Mitch picked up the phone and dialed in his access code. He didn’t close his door, he never did, so when he fished out the baseball he kept in the top drawer of his desk and started tossing it in the air, the rhythmic swoosh and tap didn’t even elicit a response from Christy at her desk.
His eyes slid shut as he listened to his voice mail and continued tossing the ball. It was mostly info about the site, a few messages from the lab about what they’d found earlier that morning.
The phone beeped and moved to the next message. When the husky female voice chimed through the line, he sat straight up in his chair.
The baseball he’d just tossed came down with a crack and hit him in the head. “Dammit,” he muttered, rubbing his skull. But the pain quickly dissipated as his mind zeroed in on the voice. He knew that voice.
It was Annie’s voice.
And it was ticked, which was why he was sure it was hers. He’d heard the clip in that voice thousands of time, the lithe way she said his name, the way her condescending tone drawled out the word jackass. The blood drained from his face as he scrambled for his phone so he could listen again.
No, it couldn’t be real. He was imagining things. Conjuring. What the hell had his mother called it when he was a kid? Spacing out in the middle of the flippin’ day.
His pulse picked up speed as he hit replay. The message was new. It was Annie’s voice, and holy hell, it was from today. He listened again, this time trying to focus on the words, not so much the voice. She’d said her name was Kate Alexander.
Kate Alexander.
The nut-job from the publishing house? That didn’t make sense. He knew that voice almost as well as he knew his own.
Scenarios, possibilities, questions swirled in his mind. No way. It couldn’t be…
And yet… His heart thumped hard. Her body had never been found. She’d been sitting over the wing. The engine had exploded. No one around her had ever been recovered. They’d all hoped beyond hope that she hadn’t actually been on the plane, that she’d changed her mind at the last minute after Ryan had dropped her at the airport. But that hope had died when Ryan had identified her belongings after the crash.
But what if she’d never gotten on that plane? Was it was possible she could still be alive? The idea was crazy. Ludicrous. Virtually impossible. And still…the only thing he could think about now.
He had to know for sure. He dialed her number but it went straight to voice mail. Slamming the phone down, he grabbed his coat and ran for the door.
Christy stood when he tore past her toward the elevator. “Mitch, what—?”
He barely heard her. He was already in the stairwell. His watch said four-thirty by the time he made it out of the building. There was no way he’d get all the way across town before five. He wove right and left through traffic, yelled at an old woman crossing the street much too slowly, and finally found a parking place in front of McKellen Publishing just before five.
Screw the meter. He didn’t even bother to see if he’d parked in a handicapped spot. He could only think about one thing. That goddamn familiar, irritating as hell, sweet voice.
He raced through the building, swore at the elevator when it didn’t seem to move, then headed for the stairs. By the time he got to the fourteenth floor he was panting, but it didn’t slow him down. He headed straight for Kate Alexander’s office.
The secretary with the tattoos and nose ring he’d run into earlier stood when she saw him, her brows drawing together in an obvious sign of worry. “Mr. Mathews, you can’t go in there!”
He swept past her, shoved the door open with his shoulder. The room was empty.
“Where is she?” He glanced around the cramped office that was the size of his bathroom.
“Ms. Alexander’s not here. She’s out for the afternoon. I can make you an appointment if you’d like.”
He barely heard her. He scanned the room, for what though, he didn’t know. Stacks of journals were shoved up against the wall. A bookshelf sat to his right, loaded with geology books and minerals. Her desk was a sea of papers, and the small window that looked out over the city cast late-afternoon light over the