Descended (The Red Blindfold Book 3) by Rose Devereux

everything there was to know about her. Which was
absolutely nothing.
    Well, not exactly
nothing. But a far cry from what I was hoping for.
    “You only got one
call about her, yesterday morning?” I asked.
    Miles leaned back in
his worn, creaky desk chair. “Yup. Gas station manager saw her
walking through town half-dressed and called it in, thinking she was
some psycho. By the time we sent somebody out, she was gone.”
    “And no missing
person’s report.”
    “Nope, not from any
state in the country. Even Alaska and Hawaii.” Miles grinned as if
impressed by his own attention to detail.
    “How about Mexico?”
I asked. “Could she have been reported missing there?”
    “Maybe,” he said,
pulling absently at his goatee, “but she’s an American. When an
American vanishes in Mexico it usually grabs somebody’s attention.
We get a few of those a month, usually a drug mule or a suicide.”
    “So you’re saying
nobody’s missing this girl? If you saw her, you’d understand why
I find that hard to believe.”
    Miles shrugged his
wide, rounded shoulders. “Not everybody’s life is neat and tidy,
especially down here. People on the run, nutcases, addicts –”
    I swallowed down a
surge of frustration. It wasn’t Miles’s fault, but he was in the
regrettable position of being the only one in the room with me. “I
told you on the phone, she’s not one of those.”
    He put his worn-soled
boots up on his desk and crossed his ankles. “How do you know? How
do you know this alleged memory loss isn’t a story she invented so
you’d do what you’re doing now? Taking care of her? Leaving her
in John Manson’s nice, big house all by herself?”
    “Instinct,” I said
without a moment’s doubt. “That’s how I know.”
    He gave me the jaded
look of a man who’d been jerked around by a woman more than once.
“Many a guy’s life has gone to shit because of an instinct about
a pretty girl.” He put his hands behind his head and laced his
fingers. “Did you fuck her?”
    I squinted at him.
“Miles.”
    “Oh, great,” he
said, with a sigh. “You fucked her. This situation’s not
complicated enough?”
    I had to smile. “Like
I said, you gotta see her.”
    “Come on, Drex. Think
about it. You know how many drugs cause memory loss?”
    “For Christ’s
sake.”
    He gave me a look of
mock innocence. “Don’t shoot the messenger. I’m just trying to
talk some sense into you, is all.”
    “Sorry,” I said,
leaning against the chipped gray wall. “This whole thing has got me
stumped.”
    “You take a picture
of her?”
    “Not yet. She’d
probably have decked me if I tried. I mean, she did deck me, but that was about something else.”
    “She’s a spunky
one, huh?” Miles said with a suggestive twitch of his eyebrows.
    “To say the least.”
    He took a long swig
from a Styrofoam cup. “Well, I wish I had better news for you. At
least with your dad we know he’s around here somewhere. It’s just
a matter of smoking him out of his hole.”
    “Nobody’s spotted
him recently, though?”
    “Not since you came
to town.”
    I snorted. That was how
it always went. As soon as I showed up, the man turned into a
phantom, capable of vanishing into the desert without leaving so much
as a footprint.
    “Hey, listen,” I
said. “You know anybody around here who drives a green F-250? About
five years old? Dent in the front fender? Big mud flaps?”
    Miles frowned. “Where’d
you see it?”
    “At John’s house,
last night. After midnight. Drove in, hung around ten minutes, drove
away.”
    “Nothing comes to
mind but I’ll keep an eye out. You know how many transients we get
around here. Don’t read too much into it.”
    “Yeah, but I’ve got
an instinct.”
    Miles shook his head.
“Those instincts again. Someday they’ll get you into one hell of
a quandary.”
    “I think they already
have.”
    Leaving his office, I
tried really hard to stay frustrated. Instead of finding Elijah and
getting