★★★★★ "Rick Waters does it again!"
Rick Waters, part-time detective and wannabe boat captain, has just solved the biggest case of his life and bought the yacht of his dreams.
As he embarks on a journey to start a charter business in Destin and track down a lost treasure supposedly buried in the Florida Keys, a new mystery appears in the form of Emily, an attractive gray-haired woman who claims to have been kidnapped and had her appearance surgically altered..
Emily has been accused of murdering her late husband, and she begs for Rick’s help to prove she is innocent.Intrigued by the case, Rick agrees to help her find the truth about what happened to her. Emily is sure the people behind her abduction want to take credit for her work as a scientist. She claims she has developed a drug that may be the cure to mankind’s deadliest disease.
The trail leads Rick from Florida to Grand Cayman and all the way to Switzerland, as he uncovers clues about the man Emily believes killed her husband and stole her drug.
The skilled detective must prove who Emily really is and release her miraculous drug before the people who abducted Emily figure out he’s on to them.
Rick will be have everything he needs to solve the case except time.
Get ready for a non-stop thrill ride!
"A unique twist on changing a victim's identity."
From the luminous glow of the deck lights of Rick’s boat on Destin Harbor Walk, he could see her brown eyes. She stood there trembling, and she looked desperate.
“Are you Rick Waters?” she asked.
“Yes. Who’s asking?”
“My name is Emily Davis. May I come aboard?” “Sure,” Rick replied, as he held out his hand to help her
step onto the deck.
“Can we go inside the boat? I read about the case you
solved in Texas and how you used your treasure hunting skills to solve that crime. I have something very sensitive I want to discuss with you, and voices carry over water,” she said.
“No problem.”
Rick opened the sliding glass doors of the Viking 55. After solving a huge case in Texas and getting paid more money that he had ever made in his life, he had purchased the yacht and put the rest into the bank. He was finally financially comfortable for the first time in his life.
Vanishing Waters
She took a seat on the settee, and he pulled up a chair to sit across from her.
She was a good-looking woman with long silver hair and a smooth face, only slightly wrinkled. She didn’t look old enough to have silver hair, but he had seen young girls in their twenties dye their hair silver sometimes. Apparently, it was a fad.
“You have a bird?” she asked, pointing to the cloth-covered cage.
“Yeah, that’s Chief. He’s an umbrella cockatoo, but he’s deep into dreamland now. Don’t worry, we won’t bother him. Can I get you a drink? Amaretto?”
“That would be fine.”
Rick poured her drink as she rummaged through her purse.
She handed him an Alabama driver’s license. “As I said, my name is Emily Davis. I’m from Tampa.”
He glanced over it. “This license says you’re Patricia Benning from Mobile, Alabama. I’m confused.”
“So am I. What I’m about to tell you will be hard to believe. As a matter of fact, if you were to tell me the same story, I probably wouldn’t believe you. But it’s true.” She took a sip of amaretto.
Her hands were shaking and she was shivering. It was a warm evening, so it couldn’t be from cold.
“Nine months ago,” she began, “I went to an office in downtown Tampa to meet with a man named Hans Larsson, who used to be a co-owner of a biotech company in Zürich. I had worked with him and his former partner, Liam Furrer, in the past and was looking forward to the meeting. I’m a chemist and I developed an immunotherapy drug that was going to revolutionize cancer treatment. It had a one hundred percent efficacy rate on lab animals. I’m not just talking about on skin carcinomas or lymphoma. It worked on everything we threw at it. In other words, Rick, what I’m saying is, I think I found the cure for cancer.”
Rick raised an eyebrow. “You’re right, that’s hard to believe.”
“That’s just the beginning of the story. During the meeting, three masked men burst into the office and shot Hans in the back. They threw a bag over my head and injected me with something. When I woke up, I was in a hospital, strapped to a gurney. My face and hands were covered in bandages, and both of my legs were in casts. I had no idea where I was. It felt like I was there for many months, but without windows or a clock of any kind, it was impossible to know for sure. They questioned me about every aspect of the drug, and I had no choice but to cooperate and tell them as much as I could remember. The room they kept me in was locked and had padded walls with no windows. It only had a bed, a toilet, and a shower. It was miserable and frightening. They had a team of doctors and therapists, and they forced me to do physical therapy after the casts were removed. But I was always under gunpoint.”
Rick was silent for several moments. Finally, he said, “I can’t even begin to imagine what you went through. It’s incredibly traumatic and horrific.”
Emily tightened her grip on her glass. “One day, a nurse came in and injected me with a needle,” she said. “When I woke up, I was in a hotel in downtown Tampa. Beside the bed was a suitcase filled with new clothes in my size, and a purse sat on the nightstand with the Alabama driver’s license and some money inside. When I went to bathroom and looked in the mirror, I nearly fainted. The person in the mirror looking back at me was not me. There was no resemblance to myself at all in the reflection. You have no idea what it’s like to see someone else’s reflection in a mirror. I almost felt like I was a ghost or a zombie.”
“You’d be surprised, but I actually do know the feeling,” replied Rick.
“What?”
“Never mind.” Rick changed the subject. “How is this all possible? I don’t see any scars.”
“I know.” She shook her head. “It doesn’t make sense.”
Rick studied her driver’s license again. “Your license matches your description of being five-foot-five with brown eyes.”
“I know, but I was five-foot-seven with blue eyes when they abducted me.”
“Are you trying to tell me they shortened you by two inches and changed the color of your eyes?”
“Yes, and that’s not all.”
She held out her hands and flipped them over to reveal the palm side. She had no ridges on the tips of her fingers that would make fingerprints. Feigning a smile, she pointed at her perfect white teeth.
“Also, I used to have a small gap between my two front teeth. Now I have none. I went to my house in Hyde Park, but it was gone.”
“What do you mean ‘gone’?”
“Gone as in vanished. It was a grass lot. I kept to myself when I lived there, so I didn’t really know the neighbors. I asked a guy who was trimming the hedges next door what
happened, and he told me the house burned down and a guy inside was found dead. I went online and found in some news articles that the man inside was my husband. He had been shot in the head and burned. They identified him with dental records. My husband was my only living next of kin. I am an only child; both of my parents died a few years ago in an airplane crash over the Bahamas.”
