Chapter 7
Rebel didn’t know what to do. How Tammy’s locket was in this vagrant’s shoe was a mystery she couldn’t deal with right now. She’d been shocked at the poor man’s fate, but to see that locket so out of place was so very wrong; she just had to get out of there.
She bolted down the dark stairs, knowing she was going at a speed that would guarantee a broken ankle if she stepped wrong. But she couldn’t hold herself back; she couldn’t stop herself from escaping here. She didn’t dare drive away because she needed the police to understand just how important this clue was. Tammy always wore that locket. She loved it. It was a connection to her mother, and her mother always wore a matching one.
All Rebel could think about was the fact that Tammy might be dead. She’d never willingly give up that necklace. And if the locket had been taken from her … Rebel just couldn’t let her mind keep going in that direction.
Once outside her wild flight slowed. The police were everywhere. One of the cops motioned to her. She gazed at him, not sure she could talk to him yet.
Suddenly a strong arm reached across her shoulders. She didn’t even jerk in surprise. She knew Saul’s touch. He led her to the police and introduced them both. She stayed silent, not knowing how to come down from this shock.
“The locket,” the policeman asked, “are you sure it’s from your friend Tammy?”
She nodded numbly. “She always wore it,” she whispered. “It was very precious to her.”
The policeman nodded. “We’ll take a statement from both of you. Can you come down to the station tomorrow morning?”
She shuddered and then nodded. “I can.”
“That sounds best for us as well,” Saul said. “The other men are upstairs with the body.”
The officer looked at her and said, “I’ll need your contact information and address. And please stay in town while we get to the bottom of this.”
She wrapped her arms around her chest and said, “I’m not going anywhere until I know where my friend is.” She gave him the information he’d asked for, thankful she didn’t have to stick around here for too much longer.
When she could, she walked over to her car, unlocked it and sat down in the driver’s seat. When the passenger side opened and Saul slid in beside her, she wasn’t surprised either. She locked her gaze on the building before her.
Despite her mad rush to escape that place, it was the one connection she had to Tammy, and it was so damn hard to leave it now. She also knew she couldn’t do anything else here. The police would check the entire building top to bottom. She already saw them setting up generators outside to give them the power needed to run the portable lights being carted inside. She could only hope Tammy’s body wasn’t lying discarded in a corner, unloved and forgotten by the world. A sob caught in the back of her throat. She placed her hand over her mouth and closed her eyes. She was close to the breaking point; she just didn’t dare do it now. She couldn’t drive under those conditions, and she didn’t want Saul to see her in that state regardless.
“What will you do now?” she asked.
“We’ll return to our temporary lodgings for the night,” he said quietly. “We’ll pick this up again in the morning.”
She shook her head. “You’ve only been here for part of a day. Look how much you’ve already shaken out of the woodwork.” She turned to look at him. “I’ve been trying since forever to find any information and got nowhere.”
“Sometimes it works out that way,” he said.
She stared at him wordlessly and then felt the resurgence of tears in the back of her eyes. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”
He reached over, grabbed her by the shoulders and gave her a gentle shake. “No. You can’t think that way.”
He tugged her into his arms and just held her. It seemed so long since anybody had been there for her that she wondered if it was okay to lean on him, even just for the moment. With everything else going on, myriad emotions boiled through her, overwhelming her. She burst into tears.
He never said a word; he just held her close.
When her emotional storm spent itself, she lifted her head, which had been tucked up against his shoulder, and stared out at the darkness. “I can’t stand to think she’s lying lost and broken somewhere, that somebody could have done something to her. She was so very special.”
He reached up gently and wiped the tears off her cheeks. “Don’t speak of her in the past tense. We have to keep up the hope that she’s alive.”
She nodded, settled back on her side of the car and wiped her tears. “I should go home and get some rest.”
“Yes, you should. It’s probably been days since you’ve had a good night’s sleep.”
“I haven’t slept.” She laughed. “How could I?”
“And again you’re no good to her if you can’t look after yourself.” He studied her face. “Let me drive you home. You’re in no shape to drive yourself.”
She stared down at her hands, still trembling in shock. She took a deep breath and told herself to smarten up. But her pep talk failed miserably.
A knock on the window on Saul’s side startled her. He rolled down the window, and Stone leaned in and said, “We’re ready to go to Richard’s.”
Saul nodded. “I’ll take her home. You want to follow and pick me up?” He motioned toward Rebel. “She’s in no shape to drive right now.”
Stone studied her face and then nodded. “We’ll follow you there.” He tapped the top of the car and walked over to Saul’s jeep with the keys in his hand.
Saul looked at her. “Okay?”
She nodded. She handed him the keys, and the two of them changed places. She watched as he started up her old car and reversed out of the alleyway. He handled the car with a competence she expected. With that, she settled back and let somebody else take care of her for once.
*
He couldn’t imagine she accepted help very often. Whether she knew it or not, she kept walls up and that worked most of the time. But she’d hit a personal limit. He’d seen it happen time and time again. Not only had she been fighting to find her friend but dead bodies were unsettling. Finding that locket was a huge step forward, but it was also a serious step backward in terms of understanding where her friend was. It did not mean she was dead, but, after ten days, with something like that showing up, it, … well, … was not a good sign.
Saul hadn’t wanted to leave the crime scene. He could only hope the police shared the information they found. He planned to go back in the daylight and see if he could find any evidence that Tammy had been in that building.
Plus he also would check out where the homeless man was known to hang out. Just because he was in the building at the end of his life did not mean Tammy had been there too. She could’ve been anywhere along his route. He could’ve taken the locket off her dead body for that matter. Or he could’ve seen it on the ground someplace where she might’ve been involved in a struggle. There were endless possibilities.
He drove to Rebel’s apartment. He knew the area well. He had friends living not too far from here. When he drove up in front of a large brick apartment building, he nudged her. “Is this your place?”
Startled, she looked at him, a dazed look in her eyes. “How did you know where I lived?”
“I heard you tell the policeman.”
She had a right to be suspicious. He just didn’t want her suspicious of him. She contemplated his answer; then she reached up and rubbed her face. “I’m sorry. I’m just not myself right now.”
He parked the vehicle, got out and walked around to her side of the car. She still sat in the passenger seat, staring at the building. She needed time to work through this. He opened her door and helped her to her feet. “Come on. Let’s get you inside.”
The jeep pulled up behind him. Saul and Rebel walked up to the entranceway, and she punched in a security code into the keypad on the wall. The door unlocked in front of them. He pulled it open and held it for her to walk through. The other three men waited in the jeep, watching. He gave them a half wave, walked her inside and to the elevator. He studied her carefully. He wasn’t sure she should be alone right now. “You have anybody you can call? Any other friends or family who could stay with you?”
She shook her head. “Only Tammy. I would call Tammy.”
Damn. That just triggered another memory of Tammy. Not that Rebel was likely to stop thinking about her best friend under these circumstances.
On the third floor the elevator door opened. He gently grasped her arm above the elbow, nudging her into the hallway. With the keys from her vehicle in his hand, he checked for an apartment key. Sure enough, he tried the door, and the selected key worked. He opened the door and led her inside.
And she froze. “What happened?”
His gaze sharpened. He kicked the door shut and put Rebel between him and the door. He pulled out his weapon with one hand and his phone with other, saying, “Get up here.”
He put away his phone and left her backed against the front door to search her destroyed apartment. He could see most of it from this vantage point but not enough to ease his concerns. Still he had to leave her to do a full sweep. Her kitchen table and the kitchen drawers were tossed to the ground. The living room couch cushions had been slashed open. He noted all this while running a timeline through his head. Had Tammy been kidnapped? Had she told them about Rebel? Or had whoever killed or kidnapped Tammy known that she and Rebel were best friends? Did Daniel tell the kidnappers that? Or did the kidnappers/murderers find Rebel lurking around Daniel’s apartment building too, just like Saul and his team did? That alone revealed Rebel had some deep connection to Daniel and/or Tammy. Were the women best friends enough that Rebel would hold something for Tammy?
He hadn’t even thought to question Rebel on that last aspect. But, with Tammy and Daniel both being in IT, espionage was not an unlikely leap. The fact that Daniel was suspected of hacking into his employer’s system and creating coding errors somehow played together. Saul didn’t understand how yet, but he would.
He made a quick sweep of the tiny one-bedroom apartment. By the time he made it back to Rebel—still leaning against the door, her face stricken—a knock at the door made Rebel jump. Saul checked the peephole and then let his friends in.
They stepped inside, took one look and Stone let out a low whistle. “Well, this is an interesting development.”
Something about his tone of voice and wording caught Rebel’s attention. She turned on him. “Interesting? This is interesting for you? This is destructive. This is horrific. This is my entire life here.”
Stone looked at her pointedly. “And yet you’re alive. So they knew you weren’t here. They went through your property, went through all your possessions. What were they looking for?”
Saul watched her face go blank.
Then her jaw dropped. “You think they were looking for something?” She shook her head in bewilderment. “Looking for what?” she cried out. “I don’t have anything. Hell, Tammy made way more money than I did. Why would they not destroy her place instead?” She stared at the men, her gaze going from one to the other and then back again. “Why me?”
Dakota stepped in. “That’s what we’ll find out. One of the first questions we need to know is did Tammy, at any time in the last few months, give you anything to safeguard for her?”
That was the very question Saul wanted answered; he stepped closer and peered at Rebel’s face, looking for any sign of subterfuge.
She stared at the men and shrugged her shoulders. “No, of course not. Why would she?”
“She could have found something damning at work, and she needed you to hold on to it, on the off chance something happened to her.”
She frowned, her focus remaining on the men. “She didn’t give me anything to hold or keep. I didn’t know of anything potentially dangerous in her world. She would’ve told me.”
“Did she feel the same way about you as you feel about her?” Saul asked quietly.
She turned her gaze to his. “Yes. We’ve been best friends since forever.”
“Maybe she wouldn’t tell you about this, seeing it would bring danger to your doorstep.”
He watched the wheels in her mind turn, and then a stricken look took over her face as she realized something. “That’s exactly what Tammy would do,” she whispered. “As I would for her.”
“And that’s why this is interesting,” Stone said. “Because this changes our avenues of thinking completely. Whoever came here was looking for something, for whatever reason, whether she told them or they assumed so because of your close association.”
“Or because Daniel told them,” she said bitterly. “He was always a troublemaker.”