Full Tilt. Rick Mofina

the technician said while clearing the small object, “we can run this through missing persons databases and ViCAP.”

      Rising from the grave of sooty earth and ash was a fine chain and a stylized charm of a guardian angel.

5

      New York City

      Kate Page, a reporter with Newslead, the global news service, blinked back tears as she consoled the anguished father, who she’d reached on his phone in Oregon.

      The man on the line was Sam Rutlidge. His eleven-year-old son, Jordan, had vanished six years ago while walking to the corner store, two blocks from his home in Eugene, Oregon. Kate was writing a feature on missing persons across the country, on the toll cold cases exact on the families.

      “I accept that he’s gone,” Sam said, “and before cancer took my wife, she told me she’d accepted it, too, that she’d see our boy in heaven. But I need to know what happened to him. Not knowing hurts every day, like an open wound that won’t heal, you know?”

      Kate knew.

      She underlined his words in her notebook, the quotes she’d use in her story. Her heart ached for Sam, a haunted trucker. She asked him a few more questions before thanking him for the interview.

      After hanging up, Kate cupped her face in her hands and let out a long breath. Then she walked from her desk across the newsroom to the floor-to-ceiling windows where she looked at the skyline of midtown Manhattan.

       It never gets any easier.

      A part of her died each time she talked to a grieving mom or dad. It always resurrected her own pain. When Kate was seven years old her mother and father had died in a hotel fire. After the tragedy, Kate and her little sister, Vanessa, lived with relatives, then in foster homes. Two years after their parents’ deaths, Kate and Vanessa’s foster parents took them on a vacation. They were driving in the Canadian Rockies when their car flipped over and crashed into a river.

      The images—hell, that moment in her life—were fused into her DNA.

       The car sinking...everything moving in slow motion...the windows breaking open...the freezing water...grabbing Vanessa’s hand...pulling her out...nearing the surface...the icy current numbing her...her fingers loosening...Vanessa slipping away...disappearing... Why couldn’t I hold you? I’m so sorry, so sorry.

      Kate was the only one who’d survived.

      Her sister’s body had never been found. Searchers reasoned that it got wedged in the rocks downriver. Still, in her heart, Kate never gave up believing that Vanessa had somehow gotten out of the river.

      Over the years, Kate had age-progressed photos of Vanessa made and submitted them with details to missing persons groups. She drew on her contacts with them, with police and the press, and she looked into open cases. But any leads always dead-ended.

      It had become her private obsession.

       Why was I the only one of my family to survive?

      Wherever Kate went, she secretly looked into the faces of strangers who might now resemble her sister. For twenty years, Kate’s life had been a search for forgiveness.

       I know it’s irrational, I know it’s crazy and I should just let it go.

      But she couldn’t. It’s the reason she’d become a reporter.

      “Kate, are we going to see your feature today?”

      She turned to see Reeka Beck, Newslead’s deputy features editor, and her immediate boss, standing behind her.

      Reeka was twenty-six years old, razor-sharp with degrees from Harvard and Yale. A rising star, she’d worked in Newslead’s Boston bureau and was part of the team whose collective work was a finalist for a Pulitzer.

      Her thumbs blurred as she finished typing a text message on her phone, then she stared at Kate. Reeka’s cover-girl face was cool and businesslike while she waited for Kate to answer.

      “Yes. It’ll be done today.”

      “It’s not on the budget list.”

      “It is. I put it on yesterday.”

      “Has it got a news angle?”

      “It’s a feature. We talked about this with—”

      “I know we talked about it, but we’d get better pickup with a news peg.”

      “I’m adding the latest justice figures on unsolv—”

      “Maybe you could find a case police are close to solving.”

      “I know how to write news—”

      “Did you remember to arrange art for your story?”

      Kate let the tense silence that passed between them scream her offense at Reeka’s condescending tone. She was forever curt, blunt and just plain rude, cutting reporters off when they answered her or dismissing their questions. Every interaction with her bordered on a confrontation, not because Reeka was ambitious and convinced she had superior news skills but rather, as the night editors held, because one of Newslead’s executives was her uncle and she could get away with it. Every newsroom Kate had ever worked in had at least one insufferable editor.

      “Yes, Reeka, there’s art. The story’s on the budget. I’ll file it today, as noted in the budget, and I’ll insert the new justice stats.”

      “Thank you.” Reeka pivoted while texting and left with Kate’s eyes drilling into the back of her head.

      Be careful with her. This is not the time to make enemies. Kate walked back to her desk amid the newsroom’s cluttered low-walled cubicles. A number of those desks were empty, grim reminders that staff had been cut in recent years as the news industry continued bleeding revenues.

      It was rumored Newslead would introduce a process to measure how many stories reporters produced and subscriber pickup rates of their work, against that of competitors like the AP, Reuters or Bloomberg.

      Bring it on. Kate could go toe-to-toe with anyone.

      She had proved that a year ago in a brutal job competition at Newslead’s Dallas bureau where she broke a story about a baby missing during a killer tornado. It’s why Chuck Laneer, a senior editor in Dallas, later offered her a job at Newslead’s world headquarters after he was transferred here to Manhattan.

      Since then, Kate had led Newslead’s reporting, often beating the competition on coverage of serial killings, mall shootings, corruption, kidnappings, every kind of chaos that unfolded across the country or around the world.

      Reporting was in Kate’s blood.

      And for as long as she remembered she’d always battled the odds.

      Her life had been a continual struggle for survival. She’d bounced through foster homes, spent her teen years on the street, taking any job she could get to put herself through college. She’d worked in newsrooms across the country and had a baby by a man who’d lied to her and written her off. Now here she was: a single mother who’d just turned thirty, and a national correspondent at one of the world’s largest news organizations.

      Settling back into her desk, Kate’s heart warmed as she looked at Grace, her seven-year-old daughter, smiling from the framed photograph next to her monitor.

      We’ve come a long way, baby. We’re survivors.

      Less than an hour later, she finished her feature and sent it to the desk.

      As she collected her things to leave, her phone rang.

      “Newslead, Kate Page.”

      “Kate, this is Anne Kelly, with the New York office of the Children’s Searchlight Network.