Racing Against Time Read Online Free PDF

until the principal’s messenger returned and she in turn told him what he wanted to hear. That Rachel was miraculously there.
    Or was that pulsing sound his own heart, marking time, waiting, hoping?
    Praying.
    But Bristol and Oak was such a huge intersection and Rachel was such a little girl. Would she have run across it, terrorized by the sight of her beloved nanny being hit by a car?
    Or was she still somewhere in the area, hiding? Crying. Waiting for him to come and rescue her. He wanted to be down there, looking for her. His inertia was strangling him.
    Placing a hand over the receiver’s mouthpiece, he turned toward Callie.
    “Was it a drunk driver?” What other explanation could there be for hitting someone? No matter that it was early, maybe someone was still celebrating something from the night before. And death had stolen in at the end of the celebration.
    Her own negative answers wearied her. “We don’t know. We don’t have any real details yet.”
    “What did the witnesses say?”
    “We haven’t found any witnesses. Yet,” she emphasized.
    Of course they hadn’t, he realized. If there were witnesses, someone would have been able to tell them where his daughter was. Which direction she’d gone in. He wasn’t thinking straight.
    Callie saw Brent suddenly stiffen, his eyes intent as a voice came on the line. She didn’t hear the words, only the muffled sound of someone talking.
    She didn’t need to hear the words. She read his expression.
    The receiver slipped from Brent’s fingers to the cradle beneath. Dread washed over him as he looked at Callie.
    “Rachel didn’t come to class today.”

Chapter 3
    C allie’s heart immediately went out to him.
    It wasn’t the first time she’d seen that look of complete devastation; the look that said the person’s insides had just been seized and twisted into a knot. Fifteen years ago she’d seen it on her own father’s face.
    For the sake of his children, Andrew Cavanaugh had kept up a good front the night his wife’s car had been found nearly submerged in the river. So good a front that Callie had thought perhaps her parents’ arguments had taken their toll and he’d ceased to care for her mother.
    But then Callie had come up behind him late that second night, when the hopelessness of the situation had hit him and he’d thought he was alone. And heard him quietly crying.
    It was a sound she would never forget. It marked the first time that her very secure world had been breached. The first time the door to that world had been thrown open, leaving them all vulnerable, and she realized that no one was ever completely safe.
    Nothing had brought it home to her more acutely than when Kyle had been killed right in front of her eyes. Her fiancé hadn’t even known that she had reached him a heartbeat later, that she’d held him to her on the sidewalk in front of the bank and sobbed his name over and over again. He was already dead by then. As dead as the man she had shot an instant before she’d reached Kyle. Shot and killed the bank robber who had first turned his weapon on her—the man who had killed Kyle.
    Callie struggled to get her emotions under control now, struggled to keep a steady voice. Emotions only impeded progress on the cases she worked. She more than anyone else knew that.
    She glanced toward the back of the framed photograph on Brent’s desk. “I’m going to need a recent photograph of your daughter, Judge. The sooner we have police officers looking for her, the sooner we’ll find her.”
    He nodded numbly, feeling like a man who was underwater and drowning. His brain seemed to be processing everything in slow motion. But he knew the credo. “Every minute counts.”
    “Yes, it does.” She took out her pad, ready to jot down any shred of information that could be used. “How much does she weigh?”
    At first his mind was blank, then he remembered. Delia had told him the information after Rachel’s last pediatric checkup.