the stress slowly melt away the farther she got from the shore. The search for her daughter, Mallory, had been fruitless so far—she could hardly believe it had been almost five years. All traces of her daughter being a part of a child abduction ring had amounted to nothing. She had come to Mexico to follow a new lead on the case, but after more than two weeks, she had little to show for it. Rachel dipped her paddle into the water, adjusted her stance on the board, and expertly turned the board around to head back. Glancing at the shore of Cozumel, she realized she had gone out farther than she’d intended to. When Rachel was on her paddleboard, time always seemed to slip away. She was a little more than a mile offshore, and it would take a good fifteen minutes or so to paddle back.
Mallory, her only child, had been just three years old when she’d mysteriously disappeared. Rachel remembered the day clearly, her pain and frustration never fading, always fresh in her mind. That morning had been hectic. She had been married to Rick at the time of her daughter’s disappearance, and they’d lived in Bal Harbour, an exclusive gated neighborhood near Miami. Rick had just left for a business trip to Orlando to oversee the opening of his new luxury-car dealership. Mallory’s nanny had called in sick, leaving Rachel with no choice but to work from home that day. Rachel, who was a top real estate broker, had sat on her front porch crunching numbers, while Mallory had played on the lawn with her dolls. Rachel was working contentedly amid the familiar sounds of suburbia—dogs barking, lawn mowers roaring to life, the occasional fluttering of a passing hummingbird—when a ringing telephone had taken her away from her daughter for about two minutes. In that time frame, Mallory had disappeared.
Rachel still remembered clearly how that day had unfolded: how law enforcement questioned her for hours until Rick made it back home, how helpless she felt as she waited by the phone for the detective to call her with updates. She had walked around the subdivision calling Mallory’s name until her throat was hoarse, then driven all over Bal Harbour, stopping at all the playgrounds and studying the faces of all the children.
Eventually, Rachel’s obsession with tracking every possible lead to find her daughter caused her relationship with Rick to fall apart. He failed to understand the depths of her grief. They decided to separate, and ultimately divorced.
Several months after Mallory’s disappearance, Rachel had seen on the local news that another toddler had gone missing in the Miami area. She’d reached out to the boy’s mother, Janine Jensen, and they’d formed a tight bond. Using nothing but her instinct, Rachel had helped Janine rescue her son, Jack, from Janine’s estranged husband. Then they’d decided to team up and form a search-and-rescue operation for missing persons; thus, Florida Omni Search was born. Since the company’s inception, they’d helped locate over a hundred missing people. Red Cooper, who was the lead detective on Mallory’s case, kept in touch with Rachel and decided to join the Florida Omni Search team after he retired from the police force.
Ironically, it was Janine’s former husband, Scott Jensen, or Scotty, as he was called by family and friends, whom Rachel had come to Mexico to find. She’d received a tip while she was in Florida wrapping up another missing-persons case that Scotty had been linked to a child abduction ring that was busted in Cozumel. After the FBI seized computers belonging to members of the ring in a warrant search, they’d combed through all the files—and found a picture of Mallory along with several other photos of young children. Rachel had demanded to see the photo and had started to sob at the image of her round-faced toddler with large green eyes and red hair in pigtails. All the data they’d found pointed to the fact that the children in the images had been kidnapped and put up for illegal adoption.
When Rachel arrived in Cozumel, she met with the FBI agent in charge, Hammond Lewis. He’d told her how everything transpired. It all started when a family on vacation in Cozumel reported that their toddler girl was missing. When the FBI was called in to investigate, fingers started pointing toward a housekeeper and her son who worked at the hotel where the girl’s family had been staying. After obtaining a search warrant, the FBI