Forgotten Secrets by Robin Perini Read Free Book Online Page A

procedure and damage the organ so it appeared diseased. Giving in to her captors would buy her time. Time to convince Adelaide that she had a choice.
    Saying a small prayer, she completed the procedure and dropped the organ into a metal dish.
    “Bethany’ll be all right now?” Ian asked.
    Not hardly. Because whatever had caused Bethany’s symptoms was still attacking her body. Cheyenne explored the open abdomen, searching for an obvious cause, but nothing appeared abnormal. She had no choice but to close the wound.
    With the last of the staples in place, she stood back. “I’ve done all I can,” she said to Ian. At least until she figured out what had made the poor woman so deathly ill.
    “When will Bethany wake up?” he asked.
    “I don’t know.” Normally a post-appendectomy patient would be awake within a few hours. Except Bethany hadn’t needed the operation. And whatever was causing her symptoms hadn’t been repaired. Cheyenne changed gloves and checked the IV antibiotic drip before lowering her mask. “I can’t promise anything, Ian. She needs a hospital.”
    Ian swallowed. “Father won’t be happy if she doesn’t get better.”
    Cheyenne’s knees shook, and she sank into the chair beside Bethany, studying her, searching for an identifying symptom. Ian hovered at her shoulder, watching, waiting.
    Somehow, Cheyenne had to do the impossible: make healthy tissue appear diseased so Father would be fooled and diagnose her patient’s symptoms.
    If she didn’t, she had no doubt that she wouldn’t leave this room alive.

    The soft green numbers of the clock glowed another five minutes since the last time Riley had checked. There would be no more rest tonight. Resigned, she padded into the living room by rote, a path she’d followed thousands of times before. The kitchenette table hadn’t been used for eating since she’d moved in three years ago. File boxes covered one side, filled with newspaper clippings, photos, interview transcripts, copies of forensic data.
    A large map of the United States was pinned to the blank wall. Black pins peppered the view, representing stranger abductions of girls about the age of her sister. Red pins indicated victims who had been recovered—most of them hadn’t made it. A few, like Elizabeth Smart, had survived longer than the seventy-two-hour life expectancy of missing children.
    Stranger abductions might be a small percentage of those taken, but they were also the deadliest.
    Riley knew all of this. She’d studied all the statistics. Her sister was dead, had probably died fifteen years ago. Riley owed it to her family to bring them closure. Somehow. Some way.
    She’d made a little headway since joining the FBI. She’d searched the federal databases on her own time and had discovered a pattern. Madison wasn’t alone. Too many girls of about twelve years old, red hair and freckles dotting across the nose, had vanished over the last decade and a half.
    The map told the story. Many of them had been abducted within thirty miles of I-25.
    Vanished without a trace.
    Gone, but not forgotten. Not by their families. And not by Riley. Never by Riley.
    One flick of a switch and her computer whirred to life. Tom might have kicked her out of the office for a week, but she could use the time. Trying to save Vincent O’Neal’s last two victims had taken 110 percent of her concentration. She’d neglected Madison’s case.
    No more.
    She logged in to the FBI’s computer system. She’d review the HSK database for changes first.
    What kind of world was it where a Highway Serial Killings Initiative database existed? The depravity of some human beings never ceased to shock her, even after studying the worst of the worst since she’d been able to sneak Ann Rule’s book on Ted Bundy from the public library as a teenager against her parents’ orders.
    Digging into evil had become commonplace. Tom had no idea what she could handle. Riley narrowed the parameters, searching for new