Love Inspired Suspense May 2015 - Box Set 1 of 2: Trail of EvidenceGone MissingLethal Exposure

by Lynette Eason

  Clay nodded. “This is the closest we’ve come in days. At least we now know what she’s running from.”

  “So we can try to figure out where she would go,” Joslyn said.

  Elisabeth sighed. “All right, I understand. But you need to take precautions.”

  “That’s what you and Liam are best at,” Joslyn said.

  Liam laughed. “Are you actually trying to charm us? You’re finally learning, grasshopper.”

  “I didn’t learn charm from you,” Joslyn said. “I learned it from Clay.”

  Caught by three pairs of eyes, he froze, and a flush shot up his face. Joslyn had never seen a man blush so fast. Then his smile came out and he turned on that famous charm. “Aw, shucks, just ’cause I could convince a Hawaiian to buy sand…”

  “Let’s get to it,” Liam said. “I’ll work on your ‘precautions.’ You and Elisabeth try to figure out where Fiona would go to hide from Roman.”

  “There might be a connection between Roman and Fiona,” Joslyn said. “I’m still not convinced that he’s only after her for revenge.”

  Clay had that caged-tiger look on his face. He must hate not having much to do. “Breakfast is ready,” he muttered, and turned to go back into the kitchen.

  Then she realized… “You need to look through Fiona’s box again.”

  He raised an eyebrow at her. “I do?”

  “She’s not just running from Roman, she’s running from anything connected to Martin, because she’s in danger from his people.”

  Comprehension dawned. “So she’d go somewhere Martin wouldn’t know about.”

  Joslyn nodded. “You’re the one who’s known her the longest. Maybe Chicago? I thought the box might jog your memory.”

  He nodded and went to get the box, which they hadn’t removed from the trunk. Joslyn got the breakfast burritos and passed them out so they could all eat and work at the same time. Clay set the box on the table while Joslyn and Elisabeth each sat at a computer and planned how they’d do research.

  “She’d go somewhere Martin wouldn’t know about,” Joslyn said around a mouthful of eggs, cheese, and tortilla, “somewhere that a private investigator or a skip tracer wouldn’t be able to find no matter how much they dig up on Martin.”

  “So let’s track Fiona’s movements for the past few years and compare them to Martin’s movements,” Elisabeth said. “And maybe cross-reference that with Roman’s movements.”

  Joslyn groaned. That was a lot of data to find and compare.

  “Wait a minute,” Clay said. “I need you to look up something first.”

  Joslyn looked up at him.

  He was holding up the Disneyland picture from Fiona’s box. “I think I know where Fiona is.”

  FOURTEEN

  Behind the wheel of their newly borrowed car, Clay was exhausted but fighting the tiredness. He had to stay alert for Fiona.

  He’d grabbed a couple hours of sleep while Joslyn and Elisabeth searched for Amelia, Fiona’s childhood friend. It took them longer than expected because Amelia had married and divorced, and her mother, Hannah, had died a few years earlier. While Clay originally chafed impatiently at the delay in going to see Fiona, as soon as he sat on the couch, he’d been out like a light while they worked.

  Liam had borrowed yet another friend of a friend’s car for them just in case Roman’s men had noted their car in the O’Neills’ driveway. Clay liked this one, an Impala that had once been black but was now mottled with various shades of gray, and with an engine that said, “Nobody messes with me.”

  “Um, despite the lack of a paint job, this is a nice car. What if it gets bullet holes or something?” Clay had said nervously to Liam.

  “Unless they injected a GPS tracker under your skin, they haven’t figured out how to follow you yet,” Liam had said. “And with this engine, hopefully you can speed away from guys with guns.”

  They were currently driving south on Interstate 5, with Liam and Elisabeth following them in two different cars, watching for anyone tailing them. But in central California, Liam and Elisabeth exited the freeway, as preplanned, in order to turn back to Sonoma. Clay and Joslyn were on their own again.

  Joslyn was dead to the world, her mouth hanging open a little as she slept in the passenger seat. He knew she needed the rest. They were both running on fumes right now.

  But he couldn’t sleep peacefully until they found Fiona. They were close. He knew it.

  Amelia rented a house in a small suburb north of Los Angeles, quite a distance, in terms of commuting time, from the downtown areas. However, the suburb was quiet and the houses a bit larger than in areas nearer to the city. Most of the buildings were fifty or sixty years old, some better maintained than others. They stopped in front of a beige house with blue trim that had, in the middle of the front lawn, a Redwood tree so large that the tips of its lower branches almost reached the edges of the yard.

  The tree overshadowed the front door and almost blocked the front glass window, but the shades were drawn anyway. Clay thought that was a little strange since it would make the inside of the house pretty dark.

  They knocked, but no one answered. Joslyn knocked again, and Clay moved to the front window to try to peer inside through a crack in the curtain.

  The front room was dark, but he could see that it had a small flat screen television against one wall and a large open space on the carpet in front of it, with a couch shoved against the opposite wall. Toys littered the carpet and an empty toy basket lay on its side, but it didn’t look as if a child had been playing—it looked as if the basket had been tipped over, the toys thrown onto the floor in haste…or in a search.

  Instantly he went on alert, his ears open to any sounds, his eyes scanning the exterior of the house, the neighbors, across the street. Everything was quiet except for the drone of an afternoon game show from the neighbor’s television.

  “What is it?” Joslyn’s eyes were wide.

  “Just a…feeling.” He moved around to the side of the house and found another window. It was a bit higher up off the ground so he had to jump to get a look inside.

  It was a bedroom. And it had been completely tossed.

  His heart rate ramped up. He jumped to take another look just to be sure. Yes, the dresser drawers were half-open, contents spilling out, clothes all over the bed, while closet doors were left open with hangers that had clothes only half hanging on them.

  “Something’s wrong,” Clay said.

  Joslyn had already unholstered her gun and held it at the ready. “Is the gate to the backyard open?”

  He tried the wooden gate that separated the front from the backyard, and found that the latchkey was unlocked. The hinges creaked as he swung it open, and he froze, listening for any movement or sounds. Nothing.

  He led the way into the backyard. He knew Joslyn had the firearm, but he wasn’t about to let her step into any danger. He’d rather take any hits first.

  The yard was open and sunny, with a large bushy lemon tree in the far corner and lavender bushes along the wooden fence. Plastic children’s toys were scattered across the grass, and there was a concrete, unshaded patio that led to a sliding glass door. A black Weber grill stood on a corner of the concrete square, and there was a glass-and-metal patio set that took up most of the space. None of it was disturbed.

  Clay moved silently toward the sliding glass door, which was obscured by vertical blinds that had been pulled closed. He peered through the cracks and saw that the kitchen table right next to the glass door also looked as if things were thrown on top of it and rifled through.

  He noticed that the screen door inside the sliding glass door was cracked open. He grabbed the handle of the glass door and pulled.

  It opened easily. Clay’s fingers tightened on the handle as he froze, listening.

  “Let me go in first,” Joslyn whispered.

  “No way.”

  “You’ve got a broken arm. I’ve got a firearm.”

  “No way.”
Clay stepped inside.

  One or two drawers in the kitchen were half-open, and Clay wondered if someone had left in a hurry, as opposed to someone searching through the house. They moved from the kitchen to the hallway, which was also littered with toys, mostly from Disney. The first room on the left was a child’s room, and it looked as messy as the bedroom he’d seen.

  Joslyn moved past him toward the other doorway before he could hiss a warning. She eased open the door. “It looks like she packed quickly and took off.”

  “Does it look like it was more than one person?” Maybe she was helping Fiona.

  Joslyn shook her head.

  “She took her daughter with her.” Clay nodded to the bedroom. “She only has one kid, right?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “This seems like a lot of stuff for one kid.”

  Joslyn peeked into the room and chuckled. “Trust me, it’s for one kid.”

  They searched through the house, but couldn’t figure out where she could have gone. There were computer cables in the wall, but no computer. There were lots of pictures on the walls, mostly of Amelia and her daughter, and a few of Amelia with her mom, Hannah.

  There were also several pictures with Amelia and a guy who might be her boyfriend. He had wavy brown hair, and in the majority of the photos, they were out hiking somewhere. They apparently liked Santa Cruz, because there were three different pictures of them hiking there.

  “Boyfriend?” Clay asked.

  Joslyn frowned. “I didn’t find anything online about a boyfriend, but she’s not very active on social media, so it’s possible.”

  Joslyn then went to the fridge and started looking at everything stuck to it with magnets, most of them also from Disneyland.

  “What are you looking for?” Clay asked.

  “She’s a single mother, so she has to have some type of card with phone numbers for babysitters,” Joslyn said. “Yup, here.” She pulled an index card from the side of the fridge that had Amelia’s cell number, work number, and the name and number of her daughter’s doctor.

  Joslyn put the phone on speaker and tried Amelia’s cell. It went straight to voice mail.

  Then she tried Amelia’s work number.

  “Hello?” answered a gruff man.

  “Is Amelia Richardson there?”

  “She quit weeks ago.” The man then hung up without another word.

  Joslyn frowned, then dialed the baby’s doctor’s number.

  A woman with a pleasant voice answered, “Hello, Ms. Richardson. What can I do for you?” The doctor’s office must have caller ID.

  “Hi, you know, I don’t have my calendar in front of me. When’s Jessica’s next appointment?”

  “Oh, you’re not scheduled for another few months. September twelfth.”

  “Okay, thank you,” Joslyn said, and hung up. “Well, she might still be in the area.”

  There was a number at the bottom of the card, written in a different pen color from the other numbers, which said Gabe.

  She dialed the number, and it went straight to voice mail. “You’ve reached Gabe Speight with Speight Associates. Leave me a message and I’ll get right back to you.”

  Clay had the phone book out before the message finished. He searched and found Gabriel Speight’s address listed. “Think she went there?”

  “If I were scared enough to quit my job? Yeah,” Joslyn said. A haunted expression passed across her face briefly, as if she knew exactly what that felt like. His hand clenched at the thought of someone terrorizing her like that.

  Joslyn moved away slightly.

  Clay wanted to reach out to her, to hold her, to help erase that pain. But what did he know about healing people? For most of his adult life, he’d only hurt others. He’d protected a few people, like the women at the club he worked at, but he didn’t know if that made up for all the ones he’d roughed up.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  Instead of exiting through the back door, Clay locked it from the inside, and they exited through the side door, which could automatically lock behind them. As they were walking onto the front lawn, he noticed sound of the television from the neighbor’s house had turned off and an older Asian woman was outside on her front lawn, watering the plants along the fence. The expression in her dark eyes was fierce. “Who’re you?”

  “I’m an old friend of Amelia’s,” Clay said.

  “I’ve never seen you around before,” the woman replied, still hostile.

  “I haven’t seen her or her mom, Hannah, since we were kids,” Clay said. “Our moms had season passes and took us to Disneyland all the time when we were living in Los Angeles.”

  The neighbor relaxed a bit at that information. “She still goes to Disneyland all the time.”

  “Her back door was open, so we went inside, but we locked up behind us,” Joslyn said. “Do you know where she is?”

  The woman shook her head. “Hasn’t been home in a few weeks.” However, by her tight-lipped expression, she wasn’t about to enlighten them on where Amelia might have gone.

  “We were going to Gabe’s house to see if she’s there,” Joslyn said. “Did you have any messages for her?”

  The woman seemed to unwind a bit. “Well, tell her I borrowed her shovel from her tool shed.”

  “Will do.” Joslyn and Clay waved goodbye to her and got into their car.

  They looked at each other, and said together, “Gabe’s.”

  Gabe lived farther south and closer to the downtown areas. His high-rise apartment building sat on a block with a coffee shop, a florist and another tall building that held law offices. They found street parking and walked to the glass-fronted building.

  For some reason, Joslyn seemed tense as they walked through the front doors into the lobby. There was a security guard in a uniform sitting behind a large desk made of faux blond wood and a glossy black top. “Hi, folks,” he said.

  “We’re here to see Gabe Speight,” Clay said, leaning against the desk.

  “Is he expecting you?”

  “No, but tell him it’s Clay Ashton.” He hoped that if Amelia or Fiona heard his name, she’d know he wasn’t here to hurt her.

  The guard got on the phone and dialed. “I have a visitor for you, a Clay Ashton?”

  The silence was tight. Clay feigned casual disinterest and confidence that they’d be allowed up, but it took all his self-control not to fidget. Would it work? Was Amelia or Fiona there?

  “All right.” The guard hung up. “Go right up.”

  Clay had to restrain from doing a victory fist-pump. “Thanks.”

  Joslyn started walking toward the elevators, then asked Clay, “What’s the apartment number, again?”

  “Er…” Clay looked back at the guard.

  “Three-oh-two.”

  “Thanks.”

  As they rode the elevator, Clay’s leg jiggled. Fiona had to be here. It was safer than her house, because of the security guard, but they’d still managed to finagle their way in. He had to get her somewhere even more secure.

  They knocked on the apartment door, and a woman’s voice inside said, “Who is it?”

  “Amelia, it’s Clay, Fiona’s brother. Is she all right? Are you okay?”

  There was the sound of the deadbolt sliding back, then the door cracked open. “Come in.”

  Something was wrong. Clay entered slowly, eyes searching the apartment. Directly ahead of them were floor-to-ceiling windows along one wall, with a leather couch and small dining room table in front. A few Disney toys were scattered on the floor.

  He and Joslyn entered the apartment, then there was the sound of a gun safety clicking off.

  Clay turned and saw Amelia, standing to the side of the open door, holding a pistol to Joslyn’s head.

  *

  Joslyn stood stock-still. Her blood roared in her ears, and all her senses were trained on the feel of metal caressing the skin of her temple.

  Clay put his hands up. “Amelia, it’s me. We’re not
here to hurt you.”

  “I haven’t seen you in years. Why have you suddenly shown up? And here? How did you find me?”

  “Please put the gun down first,” Clay said. “We’re looking for Fiona. I got a phone call from her three weeks ago. She said, ‘Help me, Clay’ and then got cut off. And Joslyn got a postcard from her with the same message.”

  There was a tense silence, then the muzzle of the gun dropped from Joslyn’s head, and she heard the safety being clicked back on. She suddenly felt as if she could breathe again, and the air returned to her lungs in hard gasps.

  “Is Fiona here?” Clay asked.

  “She’s not here,” Amelia said, sounding weary.

  Clay deflated visibly. He’d been so hoping for Fiona to be here. Joslyn had been hopeful but cautious, because she remembered how mindful Fiona was of others. Joslyn couldn’t see Fiona holing up with Amelia and her daughter, putting them both at risk.

  “How did you find me?” Amelia asked.

  “We know Fiona is running from one of Martin’s enemies,” Clay said, “so we figured she’d run to someone not connected to Martin at all. You’re the only friend Fiona had who Martin never met. He hated Disneyland, so he let Mom take me and Fiona alone.”

  A small smile quirked the corner of Amelia’s mouth. “We had so much fun there.” Then her eyes grew wide. “You weren’t followed, were you?”

  “No,” Clay said. “And I’m pretty sure Martin doesn’t even remember your friendship with Fiona from her childhood. We went to your house and found Gabe’s address, so we came here.”

  “If Fiona isn’t here, why did you run?” Joslyn asked.

  “Because Fiona told me to.”

  Clay drew in a sharp breath. “You saw her.”

  Amelia nodded. “Three weeks ago.”

  “Can you tell us what happened?” Clay asked.

  Joslyn heard voices outside the open door and ducked her head out to check. A man on his cell phone had just opened an apartment door with his key and was walking inside. She closed the front door to Gabe’s apartment and locked it.