Power Play

He didn’t for one minute think Kellie was the type of employee that was a no-call, no-show problem. She worked two jobs. She’d gotten a damn doctorate in geosciences. On her own dime. Next to the word responsible in the dictionary was her picture.

He pulled out his phone, found his contacts where he entered the number Anthony had provided and clicked on it. It went directly to voice mail. “This is Trey Riker. I stopped in at Lavender and you weren’t there. Call me, please.”

He called the number again. To voice mail again. He did not leave a second message. He pulled out of the lot. The drive that had taken fourteen minutes last night took almost twice that now. By the time he arrived at the two-story brick apartment building, he had imagined several different horrible scenarios.

He parked on the street and verified that her old gray Toyota was still in its parking place. Then he went in the front door and took the elevator to the second floor. He knocked on her door. No answer. He turned the knob. Locked. No problem—nothing that couldn’t be handled with a credit card. He was prepared for the bolt lock to also be engaged but it wasn’t.

He opened the door and caught his breath.

The apartment was trashed. Furniture upended, books and other items dumped from the five-shelf bookcase. The drawers of the entertainment center had been ripped out, the contents emptied onto the floor, and holes punched through the cheap bottoms.

Terribly afraid of what he was going to find, he moved through the apartment. It was a one bedroom, one bath. The bedroom was in a similar state, with the mattress and box spring tossed around and slashed and everything pulled from the closet. But there was no Kellie. Not on the bed, under the bed or in the closet.

She was gone. What the hell did that mean?

He was going to have to call Anthony. The man deserved to know what had happened. Then the police.

His cell rang, a number he didn’t recognize. “Riker,” he answered.

“This is Hagney, from Lavender. I’ve thought about what you said and I might know a little something.”

He was going to take a chance. “Did you know that her apartment was trashed?”

The man sighed, loudly. “No, but she suspected that someone was there.”

Suspected? Her door had not been damaged or tampered with. No way to imagine the chaos inside. Yet she’d suspected? That didn’t make sense. But he needed to focus on what was most important. Hagney had lied when he’d said she’d been a no-call, no-show. He had definitely talked to her. “Where is she?” Trey demanded.

“I don’t know for sure. But she came to my house last night. Said that she had to get out of town for a couple days and needed some cash. I had a couple hundred bucks and gave it all to her. Then I dropped her off at the bus station.”

She had a car. Why the hell wasn’t she driving it? “Where was she going?”

“She didn’t say.”

There couldn’t be that many buses leaving Vegas at that time. He could figure this out. “Why did she need to leave town?”

“I really don’t know. She wouldn’t say, said it would be better if I didn’t know. Told me not to tell anyone, but I’m worried because I think she was really scared. After ten-plus years as a bartender, I’m a pretty good judge of people and I don’t think you want to harm her. I hope to hell I’m not wrong.”

“You’re not,” Trey said. “I tried her cell phone. It went right to voice mail.”

“She left her phone with me, with the battery out.”

The only reason she would have done that was because she was afraid that somebody would use the phone to track her. Who? The people who had ransacked her apartment?

He needed a better timeline. She’d walked out of Lavender at 2:30. She’d been back to her car by shortly after 3:00 which meant that she’d likely arrived home by 3:15 or so. He knew her car had been parked in the carport at 3:28 when he’d cruised by. “Did she walk to your house?”

“Yes,” Hagney said. “She was cold. I gave her one of my wife’s sweaters.”

“What color?” Trey asked automatically.

“Pink. A cardigan.”

“Okay. What’s your address?”

Hagney gave it to him and Trey quickly plugged it in and mapped the distance between Kellie’s apartment and Hagney’s place. His phone said it would take forty-six minutes to walk there. Of course, she could have taken a cab, but if she was cold when she arrived, the likelihood was that she’d hoofed it. His gut tightened at the thought of her being outside in the middle of the night, easy prey for any of the many crazies out and about at that time. “Hagney, what time was it when she arrived? The more exact, the better.”

Hagney sighed. “I didn’t look at a clock but I think I’d only been in bed for maybe fifteen minutes. I wasn’t sleeping yet. I left Lavender at 3:30.”

“You know that for sure.”

“Yeah. I have an alarm on my phone. It rings and I’m out the door. That’s the agreement I have with my wife. A few times I got home when the sun was coming up and she wasn’t too happy about that.”

“What’s your drive time?”

“That time of the morning, it’s twenty minutes.”

“How long were you home before you went to bed?”

Hagney laughed. “Like a minute. I’m beat at the end of a shift.”

Trey did the math. Hagney had arrived home around three fifty, gone straight to bed and believed Kellie had knocked about fifteen minutes later. That would have been 4:05. That made sense. If she’d run from her apartment around three twenty and it was a forty-five-minute walk, the timing worked, give or take a couple minutes. Close enough that he was satisfied she hadn’t gone anywhere else besides straight to Hagney’s house.

“How long were you at your house before you took her to the bus depot?”

“Not long. Maybe five minutes.”

Trey pulled up the address of the bus depot and mapped it to Hagney’s house. Eighteen minutes. Probably less at that time of the morning. Now, he just needed to figure out where she’d gone from there. “Thank you for calling,” Trey said. “I mean that. And if you do happen to hear from her, tell her to call me right away.”

“What are you going to do?” Hagney asked.

“Go after her,” he said. He hung up but didn’t put his phone away. Instead, he dialed Anthony’s cell phone. It rang four times and went to voice mail. He did not leave a message. He found his office number and dialed.

“Dr. McGarry’s office. How may I help you?”

“Dr. McGarry, please.”

“This is Dr. McGarry’s answering service. May I take a message?”

Of course. It was a Saturday night. His office receptionist wouldn’t be working. “I need to reach Dr. McGarry,” he said.

“One moment, please.”

He waited, thinking of the best way to tell his friend that his sister was in trouble.

“I’m sorry,” the woman said, coming back on the line. “Dr. McGarry’s status is that he’s unavailable for the next six hours.”

“But—” Trey said. He wasn’t answering his cell and wasn’t taking calls through the answering service. Based on past experience, Trey knew that he was likely in surgery.

“I’m sorry. One of his partners is taking calls if you need to speak to a physician immediately.”

“No. Thank you. I’ll call back.” He hung up.

In six hours, he better have found her.

The next call he made was to Rico. They weren’t high-priced physicians but each week, one of the partners was also on call, in the event that there was an after-hours emergency. They had a gentlemen’s agreement that if anybody was going to be suddenly unavailable or out of commission for any reason, they needed to let the on-call person know.

“Anything I can do to help?” Rico asked after Trey gave him a brief rundown.

“Yeah,” Trey said. Rico could data mine better than anybody in the company. “There is. Get me everything you can on Kellie McGarry. Age twenty-eight or twenty-nine. Not sure of her birth date. Moved to North Las Vegas about six months ago.” Information was power and Kellie had just given up all rights to privacy.

On one hand, he was incredibly happy that Kellie had escaped the destruction at her apartment. But he was really frustrated that instead of calling him for help, after he’d just offered it hours earlier, he was now chasing after her. What the hell kind of trouble could she be in and where could she be headed?

He knew that the right thing to do was contact the police about the damage at Kellie’s apartment. But that could delay him for hours. Instead, he simply turned the lock on the door and closed it behind him, leaving it how he’d found it. He walked out the front door of the building, toward the carport. He wanted a better look at her car.

From the outside it appeared fine. But when he looked inside, he immediately saw that the glove compartment door, which had been shut last night when he’d watched her get in her car, was now hanging open. She could have opened it, of course. But given the damage in her apartment, he thought it very possible that someone had been in her vehicle. He saw no obvious signs of entry but it was easy enough to get into a locked car with the right tools.

He put two fingers under his shirttail and then tried the door. It was unlocked. Last night, he’d watched her use her fob to unlock her car. For most people, especially people who lived in places where their car wasn’t in a secured spot, it was habit to lock the doors. He suspected it was her habit.

But if he was right and somebody had searched her car, they hadn’t cared enough to lock up after themselves. Hadn’t cared enough to shut the glove compartment. They hadn’t been careful. Just like they hadn’t been careful in her apartment.

He walked back to his truck. Hagney had said he dropped her off at the bus station. Trey quickly used his phone to see the early morning bus schedule. There were a couple options. She could have headed north toward Reno or west toward Los Angeles. This was like looking for a needle in a haystack. His only option was to go to the bus station, see if there was anybody working now who had been working the previous night, and hope they remembered Kellie. Rico would verify there had been no credit card activity, but he wasn’t expecting any. She’d gotten cash from Hagney and that’s what she’d be spending.

When he got to the depot, it was busier than he’d anticipated. People coming and going into Sin City. What were the chances that somebody was going to remember her? Given that she’d purchased her ticket sometime around four thirty in the morning, that might help him. There had to be far fewer people traveling at that time.

There was no one at the information desk, so he had no choice but to wait in line to talk to a cashier. He was a young white man with an earring hanging from his nose. “My sister took a bus out of here really early this morning,” Trey said. “Maybe 4:30 or 5:00. It’s very important that I find her, a family emergency. Do you know who I might talk to who would have been working then?”

The young man shook his head. “Night shift comes on at seven. They all work twelve-hour shifts.”

Damn. That meant the same people weren’t working every night. Full-time employees probably worked three or four shifts a week. He had to hope that somebody scheduled for tonight had been here last night and that they had seen Kellie. “Okay,” he said. He had fifty minutes to kill. He walked back to his truck. Considered his options. He could call Rodney Ballure. After all, Kellie worked for him. He was a pompous moron with nonexistent morals but he would no doubt be concerned about Anthony’s little sister. But what had Anthony said the night before? Something along the lines that he didn’t think Kellie would be too happy if he involved Rodney in trying to reach her. She’d likely feel the same way if Trey reached out to Ballure now.

He really didn’t want to piss her off. He wanted to find her, ensure she was safe and convince her that whatever was the problem, he could help.

While he waited for the night shift to come on duty, he would go home and get better prepared for travel in the event it was necessary. He had a handgun in his truck, always carried it. But since he believed in being prepared, he’d also grab a rifle and lots of ammunition. Some clothes, too.

He drove fast, his mind reviewing the chaos he’d seen in Kellie’s apartment. It could have been random destruction but he was confident that somebody had been looking for something. And they hadn’t cared about being neat. They hadn’t cared that Kellie was going to know that somebody had been in her apartment.

Which meant that maybe they’d been there when she’d gotten home, waiting for her. That thought practically made him run his vehicle off the road.

But somehow, he didn’t think she’d gone inside. She’d told Hagney that she suspected somebody was inside. If she’d seen the destruction, she’d likely not been able to lie about it like that, she’d have been too shaken. So she’d seen something or heard something that made her think there was trouble inside. And headed right to Hagney’s house. There wasn’t any space in the timeline for her to dawdle or think about next steps.

Why the hell would she have thought her only option was to run? This had to be something serious. His first thought was drugs. Was she dealing? He just couldn’t see that. She was the picture of the all-American girl. She certainly wasn’t using. Too healthy.

Could it be more personal? Had she gotten involved with a married man and now the wife was causing her trouble? Maybe. But again, didn’t fit in his head.

Or had she gotten involved with a man and tried to break it off and was he now trying to convince her that she’d made a wrong decision. He knew it was a long shot but he picked up his phone and dialed a friend in the police department.

“Hi, Trey,” Gus Warren answered. “How’s it going?”

“Fine,” he said. “Hey, I’ve got a case and I just need to know what I’m getting myself into,” he said. “Can you tell me if there have been any police responses to 5331 North Maggie, Apartment 2C in the last six months?”

“Sure, hang on.” There was a few minutes of silence. “Nope. Nothing.”

“Any protection orders for a Kellie McGarry?”

Again, silence. “I got nothing,” Gus said.

Trey didn’t know if he felt better or worse. Everything was a dead end. “Great. Thank you,” he said.

“No problem. Call me when you want to lose some money at cards.”

“I’ll do that,” Trey said. He liked playing with Gus. He was a smart card player. Still, Trey very rarely lost to him.

He pulled into his driveway and quickly got out of his car. It took him less than five minutes to pack what he needed. He tossed everything into the bed of his truck, on top of the tools that he always carried with him. He made sure the top was affixed and then took off.

He drove directly back to the bus depot, pulling in at 7:05. When he walked in, he picked the shortest line to stand in. Finally got to the window and pulled up the text that he’d sent to Anthony. The middle-aged Hispanic woman looked at it. Eyes on sister. Was that going to be enough that she’d believe his story? Since it was all he had, he was going with it.

“I’m looking for my sister,” Trey said. “She bought a ticket very early this morning, probably around 4:30 a.m. We have a family emergency and must get in contact with her. Were you working last night?”

“I was,” the woman said, staring at the photo. “Such lovely hair.”

Trey discreetly slid a fifty dollar bill across the counter. The woman barely glanced at it before pushing it back in his direction. “I’m sorry, sir, but we’re not allowed to give out any information about passengers.”

“Our mother,” Trey said, “is dying. I have to let her know.”

The woman sighed. “Sorry. Are you buying a ticket or not?” she asked.

He shook his head. He would try the other windows. Maybe somebody would be swayed by the money. He stepped away and almost bumped into the young man with the nose ring who he’d spoken to earlier. “Sorry,” Trey mumbled.

“Hey, you came back,” the kid said. “You were looking for...”

“My sister.” He showed him Kellie’s picture.

“Right.” The kid looked smug. “She is pretty hot, I admit, and it probably takes some talent to have two guys running after her.”

Trey’s brain scrambled to catch up. “Two?” he said.

“Yeah. Fifteen minutes after you were in earlier, another guy came in. He talked to two other agents before he got to me. His also had a picture, although a different one, and his story was a little different, too. He said she was his wife, that they’d quarreled and he wanted to apologize. Even had a dozen roses with him.”

Kellie McGarry wasn’t married, he was confident of that. Somebody else was spinning stories and looking for her. A cold chill ran up the length of Trey’s spine.

“You get this man’s name?”

“Nope.”

“Got a description?”

The kid shrugged. “Thirty or forty, I guess. Brown hair. Maybe. I can’t really remember.”

“Tall or short?” Trey asked.

“About your height. Maybe your weight. You know, I got to get going. My ride is waiting.”

Trey wanted to press him for details but knew it was likely fruitless. Firsthand witnesses were notoriously bad at remembering pertinent details. “What did you tell him?” he asked.

“The same thing I told you. Nothing. Because I don’t know nothing. Good luck, man, whatever the truth is.” He walked around Trey and left through a door marked Employees Only.

There was little doubt in Trey’s mind that the man searching for Kellie was somehow connected to the damage at her apartment. Trey had known to come here because Hagney had told him. Who the hell else had he told?

He went back to his car and dialed the man’s cell. It rang four times before going to voice mail. “Hagney, this is Trey Riker. I really need to talk with you again. It’s important. Please call me back as soon as you get this.”

The man was no doubt busy with his bartending duties. His cell might not even be on him. Trey knew there were places that made their employees keep their cell phones out of customer areas.

Still, he tried twice more before deciding that he had no choice but to go back to Lavender. He was frustrated as he drove to the bar, weaving in and out of traffic, honking when other drivers didn’t get out of his way. He parked in a no-parking zone and ran up the stairs. Hagney was waiting on another customer and Trey barely controlled himself. Finally, he got the bartender’s attention.

“Who else did you tell that you dropped Kellie off at the bus station?” he asked, not willing to spend any time on pleasantries.

Hagney shook his head. “Nobody.”

Was he lying? Trey didn’t think so. But of all the places to look for Kellie, what was the likelihood they would just happen to go to the bus station. Almost none. “You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“Could anyone have overheard our phone conversation?”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I was back in the kitchen when I called. I guess it’s possible but I didn’t see anybody.” Two new customers came and sat down. Hagney made eye contact with them, letting them know he’d seen them. “Look, I have to go. Is Kellie okay?”

“I don’t know. Listen, if anybody comes around asking about her, please don’t tell them anything. Try to get their names. Then call me.”

He left Lavender as quickly as he’d entered. His truck had thankfully not yet been towed. He got in, pulled away and tried to think about everything he knew about Anthony and Kellie McGarry, tried to find some thread to unravel that would tell him what direction to go.

His cell phone buzzed minutes later. It was Rico.

“What do you have for me?” Trey asked.

For the next ten minutes, Rico spewed out information. Hospital where she’d been born. Grade school, middle school and high school that she’d attended. College scholarships received. Score on her SAT. Allergies noted in her medical record. Names of her college roommates. Airline flights she’d taken in the last five years. Trey sat up straighter in his seat. “What was that?” he asked.

“She flew from Las Vegas to Los Angeles four months ago, stayed at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills in a block of rooms labeled Howell/Thompson Wedding Party.”

“Before that, you said Amanda Howell was her college roommate.”

“For four years.”

“Where does Amanda live now?” Trey asked.

He could hear keys clicking in the background. “Amanda Howell-Thompson and her husband have a home in Palm Springs, California.”

She could have taken a bus from Vegas to Los Angeles and then another from there to Palm Springs. “Text me the address,” he said. “And thank you.”

“Good luck,” Rico said.

He was going to need it. Somebody else was looking for Kellie and Trey needed to find her first.

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