In a small town in the mountains of North Carolina, Frankie Tucker finally saw exactly what he had been waiting for. A tall man with a lean frame brought about by years of preferring cigarettes to actual food, Frankie was a busboy at the Silver Steel Diner in Lake Lure, and he was just about to take a smoke break outside the back door by the kitchen when he saw them come in. A family of four, with a mother and father and two teenaged daughters, had just been seated by the hostess in the red booth furthest from the entrance. One of the daughters was what most would consider classically good looking, with long dark hair and rather obvious makeup. The other daughter was much plainer, with no makeup at all that Frankie could see. He might not have noticed her at all – he imagined most people did not – except he had been looking for this exact family dynamic for so long.
Instead of taking his break, Frankie sidled over to the blue booth just before theirs and pretended to refill the salt and pepper shakers while he took a closer look. The older daughter was complaining that she wasn't going to get to see her boyfriend because her parents had insisted on taking this lame vacation, and why would anybody want to visit a lakeside resort in the middle of the winter anyway? She yammered on and on, and the parents appeared to be paying even less attention to her than Frankie was. But the younger daughter . . . yes, the younger daughter was not only ignoring her sister, she had pulled out a book. And it didn't look like a fashion magazine, or even a young-adult romance; he couldn't quite see the title, but he imagined it was one of the classics: Jane Eyre maybe, or even Shakespeare. He moved around to the side of the table nearest to them, thinking perhaps he could drop something, get the girl to look up at him. There was just one more thing he had to see.
"Frankie," called the manager of the diner. "What the heck are you doing?"
Frankie knocked the salt shaker over he was so surprised, and had to throw a pinch over his shoulder before he could respond. "Just fillin' the shakers, Ms. Nance," he answered, quickly wiping the rest of the spilled salt onto the floor.
"Did anybody ask you to do that?" The old biddy didn't even give him a chance to reply before harping on. "I don't think so."
"I noticed the last people at this table had to borrow a shaker from another booth, so I just thought . . . "
"Don't. Don't think. Nobody is paying you to think." By this time she was right beside him, breathing stale cigarette into his face. Frankie loved the cigarettes himself, but the after-smell on someone else, particularly someone as repulsive as his manager, was disgusting.
"No, ma'am," Frankie mumbled. "I'm going to take my break now." He stumbled past the booth where the family sat. The parents and the older daughter seemed not to have noticed the altercation, but the younger girl was looking at him with sympathy in her eyes. He glanced at her briefly, noticing again her plain features and her rather oversized nose, and as he continued down the hallway and out the back door, a ghost of a smile crossed his lips. He just knew she was going to be exactly what he needed.
Derek Morgan glanced at the clock sitting on his desk, willing the hands to move more quickly toward five o'clock. He and his girlfriend Savannah had dinner reservations at a hot new restaurant on DuPont Circle, and he really, really wanted to make it out of the office without getting called away on a case. The last three times he and Savannah had had plans one or the other of them ended up having to work, and while they both understood that it was the nature of their jobs – his as an elite FBI profiler, hers as one of the top doctors at George Washington University Hospital – it was seriously time for them to have a little serious time together. Morgan was actually toying with the idea of asking Savannah to move in with him, if for no other reason than that they might get to see each other more than once a fortnight if they lived under the same roof. One more hour and he could hotfoot it out of the FBI building in Quantico, stop by his apartment and put on his finest attire, and meet his woman for an elegant dinner and an even more elegant dessert at her place. He was so enjoying contemplating it, the knock on his door made him jump.
The woman who stuck her head in the door, while not Savannah, was also someone he considered his woman, in a totally different way. "Penelope," he purred, a slow smile spreading across his face. "To what do I owe the pleasure? And don't tell me you're here because we have a case, because I don't want to hear it."
"No, no case," Penelope Garcia assured him, slipping the rest of herself into the room. "I just noticed that you skipped lunch today, so I brought you a cupcake from the bakery across the street. Can't have you wasting away all alone in your office, can we?"
Morgan's grin widened even further as he noted that Garcia looked suspiciously like a cupcake herself. The green taffeta skirt mimicked the paper lining, while the pink top boasted flicks of color akin to the sprinkles in the icing. Even the red bow in her hair could be considered the cherry on top. "Maybe I'll just skip the cupcake and take a bite out of you instead," he suggested.
Rather than being offended, Garcia gave as good as she got. "Like you could handle that kind of sugar rush," she demurred. She leaned across his desk and dabbed the cupcake in her hand against his nose, leaving a dot of icing on the end. "Better stick with the baked goods." She laid the pastry down on his desk and spun back out of the office as quickly as she had arrived. "Besides, I have work to do. And you have exactly," she checked the pink and green Swatch on her arm, "forty-seven minutes before you head out to meet your own little cupcake. With any luck, you and I will not see each other again until Monday morning."
"No offense, Mama, but I certainly hope so." Morgan chuckled as he wiped the frosting off his nose and took a bite out of the offered sweet.
Alas, it was not to be. Twenty-two minutes later, Garcia stuck her head in the door again, but this time without the pastries or the innuendos. "Bad news, stud muffin."
"We've got a case?" Morgan shook his head and pulled out his cell phone, ready to call Savannah and cancel.
"We've got a case," Garcia confirmed.
"Where are we going?" he asked as he waited for his girlfriend to pick up.
"North Carolina. A little town up in the mountains. There's a teenage girl missing, and from what I've seen so far, she's not the first."