He took Angela in his arms and gave her a long, deep kiss.
“Okay,” she said. “I get it. You’re not gay.”
They shared a chuckle.
“So up for a little . . . mingling?” he asked.
“I thought you’d never ask.”
Smiling, she took him by the hand and led him toward the Nook.
Safe and Sound
JEFF ABBOTT
Jeff Abbott was once involved in a taxicab race with Charlaine Harris in North Carolina (he did not win). He is the internationally bestselling author of twelve suspense novels, including Trust Me, Panic, Fear, and Collision . He is published in more than twenty languages. He is a three-time Edgar® Award nominee, a two-time Anthony Award nominee, a Thriller Award and Barry Award nominee, and a past winner of the Agatha and Macavity awards. He lives in Austin with his family. You can read more about Jeff and his work at www.jeffabbott.com.
IF Jason Kirk was still alive on the tiny island of Sint Pieter, that happy news would boost Nora Dare’s ratings to a level that made media presidents tremble, rewrote the rules of news coverage, and produced new business case studies at journalism school.
Nora Dare sat at her Constant News Channel (CNC) desk, lacquered talons skimming the notes on the most recent police report. Her camera-men readied themselves in the gleaming studio, the sound checks ringing in her ears. She put her carefully mascaraed gaze on the computer screen buried in her desk, scanning for any breaking updates. The interview had to be played carefully—to make the story last longer, without seeming exploitative of a missing young man’s tragedy. But, Nora knew, no one walked that line better than she did.
Of course during those treasured moments when she interviewed Jason’s family—which was roughly every other night on her cable- news show, Dare to Fight Back—she pleaded for Jason’s safe return, and she meant every word. Because if the young man turned up safe and sound, well, then, that was ratings gold. Not gold: better, platinum. Maybe even uranium. For three months, college student Jason Kirk’s disappearance while on vacation with his family had made for a deliciously high market share.
Stories as long-legged as Jason Kirk’s did not happen every day. It had all the elements Nora considered key to a ratings grabber: a highly attractive, sympathetic victim with an easy-to-remember name; a photogenic mourning family stunned by tragedy’s random sideswipe; an exotic locale; incompetent local police; a mysterious, exotic woman who had last been seen with the missing young man.
The theories had come up, and Nora had dissected them with the care of a coroner. Jason had been kidnapped (an early favorite and still the feeling of the Kirk family); Jason had been sold into slavery (popular for two weeks); Jason had been murdered by the mysterious woman, robbed, his body dumped into the ocean (more likely); Jason had drowned, drunk, in a swim off a Sint Pieter beach and the woman had simply fled the scene (the preferred theory of the local police); or Jason had committed suicide (Nora quickly slaughtered that theory; it would savage her ratings).
But now, everything had changed, and the story had fresh life. A witness from a small town on the far north tip of the island claimed that a young man fitting Jason’s description had been spotted near her house. The eyewitness was a young woman who could have been a little more photogenic (didn’t they, Nora wondered, have dentists in Sint Pieter?) but was earnest and heartfelt in her sureness that she’d seen Jason.
The makeup director tended to Nora’s eyebrows with the gentlest of touches while Nora’s director, Molly, slipped an update onto Nora’s interview pages.
“Um, Nora, I’m not really comfortable with your headline theme tonight.”
“ ‘Hope or Hoax’ is perfectly accurate.” Nora didn’t flinch as a stray hair was plucked away from her near-immaculate brow. It was a point of honor for Nora that she never flinched. She made other people flinch. It had been a rocky road on the climb to ratings glory and the multimilliondollar book deals. There’d been that suspect in one case who’d killed himself after Nora grilled him (could his guilt then be clearer? Nora had saved the taxpayers the cost of a trial, in her mind), and the other one where the man she’d proclaimed guilty for five months for killing his wife had, well, been found innocent via DNA evidence. Nora still had her doubts, as did any right-minded viewer. “ ‘Hope or Hoax’ is