Little Girl Gone

“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.”