Read Online Blind Pursuit by Michael Prescott - Free Book Online Page B

up from the menu held indifferently in one hand, and her waiter was there, a blond kid with Malibu surfer looks, incongruous in the desert.
    “Uh, yeah.” Annie put down the menu. “I may have been stood up. Is there a phone around here?”
    “Right outside the rear entrance.”
    “Thanks.” She pushed back the tubular chair. “If a woman comes in—redheaded like me, but a lot better looking—please tell her I went to make a call.”
    “I’ll tell her. But she won’t be better looking.”
    The compliment lifted a surprised smile to her lips. The smile lingered as she left the cafe.
    Nice to be admired by a younger man. Of course, he probably had no idea how much younger he was. Most people took her to be about twenty-five, but she and Erin had both turned thirty last month and had commiserated together.
    Erin. The smile faded.
    A telephone kiosk, fortunately not in use, was just where the waiter had said it was.
    Though she had dialed the switchboard at Erin’s office countless times, the number was gone from her memory. Hardly an unusual occurrence—she had no head for figures, and she wasn’t good with names and faces either.
    The number was in her address book, and her address book was somewhere in the chaos of her purse. She pawed through a clutter of key rings, tissues, cosmetics, coupons, scribbled notes to herself, Life Savers, breath mints, pens, business cards, loose coins, and out-of-date lottery tickets before she found the booklet.
    Then she fed a quarter into the phone and punched in the number.
    The receptionist answered. “Sonoran Psychological Associates.”
    “Hi, Marie, this is Anne Reilly. Is my sister—”
    “ Annie . I’ve been calling your shop.”
    Tension in the words—alarm, even. Fear pounced on her like a tiger. “You have? Why?”
    “You didn’t get my message?”
    “No, I’ve been out, I’m still out, what message, what’s going on?”
    “It’s Erin. We can’t find her.”
    “You can’t find her?” She felt stupid repeating the words.
    “No one knows where she is. She missed her ten-fifteen, and her eleven o’clock, too.” A truck rattled past the pay phone, and Annie had to strain to hear. “I’ve called her home three times; her machine keeps answering. Tried calling you forty minutes ago, left a message with your assistant—”
    “I was already on my way downtown. For lunch with Erin. She hasn’t shown up here either.”
    Unthinkable for Erin to miss even one appointment with a patient, let alone two. The world would end before she would permit herself that kind of irresponsibility.
    Could she have had a seizure? Terrible thought. Erin’s last epileptic episode had occurred in high school; since then the prescription medicine she took had kept that problem completely under control.
    Still, it was possible. If she’d suffered convulsions while driving to work—or fallen in her apartment and struck her head ...
    “Okay,” Annie said, holding her voice steady. “I’ll take a run over to her place and see if she’s there.”
    “Let us know—”
    “I will, I will. Thanks, Marie.”
    She hung up and drew a shallow, shaky breath. For a panicky moment she couldn’t think straight, couldn’t recall where she’d parked her car. Then she remembered—the county parking structure, a couple of blocks from here. Yes.
    She walked swiftly to Alameda Street. The main branch of the public library rose on her right, a handful of taller buildings assembled behind it. None stood higher than thirty-five stories.
    For the most part, downtown Tucson could have been downtown Des Moines or Tulsa or Toledo, any small city that had begun as a few square blocks of brick and concrete. Outside the small historic district, there was little in the town’s business section that was distinctive. The area retained none of the Wild West flavor of Tucson’s outlying horse ranches and saguaro forests; it owned no particular charm or glamour, save perhaps for one evocative