poured a generous amount into her glass, and took a long sip.

  Okay, no more stalling, Lee.

  She would sometimes refer to herself by the name she’d had growing up. She’d been given it because Mercy had trouble pronouncing “At-lee” and just started calling her Lee. The name had stuck until Pine had gone to college. Now she would dearly love to hear her sister call her by that name even once.

  She took out the two-page letter and unfolded it. She frowned when she saw her hand shaking. She took another sip of wine to calm her nerves. It didn’t work.

  Come on! It’s just a stupid letter.

  But, clearly, it was far more than that. This would be the first example she’d ever seen of what her mother was thinking about things since she had abandoned her daughter all those years ago. Pine finished the glass of wine and poured another.

  So here goes, Pine thought, taking a deep breath and holding it, like she was about to go underwater for a while.

  Dear Jack,

  Once again you have come to the rescue and Tim and I can’t thank you enough. It was terrible, horrible, what happened in Virginia. The person obviously wanted to either hurt me by killing Tim, or thought I might be there with Tim. I am still shaking after almost losing him.

  Here, Pine almost put the letter down. She had no desire to hear her mother’s thoughts on almost losing her husband when she had chosen to walk away from her daughter. But something made her continue.

  And then came the even harder part. Leaving my beloved Lee. I can’t believe that I’m even writing this, Jack. She is really all I have left. After Mercy was taken, which was entirely my fault, as we both know, Lee was all that kept my life going. I know that I smothered her, at the same time I put up a wall between us. I felt that if I let myself get too close to her that I would let something slip that would put her in danger. I couldn’t do that to my little girl. Sitting next to her in that hospital bed, not knowing if she was going to live or die, not knowing what had happened to Mercy, my mind just shut down. I couldn’t process anything other than the well-deserved guilt I was feeling. When my girls needed me, I wasn’t there. There is no more basic duty for a mother. And I failed that duty miserably. She has now grown into a very smart, accomplished young woman I’m so proud of. And she did it all on her own. I know that she sees how I have shut her out and this just deepens my guilt. To withhold love from someone you love more than life itself, it does something to you, Jack, something irreversibly painful. But I can’t make myself change course now. I just can’t. The truth is if Lee thinks I don’t love her then she won’t miss me when I’m gone. At least that’s my hope. Now, I have come into some money, I won’t tell you exactly how, but I figured out something and when I confronted the person I turned out to be right. This money will fund Lee’s college and also help provide for her later in life, and also give Tim and me something to live on. It is with a heavy heart that I am leaving her, but I feel very confident that she will be safe now.

  When you recruited me all those years ago I was younger than Lee is now. I was scared to death. I didn’t want to do it, but you showed me how much good would come of it. And I suppose it has. For others. But not for the Pine family. I fully accepted that. Tim did as well. But not Mercy and Lee. They had no choice. All I know is, even though Tim and I will be together, I will be more alone than I ever have been before. Without my daughters, I am nothing. I thought that I had sacrificed everything for them. In the end, I simply sacrificed them. No mother could have done any worse than I did. So much so that I don’t deserve to even be called one, not anymore. I think of Mercy and Lee every day and I will until the day I die. They were both my little flowers that I let wither. But I will spend the rest of my life trying to make up for what I did, for the poor choices that I made. At least I can try.

  Thank you for everything, Jack. If you ever see Lee, please don’t mention me to her. Don’t say anything that will dredge up memories she should just forget. I’m not worth the trouble. She just needs to get on with her life and never look back.

  And then she had signed the letter with her real name, Amanda, as opposed to Julia.

  The tears that had fallen from Pine’s eyes had stained the pages in several places. She read it through three more times, clinging to different words and phrases with each pass. She finally folded the pages and set them next to her as she watched night fall over the lighted Atlanta skyline.

  Her family was out there somewhere, but the reality was all three of them could be dead now. If so, would finding their graves, if there even were graves, be enough for her?

  I don’t know the answer to that. I can’t possibly.

  Her phone dinged. She looked at the screen. It was a text from John Puller.

  She sat up straighter. Leonard Atkins was receiving aid from the VA. And it was going to an address in Huntsville, Alabama, that Puller had also provided in the text. Pine Googled the location. It was about three and a half hours by car from Atlanta.

  She went back inside and climbed into bed.

  Her last thought before she fell asleep was, Just keep plugging, Atlee. Every day. And you’ll eventually get there. You’ll find them, one way or another.

  Chapter 6

  WHEN THE WOMAN ROSE FROM THE chipped wooden stool, she stood a statuesque six foot one in her long, bare feet. She flexed her right hand and then her left. The fingers were callused and strong, just like all the rest of her. She felt pops, twinges, and creaks as bones and cartilage resettled into appropriate grooves; more cantankerous elements refused to fully reset, but grudgingly moved a bit closer to normal. She stretched her long, muscled neck, rolling it one way and then the other. She pushed her sculpted shoulders away from her neck, and her ripped traps and delts thanked her as the release of tension was both palpable and immediate.

  She wore a frayed black sports top with a faded Nike swoosh, and a chest protector under that along with a pair of faded black Lycra athletic shorts. Both pieces of compression clothing sharply defined her long, muscular, and scarred physique.

  The short, trim man standing next to her helped the woman slip on her gloves, and then he commenced rapidly massaging her long, ropy arms.

  “You ready?” he asked, looking up at her.

  She glanced down at him with a frown. “I’m here, Jerry. So what the hell do you think?”

  He put in her mouthguard and then made the sign of the cross. He always did that, and it always irritated the crap out of her.

  “Who you trying to signal, dude, your bookie?” she muttered through the mouthguard.

  “See you on the other side, El,” said Jerry as he hurriedly left the ring.

  Eloise “El” Cain was getting a bit long in the tooth for what she was about to do, though she did it only when she really needed the money. Her opponent tonight was four inches shorter, but a real stud; at 190 pounds she outweighed the taller Cain by ten pounds. And, like Cain, almost all of it was bone, gristle, and muscle displayed across her broad shoulders, sinewy core, abs like rows of stacked bricks, barrel-thick thighs, muscled glutes, and diamond-hard calves. She could destroy 99 percent of the guys out there and give the other 1 percent a run for their money. Her technique was rock-solid: She could fight all day, could absorb terrific punishment, and had crushing power in all four limbs. She was over a dozen years younger than Cain, and many thought she had a shot at the big time. The only question marks were her fighting smarts and mental toughness. And the fact that the women’s UFC world topped out at featherweight, or a 145-pound limit.

  Cain had always thought that was sexist bullshit. There were some women out there who could fight with the best of them. The men had heavier weight divisions in the UFC, so why were the bigger women ruled out? Maybe they would just have to start their own league, or the larger women would have to make the jump to boxing, with its far heavier weight divisions. But ultimately it wasn’t fair, and, like always, the women got the short end of the athletic stick, Cain believed.

  Her opponent had more tats than unmarked skin, Cain observed. The general theme of the skin art seemed to be violent death, with sadomasochistic torture running a close second.

  Cain knew she was here just for the woman to notch a win on her career belt as she moved up in the land of mixed martial arts.

  Well, maybe I have different plans.

  This was decidedly not the big time. No cage match televised on pay-per-view happening here. No Ronda Rousey, Holly Holm, or Cris Cyborg within a thousand miles of this dive. No million-dollar payoffs or eye-popping commercial endorsements. This was small-time, local stuff. But the rowdy, hard-drinking crowd numbered well over two hundred, and the excitement of what they were about to witness was palpable. The site was an old factory where stuff used to be made by the locals until the world changed and the country stopped making any stuff at all. Now it was a tinpot relic that was used for myriad purposes, none of them authorized and some of them patently illegal. But who was going to deny folks a little fun and a way to make some money on the side?

  And I can earn my little pot of gold tonight.

  The official purse was five grand. If she won, Cain would get only a thousand of it. The loser got three hundred bucks flat for getting her brains scrambled. Just how it was at this level. What Cain called it was kicking the shit out of someone while they kicked the shit out of you, while the crowd guzzled beer and sucked in weed, cheering and jeering. The rest of the cash would go to assorted males on the food chain who added no value and took no risks and raised not one finger. But they had power and influence behind them, so they got their pound of flesh.

  Yet the possibility of a thousand bucks for one night’s work was more than enough incentive for Cain to be standing where she was, mouthpiece in, fists gloved, strategy mapped out, adrenaline spiking.

  The women met in the middle of an improvised ring, where fence posts had been cemented into huge tractor trailer rims to hold them upright. The chain-link fence around the ladies was eight feet high with a padlocked gate. Unlike a UFC octagon ring, the chain link was not coated with soft vinyl and the metal posts had no safety coverings. You got rammed into that, it was not going to feel good. The floor was not springy canvas, just concrete, so ditto for sudden collisions there. But Cain didn’t mind. This was a piece of cake compared to other things she’d endured in life, although the locked cage door always bothered her. But if need be, she could climb the fence.

  She glanced at her opponent, who was giving Cain her version of the intimidating dead-eye stare, which differed from the way that men did it. While testosterone-spiked guys always overplayed their hand and abilities in mental confrontations like this, women usually understated how badly they were going to mess you up.

  “In your dreams, buttercup,” Cain said. She tacked on a broad smile at the dead-eye, which really seemed to piss the gal off.

  If I get in your head, all the better.

  The setup was three five-minute rounds, unless one fighter was knocked out or otherwise was no longer able to defend herself. Cain had never been knocked out, but there was always the chance. The lower number of rounds meant that the fight would be high intensity pretty much from the get-go. There was no cruising in this ring of human mayhem. The crowd wanted punishment and blood and lots of it. Like watching the NFL, it was far more American than baseball and apple pie ever would be. The tough and vicious won, and everybody else was a loser.

  The only people inside this temporary prison where the max sentence was fifteen minutes were the fighters and the ref. This one was a stout, arrogant piece of work who had the deserved rep of being a misogynistic creep who was not below feeling up a gal who had been knocked off her feet and/or robbed of consciousness. He had tried that on a momentarily dazed Cain in one fight, and she had communicated her displeasure by nearly biting off one of his fingers. He had never tried it with her again, but she didn’t hold out hope for the jerk to call anything fair her way tonight.

  But Cain also wasn’t overly confident. She had assorted injuries that had never healed properly, including a rotator cuff that had the tendency to seize up on her when she needed it the most. And her opponent wouldn’t need much of an advantage to knock Cain right on her ass, lights out.

  The ref gave his brief instructions, shot a glare in Cain’s direction, wiggled his permanently damaged index finger, and the ladies stepped back, awaiting the commencement of the match. It came a few seconds later via air horn, and the fight was on.

  Chapter 7

  THE WOMEN CHARGED FORWARD AND met once more in the middle of the ring, with flared nostrils, cocked and locked limbs, and lethally intent eyes, while the crowd noise revved higher as the old, rusted guts of the factory rose up behind them. The whole scene was bolstered by ear-piercing music. “Eye of the Tiger” was running on a loop, and someone had set up seventies-era strobe lights and even a smoke machine that was already starting to peter out. It was tackiness taken to a whole new level, and everyone in attendance apparently loved it, except the two women about to do serious battle. They had other things on their minds, like survival. And money.

  While the volume of the crowd spiked, Cain and her opponent took just a few seconds to feel each other out. Cain threw a jab and a snap kick to gauge the other woman’s tendencies, power, skill level, and reaction time. Her opponent did the same. The woman landed a crisp shot to Cain’s left oblique. Cain made her retreat by looping a kick in the woman’s direction. But she did not stretch her long leg to its maximum range of motion.

  Cain took a right cross to the chin and a knee to her other oblique. Both blows stung. The chick was faster than Cain was, she had to admit, her muscle twitch superior; none of that was unexpected. She could tell that the lady was not maxing out, not yet. She had the fuel to dump Cain on her ass, that was without doubt.

  Cain feigned a short left and then hit her opponent with a right uppercut straight to the gut. But the woman’s ab wall was stone. No damage done there, not really. Cain observed a sharp exhale of breath come out of the lady’s mouth with the impact, like air from a popped balloon. But the eyes remained clear, and her expression looking more assured of victory. She must have assumed Cain had used max power on that blow. But the arms were your weak limbs. True strength, the real knockout power, Cain well knew, was housed lower.

  Two rounds passed with hundreds of punches and kicks and knees thrown and painfully landed, and blood and sweat released. And it was a lot of blood and a lot more sweat, as their bodies collided, separated, and slammed against each other again and again like grizzly bears ripping at each other.

  The concrete floor quickly became littered with the droplets of both women’s blood and sweat, which their constantly moving bare feet had fashioned into blurry, ill-defined patterns that looked like an early-stage Jackson Pollock masterpiece. Welts and purplish bruises covered their arms and legs and torsos. Cuts littered their faces. You didn’t do this sort of thing if your looks really mattered to you. A forearm to the nose or a foot to the chin was going to land you on the floor, not a magazine cover.

  In a brief clinch, Cain said tauntingly through her mouthguard, “Come on, kid, you’re supposed to be the next big thing. You haven’t even knocked me down once, cream puff.”

  The angry woman tried to arm-bar her, but Cain roughly shoved her off and got a snarl in return. Her opponent leapt forward, and Cain took a hard shot to the head. She fell back a bit, but not in a defenseless way that would encourage the woman to immediately charge after her, hoping to land blow after frenetic blow until the ref stepped in and ended it. And this ref would do that in a heartbeat against Cain, just to deprive her of the cash.