Brett Battles - Little Girl Gone
Logan let this sink in for a second, but found it hard to believe a foreign government was kidnapping people in the U.S. “The man who attacked you wasn’t Burmese. He was Caucasian.”
Harp scoffed. “Probably just hired for the job.”
“I don’t know. It sounds too—”
“Crazy?” Tooney asked.
“But why kill you?”
“Elyse is the important one. Not me. Maybe I was just in the way.”
Logan hesitated. “What about the rest of your family? Have any of them been attacked, too?”
“They can’t get to Sein. She is in Europe with Khin and oldest daughter, Yon. The foundation that she work for give her with excellent security. Besides, Burma would want to quietly shut her up, not kill her. Her death would be international news and focus more attention on the country, not less.”
“Have you called her and told her about Elyse?”
“I wanted to know for sure he was not lying to me first. That’s what I’ve been telling myself, anyway. But the truth is that I know Sein won’t answer even if I do call.”
“You’re going to have to try and get a hold of her somehow.”
He looked ashamed. “I know.”
Logan paused for a second. “If Sein’s death would focus more attention on Burma, wouldn’t killing her daughter do the same thing?”
Tooney shook his head. “Elyse is not high profile like Sein. Her death could be made to look like anything. An accident, suicide, whatever they want. Besides, Sein would never let it come to that. They know this. Our children are always our weaknesses. She will do what they want so Elyse will live.”
“And if we call the police?”
“They will kill her now. Make her disappear so they can claim zero responsibility and avoid creating international incident. No one will ever know what happened. It is the only thing they can do.”
“What about your other daughter?” I asked.
“Anka’s married to an American. She has an American last name. That’s her protection. They would not want the kind of trouble they think might happen by hurting her.”
“Elyse is an American, too. Hurting her is going to cause just as many problems.”
“They won’t see it that way. To them, she is one hundred percent Burmese, like her mother, and her grandmother.”
Logan leaned back. “There’s no guarantee they won’t kill Elyse anyway.”
Tooney paused, then locked eyes with him. “One way is for sure, the other is…unknown.”
15
Logan didn’t call the FBI.
He didn’t promise Tooney he wouldn’t, but he did say he would think about it and let him know what he was going to do. But he knew even then that he wouldn’t make that call.
He wasn’t ready to buy the whole story yet. The idea of Burma—or Myanmar, as the leaders there preferred—reaching its hand all the way into the United States to pluck a twenty year-old college student off the street just didn’t sound right. Unless things had changed since he last checked, Burma had showed little interest in the world outside its borders. Would they even have the resources to pull something like this off? He had his doubts. But they weren’t strong enough for him to test the theory by calling the FBI.
Which meant he needed to find out what was really going on.
While Logan spent his morning at the police station, his dad and the others had unexpectedly done a little work for him and found the address of Elyse’s friend Lara Mendonca. They hadn’t, however, been able to further identify her other friend, Anthony.
Lara lived just south of LAX in an area called El Segundo. Her apartment was on the third floor in a generic box of a building, a block off of Imperial Highway.
Logan knocked, half expecting no one to answer. It was afternoon, and though Lara would be on spring break, he thought even if she were still in town there was a good chance she was out and about.
The door opened, and a woman about Elyse’s age and wearing a Starbuck’s Coffee uniform looked out. “Yes?”
“Lara Mendonca?”
“Yeah. Who are you?”
Logan tried not to let his sense of relief show as he said, “Logan Harper. You’re a friend of Elyse Myat’s, right?”
She looked at him, warily. “Yeah.”
“I’m a friend of her grandfather. Tooney.”
She continued to stare. “So?”
“Can I ask you a few questions?”
“It’s almost time for me to go to work. What kind of questions?”
“Well, Tooney’s concerned about her. She was supposed to visit him yesterday, but she didn’t show up. And now we can’t find her anywhere.”
The suspicion on her face immediately turned into concern. “Are you serious?”
Logan nodded. “When was the last time you talked to her?”
She looked away in thought. “The night before last. Yesterday she was supposed to go up to…” She looked at Logan again, testing him.
“Cambria,” he said. “To visit her grandfather.”
“Yes.”
“She didn’t make it.”
“Oh, God. Did you check the hospitals? Maybe she was in an accident.”
“We checked. No accident,” he said. “Could I come in for a minute? Might be easier than talking out here.”
She hesitated only a second, then nodded, and moved to the side so he could enter.
Unlike Ryan’s apartment, Lara’s place was furnished in a much more finished, post-college style—real paintings on the walls, furniture that didn’t look twenty years old, and no smell of stale pizza.
As soon as they were seated in the living room, he asked, “What was her mood like when you last talked?”
“Mood? Uh, fine, I think,” she said. “She was looking forward to getting out of town.”
“Any clue that she might have been thinking about going some place else?”
“Not that I can remember.”
“Any problems with her boyfriend?”
“Boyfriend?”
“Aaron Hughes.”
She snorted a laugh. “Aaron’s not her boyfriend. Who told you that?”
“Angie.”
Her laugh this time was even louder than the first. “I don’t think Elyse would ever talk to Angie about her love life. She and Aaron went out once, I think, but that was it. She thinks he’s kind of odd, and not in a good, Jesse Eisenberg kind of way. Elyse does sometimes spend the night here. Maybe that’s what Angie was thinking.”
That pretty much confirmed what Logan already suspected. Aaron was not Elyse’s boyfriend, and Angie was not trustworthy. “How long have you known Elyse?”
“Three years this coming summer. We started school together.”
He looked around the room. “You live here alone?”
“Why?” she asked, her guard coming back up.
“Sorry,” Logan said quickly. “Just curious. That’s all. You don’t have to tell me.”
She allowed herself to relax a little. “My sister. We share this place. She’s a CPA.”
He smiled. “I was wondering how you could afford to furnish your place like this on a student salary. It’s certainly nothing like Ryan’s apartment.”
She gave him an odd look. “Ryan?”
“Elyse’s neighbor?” he said. “That’s where Angie was when I went by last night.”
She shook her head and shrugged. “I guess I’ve never met him, but we don’t really hang out much over there. Not since Angie showed up, anyway.”
“How long has she been there?”
“She moved in over winter break. Three months now, I guess.”
Only three months?
“Thanks,” he said, feeling the sudden need to have his talk with Angie as soon as possible. “I appreciate you giving me a little time.”
“Hold on,” she said as he started to rise. “You haven’t told me what’s going on. Is she really missing?”
He tried to sound reassuring. “I think her grandfather’s probably being a little over cautious. I’ll bet it turns out she decided to go someplace like Vegas or San Diego on a whim.”
Lara looked less than convinced, but she didn’t argue the point.
Logan wrote his number on a page from his notebook, and gave it to her. “Please call me if you hear from her.”
“Can I use your pen?”
He handed it to her.
She tore the page in half and wrote her info on the blank piece, handing it back to him when she was done. “And you call me if you hear from her.”
“I will,” he promised. “One last thing. I understand that Elyse had another friend, a guy named Anthony? Do you know who that is?”
“Sure. Anthony Hudson. We’re all friends.” She was quiet for a moment, then her eyes brightened. “Hey, they were supposed to have dinner the night before last. He would have seen her.”
“Do you know where I can find him?”
“His apartment’s maybe a half mile from Elyse’s.”
He gave her back the piece of paper, and she added Anthony’s address and cell number to it.
“Thanks, again,” he said.
• • •
Logan found a parking spot almost directly in front of Angie and Elyse’s building, then ran into the courtyard and up the stairs to the second floor breezeway. He was almost to their apartment when he suddenly stopped, the soles of his shoe screeching against the concrete surface.
There were no curtains covering the windows of Ryan’s apartment. The ratty furniture, the television, even the pizza boxes, they were all gone. The place was as spotless as Aaron’s place had been the night before.
Logan stared inside for a moment, then sprinted the rest of the way to Elyse’s place. The curtains were closed, which he took for a good sign as he pounded on the door. When no one answered, he knocked again, then tried the doorknob. Locked.
Angie must have gone out.
He thought for a moment. Anthony’s place was only a half-mile away. Logan could see if he was home, and probably be back in less than thirty minutes. Maybe by then, Angie would have returned.
It took him longer to find a parking spot than it took to drive over. Anthony’s apartment was at the back of his building on the first floor off an interior hallway. There were no windows, so Logan couldn’t see in.
He rang the doorbell, then knocked several times. But, like at Angie’s, there was no response.
He contemplated what he should do, then decided to go around back and take a peek through Anthony’s windows, just to make sure it wasn’t another empty apartment.
He found an exit, but was surprised when he had to take a staircase down to reach the back alley. The reason for this became clear as he stepped outside. The building had been erected on the side of a small rise. The architect had used this to his advantage, and built a carport into the lower part of the slope, below the first floor. Unfortunately, this meant he couldn’t simply walk up to Anthony’s window and peer in.
He examined the back of the building. The last foot of the carport stuck out like a lip just below the first floor. If he could get on that, he could work his way over to Anthony’s windows. The question was, how to get up there?
The simplest answer turned out to be his El Camino. He drove it around, then backed it most of the way into one of the empty parking spots, leaving the hood sticking out from under the carport. Carefully, he mounted his car, then pulled himself onto the lip.
Making an educated guess as to which windows belonged to Anthony’s place, he inched his way over. There were no curtains over the nearest of the target windows, but when he looked in, he saw with relief a very lived-in looking living room.
As he moved down to the next window, he noticed that the screen covering it was hanging loose in one corner of its frame. Somebody had cut a triangle flap large enough for a person to fit through.
Logan looked inside. It was a bedroom. And unlike the living room, it was occupied. There was a man lying on the bed, his right arm flopped on the pillow beside his head. But what caught Logan’s attention was the Berretta pistol lying inches from the guy’s hand, and the impossible-to-miss hole in the side of his head.
He would have preferred it if the place had just been empty.
He thought it was a pretty good chance the dead man was Anthony. According to Lara, he’d been the last to see Elyse. Did that mean she was in the apartment, too? As much as he’d rather not, he knew he was going to have to check.
He pulled the sleeve of his jacket over his hand, then put it through the cut in the screen, and up against the window. With just the slightest of pressure he was able to slide it open. He then looked both ways down the alley to make sure no one was watching, then slipped inside.
Immediately, he started to gag.
The smell of rot and death hung in the room like a thick fog. He threw a hand over his nose, and quickly ran into the hallway.
The stench was there, too, but not quite as strong. He did a quick sweep of the rest of the apartment to see if there were any more bodies, but, with a definite sense of relief, he found none.
Returning to the bedroom, he took a couple of T-shirts out of the dresser. He used one to cover his nose and mouth, then wrapped the other around his hand so he could pat down the body.
The dead guy had a wallet in his front pocket. Logan worked it out, then carefully opened it. A driver’s license sat behind a clear window in the front. The name on it read: Anthony Hudson. Logan put the wallet back.
The position of the gun, Anthony’s hand, it all pointed to suicide, but with the way things had been going, suicide was not a conclusion Logan was ready to jump to. Besides, the unlocked window and cut screen bothered him. Could be he had a cat that used it, but, if so, where was it now?
What surprised Logan most was that no one had heard the shot. In most of the apartment buildings he’d ever lived in, someone was always complaining about hearing their neighbors through the walls. A gunshot from the Beretta should have been heard not just by the people next door, but also by people in the buildings that lined the alley. And since this was the middle of a big city, no matter what time the trigger had been pulled, someone would have been home. But by the look of the wound and the smell, Anthony had been lying there dead for at least a day, if not more.
Logan scanned the room, looking for a note somewhere, but there was none.
…death could be made to look like anything. An accident, suicide, whatever they want…
Was this not what it appeared? There was no way for Logan to know for sure, but it certainly felt that way.
Instead of going out the window, he used the front door, then circled around to the alley like he had before, and got back into the El Camino.
He knew he should call the police. But if he did it from his cell phone, they’d record his number, and know who he was. He couldn’t have that. He’d lose too much time down at the station trying to explain why he’d found the body, and given the suspicions Detective Baker already had, it was possible they would even lock him up for a few days. He could always find a pay phone, but those were few and far between anymore, and you never knew where a security camera might be aimed.
