Little Girl Gone

Logan walked over and pulled the drape back. Beyond was a large, loft-style room. It was considerably brighter than the entry room had been, mainly due to dozens of candles scattered throughout the space. The room had that over-the-top decorated feel: orange end tables, fur-covered cubes, a sculpture made of old computer parts, bar stools in hot pink, and paintings on the walls that were the definition of abstract.

There were ten people, too. Men mainly, but also a few women, and all Asian. They’d all been talking when Logan first stepped in, but quickly stopped and were now staring at him.

“Please,” the thin man said behind him, urging Logan on.

Once they crossed the room, the man showed Logan to a chair near where the others were sitting.

“Mr. Harper,” he said, introducing Logan.

“Hi.”

“Hello.”

“Sawadee, ka.”

“Welcome.”

Logan nodded and smiled grimly in return, but kept his mouth shut, waiting for the person who’d called him to identify herself. But no one spoke up.

For nearly two minutes, they all sat in silence. Then Logan heard a faint noise behind him, followed by the sound of footsteps on the tiled floor. Before he could turn to look, the same voice he’d heard on the phone called out, “You must be Mr. Harper.”

Entering the room through a doorway in the far corner were two men and a woman. One of the men was wearing a gray suit, white shirt, and dark tie. The other was in a pair of jeans, black button shirt, and cowboy boots. Where the first had short hair and was clean-shaven, the second had hair that fell almost to his shoulders and was sporting a goatee. The suited guy reminded Logan of an accountant, while the other one he would have pegged as a musician straight in from a club.

But the woman was even more surprising, and it had nothing to do with her impressive height or striking blonde hair, or the electric blue dress she wore. Unlike everyone else present except for Logan, she was Caucasian.

Logan stood as she swept across the room.

“You look exactly like your picture,” she said. “A few years older, perhaps. But you’ve aged well.”

He was suddenly wary. “What picture?”

She looked at one of the men sitting nearby, then rattled off something in what Logan assumed was Thai.

The man immediately grabbed a piece of paper off an orange end table, and handed it to her. She examined it for a moment, then turned it so Logan could see. “This one.”

He tensed. The picture was his Forbus employee photo. In this case, it was part of the newspaper article that had raised questions about his conduct in Carl’s death, and other matters concerning Forbus. Two days after the article had come out, his status had switched from suspended with pay to terminated.

“Where did you get that?” he asked, trying to keep his voice even.

She gave him a pitiful, are-you-serious look. “The Internet, of course. Oh, don’t worry. I don’t care if you were guilty or not. I just wanted to have a way to identify you when you arrived.”

“I wasn’t guilty.”

“I said I don’t care. Dev Martin vouched for you, and that’s all that matters to me.”

“You talked to Dev?”

“Of course, this morning. He gave me the details about why you’re here. Thought it might assist me in figuring out what kind of help I could provide.”

“This morning? You mean before the jet arrived?”

“The private plane? Yes…” she said, drawing the last word out.

“Were you able to follow them from the airport? Do you know where they are?”

She smiled. “Why don’t you sit down?”

“Please. We don’t have time to waste.”

“We do have time to sit.”

One of the people who had been sitting on a fur cube near Logan moved so that the woman could take it. Reluctantly, Logan sat back down, too.

“All right. We’re sitting,” he said.

“First, no one asked us to go to the airport to follow them,” she told him.

He felt the sinking sensation of lost opportunity.

“Second, even if they had, there wouldn’t have been enough time to get there before they were gone.”

This revelation didn’t help much. If he’d been thinking correctly before he left Los Angeles, he would have had Dev call her right away. As it was, Logan hadn’t even asked him to call at all. Doing so had apparently been Dev’s own idea. Logan owed that man a beer or three when he got back.

“So there’s no way to know where they went,” he said, feeling like he was back at square one again.

“I didn’t say that.”

He looked at her. “Are you saying you do know?”