by Dale Mayer
He kept writing down his thoughts, looking at the options, at all the things that could’ve gone wrong. When his brain calmed, he set aside his pen and stared past Stone out the small window to the plane. That made him think, what about Daniel booking a flight? Saul quickly picked up his pen and wrote a note to check if Daniel’s passport had been used, just in case Daniel made a cash purchase of airline tickets. Then the transaction wouldn’t show up when Ice ran his credit cards. Maybe he’d left the country.
Merk held out a hand. “May I see that?”
Saul looked at him. “It’s just random thoughts.”
“Still I’d like to see it, please.”
Saul handed over his list.
Merk read a couple of the top items out loud.
“Don’t know how you can read my chicken scratches.”
“No problem.”
Saul shrugged and settled back. He hadn’t meant anybody to read it. They were just notes for himself.
When Merk got to the bottom and returned his notepad, he said, “Well done.”
*
Rebel Matheson slipped around the corner of the building, her breath catching in the back of her throat. Four men approached Daniel Longmire’s apartment complex. Strangers. Big tough badass-looking brutes. She had trouble maintaining 110 pounds when soaking wet. The last thing she wanted was to confront any of those men. But she’d been in tough spots before. Lots of them. It usually took luck and brains to get out of them. She had a black belt in karate, but some things even that wouldn’t solve. Still this was the first interesting thing to show up in the last couple days. Daniel’s brother, Benji, had been by a few times, but she’d avoided talking to him after the first time. Did he realize the serious trouble his brother was in right now? You could stick your head in the sand and ignore situations for only so long.
She waited until she thought it was safe, then peeked around the corner. One of the men—Icelandic, tall, broad-shouldered, wearing a T-shirt that hid none of the well-built muscle underneath—stared in her direction. She withdrew quickly, spun and bolted in the opposite direction. She raced around to the rear of the apartment building, deliberately avoiding her car, and ducked between several vehicles. She didn’t know what the hell was wrong, but she’d learned to listen to her instincts a long time ago. Something in the man’s gaze said, if he ever caught her, he wouldn’t let her go without an explanation. And she couldn’t give a good one.
Too much deceit and lies were happening right now. She didn’t know who those four guys were or who they worked for, but that one tank of a guy looked like the muscle. Yet the blond guy she had shared a quick gaze with, so far, by the intelligence she saw in his eyes, she guessed he had an analytical mind. She just wasn’t sure whether they were good guys or bad guys at this point.
She debated rolling under the truck beside her—the only way she could nearly disappear. Even then, the blond guy looked like the kind who would know to check if she were hiding there. She finally stood, after ten long minutes, and popped her head up to look cautiously around. When she saw no sign of anybody, she breathed a heavy sigh of relief. Then turned to slip away between the two vehicles.
And came up hard against a big chest. Instantly she knew who it was. She tried to evade him, only to have hands come down around her arms. Just as she went to kick him in the shin, she was spun sideways and pinned against the vehicle. His grip made sure she couldn’t possibly get away, yet was also gentle.
“Saul? Find anything?”
“A woman, hiding around the corner, watching us from up front, but bolted when she saw me,” he told the man behind him. “Not certain who she is, but I’m pretty damn sure she’s keeping watch on the building.”
A man, almost the same size as Benji, said, “Bring her over here.”
Slowly, reluctantly, she was walked over to where the three other men stood. She frowned at them. Attitude wasn’t much of a weapon, but it was about all she had right now. She’d been known to wield it with such finesse that even her mother stopped arguing with her. “Do you always go around attacking people?” she asked them in general.
“Nobody attacked you,” one of the other men said gently. “But, if you’re involved in the disappearance of Daniel Longmire, then that’s an entirely different story. We’ll be taking you to the police station to discuss it in greater detail.”
She could feel the panic flooding her. “I had nothing to do with his disappearance.”
“Interesting. So you know Daniel then?” asked the man behind her.
She shrugged off his hold and turned to glare at him. “Yes, but not well. And I wouldn’t want to know Daniel any better. The man’s a piece of shit, and, if someone ran him over and tossed him in a ditch, I’d be okay with that.”
Chapter 2
If these men were Daniel’s friends, her comment would hardly win her any brownie points. She took a deep breath. “I need to find his ex-girlfriend, my best friend. She was at Daniel’s ten days ago, yet no sign of her since.”
“No sign of her in what way?” A dark-haired man stood in front of them with his arms over his chest. “As in she completely disappeared?”
“Exactly. She didn’t show up for work, and her mother hasn’t heard from her, and she didn’t call me. We talk every day, plus she calls her mom daily. She went to Daniel’s two Fridays ago. They had a huge fight. She called to tell me that she was leaving Daniel’s apartment, that she’d phone me when she got home and that we could talk later. She never called. I don’t think she made it home. I phoned the cops and filed a missing person’s report. Yet there’s been no sign of her for ten days. I know it has something to do with Daniel. I just want to find Tammy.”
“Did you see Daniel this last week?”
She turned to answer the man who had grabbed her. “I haven’t seen him since early last week.”
“Three days ago, last Friday night, Daniel spoke with his brother, Benji. Saturday they had plans to meet for a breakfast. Daniel didn’t show. Today’s Monday. There’s been no sign of Daniel recently.”
She nodded. “I got that much from Benji. This has been really hard on him. I’ve been dealing with this for over a week now, and still nobody’s come forth to help me.”
“What about the cops?” the tall dude asked with a hint of a French accent. “Surely they followed up.”
She shrugged. “They haven’t found anything. I believe they spoke to Daniel too. As far as I’m concerned, he probably did something to Tammy, packed up and got the hell out of here so he wouldn’t get caught.”
The four men exchanged hard glances.
“How well do you know Daniel?” she asked the group.
The men shook their heads, but the blond spoke to her. “Merk knows him, but the rest of us have never met him. Benji is our friend, so we’re trying to find his brother.”
She snorted. “When you find Daniel, I want to know what the hell he did to Tammy.”
The tank stepped forward and held out his hand. “I’m Stone. The four of us work for Legendary Security out of Texas. We meant it when we said we’re here to help Benji. So any information you can give us about Daniel will help us find him sooner, and the sooner we can ask him questions about Tammy’s disappearance.”
Rebel hesitated. She wanted to trust him, but she’d met way too many big hulking men who weren’t good guys, and four of them were with her right now, including the one standing to her side. She didn’t like how he had snuck so quietly behind her to catch her. “I’m Rebel,” she said in a low voice. “And you guys as a group are very intimidating.” Yet she thrust up her chin and glared at the tank, the biggest guy of them all.
The big man smiled at her and said, “But inside we’re just teddy bears.”
She narrowed her gaze at him and snickered. “Right.”
The other men introduced themselves, and she figured out the man who had caught her was Saul. Two were dark-haired. One was Merk who spoke with an accent, and this taller dark-haired guy w
as Dakota. “I’d love to get into his apartment and see if any of Tammy’s belongings are still there.”
“What would that tell you?” Saul asked.
She shoved her hands into her pockets and shrugged. “I don’t know. But if we don’t start looking, even more time passes without us finding anything, so the less chance we have of locating my friend, and that scares the crap out of me. Tammy is a sweetheart. She wouldn’t hurt anybody.”
“And yet she was with somebody like Daniel?”
At that Rebel shook her head. “They were together for a couple months. She broke it off about a year ago. Then maybe a month ago, he contacted her again. I told her to stay the hell away from him as Daniel was just bad news for her.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because a year ago he was living with the mother of his child,” she snapped. “Yet persuading another woman how he was single, free and available.” Rebel shook her head. “Tammy doesn’t need a lying rat like that.”
“That’s part of the issue for us, since Daniel has not contacted his son or the mother of his child or his brother either.”
At that she frowned. “Is Daniel in contact with his son normally?”
Saul nodded. “All the information we have says he’s a very involved father.”
She snorted. “That would be the first good thing I’ve heard about him.”
Merk spoke up. “We also understand his apartment is completely empty. Furniture, personal belongings gone. It’s been scrubbed from top to bottom.”
She stared at him with a gasp. “What?”
“While watching this building for the past several days, you didn’t see any moving vans or any furniture coming and going?” Merk asked. “No sign of Daniel packing up and getting out of here?”
“It was the end of the month, a normal time to move in or to move out. So people have been coming and going. I took this last week off to find Tammy,” she confessed. “A couple people were moving …” She pressed her lips into a tight thin line. “I haven’t seen Daniel though.”
“Have you ever been in Daniel’s apartment?” Saul asked.
She shook her head. “No, I haven’t, so I don’t know what it would normally look like.” She pulled her phone from her pocket and brought up an image. “This is Tammy.” She passed it around for the men to look at. “She’s twenty-eight. She’s my height, red hair, and has lots of freckles with a bouncy personality, tiny and very smart.”
“What did she do?” Stone asked.
“Computers. She worked with Daniel.”
“What company was it?” Merk asked.
She named the big telecom company that she, Tammy and Daniel all worked at. “I’m in the marketing department. Tammy was in programming.”
“Did she mention any irregularities at work or that she was worried about other coworkers?” Merk asked. “Anybody bothering her? Anybody have any reason to hate her?”
The questions came so fast at her that she struggled to answer. “No, she was happy at work. She didn’t say anything as far as I know. Nobody hated her. She’s beautiful inside and out.” Rebel shook her head. “She’s unlike me in a lot of ways. I can be a bitch. Where she would be all sweetness, I’d be the lemon punch. If she sees a puppy running loose, she’ll pick it up and bring it home, and I’d be the kind of person who would say the owner probably beat it, and we should take it to a shelter to see if it’s injured. She saw sunshine, whereas I would always see the clouds.”
As her anger dissipated, her voice thickened with tears. She reached up and pinched the bridge of her nose, getting control of herself. “I don’t know what the hell happened to Daniel, and I don’t have a clue what happened to Tammy. But two people disappearing who are that closely connected—at work and socially too—can’t be a coincidence. The disappearances have to be related.”
The men nodded. “In that case, you stay with us,” Merk said. “We’ll find out more if we stick together.”
She stared at them, assessing them again. “I have an apartment. It’s not very big, but it’s mine. I’m not going anywhere with you guys.”
Saul spoke for the first time in a long time. “How about to a nice public restaurant for a meal or at least coffee? And we can talk.”
On cue her stomach growled. She frowned.
Saul asked, “When did you last eat?”
She wrapped her arms around her stomach and shook her head. “How is it that I’m supposed to eat when, for all I know, Tammy’s injured and hasn’t eaten for a week?”
“It’s a great sentiment,” Saul said, “but, if you don’t look after yourself, you can’t look after Tammy when we find her.”
Maybe she was swayed by the conviction in his voice that they would find her … Maybe the deciding factor was that these men looked like they could handle whatever life threw at them, or maybe she was just so damn desperate to have someone care that she believed them capable of getting to the bottom of this nightmare. She knew she couldn’t do it alone. She stood for a long moment and then nodded. “Let’s find a quiet place where I can grab some food and some coffee, and I’ll fill you in on what I do know.”
*
It never ceased to amaze Saul how a simple-enough case could blow into something so much bigger. It often happened when he was out on missions and especially since he had started working for Levi. It always seemed to be the same. They had come to look for Daniel, but now they found a woman missing too.
Rebel had brought up another possibility they hadn’t considered. Maybe Daniel had lost his temper and done something to Tammy. What if he’d killed this poor woman, then realized he would be an immediate suspect and bolted to save his own hide? Set it up to look like he just disappeared or had been kidnapped, anything he could do to erase the stain of his guilt from the public eye. Then he could avoid being charged for the crime. At least for a while.
Saul walked toward his jeep. They were staying at Richard’s, and Foster had offered them one of Richard’s cars, but, as soon as Saul had arrived, he’d grabbed his own wheels. He hadn’t yet had a chance to get his vehicle to Texas.
Everybody got in, keeping Rebel in the middle of the back seat. He went to a popular coffee chain that served food and pulled into the rear parking lot.
They went in and sat around a table in the back corner. After everybody had ordered food and coffee had been delivered, Rebel said, “Tammy’s relationship with Daniel started about fifteen months ago. He pursued her at work. She was initially flattered, thinking he was the best thing since sliced bread.” Her voice belied her inherent distrust, as if she couldn’t believe her friend had fallen for Daniel’s used-car-salesman’s schmooze.
“But it didn’t last. Doesn’t take too long for the shiny to become tarnished, and she realized he was getting too close to her—to her work. She hung on for a little bit, figuring out what he was up to. And then got in trouble herself when some errors were made through her log-in. She’d been blamed, even though she had protested. She managed to squeak through that with her job intact, but she quickly changed all her passwords and then set about hunting down who did what and used her to do it. Because she was very meticulous with her coding, she also knew other coders’ work. She told me how she thought Daniel was the culprit. And that was the reason he’d been acting nice to her. What she didn’t know was why he was doing it. It was the kind of prank he loved though.”
She shook her head. “Tammy wouldn’t have anything to do with him for quite a while after that, and she made a point of changing her log-in every day before she left the office. Everything nonsequential, nothing anybody could hack easily. Of course, programs are always out there that can hack anything. But she had security set up to ensure it wouldn’t be easy. Plus other people were getting into trouble when the same thing happened to them. She said, since she’d been the first one blamed, nobody had believed her at the time. But with three different employees saying somebody hacked their passwords and had adjusted codes, making it look like the
y’d been the ones doing the sloppy work, the company set up new security. And all those issues stopped.”
She glanced over the men. “To me that meant the person who’d been doing the hacking, changing the coding, was inside the company. He had to know that the security had been upped and that, if he did anything else, they would know who it was.”
A couple men nodded, and Stone said, “Did the hackers continue to try to get in?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know all the ins and outs of programming, but the hacking stopped.”
“What possible reason would there be for making errors in her code?” Merk asked.
“Tammy thought, at the time, it was because they’d been fighting, and he wanted her fired.” Rebel stared at her hands. “He was like that back then. Very small-minded, looking for revenge. Tammy says he’s changed, but I doubt it. As to whether he’d been the one hacking all the others in the office?” She raised her eyebrows, tilted her head. “I don’t know why he would’ve.”
“Unless it was just that he could?” Saul asked. “Maybe he had problems with those people at work?”
“Who knows?” She shrugged. “Anyway, Tammy didn’t have a whole lot to do with him after that. She kept her distance at work and never saw him socially. About a month ago he stopped by her desk, all friendly again. He brought her fresh flowers, telling her how sorry he was, that he had taken the last year to get his shit together. He’d separated from his ex-girlfriend, was seeing his son all the time, and he was a different man.”
“Tammy believed him?” Saul asked.
“No, not at first. But he worked on her daily. She started to wonder if maybe he had changed. They went out to a movie, spent some time in the park, just little test-the-water type of dates. She was hesitant to go much further than that.”
“Were they in a relationship before she disappeared?” Dakota asked.
