Carter by Kathi S. Barton Page A

use to us. His apartment? Have you searched it too?” Victor said that he had. “Well fuck. This is a mess and I don’t like it one bit; you know that, don’t you? She should have been here months ago, if not years. I want her found. Oh, and one more thing. I want you to find out why, after all this time, she is living with a family out in the open. She’s been in hiding for years with the boy, and I want to know why now and why these morons. Her job; have you gotten anything about that? Why she transferred in?”
    “Just that she was ready for a change is all anyone seems to know. There were rumors that she was going to be running the place here about, but there’s nothing I can nail down on that right now. And you were right about the kid. No one knows she has one. Same as her other precinct. How the hell did she hide a kid for all this time?” Victor handed him more papers. “She took some vacation once in all the time she worked for the other place. She had five weeks and took them all at once. I’m assuming that’s when she had the boy. If so, that makes him eleven years old.”
    Daniel had no idea if that was true or not, but it was something more than he had before. And it pissed him off that she was that good at keeping him out of the loop. Better than anyone he had working for him, including Victor. When he got her—and Daniel had no thoughts that he wouldn’t—she was going to answer a great deal of things for him. But he wanted that boy now.
    After Victor left, he reached into his bottom drawer and pulled out the thick envelope that only he had seen. There were tapes in there as well, digital recordings that he’d changed from VCR tapes to DVD’s all on his own. But the folder was what he looked at now. It was Dane’s birth certificate, her health records, as well as her school and college transcripts. There was nothing there that gave him a clue as to why she could do the things that she could.
    He’d known that she was different from nearly the beginning. The first time he’d noticed it was when she’d been five months old. Daniel had been entering the nursery, where she’d been fussing, to tell the nanny to shut her up. The bottle going across the room to her had startled him badly. He watched her as she drank it down, then put it back on the dresser across the room. He’d set up a camera in her room to watch her do that every day.
    Over the next five years he’d recorded her doing all kinds of extraordinary things. Not just with the bottles, but books and other things she could move. And her intelligence level was off the charts. Sending her to college, he realized now, was the greatest mistake he’d ever made. One that he regretted almost as soon as she was there. But it was too late then.
    “Bitch.”
    She’d learned a few things on her first few days that had her hiding from him. Mostly about him and his need to control her. And she’d also found that he’d been using her. Completely against her will, of course. He’d made millions off just her knowledge, and her abilities had netted him even more; horses, people, and anything or anyone else that she could read. It was her first call home, three days after she got away, that she told him she was done with him.
    There were no more board meetings where she controlled the men who worked for him. The races that he took her to, gave her part of the winnings of, were also done. He’d made billions off her for only pennies on the dollar. She’d taken that with her as well. He’d unknowingly funded her escape from him. She no longer was there to tell him when a deal was going badly, a man was cheating him, or someone was going to try and buy him out. Daniel had lost his biggest money maker because he’d made a promise to her one night when she’d made him over two billion dollars on a deal. Daniel wondered if she’d known then what he’d been doing with her.
    The few times he’d gone there to bring her back, something always