Every Precious Thing (A Logan Harper Thriller) Read online

  How the hell did that happen?

  Erica was the one who found the note. When she read it, she’d come very close to ripping it up on the spot. Extreme self-control was the only thing that helped her return it to its envelope.

  It had taken her over two years to find Diana again. Two years! Once she had, she’d sent Frisk out to monitor her, with the hope that Diana would lead them to the other one. But then tonight, while Frisk slept, Diana had skipped town.

  Incompetency!

  Frisk was lucky she didn’t have him killed on the spot. Once more her cool nature prevailed, and all four of them retreated to her car where they would wait and see what happened.

  Now, for the thousandth time since the sun had risen, she looked down the street at Diana’s duplex.

  “You all right?”

  Erica glanced at Frisk in the passenger seat. “I’m fine.”

  “You look a little…pissed off.”

  She locked eyes with him. “Really? And that surprises you?

  “No…I…I—”

  “Company,” Clausen announced, pointing between the front seats and out the window. He and Markle were sitting in the back.

  A Jeep Cherokee had just pulled to a stop in front of the duplex. Momentarily forgetting her anger, Erica watched as two men exited the car and walked up the pathway to Diana’s place. One of the guys was probably not much more than thirty, while the other was older and harder to pin down.

  She wondered if one of them was the landlord mentioned in Diana’s note.

  “You want us to get in closer?” Clausen asked.

  “Do it,” she said, nodding.

  Clausen and Markle got out of the car and disappeared into the neighborhood.

  “Maybe I should go, too,” Frisk suggested.

  “You stay here.”

  At the house, the two new arrivals stepped over to the door, then the younger one took a quick look around the street, obviously making sure no one was watching. Erica froze as the man’s gaze moved in her direction.

  “Hold still,” she ordered Frisk.

  Given the distance, the guy wouldn’t be able to discern them from the rest of the car if they remained motionless. Apparently satisfied, the man pulled something out of his back pocket—a piece of cloth or paper— and used it to cover his hand as he grabbed the doorknob.

  That certainly wasn’t landlord behavior.

  She watched the men step inside the house. Their visit wasn’t a long one. When they came back out, the younger one was carrying something that looked very much like the envelope Diana had left behind.

  Erica called Clausen.

  “Yes?” he answered, his voice low.

  “Where are you?”

  “In the backyard.”

  “You don’t have to whisper. They’re getting into their car.”

  “I thought it sounded too quiet in there.” Clausen’s voice returned to normal.

  “I think they took the note. Check, then meet us back at the motel.”

  “Will do.”

  Erica waited until the other car left, then pulled onto the street to follow them.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  INSTEAD OF MAKING Logan and Dev go through the documents there, Hackbarth let them photocopy everything so they could walk out with their own set. Once they finished, they headed for Mary Ralston’s place.

  It turned out she lived in a trailer park in the northwest corner of town. Surprisingly, it was the most well-maintained neighborhood Logan had seen in Braden, the trailers showing little sign of the wear and tear the nearby permanent homes displayed.

  Mary Ralston’s place was a white double-wide right in the middle of the park. Since there was no car in the driveway, Logan thought she might not be home, but as Dev turned off the engine, the trailer door opened, and a woman around Dev’s age stuck her head out.

  “So are we going all Sopranos again?” Dev asked. “Or trying something different?”

  “I guess that depends on whether or not our friend Mark Hackbarth has called and told her about us.”

  It turned out that Hackbarth had called, but hadn’t said anything about Logan and Dev, just that Diana had left town.

  “I figured it was going to happen someday,” Mary said. She was sitting in a cloth-covered recliner, while Logan and Dev sat on the couch. “Diana’s always been kind of the restless sort.”

  “How long had she been in Braden?” Logan asked.

  “About two years now. She and I, we’ve had our differences on occasion, but she’s a hell of a bartender.”

  “Did she work for you the whole time she was here?”

  “Yep. I ran an ad in the local paper. She called me up, I tried her out, and that was that.”

  “So she was here before she got the job,” Logan said, thinking the woman had misunderstood him.

  Mary shook her head. “No. She called me from somewhere in Arizona, I think. Can’t remember exactly. Think she said she found the ad on the paper’s website.”

  “She have any friends here you know of?”

  “A few different people. Lately she’d been hanging around with Tessie Carter, I think.”

  Logan typed the name into a note on his phone, then accessed the picture of Sara. “Have you ever seen this woman before?”

  Mary looked at the picture for a second, then glanced around until she spotted a pair of glasses on the coffee table. “Can you hand me those?” she asked Dev.

  Dev passed them to her. “Here you go.”

  “Thank you. My close-up vision is shot. Growing old sucks sometimes.”

  “Tell me about it,” Dev agreed.

  She gave him a smile, and looked back at the picture.

  “You might have seen her with Diana about two years ago or so,” Logan suggested.

  “She is familiar.” She continued to examine the photo. “Wait, wait. There was this…friend who visited her from out of town. What was her name?” She stared at the floor for a moment. “Sandy? Sally. I don’t know. Something like that.”

  “Sara?” Logan suggested.

  “Maybe.” She pointed at the picture. “That could be her, but I’m not a hundred percent.”

  “And you haven’t seen her since then?”

  “No. Don’t think so.”

  “You see anyone else with them at the time?”

  She thought for a moment. “If I did, I don’t remember.”

  “Is there anything else about Diana that might help us find her? Something she might have said? Family she might go to?”

  “No family that I know of. Certainly none in Braden. She said her mom died a few years ago, but otherwise…” She shrugged. “She’s a pretty private person. Never really talked much about herself.”

  Logan hesitated, then said, “If you don’t mind me saying, you don’t seem as mad as I expected, given she just quit on you.”

  “Annoyed that I’ll probably have to cover a few shifts myself, yeah, but I can’t be mad at her. Diana’s a good person, but I always felt like there was something missing, you know, like she was looking for something that she would probably never find.”

  __________

  AS THEY WALKED to the car, Dev tossed Logan the keys. “You drive.”

  Logan gave him an odd look, but said, “Okay,” thinking that maybe Dev was just tired of being behind the wheel.

  But as they exited the mobile home park, Dev swiveled in his seat and stared out the rear window.

  “What is it?” Logan asked.

  Turning back around, Dev seemed to contemplate something. Finally he said, “I think someone might be following us.”

  Logan’s gaze flicked to the rearview mirror. “Who?”

  “There’s a gray sedan about a block back.”

  Logan searched the street behind them. “Okay, I see it. You sure?” The car was too far back for him to see the people inside.

  “No, I’m not. Have you seen how many gray sedans there are in this town?”

  “Then what make
s you think we’re being followed?”

  “It looks like the same one I saw when we visited the real estate place, and before that, not long after we left the woman’s house. But I don’t know.”

  Logan frowned. He considered making a few quick turns to see if the car was really tailing them, but decided doing that might scare the person off. If they pretended like they hadn’t noticed, and just kept tabs on the other car, there was a better chance they might learn something useful. He told Dev what he wanted to do, and the former Marine nodded as if he’d been thinking the same thing.

  Mary Ralston had told them Tessie Carter was working at the Wallace Wash Mini Market out near the interstate. As Logan pulled into the store’s small lot and parked, Dev positioned himself so he could see out the back without seeming too obvious.

  “There they go.”

  “They?”

  “There’re two people inside.”

  “Did either of them look this way?” Logan asked.

  “No. Kept facing straight.”

  “Recognize them?”

  Dev shook his head. “Never seen them before. A man and a woman, both white. Her hair’s cut short.” Dev touched his neck about halfway between his head and shoulder. “About to here. Think it’s brown. But she was driving, so harder to see. The guy’s hair was close-cropped, lighter, almost blond.”

  “How old?”

  “She could be anywhere from thirty to fifty. Sorry, best I can do. The guy’s younger, late twenties at most.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “They kept going straight through the next intersection, like they were going to get on the freeway.” Dev craned his neck. “Can’t see them anymore.”

  Maybe it was nothing. Braden was small, with only so many roads a person could use, and the route they’d just taken had been the logical route to the highway. They’d just have to see if the car showed up again.

  The Wallace Wash Mini Market was a kind of low-rent 7-Eleven—older shelves, worse lighting, and fewer choices. Behind the counter was a woman with vibrant auburn hair and too much black eye makeup. Her clothes of choice were a Lady Gaga T-shirt and a short black skirt.

  Logan caught Dev’s eye, then subtly motioned to the opening in the counter that allowed whoever was behind it to get out. With a single nod, Dev walked toward it as Logan grabbed a bag of beef jerky and approached the cash register.

  The woman took the bag, scanned it, said, “Anything else?”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  She stared at him, bored.

  “Are you Tessie Carter?”

  A spark in her eye. “I don’t know you.”

  “That’s right. You don’t.”

  She pulled back from the counter. “Then how do you know me?”

  Logan raised his hands in front of his chest, palms out. “I just want to ask you a few questions.”

  “About what?”

  “Diana Stockley.”

  “Did that bitch send you?” she spat. “You can tell her that if she wants to talk to me, she should have the balls to do it herself.”

  She moved toward the opening in the counter, but Dev was there, blocking her path.

  “What the hell?” she said. “Get out of my way!”

  “Diana didn’t send us,” Logan told her. “We’re trying to find her.”

  “Does it look like she’s here? Her place is on Sage Lane. Try there.”

  “We did.”

  “Well, then wait until she goes to work. The Hideaway. She starts at six.”

  “According to her note, she left town and isn’t coming back.”

  Logan’s phone buzzed in his pocket, but he ignored it.

  The anger on Tessie’s face morphed into disbelief. “What are you talking about? What note?”

  “The one she left her landlord. Said he could sell whatever was left in the house.”

  “No,” she said. “No, you’re wrong. She’s not gone. She probably just went on a trip.” She paused, her face hardening. “I don’t even know you. You’re probably lying.”

  “I wish I was, but I’m not. You can ask Mary Ralston. She’s the one who told us you were a friend of Diana’s.”

  “Mary…? No, no, you’ve got to be wrong. Diana wouldn’t leave, not without…”

  Suddenly she whipped around and grabbed the cell phone that was sitting on the back counter. She found a number and called it.

  “Mrs. Ralston?” she said a moment later. “Sorry to bother you. This is Tessie. Tessie Carter. Look, um, there’s some random guy here trying to tell me that Diana’s le—” As she paused to listen, her expression grew worried, then pained. “Are you kidding me?…No. No…All right. Okay…Okay.”

  She hung up, and absently set the phone back down. Her eyes began to lose focus, and she leaned against the back counter, seemingly forgetting they were even there.

  Logan and Dev shared a confused look. This was a much stronger emotional reaction than Logan had been expecting. It was almost as if—

  Oh, damn.

  He motioned for Dev to move out of the way so he could get behind the counter. He then stepped in next to her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize there was something going on between you.”

  “Well, there’s not,” Tessie blurted out. “Not anymore.”

  “What happened?”

  “That’s none of your business!”

  Logan paused. “We just want to talk to her. We think she knows a friend of ours we’re trying to find, a friend who’s in trouble. Diana might be able to point us in the right direction. That’s all. Anything you could tell us that will help us find her would be great.”

  “I told you, I have no idea where she is. I haven’t talked to her in almost two months.”

  Two months? “Is that when…?”

  “When we broke up?” She tried to sound accusatory, but the sadness that had taken over her face wasn’t selling it.

  “Yes,” Logan said.

  She dipped her head and nodded. “She…she started going out of town on her days off. That was usually our time, you know. When I asked where she’d gone, she’d give me some half-assed answer that I knew wasn’t true, so one day I followed her.”

  “Where did she go?”

  “All the way to Riverside, of all places.”

  The nape of Logan’s neck started to tingle. He didn’t trust his own voice, so he said nothing.

  “She met with this other woman there. I watched them have coffee, but when they left, I lost them in the traffic. I drove around for a while, but couldn’t find them again, so I came home. That night I asked her if she was seeing someone else. When she said no, I told her what I saw.” Tessie looked at Logan. “She totally freaked out. Told me she never wanted to see me again. She hasn’t talked to me since.”

  Not wanting to do so, but seeing little choice, Logan pulled out his phone and showed her the picture of Sara. “Is this the woman she met?”

  Tessie stared at the image, her eyes welling with tears. “Fuck,” she said to no one, then nodded. “They ran off together, didn’t they? God, I’m such an idiot.”

  Logan kept his voice soft. “I don’t think Diana was cheating on you with this woman. This is our missing friend,” Logan said, keeping his voice calm. He didn’t know if he was right, but he felt that he was. If Diana had been involved with Sara, then why hadn’t Sara been here with her?

  “I saw them together.”

  “You saw them getting coffee. That’s all,” he said. “Now think, Tessie. Do you know where Diana might have gone? Maybe she went back to where grew up?”

  “She never talked about her past. I got the feeling it wasn’t all that great.”

  “Were there any special places she mentioned? Places she liked to visit?”

  She was silent for a moment. “Buenos Aires. Said she wanted to live there someday. She…she talked about us going together.”

  Buenos Aires was a long way away, and if Sara was already there, he might as well pack up no
w and go home.

  “Anyplace else?”

  She thought about it, then shook her head. “Nothing that I can remember.”

  __________

  IF LOGAN WASN’T convinced before, he knew if he found Diana, Sara wouldn’t be far away.

  “Our friends are back,” Dev said.

  They were in the Cherokee again, with Logan once more in the driver’s seat. He looked in the rearview mirror. The same gray sedan was a block back, and Logan recognized the silhouettes of the driver and her passenger.

  He stuffed his hand into his pocket and pulled out the keys to the El Camino. “Here,” he said, handing them to Dev. “I’ll try to lose them for a few seconds near the motel. You jump out, but make sure they don’t see you.”

  Dev smiled. “Then I follow them.”

  “Exactly.”

  “They’re going to wonder why there’s suddenly only one of us.”

  “No, they won’t,” Logan said. “Lean your chair back as far as it will go, but take your time so they can see what’s going on. Then lie back, and get them used to seeing only me.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “READY?” LOGAN ASKED as they neared the motel.

  Dev grabbed the door handle. “Ready.”

  Logan checked the rearview mirror again. The other car was still a full block behind them.

  “Don’t worry about trying to catch up right away,” Logan told him. “Call me once you get going and I’ll tell you where we are.”

  Just beyond Desert Inn was a small intersecting street that was mostly blocked from view by one wing of the motel. Keeping their pace steady, Logan flipped on his turn signal so as not to alarm the other driver with any sudden movements.

  “Here we go.” He slowed through the turn. As soon as the building was between them and the sedan, he slammed on the brakes and shouted, “Now!”

  Dev shoved the door open and hopped out in record time. The second he was clear, Logan took off again, accelerating until he matched the speed he’d been traveling at earlier. In the mirror, he could see Dev race across the sidewalk and crouch behind a car parked at the curb. He’d barely ducked down when the sedan appeared around the corner.

  “Stay with me. Stay with me,” Logan muttered under his breath.