Little Girl Gone - Brett Battles

There was a third option, though.

He started the El Camino, and pulled out of the carport.

16

Logan’s phone rang as he was driving back to the motel. The number on the display had a D.C. area code.

“Logan?” It was Ruth.

“I thought you’d forgotten about me.”

“I tried. Trust me.” She let out a little laugh. “My contact couldn’t run the plate number until after hours, and I wasn’t about to call you back from any of my phones.”

“Uh…thanks?”

“What? You want me to give them a good reason to fire me? I’ve got a family, remember?”

He didn’t say anything. He’d had a family once, small as it had been.

“Sorry, that was…unnecessary,” she said. “It’s just if anyone looks at the phone records they’ll already see that you called me at the office. One call I can play off, tell them I told you to get lost. But two? Especially if I’m the one initiating the second one? Not so easy to ignore.”

“Don’t worry. I get it.” And he did. Her cell phone and, of course, her office phone were both paid for by Forbus. They would know exactly who she talked to. “What did you find out?”

“Nothing that you’re going to like, I’ll bet. The car’s registered to a Cameron Jackson in Burbank, California. Unfortunately, Ms. Jackson filed a stolen vehicle report yesterday. It seems when she headed out to work in the morning her car was gone.”

There was an airport in Burbank, one that was a hell of a lot easier to use than LAX. Fly in, walk a few blocks away, steal a car from in front of a home. Easy. No doubt, in another couple of days, the police would find the car, but wouldn’t be able to pursue the case any further because there would be no prints.

“Thanks, Ruth.”

“I said you weren’t going to like it.”

“You’re right, but I’m not surprised.” He hesitate a second. Things had changed since they’d last talked. There was information she was uniquely positioned to provide him. He didn’t want to push, but he had to. “Listen, what kind of intel do you have on Burma these days?”

“Burma? I thought we were talking stolen cars.”

“Separate subject.”

“What’s important about Burma?”

“It’s for a friend. He…used to live there years ago.”

Ruth said nothing for several seconds. “What have you gotten yourself into?”

“Nothing. Just getting some info for a friend. That’s all.”

“And the stolen car?”

“I told you, unrelated. It dinged my dad’s car in a parking lot. But if it was stolen there’s not much we can do about it.” They both knew he was lying, but if Ruth was ever asked about it, she could honestly repeat what Logan had just told her. “So…Burma?”

The pause went on for several seconds. He could imagine her shaking her head in resignation as she finally spoke. “As far as I know we don’t have much going on in that part of the world at the moment. A little contract work in Singapore, emergency response training, but that’s it.”

“You still get the daily brief, right?” The daily brief was a breakdown of what was happening in the world by country and region. Forbus wanted its top people kept up-to-date in case an opportunity suddenly presented itself.

“Hell, Logan. I don’t really pay that much attention to Burma. As far as I remember, it’s pretty much the same as always. A group of old, asshole generals not wanting to relinquish the power they don’t deserve. Nothing stands out, though. No new protests or anything.”

Logan hesitated, then said, “I need another favor. I need the latest Burma assessment.”

“Are you serious?”

“I wouldn’t ask you if I wasn’t.”

“I hate you sometimes, Logan Harper.”

“Is that a yes?”

“That’s a maybe.”

“Thank you, Ruth. I mean it.”

He pulled into the motel parking lot a few minutes later, and saw that the cars the Cambria contingent had ridden down in were all there. He called his dad.

“What room are you in?”

“Thirty-five.”

“I’ll be right there.”

Dev and Ken were standing just outside his father’s door like they were protecting the Oval Office.

“Everything all right?” Logan asked.

“Everything’s fine,” Dev said, then knocked on the door.

“Good. Thanks for being here for them.”

“Always like to help a friend.”

A moment later, Barney opened the door and let Logan in.

Tooney and his father were sitting on one of the two beds while Jerry stood nearby.

“We were going to order some Chinese,” Jerry said. “Want some?”

“We need to talk.”

“Did you speak with Elyse’s friends?” Tooney asked.

“I talked to Lara, but…” Logan hesitated only a second. There was no use sugar coating it. “Anthony’s dead.”

Stunned silence.

“Did you say dead?” his dad finally asked.

“Lara gave me his address. Said that he was supposed to have had dinner with Elyse the night before last, so I went over there. I found him in his apartment.”

“How did you get in if he was already dead?” Barney asked.

“I just did.”

“Did someone kill him?” Jerry asked.

“The way it looks, he shot himself through the head.”

Harp leaned back, surprised again. “Suicide?”

“That’s the impression.”

“What do you mean ‘impression’?” he asked.

“With everything that’s been going on, I’m not willing to believe suicide yet.”

“So what do you think might have happened?” Jerry asked.

“I don’t know. Could be he did kill himself. But if he did have dinner with Elyse, he would have been one of the last people to see her before she disappeared. Maybe he was with her when they grabbed her. Wrong place, wrong time.”

“Oh, no, no,” Tooney said, burying his eyes in the palm of his hand. “We should have called the police yesterday.”

“I don’t think it would have made a difference,” Logan told him. “I’m pretty sure he was shot before that guy even came to the café to try to kill you.”

“But the police are going to know now anyway, aren’t they?” Barney said. “You must have called them after you found the body.”

Logan hesitated. “No. I didn’t.”

“No?” his dad said.

“They almost got Tooney,” Logan said. “They probably did kill Anthony. The first sign that anyone tries to involve the authorities, I think you might be right. Whoever has Elyse will kill her, too. As far as Anthony goes, the police will know, but it can’t come from me. Not if you still want me to find Elyse.”

“We can’t just let him lie there, can we?” Barney asked.

Logan shook his head. “No, we can’t.”  He walked over to the front door and opened it. “Dev, can you come in here for a minute?”

“Sure,” the ex-marine said.

Once they had rejoined the others, Logan asked his dad, “How much does Dev know?”

Harp shrugged. “Maybe not all the details, but pretty much everything.”

Good, Logan thought. It would save him some time.

Vets who’d seen serious action usually went one of two ways: they’d either wall off what they’d gone through and tried to forget, or they remembered and gravitated to others they’d served with or who’d had similar experiences. Logan had a feeling Dev and his buddies fell into the second group. “You have any local friends you can call on for help?”

Dev cracked a smile. “A few.”

“Can you get them in a hurry?”

“Shouldn’t be a problem. Why?”

“Tooney’s granddaughter had two close friends,” Logan said. “One of them’s turned up dead. That’s not public knowledge. Two things I need your help on. First, I know I’d feel a hell of a lot better if the one who was still alive had someone keeping an eye on her. And second, I’m hoping that you or someone you know can anonymously inform the police about the one who’s dead.”

“The people who did this, are they the same people who are after Tooney and his granddaughter?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Give me the info. I’ll take care of it.”

Logan wrote everything down on a piece of paper, then gave Dev a quick description of Lara. “She can’t know you’re there.”

“She won’t.”

“Thanks, Dev.”

He gave Logan a nod, then left.

“Do you really think someone’s going to try to kill Lara, too?” Logan’s father asked.

Logan shook his head. “If they considered her a threat I think they would have gotten rid of her by now, but better not to take a chance, don’t you think?”

For a moment, no one said a word, then Tooney looked up. “Find my granddaughter, Logan. Please, just…find her.”

Logan hesitated, worried that he wasn’t the right one to do this, that he’d make a mistake, that he’d fail once more.

Worried that he wouldn’t get to her in time.

But he could see in Tooney’s eyes that he was also the old man’s only hope.

“Rise above, that’s what we do, soldier,” Carl had often said with a smile when faced with adversity. “Rise above.”

Logan nodded, still holding Tooney’s gaze, then said, “I will.”

17

So far Logan seemed to have been doing a lot of catch up. What he really needed to do was get ahead of the game. To accomplish that he needed to find someone who could help him, whether they wanted to or not.

As he saw it, he had three choices: Aaron the not-boyfriend, Ryan the neighbor, or Angie the roommate. Aaron and Ryan, because of their sudden absences, would take time to find, if Logan could locate them at all. Angie, on the other hand, was still around, or at least had been when he’d talked to her that morning. Hopefully, she wasn’t gone, too.

Logan made a quick stop at the Home Depot in Playa Vista, then got to the girls’ apartment by 7:30 p.m. With the exception of the sun having gone down, nothing else had changed—Ryan’s apartment was still empty, and the curtains were still pulled across the windows of Elyse and Angie’s place. Logan rapped on the door, but, like before, heard nothing from inside.

Working security in trouble spots around the world meant knowing a variety of skills. The more you learned, the more likely you’d stay alive. As a trainer, it was Logan’s job to teach the men some of these skills. Skills like how to pick a lock.

Wearing the thin rubber gloves he’d purchased at the hardware store, and using the other items he’d bought to serve as a makeshift lock-pick set, Logan set to work on Elyse’s door, and had it open in less than thirty seconds.

He quickly slipped inside, then stood still, listening. Though the apartment was quiet, he was relieved to see it wasn’t empty like Aaron’s or Ryan’s places. Of course, that didn’t necessarily mean Angie was still around. The apartment had been Elyse’s and her other two roommates’ before Angie had moved in, so there would have been no reason to remove all the stuff.

The place was basically a mirror image of Ryan’s apartment. In this case, the living room was to the right, and the dining room/kitchen to the left. Logan checked the kitchen first. There were several dishes in the sink, and a box of cereal sitting on the counter, but nothing that really told him if Angie had bolted or not. He headed into the back of the apartment.

There were two bedrooms at opposite ends of a short T-bone hallway, with a bathroom smack between them. Each bedroom was loosely divided into two separate areas, with beds, dressers, and, in three cases, small desks.

He found Elyse’s room first. He knew this because of the framed picture on the desk under the window. In it, Elyse, Lara and Anthony were mugging for the camera somewhere along the beach.

There were several paintings on the wall next to her bed. The images were almost cartoonish. Illustrations, he guessed you’d call them. The common thread in each was a young girl who looked more than a little bit like the girl in the graduation picture Tooney had given him. In the paintings, she seemed to be playing the role of the observer, not quite part of whatever was going on, but always hovering nearby. The girl in the one that stood out most to Logan had wings far too large for her body, and was sitting in a barren tree watching some other kids go by. If the colors hadn’t been so vibrant, and if there hadn’t been a mischievous smile on her face, it would have been depressing, but it was far from that. When he looked at the bottom corner, he wasn’t surprised to find it was signed Elyse Myat.

He moved to the other half of the room. There were a dozen photos pinned to the wall, but the girl who reoccurred in most of them was not Angie, so Logan assumed Elyse’s roommate had to be one of the other two girls.

He walked over to the second bedroom, and quickly determined that the bed nearest the door belonged to the last of the long term roommates.

The other half of the room, Angie’s half, was considerably less lived in. She had no desk, and what pictures she’d taped to her wall were limited to ones taken right there in the apartment. It was as if she had no life before moving in.

When Logan looked around the bed, he stopped and stared.

Sitting on the floor were a suitcase and a backpack. He checked inside each. They were stuffed with clothes and a few personal items. He zipped them up, then looked through the dresser he figured belonged to Angie. It was empty.

Clearing out, he thought, but not cleared out.

He thought for a moment, then walked back to Elyse’s room, and found a clear spot on the floor next to the wall to sit.

An hour and twenty minutes passed. Several times during that stretch he wondered if Angie might have left town without her bags. It was always a possibility. But then a key entered the lock, and the door swung open, and someone stepped inside.

He sensed more than heard the person rushing through the apartment.

A light flicked on in the hallway spilling into Elyse’s room. Quietly, Logan rose to his feet, ready to act if Angie or whoever it was decided to come his direction. Instead, the person entered the bathroom.

Logan repositioned himself so that he could see into the hallway, but wouldn’t be noticed without effort. Soon the toilet flushed, then water ran in the sink. A few seconds after it shut off, the person stepped back into the hallway.

It was Angie, and she was obviously in a hurry as she all but sprinted into her bedroom.

Logan stepped lightly out of Elyse’s room, and into the dark living room to wait.

It was only a few moments before he heard the suitcase bang against something. Once Angie reached the hallway, she stopped just long enough to flip off the light, then enter the living room.

Logan remained motionless as she lugged her bags toward the front door. As soon as she passed his position, he moved silently in behind her, then reached out and grabbed a loop on her backpack, and gave it a tug.