Cry No More Read online

  Three years ago, at the family Christmas celebration at her parents’ home in Ohio, her brother, Ross, had brusquely told her it was time to get on with her life and stop letting something that had happened seven years before dominate all their family get-togethers. To her horror, her sister, Julia, hadn’t spoken up in her defense, and had refused to meet her gaze. Since then, Milla saw her parents only when her siblings weren’t also visiting. The holidays were lonely, but she didn’t think she’d ever be able to forgive Ross for his callousness.

  Two years ago, she’d heard the name Diaz for the first time. After eight years of nothing, finally, there was a whisper of information that could possibly have a connection to Justin.

  A year ago, David and his wife had a second child, a son. When she heard, Milla cried herself to sleep that night.

  Tonight . . . tonight, she’d seen him, the monster who had destroyed her. She’d been so close, only to come up empty-handed once again.

  But he was still alive. That had been a deeply buried fear, that he would die before she could talk to him. She didn’t care what happened to him, so long as she could find out from him what he’d done with her baby. And now that she knew for certain he was alive, and what area he was in, she would intensify her search. She’d hunt him down like a rabid dog, or die herself in the effort.

  4

  A little after four-thirty, Milla let herself into her condo. She was bone-tired, and so dispirited she wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed and hide under the covers.

  So close.

  She couldn’t get the refrain out of her head. For years she’d kept her hope and determination alive with almost nothing to go on, yet now that she’d actually seen the man and knew he was still alive, knew what area he was in, she felt nothing but despair for having failed to capture him.

  “I won’t let it get me down,” she said aloud, going into the bathroom and stripping off her filthy clothes. “I won’t.” That was how she’d gotten through the hell of the past ten years, by simply refusing to give in. Sometimes she felt like one of the Japanese soldiers after World War II, fighting on long after the war was over because they couldn’t accept the outcome.

  You’ll never find him, people had said. Get on with your life, her own brother had told her. Justin had been so young when he was taken that she had no idea of how he would look, no way of identifying him short of DNA tests, and she couldn’t go around the country demanding that all ten-year-old boys have DNA tests. That was assuming he was even in the United States. He could be anywhere. He could be in Canada, or still in Mexico. One well-meaning but totally demented woman had even told her it might help to have a funeral for him, and lay him to rest.

  The fact that the woman was still alive was a testament to Milla’s self-control.

  Justin was not dead. If she ceased believing that, she wouldn’t be able to function.

  Her bathroom mirror reflected back a face that was drawn and pale with exhaustion, with dark circles under her brown eyes and a grim set to her mouth. Tonight, she looked older than her thirty-three years. The streak in her untidy hair was stark under the fluorescent lights. Within days of the kidnapping, one of the nurses at the clinic had noticed that a strand of her hair was growing in white. The streak always stood out in the photographs that were taken at fund-raisers, a reminder to everyone that she knew all too well the agony parents went through when their child was lost. The rest of her hair had remained the same, light brown, curly, but the streak was what drew the gaze.

  There was another fund-raiser tomorrow night, she thought; her tired brain caught itself. No, tonight. Just because she hadn’t been to bed yet didn’t mean another day hadn’t arrived.

  But after she’d showered and pulled on a nightgown, then fallen into bed, sleep wouldn’t come. Tonight she hadn’t just come close to the man who’d stolen Justin, she had come close to getting both herself and Brian killed. If she had charged those four men, pistol in hand, they would have shot her and, inevitably, Brian, who would have charged to her aid. In retrospect, her lack of control horrified her. Brian had been right to be so upset with her. The Finders weren’t vigilantes; they weren’t trained to go into gunfights. The core group all had some firearms training, just so they would know how to protect themselves if necessary, but that was all. Brian, with his military background, was the most qualified of them all when it came to weapons.

  But because it involved Justin, she had lost all reason, all sense of caution. She would have to do better than that, or she’d never find him, because she would be dead.

  She finally dozed, and she dreamed of Justin. It was a recurring dream, one that she’d often had in the first few years after he was stolen, but now her subconscious seldom produced it. As dreams went it was but a small snapshot, and heartbreakingly realistic. She was rocking him while he nursed, and in the dream she felt the small weight of him in her arms, the warmth of his little body against hers. She smelled the sweet baby smell, touched his blond hair and felt the softness, stroked her finger over his cheek and reveled in the velvety texture of his skin. She felt the release of her milk, the tug of his rosebud mouth on her nipple . . . and she was at peace.

  She woke crying, as she always did. In the perverse way the body had when it was really tired, she wasn’t able to go back to sleep. After trying for half an hour to put the dream out of her mind, she gave in, got up, and put on some coffee; then, while it was brewing, she stripped off her nightgown and did some stretching and yoga, which was her favorite form of exercise.

  Because she never knew what a case would demand of her, whether it was running down a city street or climbing rocks, she worked hard at staying in good physical condition, but none of it came easily or naturally to her. She intensely disliked sweating, almost as much as she disliked bugs and getting dirty. She did it, though, because she had to, just as she had learned how to handle firearms even though she hated the noise, the smoke, the smell, everything about them. She was at best mediocre in her marksmanship, but she had kept practicing until she had achieved at least that. To track the men who had stolen Justin, she had learned to deal with many things that she disliked, had turned herself into someone else. The woman she’d been before couldn’t have dealt with these things, so Milla had forced herself to change.

  No, it was those bastards who had changed her. She had been changed the instant Justin was wrenched from her. From the moment she’d regained consciousness in that little clinic, too weak to move, racked with pain, she had been a different woman, focused on only one thing: finding her child.

  That was why David had divorced her.

  Divorced her, yes, but he hadn’t walked away from her. He’d insisted on buying this condo for her in El Paso’s Westside, and he paid her forty thousand dollars a year in alimony. Both gestures enabled her to concentrate full-time on Finders rather than having to find a conventional job that would, of necessity, have severely curtailed her ability to track down any and all leads that came her way.

  If she had let him, David would have beggared himself buying a lavish mansion for her and giving her a ridiculous amount of money each year. This condo was strictly middle-class, about two thousand square feet, with two bedrooms and two baths upstairs, and a half bath downstairs. It was twenty years old, cozy without being lavish. The forty thousand dollars was about fifteen thousand dollars a year more than she was comfortable with, but she understood it was David’s way of helping her in the search. He couldn’t do what she did, so he did what he could, and considering he had another family now, that was more than generous.

  Her exercises done, she poured a cup of coffee and took it upstairs with her to dress. No jeans and boots were necessary today, thank goodness; she could dress in a skirt and sandals, which were much cooler. Because small luxuries helped get her through the hard times, she always took advantage of nontravel days by taking the time to smooth her skin with moisturizers, take extra care with her hair and makeup, wear perfume; just little things, things