Cold Case Kidnapping
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Kimberly Van Meter
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Chapter 1
The hallway at the Bureau of Indian Affairs office was filled with the faint hum of fluorescent lights overhead as agent Dakota Foster mentally steeled herself for the meeting she’d been dreading since her superior, Isaac Berrigan, dropped the file on her desk last week for review.
Unlike her first case, which involved a drunken cheater who got whacked by his wife one night when she’d had enough of his bullshit, this case had a real chance to make a difference—and she was hungry for a personal victory.
She didn’t even mind that it was a co-op with the FBI, until she read who the FBI agent assigned to the case was and her heart sank like it was tied to a bucket of cement and tossed into Flathead Lake.
Of all the FBI agents who could’ve been assigned, why Ellis Vaughn? The last time she saw that train wreck was two years ago and the memory still had the power to make her wince.
Sometimes, late at night, when her brain refused to shut down, her thoughts wandered into forbidden territory—opening that tightly sealed locked box where she’d stuffed memories of Ellis—and it still hurt when she thought about what could’ve been.
But doing so felt like weakness and she couldn’t abide such a slip in her self-control.
Her drive had pushed her to become the first in her family to graduate from college—a hard-won accomplishment for an Indigenous woman who grew up on a Montana reservation—which then propelled her into the world of law enforcement, before transitioning to the BIA. There, she quickly gained a reputation for her unwavering commitment to chasing justice for the Indigenous people even when it meant going head-to-head against bureaucratic red tape and relentless opposition. She was ambitious and efficient, and she prided herself on being organized and no-nonsense.
Which left little room for self-indulgent pity parties.
Besides, Ellis was her polar opposite and a relationship with someone she had little in common with was an exercise in futility. Something she should’ve known better years ago.
It wasn’t that Ellis was lazy or lacked ambition, but he operated in a state of chaos that made her head spin and Ellis never found a rule he didn’t mind bending or breaking.
But some rules had serious consequences for breaking—a tough lesson he learned the hard way.
Whatever, the past is the past, she told herself, drawing a deep breath before pushing the door open to the debrief room. She was early but her colleague Shilah Parker was already there. She looked up as Dakota entered. “I just finished going over the file... The original vic, Nayeli Swiftwater, was from the Flathead Reservation. That’s your neck of the woods, right?” she recalled.
Dakota nodded and slid into the seat beside her. She and Shilah had worked the drunk case—and in doing so, had become tight friends. She recalled the Swiftwater case with a subtle wince. “Yeah, I remember when that hit the news. I was sixteen at the time, but it’d only been three years since my older sister, Mikaya, was killed so I was following the case as much as a kid could.”
“Ouch, that had to have been rough,” Shilah commiserated. “That would’ve hit too close to home for me.”
Dakota remembered being hyperfocused on Nayeli’s case for that very reason. “Each time the case came up in the news, it was like swallowing razor blades, but I couldn’t stop watching or reading anything that popped up. I think I was clinging to the hope that if Nayeli’s case got solved, maybe that would mean there was hope for Mikaya’s case. Naive of me, I know, but I couldn’t help myself. I needed something to make the pain manageable.”
“The pain of hope,” Shilah murmured, understanding, returning to the case. “Well, it’s been a long time coming but I’m happy to see a cold case like this getting some attention. Maybe with some luck, eventually there will be answers for Mikaya’s case, too.”
Dakota had long since abandoned hope for answers in her sister’s case but the resurgence of Nayeli’s case renewed her sense of purpose—the reason why her job was so important—even if the memory dredged up the inevitable pain of losing her sister.
“Maybe,” Dakota agreed, blinking away the tears that were never far whenever Mikaya’s name was brought up. She gestured to the case files. “This case was so brutal. Nayeli was nineteen and a single mother when she was killed, but her baby was never found. Cases like these never fail to punch you in the gut. I’d always held out hope that the baby would turn up.”
“If you don’t find an infant within the first forty-eight hours...” Shilah trailed, shaking her head.
It was a heartbreaking statistic that they wished wasn’t true but even if the kidnapped child wasn’t harmed, their faces changed so much in the first year, even with age progression software, they were difficult to recognize without an identifying mark or feature.
Unless a twist of fate intervened and seventeen years later that infant reappeared out of nowhere, creating an all-hands-on-deck frenzy to reopen the case.
Isaac Berrigan, the task force leader, walked into the room, along with Sayeh Griffin and Levi Wyatt, and not more than two minutes later, Ellis Vaughn, catching the door with a flash of that charming grin that made most women weak in the knees, followed.
“Looks like I just made it,” he said, shaking hands with Isaac and Levi, nodding to Sayeh, before swiveling his gaze to Dakota.
The moment their eyes locked, the tension between them was immediate and palpable—and hard to smother.
When Isaac had broached the subject of putting her on the case with the FBI agent, she hadn’t disclosed that she and Ellis had history and she wasn’t about to do that now, either, which meant she had to stove her natural reaction to seeing him again.
Dakota studied him for a moment, taking in the dark circles under his eyes and the faint lines etched into his features—signs that the years that’d passed since their breakup two years ago hadn’t been a cakewalk. Despite the lingering tension between them, she couldn’t deny that Ellis was brilliant at his job, and his troubled past only seemed to fuel his determination to bring criminals to justice, something she’d always admired.
It’d taken a long time to get over Ellis and seeing him again wasn’t doing her any favors, but this case was bigger than her feelings.
Isaac, a man who hated politicking and posturing, made short work of the introductions in a gruff voice before taking his seat at the head of the table.
“Agent Vaughn,” Dakota said, managing a tight smile as she extended her hand, ignoring the flutter in her stomach the second their palms met.
“Agent Foster,” Ellis replied, shaking her hand firmly before finding his seat opposite her. There was a time when his hand in hers had been the calm in the storm, no matter what life had thrown their way. Now they were strangers and that’s the way it would stay because the past needed to stay in the past. The sudden prick at her heart only focused her resolve that much more.
“I assume you’ve all read the brief,” Isaac started, opening the file. “The gravity of the situation is only outmatched by the sense of urgency to find out how a six-week-old infant that’s been missing for seventeen years just showed up as a coma patient in a Butte hospital.”
Seventeen-year-old Cheyenne Swiftwater was admitted into Saint James Hospital after a solo rollover car accident, suffering a major head injury. According to the police report, the teen overcorrected on a turn and flipped the car. She was ejected from the vehicle and was put into a medically induced coma to bring down the swelling in her brain.
“It’s a miracle she survived the wreck,” Sayeh murmured, surveying the crash scene pictures. “It’s not often that getting thrown from a vehicle actually saves your life. If the seat belt hadn’t failed, she would’ve been crushed.”
“Situations like these make idiots say that seat belts don’t save lives,” Isaac grumbled, but added, “Luck was riding shotgun with this girl, that’s for sure.”
“No ID found at the time of the accident,” Shilah said, reading over the report. “How’d they get an identification?”
“They had her listed as Jane Doe until her fingerprints were put into the system, tripping the FBI database for Missing and Exploited Children,” Ellis answered, adding, “Imagine our surprise when Cheyenne Swiftwater popped up.”
Nayeli’s baby. The sixteen-year-old Dakota wanted to sob with relief that the child was alive, but the adult BIA agent had to stay focused and detached. She wouldn’t dare do anything that would cause Isaac to side-eye her involvement with the case. “Did Cheyenne say where she was headed?” Dakota asked.
“She’s awake but she doesn’t know who she is or where she was going,” Ellis said. “Doctors are saying it’s short-term memory loss due to the head injury and there’s no telling how long it might last but we need to find out where Cheyenne’s been all this time.”
“There’s also no guarantee she’s been in Montana. For all we know she could’ve been anywhere. Who’s the car registered to?” Levi asked.
“An eighty-year-old Stevensville man who’s been dead for at least five years. No surviving kin,” Ellis answered, shaking his head. “If he was the one who abducted Cheyenne, he took the truth to his grave.”
“We can put the media to work—area newspapers, news outlets, even social media—to see if anyone recognizes her,” Dakota suggested. “Someone out there is bound to know something.”
Isaac nodded with approval. “Good call. Dakota, you and Agent Vaughn will go to Saint James Hospital and speak with the girl first thing tomorrow. Talk to her doctors, see what you can find out. Levi and Sayeh, you’ll handle the press, get the word out. Shilah, run background on the girl’s mother. See if there’s anything from the past that might’ve been missed.”
The debrief room’s fluorescent lights hummed overhead, casting a harsh glare on the case files spread across the table, a visual reminder that emotions didn’t matter in this situation. The import of this case was huge but Dakota fought a well of complicated thoughts and feelings at the reopening of Nayeli’s case. Solving what happened to the stolen infant of a murdered Native mother was the kind of case that would make all of her sacrifices worth it, but it didn’t change the fact that Nayeli’s case was located too close in her heart to Mikaya’s for her to remain completely unbiased.
And Ellis had to know this, but he hadn’t raised the alarm, so she’d give him that.
Perhaps Ellis’s silence was a sign that he was willing to keep the past buried if she was—and Dakota was determined to prove that she could.
If she had to work side by side with Ellis, she’d do it as a professional should.
“We can drive together,” Ellis offered but Dakota shut that down real quick.
Oh, hell no. Just because she was ready to show that she could keep the past in its place didn’t mean she wanted to ride shotgun with the man like they were buddies. “I’d prefer separate cars. We can meet at the destination.”
Ellis accepted her counter with a nod. “I’ll call ahead, let the hospital know that we’re coming. Let’s meet at the hospital at eleven hundred. Does that work for you?”
Dakota put the time into her schedule with a short, “It does,” and quickly added her own checklist into her notes for tomorrow.
Berrigan nodded. “Good. All right, you have your assignments. Let’s bring home another win—and it goes without saying, stay safe.” The last case nearly cost them Sayeh and Levi but a win was a win and their case had given the task force the added weight they’d needed to go harder on more complicated cases.
Such as this one.
The team started to disperse but Ellis hung back, which made Dakota want to run from the room, but they were officially on the same team for the time being so being professional was her emotional armor.
“It’s been a while,” Ellis said in an attempt at small talk, which she didn’t want or need.
Since they were alone, Dakota dropped the act that they were strangers meeting for the first time. She turned to Ellis, addressing him in a low tone. “Look, I’ll only say this once—our past doesn’t matter. What matters is this case. We’re adults. I can handle being civil and professional but don’t try to charm me into anything more. Whatever we once had is now dust and ash with zero hope of resurrecting. Got it?”
“Geesh, Dakota, all I said was It’s been a while. I wasn’t trying to resurrect anything,” he assured her, shaking his head as if she were overreacting, but there was the tiniest flicker of something else behind his eyes even as he added, “I was just being polite. That’s a thing, you know.”
“Don’t do that,” she warned, hating how he was trying to turn this into a problem on her end. “I know how you operate and I’m not interested in playing your games. Focus on the case, keep the past where it belongs and we’ll do just fine.”
Ellis looked away, accepting her terms with a stiff nod, but as she started to leave, he added, “Well, it’s still good to see you, even if you don’t share the sentiment.”
She’d eat her shoe before admitting that she missed Ellis, but damn him for even saying such a thing to her. The time for sharing such thoughts was long gone. She ignored the heat flushing through her body and blurted, “I’m seeing someone.” Which was a complete lie but she needed him to know that she wasn’t pining for his stupid ass. “And it’s pretty serious.”
That subtle arch of surprise in his brow as well as the micro-expression of hurt before he smiled with a congratulatory, “That’s great. I’m really happy for you, Dakota,” made her instantly angry. He wasn’t supposed to be nice about learning that she’d replaced him in her heart but how else was he supposed to react? What did she want, for him to fall to his knees and publicly humiliate himself with an overt display of a broken heart? That might soothe her bruised ego but would create major turmoil affecting their case, so no.
“Thanks,” she returned stiffly, clutching her files to her chest. “So, tomorrow, then. Eleven hundred hours. I’ll see you at Saint James.”
“Don’t get the wrong idea but we should probably exchange numbers...” he suggested as Dakota started to walk out the door, adding, “Unless, your number is the same, because mine hasn’t changed.”
She swallowed, hating that she hadn’t changed her number. At the time, when her heart was still weeping, she’d desperately hoped that her phone would ring in the middle of the night and it would be Ellis begging for another chance. That call never happened but she also couldn’t bring herself to change numbers. She lifted her chin. “I never got around to changing mine,” she said, hoping to convey that he hadn’t been important enough to warrant top priority.
If her statement hurt him, his brief smile and short nod didn’t show it. “Great. Eleven hundred, then.”
Dakota didn’t trust herself to stay in that room a moment longer. She left without another word. Ordinarily, working with a new partner—especially interagency co-ops—she would’ve been more accommodating, maybe even offering to take them to lunch to get better acquainted, talk shop, the usual, but she already knew all she needed to know about Ellis Vaughn.
He’d grown up with a sadistic “one-percenter” outlaw biker father who’d kicked the crap out of him whenever Ellis had even sneezed wrong, and who’d eaten a bullet from a rival gang when Ellis was a teenager, which was the best thing that could’ve happened.
Ellis, determined to be different from his old man, went into law enforcement, taking great pleasure in taking down violent dirtbags with similar MOs as his father but his maverick style had rubbed his superior the wrong way. After the last assignment had barely gone the right way, Ellis was unceremoniously kicked out of the narcotics unit and sent to the missing persons division.
She remembered that day all too well.
“They demoted me!” Ellis had roared, slamming into the kitchen with all of the rage of a man wronged. “That son of a bitch Carleton demoted me to the goddamn missing persons division!”
Dakota, alarmed at seeing this side of Ellis, tried to call him down. “It’s not exactly a demotion. Missing Persons is an important division with a lot of opportunity for growth... You might even say that Carleton did you a favor.”
“It’s a paperwork division with no action,” Ellis had shot back, his narrowed gaze hot with scathing mockery. “He did it on purpose because he knows I need to be where the action’s at. This is punishment, Dakota. Don’t insult me by trying to make me think it’s not.”
She’d tried to empathize with Ellis’s situation but she’d warned him that he had to stop playing fast and loose with the rules or else it was going to backfire on him. It was the lowest-hanging fruit of an “I told you so” but facts were facts.
“I’m not trying to do anything but point out a perspective that you might’ve missed,” she retorted, stung. “And if you didn’t want to leave the narcotics division, you shouldn’t have pressed your luck when Carleton told you to cool it. A dead agent is the last thing anyone wants and that’s exactly what was going to happen if someone didn’t put you in check. I’m sorry, Ellis, but I agree with Carleton’s decision.”
It might’ve been true but it’d been the wrong thing to say at that moment.
Ellis was a powder keg of rage, guilt and self-recrimination that only needed the slightest spark to ignite—and Dakota had just lit the match.
Ellis had grabbed the first thing his hand could grasp and the crystal cookie jar shattered into a million pieces against the wall.
In her life and career, Dakota had seen too many red flags go ignored only to grow monstrous with time and she couldn’t let the incident slide. It would’ve been easy to chalk up the situation as a moment of anger that got out of hand and might never happen again but Dakota didn’t play with those kinds of odds.
The memory of the shattering glass echoed in her mind—as did her decision to leave. At the time, Dakota had been grateful that Ellis neither tried to make excuses for his actions nor did he try to stop her from leaving. Did Ellis ever think of that night? Or did he walk away from everything they’d shared without a backward glance? It wasn’t her business to know or ask but the questions poked at her during quiet moments.
Or not-so-quiet moments—like now.
After the breakup, she’d rationalized they’d been kidding themselves from the start. Their relationship had never stood a chance. Compartmentalizing the reason for their breakup had helped manage her grief but it didn’t stop the sting when he was standing in front of her.
Dakota knew that Isaac had picked her to work with Ellis because of her connection to the Flathead Reservation. She appreciated that he cared even when he acted like he was insensitive to anything but the outcome of a case, but working side by side with Ellis was going to take its toll.
She might put up a good front, but privately, seeing Ellis again had just taken a sledgehammer to that carefully sealed box. The thing was, they never had any closure over what’d happened and why they broke up.
It’d been more than the crystal cookie jar—it was the explosion of unfettered rage that’d scared her.
Even if they’d both agreed it was for the best, neither had actually had that conversation, which, in hindsight, was probably necessary to process the pain, but Dakota couldn’t handle seeing him again for fear of slipping in her decision to end things. So, when she walked away, she hadn’t looked back—and he hadn’t come looking, either.
In her mind, that was further confirmation that he’d agreed.
But seeing him again was going to put the strength of that mental box to the test. What might happen if it finally sprang open after all these years of being tightly shut?
Don’t go there, Dakota. Focus, focus, focus—all that matters is the case.
It would have to be the mantra that got her through this.
