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 was 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 they’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.
“That is one of the odd things. Yes, but not sexually, at least I don’t think. He seemed to have straightened up, and she decided she would spend the weekend at his place. She packed an overnight bag. And, yes, we talked about it all week as to whether she should go or not, if she should stay with him. That first night she texted me, saying they had a rip-roaring fight, and she was leaving, and she’d call me when she got home. I waited and waited, but I never heard from her. I went to her place, and she wasn’t there. I found no sign she’d made it home. I phoned her. I texted her. I drove past Daniel’s place. I searched his building to see if I could find her, but there was just no sign of her.”
“How did she get to Daniel’s?” Saul asked.
“She took public transit,” Rebel said. “She didn’t drive, and San Diego is a big city with lots of ways to get around, so she didn’t bother to learn.”
“So it’s possible she was attacked on the way home?” Stone asked.
“It’s possible.” Rebel stared off in the distance. “I just wish I knew what happened.”
“Did you ask Daniel what the fight was about?” Merk asked.
Again she nodded. “I did. He said it wasn’t a fight. They just had a slight disagreement. According to him, when she left, she was totally fine. She just wanted to return to her place and think some more. He told me how he didn’t want to push her because he wanted her for long-term, not just short-term this time.”
“Did you believe him?” Saul asked.
“Hell no. The man’s a perpetual liar. I can’t believe anything that comes out of his mouth.”
Saul studied her. So far she appeared to be very forthcoming and open. “When did you go to the police?”
“I ended up at the police station about four o’clock that morning. I told them what had happened. They said they couldn’t open a missing person’s report for twenty-four hours. But they would see if any attacks were reported anywhere along her route, in case she ended up in the hospital and couldn’t give her name or had no ID on her. I phoned the hospitals and checked myself but found no Jane Does, and nobody with her general description was unidentified.” Rebel raised her coffee cup and took a sip. “I asked them to call if any petite redheads were admitted throughout that night at all.”
“What do you think happened to her?” Stone asked.
She eyed him carefully. For such a big man his voice was very gentle. “Of course I’m afraid she’s been murdered, but thinking that way would paralyze me. I have to consider that she’s okay, that she’s running from him and doesn’t want to contact anybody she cares about because she’s afraid we’ll get drawn into the mess with her—or she’s incapable of contacting any of us or she’s been taken prisoner somehow.”
The men stared at her. She had put a lot of serious thought into this, and, for that, Saul was pleased. “Sounds like you’re a very good friend.” Saul smiled.
“How good a friend am I when she’s not home where she belongs?” Rebel snapped. “I’d do anything to bring her back.”
Just then their food arrived. Saul waited until she started to eat, recognizing her frustration and temper mixed with hunger as she attacked her food with vigor. “You haven’t eaten for a couple days, have you?”
She looked over her fork and shook her head.
He knew the feeling. Nothing like having your whole world fall apart for you to look at life differently. If she wanted to find her friend, she needed to keep her wits about her; otherwise she’d end up in the hospital herself. “What can you tell us about Daniel?” Saul asked as he took a bite of his hash browns.
“At work, he’s the guy who does the least and gets most of the recognition. He’s the guy who somehow just shows up in all the brochures and promo because he’s got that well-put-together face and smile. But it’s kind of smarmy. He’s not my kind of guy. I hadn’t thought he was Tammy’s kind. He is very persuasive. Very much a ladies’ man, very smooth.”
“Why isn’t he your kind of guy?” Saul realized too late that he shouldn’t have asked that question, but it was already out, so he would ignore the men’s stares and wait to hear her answer.
“Loyalty, integrity and honesty. Those will always come above looks, schmoozy mannerisms and sweet talk for me,” she said. “Daniel has none of what matters.”
Saul studied her for a long moment. “You really don’t like him, do you?”
“I didn’t like him before. Now that I believe he’s involved in Tammy’s disappearance, I really hate him.”
So much truth rang through her voice that he believed her. The trouble was, it was the last thing they needed to hear.
“Did you do anything,” Mark asked, “such as threaten him, argue with him, set the cops on him? Anything that would have made him pack up and run?”
She froze, frowned and slowly put down her fork. “On that note, I don’t know. I certainly asked him about her at work, and he said he didn’t know what happened after she left his place. I talked to him, told him how I’d reported her missing, that he was the last person to see her alive, but Daniel said I was wrong about that. The last person to see her alive was the person who had kidnapped her or hurt her, and that hadn’t been him because, when she’d left, she’d been alive. I told him I would find out what happened, if it was the last thing I did on this planet, and, if he was responsible, I’d see he paid for it. His response was kind of odd. He said something about hoping that’s not the way it turned out, but, if it had to be, then it had to be.”
Saul stared at her. “I don’t like the sound of that.”
“At the time I didn’t think anything of it,” she confessed. “It just seemed like something he’d say, something to avoid suspicion, and I kind of glossed over it. I even wondered if Tammy would have been so depressed about their relationship failing so soon again that she’d committed suicide, but I dismissed it immediately as I knew she wouldn’t have.”
“So, when you talked to Daniel at his apartment, when he opened the door, could you see inside?” Stone asked.
She shook her head. “I met him in the lobby. I couldn’t go up to his apartment without a reason. And I couldn’t have him call the cops on me. I was hoping he would lead me to her, so I’ve been watching the building ever since.” She raised her hands in surrender at their looks. “I know. I know. But what else could I do?”
Saul leaned over and gently gripped her shoulder. “You did what you could. Now just ease back and let us think about this.”
She picked up her fork and stared at him again.
He said, “We’ll consider other options. Daniel has been missing forty-eight hours. The police have our missing person’s report, but, so far, nothing has shown up.”
“What about his car?” she asked. “He drives one of those muscle cars, all souped up. Black, I think. Like the one in that long-running TV show.”
“Supernatural?”
She nodded. “Looks something like that.”
“When did you last see it?”
“Months ago, when he arrived at work one day.”
“We can get the license plate easily enough.” Saul nodded and sent a text to Ice. Her response came back almost immediately, and he glanced at Stone. “Ice will look for it. She’s searching for any property he owns, in case he’s got a place to go underground.”
“Going underground won’t help him,” Rebel snapped. “Not if he’s done something to Tammy. I’ll make sure of that.”