Little Girl Gone

Logan hesitated, worried that he wasn’t the right one to do this, that he’d make a mistake, that he’d fail once more.

Worried that he wouldn’t get to her in time.

But he could see in Tooney’s eyes that he was also the old man’s only hope.

“Rise above, that’s what we do, soldier,” Carl had often said with a smile when faced with adversity. “Rise above.”

Logan nodded, still holding Tooney’s gaze, then said, “I will.”

17

So far Logan seemed to have been doing a lot of catch up. What he really needed to do was get ahead of the game. To accomplish that he needed to find someone who could help him, whether they wanted to or not.

As he saw it, he had three choices: Aaron the not-boyfriend, Ryan the neighbor, or Angie the roommate. Aaron and Ryan, because of their sudden absences, would take time to find, if Logan could locate them at all. Angie, on the other hand, was still around, or at least had been when he’d talked to her that morning. Hopefully, she wasn’t gone, too.

Logan made a quick stop at the Home Depot in Playa Vista, then got to the girls’ apartment by 7:30 p.m. With the exception of the sun having gone down, nothing else had changed—Ryan’s apartment was still empty, and the curtains were still pulled across the windows of Elyse and Angie’s place. Logan rapped on the door, but, like before, heard nothing from inside.

Working security in trouble spots around the world meant knowing a variety of skills. The more you learned, the more likely you’d stay alive. As a trainer, it was Logan’s job to teach the men some of these skills. Skills like how to pick a lock.

Wearing the thin rubber gloves he’d purchased at the hardware store, and using the other items he’d bought to serve as a makeshift lock-pick set, Logan set to work on Elyse’s door, and had it open in less than thirty seconds.

He quickly slipped inside, then stood still, listening. Though the apartment was quiet, he was relieved to see it wasn’t empty like Aaron’s or Ryan’s places. Of course, that didn’t necessarily mean Angie was still around. The apartment had been Elyse’s and her other two roommates’ before Angie had moved in, so there would have been no reason to remove all the stuff.

The place was basically a mirror image of Ryan’s apartment. In this case, the living room was to the right, and the dining room/kitchen to the left. Logan checked the kitchen first. There were several dishes in the sink, and a box of cereal sitting on the counter, but nothing that really told him if Angie had bolted or not. He headed into the back of the apartment.

There were two bedrooms at opposite ends of a short T-bone hallway, with a bathroom smack between them. Each bedroom was loosely divided into two separate areas, with beds, dressers, and, in three cases, small desks.

He found Elyse’s room first. He knew this because of the framed picture on the desk under the window. In it, Elyse, Lara and Anthony were mugging for the camera somewhere along the beach.

There were several paintings on the wall next to her bed. The images were almost cartoonish. Illustrations, he guessed you’d call them. The common thread in each was a young girl who looked more than a little bit like the girl in the graduation picture Tooney had given him. In the paintings, she seemed to be playing the role of the observer, not quite part of whatever was going on, but always hovering nearby. The girl in the one that stood out most to Logan had wings far too large for her body, and was sitting in a barren tree watching some other kids go by. If the colors hadn’t been so vibrant, and if there hadn’t been a mischievous smile on her face, it would have been depressing, but it was far from that. When he looked at the bottom corner, he wasn’t surprised to find it was signed Elyse Myat.

He moved to the other half of the room. There were a dozen photos pinned to the wall, but the girl who reoccurred in most of them was not Angie, so Logan assumed Elyse’s roommate had to be one of the other two girls.

He walked over to the second bedroom, and quickly determined that the bed nearest the door belonged to the last of the long term roommates.

The other half of the room, Angie’s half, was considerably less lived in. She had no desk, and what pictures she’d taped to her wall were limited to ones taken right there in the apartment. It was as if she had no life before moving in.

When Logan looked around the bed, he stopped and stared.

Sitting on the floor were a suitcase and a backpack. He checked inside each. They were stuffed with clothes and a few personal items. He zipped them up, then looked through the dresser he figured belonged to Angie. It was empty.

Clearing out, he thought, but not cleared out.

He thought for a moment, then walked back to Elyse’s room, and found a clear spot on the floor next to the wall to sit.

An hour and twenty minutes passed. Several times during that stretch he wondered if Angie might have left town without her bags. It was always a possibility. But then a key entered the lock, and the door swung open, and someone stepped inside.

He sensed more than heard the person rushing through the apartment.

A light flicked on in the hallway spilling into Elyse’s room. Quietly, Logan rose to his feet, ready to act if Angie or whoever it was decided to come his direction. Instead, the person entered the bathroom.

Logan repositioned himself so that he could see into the hallway, but wouldn’t be noticed without effort. Soon the toilet flushed, then water ran in the sink. A few seconds after it shut off, the person stepped back into the hallway.