“I am.” How could Cooper look at anything else? The dots were everywhere, in every state. It boggled his mind.
Marlee finished her food. “I did one of those after my sister was killed. It’s what propelled me to do what I do now.”
“How can this continue to happen without the police catching anyone?” Jace demanded to know.
Marlee shrugged. “How do so many murders of any kind happen that are never solved? It is what it is.”
Cooper took her plate and set it atop his. “I’m having a hard time accepting that. I don’t like the idea of murder, but this is different. These are pregnant women who have their children ripped from them and are left to die. There should be something about this that hits the Feds’ radar.”
“It has,” Marlee told them. “I have a contact there. We met during my sister’s case. I wish I could tell you they are making headway, but they aren’t.”
Jace shook his head. “With all the equipment, manpower, and surveillance we have now, there has to be something.”
“It’s the same question I ask myself weekly, and there’s never any change.”
Cooper folded his arms over his chest. “Then let’s make sure there is some.”
“Now that’s what I’m talking about,” Jace said with a grin.
Chapter 23
Marlee stared with sickening dread at the explosion of marks on the map. So, so many more had been added in the ten years since she had done a similar one. She had hoped that by trying to locate the missing children, she could make a dent in all the chaos, but she didn’t think that was possible.
No matter how you looked at it, babies were thought of as a commodity, and people with an agenda were going to exploit that. Never mind all those in foster care or those in orphanages. For reasons she couldn’t even begin to fathom, so many ignored the babies and children in desperate need of homes and love. Instead, those same people wanted infants to raise as their own, babies who hadn’t seen the horrendous depths humanity could sink to.
Those people paid untold sums of money on the black market for babies. They didn’t ask where the infants came from, because they didn’t care. All that mattered was that they got what they wanted—a baby they could call theirs.
Macey’s daughter was somewhere out in the world. Marlee knew in the depths of her soul that her niece was alive. If not, Marlee would’ve found the body by now because she had left no stone unturned. At least in the States. She hadn’t looked abroad, but she wanted to. She’d always wanted to.
That cost money, however. Funds she’d been trying to raise for ten years. Every time she got a little bit saved, something came up, be it part of a job or with her parents. At this rate, she’d never be able to search the world for her niece.
Cooper’s words from that morning came back to her. The idea of having people working for her was something she wanted. Instead of hiring the first person she thought was a decent fit so she could hand off some work, she needed to approach it differently. First, they needed to have the kind of dedication to the job that she had. That was the biggie. If they didn’t, then it simply wouldn’t work.
She blinked and noticed that Jace and Cooper were staring at her. She’d been so engrossed in her thoughts that she hadn’t paid attention to them. “I’m sorry. I was lost in thought for a moment.”
“We can hold off,” Cooper suggested.
She shook her head and smiled at him. “I can handle it. I should’ve been doing this all along. That first year when more and more marks went on the map, and I didn’t make any headway, it was…” She paused, looking for the right word.
“Daunting,” Jace offered.
Cooper then said, “Discouraging.”
“Both,” she replied. “I wanted to make a difference. Instead, more and more women were being killed, their babies taken. So, I stopped tracking then. It allowed me to focus on the cases at hand instead of all the ones out there suffering as my family did.”
Cooper ran a hand up and down her arm from across the space of the island. “That was probably a smart thing to do. Did you keep track of the cases you solved?”
“Oh, yes.” She smiled, thinking of the board her parents had created at the house. “I let my parents know, and they kept track of them, sending me pictures to help bolster me.” Marlee shook her head as she thought about that board. “For so long, I thought they did it for themselves. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I discovered they’d done it for me because they thought I needed to see how many I’d helped.”
Jace asked, “And did it help?”
“It did. I’m so glad my parents did it. They even kept a record of the cases I solved, even if I wasn’t able to deliver a child back to their loved ones alive.” Marlee took a deep breath and looked at Cooper. “However, I think it’s time to bring out the map again and track it. Especially if I’m going to hire people.”
Cooper’s smile was slow and so damn sexy that she wanted to go to him and kiss him. “Think what you could accomplish if you trained others in how you work. You could solve double the cases. Hell, triple.”
“That’s why I’m considering it. That, as well as the fact that I can’t keep running myself into the ground like I have been.” It was a big wakeup call. One she should’ve heard years ago but had ignored.
Jace rubbed his hands together. “So. Back to the map. You’ll see I used different colors. The purple ones are for locations where infants were kidnapped. I kept it to infants so we could see a correlation. The green ones are for pregnant women killed and the babies taken. The orange ones are pregnant women killed where the infants didn’t survive.”
“There are so damn many of them,” Cooper murmured.
Marlee’s gaze was glued to her little town in California. There were four green dots there. One of them was for Macey. While she mourned her twin as well as her niece, Marlee inhaled deeply and let her gaze move over the map. Every state had dots of all three colors. Still, there were a few states with more than any other—Texas, California, New York, Florida, Louisiana, and Nevada.
Jace pointed to each of them. “What makes these so special? Texas, I get. It’s vast with a lot of wide-open spaces.”
Marlee considered it for a moment. “There’s some correlation we’re missing, but I don’t know what it is. I know that while there are a lot of marks on that map, I’d guess we’re missing at least half.”
“Illegal immigrants,” Cooper said.
Marlee nodded. “They won’t tell the police anything. And if we don’t know about them, we can’t guess where they are.”
“Which means we can’t come up with anything to work with without all the data,” Jace said and ran a hand down his face. “This could be why the Feds haven’t done anything.”
Marlee shrugged, thinking of Stephanie. “Like I said, I made a friend in the FBI. I’d like to think she’s been honest with me, but I can’t be certain. For all I know, they aren’t doing anything. I don’t think that’s true, but I only have her word to go on.”