Read on to catch an exclusive sneak peek at
Goodbye Again
the highly anticipated second novel in the Mercy Street Foundation series from New York Times bestselling author Mariah Stewart!
Coming in March 2009 from Ballantine Books
Available wherever books are sold.
In southern California, a woman leaned closer to her television and listened with great interest to the midday press conference she’d found by accident while she was channel surfing, wasting time until she had to pick up her daughter at summer camp. Intrigued, she went to the Mercy Street Foundation website and read about Robert Magellan’s latest brainstorm. Using Magellan Express, the Internet search engine he’d developed and later sold for a king’s ransom, she typed in Conroy, PA, and found it to be a small, working-class city surrounded by farms and gently rolling hills. She studied the photographs, and liked what she saw. Returning to the website for the Foundation, she filled out the online application for employment.
Fifteen minutes later, she was still deliberating whether to submit the app, when the sound of a slamming car door drew her attention to the street outside. In this mostly blue collar neighborhood, there was little traffic during the afternoon hours. She rose and peered through the front window, and her blood froze in her veins. A late-model car was parked directly across from her house, and two men were standing on her front lawn. Instinctively, she knew what they were there for, even if she did not know their names.
Turning back to the laptop, she hit SEND.
Almost without thinking, she ran up the steps and into her daughter’s room, where she grabbed a few things she knew they could not leave behind, then slipped back downstairs. The men were still standing on the front lawn, debating, perhaps, the likelihood of finding her home in the middle of the day. She picked up her laptop from the sofa and hurried into the kitchen. Grabbing her handbag from the counter, she checked for her Glock, stuffed her daughter’s things in with it, opened a drawer and searched quickly for her checkbook, then quietly passed through the back door into the yard.
She’d been warned that this day was coming. She just hadn’t expected it to be so soon.
Her heart pounding, she ran the length of the backyard to the alley behind her house where she’d parked her car. Driving carefully to make certain she was not being followed, she took a roundabout way to her daughter’s day camp. She parked on a side street, out of view of the front of the building, took a deep calming breath, and entered through a side door, just in case.
Once inside, she waved to the head counselor, indicating that she’d arrived to pick up her daughter.
“Hey, you’re early today,” the counselor said.
“Just a little.” She searched the group for her child.
“Chloe, your mommy’s here,” the counselor called into the next room.
A tiny girl with dark curls and yellow paint on her clothes skipped through the doorway.
“Can I go home with Natalie today?” The little girl flung herself onto her mother’s legs and held on. “Please?”
“Not today, sweetie,” her mother replied softly. “Go get your things and tell Natalie maybe another day.”
“Tomorrow?”
“We’ll see.”
“‘We’ll see’ means no.” Chloe pouted.
“It means, we’ll see what tomorrow brings. And we will. So go get your things now and—”
“I have my things. There, by the door.” The child pointed to the pile of backpacks.
“Say good-bye to your counselor, then, and let’s go.”
“Bye, Miss Maria. Bye, Natalie. Bye, Kelly.” The little girl’s voice trailed off as she picked up her belongings. Reaching up to hold her mother’s hand, she babbled brightly all the way to the car.
“Are we going home?” Chloe asked as she strapped herself into her seat.
“We’re going to Aunt Nikki’s for a while.”
“Are we eating dinner there?”
“We might even stay all night.”
“Yay! I get to play with Mr. Mustache.” Chloe’s small feet kicked the seat gleefully. “He’s my favorite cat in the whole entire world.”
“He’s a pretty special cat, all right,” her mother agreed.
“Mommy, are you having a bad day?”
“Why? Do I look like I’m having a bad day?”
“You’re not smiling.”
She forced the biggest smile she could muster.
“Better?” she asked.
“Better,” Chloe agreed.
She took the long way to her friend Nicole’s house, and parked two blocks away. Knowing that cell phones can be tracked, she opened the glove box and set it inside. She gathered up the things she’d brought with her, and locked the door. She’d have to remember to ask Nikki to have the car towed to the police impound lot for safekeeping.
“Why do we have to walk so far?” Chloe grumbled as she trudged along, lugging her backpack.
“Because it’s a good day for a walk, and we want to see what we can see.”
“It’s cold,” Chloe complained.
“Then we’ll cross and walk on the sunny side of the street.” She remembered there used to be a song about that, but she couldn’t remember the words. Someone used to sing it to her, long ago, but she wasn’t sure who. “But we’re almost there already. See? Just three more houses and we’re there.”
They crossed the street and walked up the drive way to the backyard.
“Her car’s not here. She isn’t home.” Chloe looked as if she were about to cry.
“She’ll be here soon.”
“What if she isn’t? We’ll have to walk all the way back to the car…” Chloe’s eyes widened dramatically at the thought.
“She said she’d be home by…oh, there she is, see? I told you.”
The blue and white Crown Victoria pulled slowly into the driveway, parked, and a tall woman in her early forties got out. If she was surprised to see she had visitors, Chief Nicole Jenkins of the Silver Hills, California, police department didn’t show it.
“Hey, cuteness,” she called to Chloe. “What’s happening?”
“I’m happening,” Chloe grinned.
“You bet your buttons you are.” She kissed the top of the child’s head, looking over it as if trying to read her friend’s expression. “Come on inside. Let’s see what old Mr. Mustache is up to. I’ll bet he’s sleeping like a big old slug.”
“Mommy said we might eat dinner here and maybe sleep here, too.” Chloe dropped her backpack inside the door and took off in search of the cat.
“Mi casa es su casa,” her Aunt Nikki told her.
“What?” Chloe turned to ask.
“It means my house is your house. It means you are welcome to stay as long as you’d like.”
“Yay.” Chloe grinned. “Does that mean your cat is my cat, too?”
No words had yet been exchanged between the two women. It wasn’t until after Chloe was sleeping snugly in the guest bedroom, the old gray tom curled up contentedly beside her, that Nikki handed her old friend a glass of wine and said, “Okay, spill.”
“I brought in a hooker this morning for solicitation.”
“And that would be news because…?”
“She offered to trade some information with me in exchange for not booking her.”
“By the look on your face, I’d say she had something big to trade.” Nikki tucked her legs under her on the sofa.
“She told me that Anthony Navarro knows that the child I adopted four years ago is his daughter, and he’s coming after her.” She nodded slowly. “I’d say that was big.”
“You think she knows what she’s talking about?”
“You think there’s any chance she could have made that up and just coincidentally got the facts right?”
“Okay, so we pick him up…”
“First, you have to find him. Nik, you’ve been after him for years, and you haven’t come close.”
“So we stake out your house and we wait for him to show. In the meantime, you and Chloe stay here.”
“He won’t be coming himself. He won’t have to. He’s offered twenty-five thousand dollars to the person who brings him his daughter.”
Nikki whistled. “Jesus. He’s serious.”
“As a heart attack.”
“So we pick up whoever he sends—”
“They’ll just keep on coming, Nikki. He wants his daughter.”
“Why?”
“The word on the street is, two years ago he had measles. It left him sterile. No more baby Navarros.”
“So he wants the one he had with…wait a minute. How did he find out who adopted her? Tameka died while she was in prison. The court terminated his rights because he never showed up for any of the hearings. How all of a sudden does he know who has his kid?”
“He bribed someone at children’s services. This gal this morning, she knew the whole story, Nik. She even knew the name of Chloe’s birth mother.”
“Well, shit.” Nikki stood and began to pace. After a moment, she said, “Okay, we do this. We stake out your house—”
“You’ll have to get in line. It’s already being staked out.”
“You know this for certain?”
“I saw them. Two of them, parked right across the street from my house. Bold little bastards, they thought nothing of walking right up onto my lawn.”
“When was this?”
“They were there when I left to pick up Chloe. Which is why I left when I did, and why I came here instead of going home.”
“You think Navarro sent them?”
“I’d bet my life on it. I won’t, however, bet Chloe’s.”
Nikki reached for the radio she had strapped onto her waistband, but her friend stopped her.
“Uh-uh. It won’t do any good, Nik. It won’t stop until he gets her. He’ll get her at her school or he’ll have someone come into the house in the middle of the night, but he will get her.” She shook her head. “As long as we’re here, and he knows we’re here, it won’t stop. There aren’t enough police in this part of the state to take on his whole family, and he won’t care how many of us or how many of them die.”
“So we call in the FBI.”
“Nikki, the FBI has been after him for longer than you have.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Let me tell you what I saw on TV this afternoon.” She related what she’d heard and what she’d learned from the Mercy Street Foundation website.
“You’re thinking about applying?”
“I already did, online.”
“You’re just going to pack up and move east?”
“No time to pack.” She shook her head. “I don’t dare go back to the house, Nik. I have to protect my daughter. No way can I let that animal or any of his relatives get within a country mile of her.”
“Give me a few days to see what we can do.”
“There’s nothing you can do. No one’s gotten close to him, ever. No one knows where he is. He has a huge network, his brothers, his cousins, his uncles. We’re talking about one of the biggest drug families in southern California.”
“Sooner or later—”
“Later will be too late for my daughter. I can’t give her up to the kind of life she’d have, growing up as the daughter of a major drug dealer.”
“So you move across the country, you think he won’t be able to find you?”
“He won’t be looking for Emme Caldwell.”
“You’d change your name?”
“My name?” she snorted. “What’s my name, Nik? I don’t even know what my real name is.”
Nikki held her head in her hands. “You know that Emme Caldwell died two years ago.”
“Robert Magellan won’t know that.”
“He will when he checks her references.”
“That would be you.”
Nikki fell silent.
“I know it’s a lot to ask. If you’re not comfortable with it, God knows, I’ll understand. I can reapply, with a different name.”
“You already applied as Emme?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that pretty much seals the deal.”
“I know. I should have thought this through a little more. It’s just that, after hearing all this from that hooker this morning, then going off my shift and seeing this press conference on TV, then those two goons were outside my house…” She blew out a long stream of air. “It just seemed like a sign, like someone was telling me something. Anyway, it’s going to be okay, Nik. I’ll come up with something else.”
“It’s not okay,” Nikki told her. “You’re the best friend I ever had. You saved my life twice in the past five years. I can save yours this once. Besides, if anything happened to you or to that precious girl…”
A chill ran through Nikki, and she visibly shivered. They both knew she’d seen firsthand what happened to those who crossed the Navarro family in the past.
“Just tell me what you want me to do.”