Page 3 of Long Gone

I wasn’t often compared to him, and it made my heart swell. My father had always been the softer of my two parents, and everyone used to say that Andi was like my father while I was more like my mother. Up until I’d left my job on the force, I’d tried hard to be seen as friendly and accessible, not hard and aloof, but looking back, I had to wonder if it had been a front. There was nothing soft about me now.

I gave Mitch a soft smile. “Thank you.”

He studied me for a moment with a dramatic pause that gave me a small insight to how he dazzled a jury in a courtroom. He was drawing this out, putting on a performance. The question was why?

“Other than Peterman’s daughter, have you ever looked for a missing person?” he asked.

“I never admitted to finding Peterman’s daughter, but I have plenty of experience working missing person cases, both as a beat cop and a detective.”

He uncrossed his legs and turned serious. “A client’s husband has been missing for five years. Hugo Burton. She wants to declare him dead so she can collect his life insurance, but officially, he’s still a missing person.”

“And you want me to find him?”

“Or prove he’s dead. Clarice has lived in the shadow of his absence for far too long. She needs closure.”

“And she also wants the life insurance money,” I said dryly.

He leaned his head to the side. “True. I mean, if he’s dead, she deserves to collect.”

“How much money are we talking about?”

“Two million dollars.”

My brow shot up, but I remained silent for a moment before stating the obvious. “That’s a significant amount of money.”

“Hugo was a prominent businessman and land developer in the county, so I would have been surprised if it had been less.”

“I suppose you know the details of his disappearance.”

He nodded. “He told his wife he had a late afternoon business meeting and never came home. She reported him missing that night and the police found his car at the Little Rock airport two days later.”

“So he flew off somewhere?”

“There’s no record of him flying anywhere.”

“Surely there was security footage of the car being parked in the lot.”

“The camera in the parking lot had been shot out.”

I lifted a brow. “That’s convenient.”

“I know. There’s also no record of him checking in for a flight, let alone booking one.”

I recognized the familiar stirring in my gut. I’d always experienced this sensation when I started investigating a case. Slipping into detective mode was like sliding on a pair of worn slippers. “Did he get a new identity?”

“Possibly, but the police looked at the video footage from security, and there’s nothing of him going through.”

“So what’s the going theory about the car?”

“The question is if he drove it there and dumped it, then found another mode of transportation or?—”

“Or someone else dumped his car,” I finished.

“Exactly,” he said with a knowing look.

“If Hugo Burton was a land developer and had that much insurance, I take it he was a wealthy man.”

“Wealthy is a relative term,” Mitch said. “Turns out Hugo was broke when he disappeared.”

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