Some kind of emotion flickered across her face so quickly he couldn’t identify it. Anger? Fear? Or something else?
“Did you see the man who drove that car?” he asked again.
A low rumble sounded from the direction of the bushes where Faye had emerged a few moments earlier.
Jake yanked out his gun and shoved Faye behind his back as he whirled around. Was the panther still out here, stalking them? Or was that more of a curse than a growl?
A full minute passed in silence. No more growls or curses. No rustling of leaves to indicate anything, or anyone, was there. He cautiously straightened and turned back to Faye.
She was gone.
So were her knife and her rifle.
Missing in the Glades
Lena Diaz
LENA DIAZ was born in Kentucky and has also lived in California, Louisiana and Florida, where she now resides with her husband and two children. Before becoming a romantic suspense author, she was a computer programmer. A former Romance Writers of America Golden Heart award finalist, she has won a prestigious Daphne du Maurier Award for excellence in mystery and suspense. To get the latest news about Lena, please visit her website, www.lenadiaz.com.
Thank you, Allison Lyons and Nalini Akolekar.
Thank you to my mom, Letha McAlister, who got such a kick out of this story. This book is dedicated to my friend and fellow suspense author Sarah Andre.
Thank you for self lessly giving me your time, ideas and encouragement. This book would not have been written without you.
Contents
Jake aimed his pistol and flashlight through the chain-link wildlife fencing that marked where civilization ended and the Florida Everglades began. Behind him, his black Dodge Charger sat on the shoulder of a remote section of Interstate 75 that Floridians affectionately called Alligator Alley. With good reason. Alligators infested the swampy areas along this east-west corridor connecting Naples to Hialeah.
He swept his flashlight up and down the ditch behind him. Did alligator eyes reflect in the light? He sure hoped so. That might be the only way he’d see the hungry reptiles creeping up on him, looking for a late-night Jake-snack.
Not for the first time, he questioned his sanity in searching this dangerous area at night. But when a rare black panther had darted across the road in front of him and he’d skidded sideways to avoid it, he’d noticed a reflection in the beam of his headlights through the wildlife fence—a reflection that just might be the car Calvin Gillette was driving when he went missing three days ago.
In theory, if Gillette had crashed, the cable barrier system should have kept his car from sliding under the fence into the woods. And hitting one of the cables would have triggered strobe lights and an automatic notification to the Department of Transportation. But the system wasn’t foolproof. A few months earlier a minivan hit a pole and went airborne, flipping over the cable without touching it and sliding under the fence into a canal. Jake figured if it happened once, it could happen again. And the few clues he had about Gillette’s disappearance all led him to this same area.
A few minutes later, his search paid off. He found deep tire tracks in the wet grass. He hopped the ditch and pressed against the chain links—loose and floppy as they’d be if a car had hit the fence. Excitement sizzled through him. He stepped over the cable and slid through to the other side.
Grateful he’d worn boots for this search, he trudged across the damp ground to a thick stand of pine trees and palmetto bushes. Not anxious to go much farther in the dark, he braced his shoulder on one of the trees and used his flashlight to search for that elusive reflection of metal he thought he’d seen from the road. And suddenly, there it was, behind some bushes, too big and shiny to not be man-made. But without knowing for sure that it was a car, he didn’t want to raise an alarm. Which meant he would have to go into the swamp.
It was times like this when he seriously wondered if he should move forward with his planned career change from police officer to private investigator. He was on leave from his police job to give the private sector a try, which was why he’d recently moved south to this