Searching (PAVAD- FBI Romantic Suspense Book 18) Read online

  “How old?”

  “Six.”

  “Oh my. He’s very small for six.” Marianna put one hand on his back. “And his clothing is far too big.”

  “And dirty. I don’t think he’s been bathed in a few days. Maybe longer. That group home needs seriously investigated, Mari. I’m going to send the photos I took on to the proper departments once this case is finished. And I’m going to push, if I have to.”

  “Just let me know if I can help.” Marianna was very obviously inspecting the little man. Marianna was a mother of seven children. Her eyes showed her compassion, immediately. “I’ll call home. Ed ran home to take a shower and grab some files not even an hour ago. I have a box of clothing to donate ready for the Brynlock clothing drive in our garage. I know there will be things in there he can wear from my boys, and I think Georgia has some things of Matthew’s in there as well. We’ll get him taken care of.”

  “Thanks. I just…couldn’t leave him there to be forgotten about. They barely even checked my ID. Sturvin could have walked right in and taken him. Anyone could have. I just had to sign one form and he was free to go with me. Just like that.”

  “Totally understand. He’ll be safe here, while we look for his cousins,” Marianna said as Shayna came up behind her.

  “What’s up, Doc?” Shayna said as her gaze landed on the little boy. And the hot man at Miranda’s side. “Well, looks like you’ve been busy.”

  “Heard you have, too.”

  Shayna waved a report in front of her. “Who wants it? Here’s the deal. An adult print was found on top of the purple residue on Debbie Miller’s rear window. It was purple hard candy, by the way.”

  “Did it match anyone?” Miranda asked. Shayna had that look in her big brown eyes that said she had found something. “Let me guess? Paul Sturvin.”

  “Nope. But very, very close,” Shayna said. “Want to guess who? It came back to a ten card from Ft. Benning.”

  “Military? Sturvin was never in the military. Who do we know in the case that has a military record?”

  “Philip James Sullivan,” Shayna said. “Paul Sturvin’s identical twin brother.”

  “The guy who was killed in an auto accident six years ago?” Miranda just stood there and gawked at the other woman.

  “The very one. Interesting twist, isn’t it? I’ll let you tell Mr. and Mrs. Jones all about it.” She turned toward Tag, holding out the report. “Well, you’re new. Welcome to Crazyland. Here, Randi looks like she has her hands full.”

  Miranda looked at Tag, as her mind tried to process what she was hearing. Paul Sturvin had visited Bentley weekly. Not just as the devoted uncle. No, he’d visited just like a parent would. “Just whose child is this?”

  He smirked at her. “For the moment, lady, it looks like he’s going to be yours.”

  75

  Jac, Max, Dani, Whit, and that idiot Barnes were going over the reports they had one more time when Miranda walked in, a small child cuddled in her arms and a tall, gorgeous Black man in a severe suit at her side.

  “Randi?” Jac asked. “Who…?”

  “Meet Bentley Philip Sullivan. Paul Sturvin’s nephew…or son. I’m not entirely certain which. I found him in a group home a few hours from here. But we have a bigger problem. Has anyone spoken to Shayna recently?”

  “What?” Max asked, taking the boy from Miranda like the experienced parent that he was. Within a moment, he had the little boy sprawled out on the couch and covered with his own suit jacket that Max had hung on the back of a chair hours ago. The child never woke. “Start talking.”

  “I spoke with Shayna,” Miranda said, taking a sheet of paper from the man next to her. “Everyone, this is Agent Walker Taggart. He’s asked to observe this case, and Ed said that was ok. Apparently, Tag is on the short list to transfer to PAVAD. Poor guy is a friend of Knight’s, by the way.”

  “What did Shayna find?” Jac asked.

  “There was a fingerprint on top of the candy on the window. It came back to Philip Sullivan’s ten card from his time in the army. Whoever is out there, whoever has those girls, it’s not Paul Sturvin. And probably never has been.”

  Jac stared at the report as she processed what Miranda was telling her with what Dani was working on as well. “Identical twins do have completely different fingerprints. And it explains the difference between Alabama and Georgia, like Dani thought.”

  “We have an evil-twin situation going on here?” Dani asked, rolling her chair close to the little boy to look at him, compassion on her face. “So if this is Paul’s nephew, he’s Philip’s son. We won’t be able to tell via DNA, either.”

  “We’ll probably never know for sure who the father of this child is—or Olivia and Ava Sturvin,” Whit said, making notes on his phone. He was an obsessive note taker.

  “No, not with Paul and Philip being identical.” Jac tried to work things out. She stood, then walked to the board, studying the names and dates written there. She crossed out Paul Sturvin’s name beneath his photo and wrote Philip instead. “What if this isn’t the first family this man has killed?”

  “Go on,” Max said. She looked back at him, noting how he was showing the stress of the last forty hours or so.

  Jac both felt they were making progress—and still no closer to having Ava and Olivia safe. Her gaze landed on all the reports spread before them.

  They’d been hitting this nonstop since they’d made it back to the conference room at seven thirty that morning. They’d worked until three a.m. before Max had had to call a halt for people to get some sleep.

  “The woman who adopted Philip died fifteen years ago from carbon monoxide poisoning. What if it wasn’t accidental?” She shuffled through papers on the table and laid out Susan Sullivan’s death certificate. “Paul’s adoptive parents were both killed in a fire five years later. Arson investigation was inconclusive. The pair was elderly, and it was thought one of them left something burning on the stove. What if Philip left something on the stove, knowing what would most likely happen?”

  “You’re reaching a bit,” Barnes said. He’d not exactly been helpful, but he’d had a few good insights. Jac hadn’t been completely turned off from working with him, at least. “That’s a bit simplistic.”

  “Exactly. Isn’t that the point? Three people in their seventies and eighties aren’t exactly difficult to kill. And there were UK studies that showed that carbon monoxide poisoning is a common choice for family homicides,” Jac said, barely aware of who she was talking to until her eyes met Todd’s. “The fire that killed his brother’s family would have been more difficult to pull off. But the fact that two families connected to one man die in suspicious fires? There is something going on there.”

  “Unless it wasn’t his brother’s family but his own,” Whit said.

  Max grabbed a nearby file and opened it. “The chief investigator in that case stated that the father was supposed to have been out of town at the time but managed to come home just in time to rush in through a back door. The baby’s room was the closest. He was able to grab his son and get him almost to the door before smoke inhalation overcame him. Firefighters pulled him and the baby out of the house just minutes later.”

  “What if that was a lie? What if he’d driven back earlier? Like it’s possible Sturvin/Sullivan drove back early to kill Rachel?” Dani asked. “Started the fire, and just waited? The baby could have been a convenient cover. I mean, if he was the one who started the fire, the older children would have been able to identify him, right? How old were Philip’s daughters again? Seven, five, and three?”

  Jac nodded. “So…how did he get rid of Paul? Because someone is buried in that grave. And if we go on the evil-twin theory, it’s the real Paul Sturvin.”

  “Report says he had an accident related to the severe weather at the time. Ran off the road, neck snapped on impact. His car was found at the bottom of a ravine three weeks later. There is also a note from the investigator saying he was despondent, and it could ha
ve been suicide,” Max said, laying out the report next to the one about the fire. “Due to the fact that his wife and three daughters had recently perished.”

  “What if it was Paul? What if Philip killed him and put him in the car before pushing it over the ravine?” Jac said. It was a wild speculation, but it felt right. “He was in the military. He probably knew just how to break his own brother’s neck. Then he just assumed his identity. With Rachel and Olivia? Ava might be his, the dates coincide. And except for a similar birthmark, there is nothing that would have made Rachel even know? And how closely does a woman look at a man’s birthmark?”

  “Debbie’s photo albums had absolutely no photos of anyone from Paul’s side of the family. In fact, there was a family tree portion in the book—and every member of Paul’s family was listed as deceased,” Dani said. “What if he never told Rachel he had a twin? Would she have even known to doubt who her husband actually was? How many of us confuse the Lorcan brothers at first glance?”

  Jac nodded. “Exactly. We all know how easy that is to do—especially with Sin and Sebastian. Their wives can tell them apart, but if Rachel never knew a twin existed, she wouldn’t have ever known the man with her wasn’t Paul. Especially if the imposter worked at duplicating his brother’s mannerisms. How that ties into finding the girls, I don’t know yet. But if it’s not Paul who has them…”

  “What did the social worker say about the boy?” Max asked, looking at Miranda.

  “The file said that after the death of his family, the boy’s father didn’t feel like he could adequately provide for him, so he asked an aunt to take in the boy. She had him for the next five years before she passed away from cancer at the age of fifty-six.”

  “So he went back into the system instead of going to his supposed aunt and uncle,” Jac said. “When?”

  “She passed away July 14 of this year.” Whit handed her the next death certificate.

  “Maybe Rachel never knew the boy existed? How would you explain a nephew, when you’ve never mentioned a brother?” Whit asked.

  Dani wheeled herself closer to the table and laid out another report. One she’d been working on. “She died one week before the first deposit of unexplained cash—fifteen thousand dollars—went into Paul Sturvin’s bank account. I’m still not sure where that money came from.”

  “If he’s anomic, he’s financially motivated. But with that type of cash coming in, what would trigger him killing Rachel?” Max asked.

  “It’s possible that is connected,” Jac said. “But I think it’s something else. What do we know about the types of family annihilators?”

  “Anomic does it for financial reasons, self-righteous blames the wife or mother for ruining the children, disappointed type believe the family has let him down, and there is the paranoid type who believes he’s protecting his family from an outside threat,” Max listed quickly. “And most show signs of being a mixed type. So it could be anything.”

  “None of these seem like a paranoid type. They are far too calculated for that.” Jac wrote the types on the whiteboard quickly, then marked out paranoid. “We’ve heard of known financial struggles for the Sturvins. The principal at Brynlock told me that herself. We need to check into the Sullivans’ financials as well. Dani?”

  “Will do that now, but it’ll take some time. And probably warrants. Those are six-year-old records. Not like we can just bring up his checking account out of the blue.” Dani was already pulling out her iPad. Jac knew she would be as tenacious as a bulldog getting those warrants now that they were on to something.

  “This is all well and good, and the guy has probably done this before. But how is it going to help us find him and those girls now?” Barnes. Jac had completely forgotten the man was even there. “Those little girls have been missing for more than a day and a half. We don’t know how much longer this guy is going to keep himself together and not hurt them. We can’t just sit here.”

  “Simple. We’ve been profiling Paul as this being his first event, but it’s not. If this is Philip, then he’s a serial killer. Which is an entirely different profile than a classic family annihilator,” Max answered. “And instead of looking at where Paul would go, we need to find out where Philip would go. Which means…property records. We need to narrow things down. As soon as we possibly can.”

  “Because…” Jac bit back the bile. “Because if this isn’t the first time he’s killed his family, then there is even less to keep him from killing the girls the first moment they become inconvenient. He’ll kill them and just disappear—possibly to start all over again. It’s just a matter of time. We need to learn everything we can about Philip Sullivan.”

  76

  Todd knew they were getting closer to finding Paul Sturvin/Philip Sullivan. The guy had come across as a pansy to Todd, not a damned serial killer. But now they had him on suspicion of killing at least nine people.

  That just pissed Todd off and made him feel slightly sick to his stomach. What kind of man targeted innocent kids and old people? The youngest girl killed in that fire had been three. Todd had a three-year-old niece of his own. If anyone ever did anything to hurt Esme, Todd would kill them. Without hesitation. He’d face the needle if it meant protecting Esme.

  Todd hated when jackasses like Sturvin targeted kids. Kids were completely innocent. Adults were supposed to protect kids.

  Not hurt them.

  There was a little boy fussing on the couch not fifteen feet from where he stood. Before he realized it, Todd was straightening Jones’s coat over him and patting the tiny back until he settled deeper into his nap, just like he’d done Esme a hundred times by now.

  He was just an innocent kid with a real bastard for a father.

  That the ones who had made Todd that offer were also in bed with Sturvin sickened him. That was just wrong.

  Todd wanted no part of that.

  Combine that with how cold-blooded Lytel was, and Todd suspected he’d done a seriously dumbass thing getting anywhere near this.

  He could think of nothing else for the next two hours after he returned to his loaner desk in the CCU bullpen. Todd was doing his damnedest to find people who had known Philip and Holly Sullivan six years ago. But a part of him was contemplating going to Ed Dennis and just confessing it all. Laying it bare.

  It could end his career. But the only thing he had done yet had been carrying an envelope from a friend in Texas to a guy in St. Louis.

  That it had been the same day Andrew Anderson had been killed could have damned well been coincidence. Something he had only learned since being in St. Louis now.

  As far as he knew, the two things weren’t connected at all.

  But Todd wasn’t stupid. In his gut he knew that they most certainly were connected.

  That envelope could have been Todd paying Paul Sturvin to commit murder. But if he kept his earlier encounter with Sturvin secret during this case, that could look bad. Real bad.

  Todd’s gut clenched as he thought about it.

  There had to be a way to get himself out of this without destroying his entire life in the process.

  Before he could stop himself, he sent a text to the director of PAVAD. As soon as this case was solved and those girls were safe, Todd was going to go to Dennis. Lay it all bare.

  Whatever happened, happened.

  Hell, if he lost his job—he still had his law degree. He’d go back to Texas, find a small town there in need of a good family attorney, and he’d build a practice. Build a real life.

  Maybe find a woman who’d love him like Jaclyn loved Jones. Maybe make a few kids of his own. Finally make his mother happy, with more grandkids to cuddle.

  Have an actual life outside of the FBI. Yeah, that was exactly what he’d do.

  Todd was going to get himself a life.

  77

  The girls were sick. And they weren’t going to just get better because Paul demanded it. Paul fought the irritation.

  Kids got sick all the time, especially kids o
f this age group. Ava was especially bad about remembering to wash her hands after using the restroom. It was just his bad luck that they had caught whatever cold Debbie and Rachel had had. He rested his hand on Ava’s forehead, feeling the fever burning through her tiny body. His gut wrenched in that particular way it did when a parent realized their worst nightmare could happen. That their child could be ill and they just couldn’t make them better by wishing illness away.

  He had always hated it when she was unwell. She…was his star. His baby. She was the only child born to him since the tragic loss of his other three daughters. He loved Bentley more than he could ever say, but because of what he had done to Bentley’s mother and sisters, he had not felt right keeping the son he had loved so much. Bentley had his mother’s eyes; every time he’d looked at the little boy, he would see Holly.

  The one woman who had ever truly loved him for him. For the man he’d been before. She’d stuck by him through everything. She had known him.

  At first, he’d thought she was a poor comparison to Rachel, but now he knew. Rachel had been the poor substitute, because she had never known the real him.

  That mattered. The one that you loved should know you.

  He’d failed her and the children. Failed them all. Until they had almost lost everything they had been working toward. He hadn’t been able to face the disappointment in Holly’s eyes. The idea of someday seeing that same disappointment in Bentley’s eyes had been more than he could bear.

  So he’d done what he had to do. But as the house had burned around them all—he’d fully intended he’d die that day, too—his son had cried out.