Parker Security Complete Series

by Camilla Blake

  Instead of going into Heathens, as I had planned, I walked back up in the direction of my apartment, to the parking garage where I kept my car.

  I drove down to Daly City, to the crappy apartment complex my father lived in. His beat-up pickup truck was in the parking lot, the driver’s side-view mirror hanging by a thread. I knocked at his door and waited for what felt like several minutes before he opened it. He didn’t greet me but instead left the door open and gingerly walked back to his easy chair.

  “You look like hell,” he said. As though he were one to talk. He cracked open a beer. Pabst Blue Ribbon. It was either that or Miller High Life. “You want one?”

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  “You bring me something to eat?”

  “No. I didn’t realize you’d be hungry. You want me to go pick you something up? A burger?”

  Dad shook his head. “Just wondered if you’d started cooking again. That soup you brought over that one time, that was real good. What was it called?”

  “Pho.”

  “Pho—that’s it. Didn’t think I’d like it, based on the looks of it, but that was probably one of the best things I’ve ever eaten.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t bring any. Haven’t made it in a while. Haven’t really had the time.” I rubbed my eyes.

  “Rough weekend?”

  “That’s one way of putting it. It wasn’t ideal, that’s for sure. We lost someone.”

  He eyed me as he tipped the can back. “You lost someone? Don’t think I’ve heard that one before.”

  “We were working security at a club and the main performer didn’t show. I was the last one to see her.”

  “How were you the last one to see her if she didn’t show?”

  “Well, she was there, before she was supposed to go on. I saw her a little bit before her set was supposed to start and then she just... vanished.”

  My father did not look impressed. “So, what? They think you had something to do with it?”

  I bristled. “No. At least, I don’t think they do. They shouldn’t, anyway, because I didn’t have anything to do with it. But I feel responsible, like there might have been something I could have done.”

  Dad didn’t say anything, leaving the last sentence I’d said just sort of hanging there.

  “I have to do something.”

  “If you think it’s going to make you feel better, then go right ahead and try to figure out what happened,” Dad said. “I’m not saying I think you’re going to be successful at it or anything, but it’s better than looking back and regretting that you didn’t do more when you could have.” He brought the can up to his lips again and took a long sip. He didn’t need to say that he was speaking from personal experience; I knew he tortured himself every day over the fact that Ryan had killed himself and he hadn’t been able to do anything about it.

  Chapter 6

  Emmy

  I woke up on Monday morning and immediately reached for my phone to see if there was any word from Isa. No, but there was a voicemail from my mother. I listened to it; she was asking me to come over later because the police were going to stop by and talk with her. I could hear the nervousness in her voice at this possibility, but I tried to take it as a good sign—if the police were taking it seriously, then maybe they’d actually be able to find her.

  Yeah, right, a little voice whispered. I tried to banish it from my mind, though. I didn’t like having these feelings of mistrust, but I knew from firsthand experience that just because you got law enforcement involved, it didn’t mean you were going to get any closer to finding answers.

  I didn’t want to think the worst, but it was almost impossible to prevent my mind from cartwheeling in that direction. I had some coffee and sat on the couch with my laptop. I checked out Isa’s various social media accounts—no updates, but the hashtag #wheresisa was making the rounds on Twitter and Instagram. After a little while, I forced myself to stop and tried to focus on work for a few hours before driving over to my parents’ house, where my mother had drawn the curtains and was pacing the floor in the living room.

  “Can you believe your father just went into work today?” Mom asked when I came in. “Like nothing was out of the ordinary. Like it’s perfectly normal for your twenty-seven-year-old daughter to just vanish without a trace. He thinks that we’re all making a big deal out of this and that there’s some sort of reasonable explanation. Though when I asked him what on earth that could possibly be, do you think he had an answer?” Before I could respond, she shook her head and spat, “His answer was to head into work. As though the bank would suddenly stop running if he weren’t there to push papers around.” She sighed. “The police are coming over,” she said. “So I’m glad you’re here. I wouldn’t want to talk with them myself. Let’s make a pot of coffee.”

  Coffee was the last thing I felt like having, but I went out to the kitchen and filled the Mr. Coffee coffee maker with water and some Folgers. I wondered if Dad had really gone into work or if he was out with that woman. Now was definitely not the time to bring it up, though.

  I was also trying not to think too much about Jason, whom I hadn’t called back yet, despite part of me really wanting to. I’d felt weird at first, going with him to the coffee shop, but then it hadn’t felt weird at all—I had started to feel like I was actually enjoying myself. There was something about him, though I wasn’t quite sure what it was. I tried to push the thought from my mind; I was supposed to be focused on finding Isa, not thinking about one of the last people who had seen her before she vanished.

  “Can we at least open some curtains?” I asked, looking around. “It’s a nice day out, Mom, and it wouldn’t be a bad idea to let a little natural light in here, especially if you’re going to be having people over.”

  “You act like this is some sort of social call. I’m doing this because I want to find Isa. But if you think I’m enjoying the idea that there are going to be strangers in my house, well, I most certainly am not.”

  “I wouldn’t think that for a second.” I pulled back the living-room curtains.

  My mother pressed her lips together and nodded tightly. I couldn’t help but sense her disappointment that I hadn’t come back and told her I’d found Isa.

  ***

  “Thank you so much for coming by,” Mom said. She stepped back to let the two officers in. It was a man and a woman, and their names were Mike Corrie and Trish Lukeman. “I appreciate you making the trip up here so I wouldn’t have to come down to the police station. This is my daughter, Isabel’s twin sister, Emmeline.”

  I shook both their hands and said hello. Mike looked to be in his mid to late fifties, still with a thick head of hair, shot through with gray, though. He looked remarkably similar to the police officer I’d talked to at the hospital after the attempted mugging, but what were the chances it would be the same person? I couldn’t remember the officer’s name from that night, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t Mike. Still, a feeling of unease threaded its way through my gut, which I tried my best to ignore. Trish was probably a decade younger, her curly, brown hair pulled back in a no-nonsense ponytail.

  “Twins?” she said. “Identical?”

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  We sat down in the living room, where Mom had her photo albums at the ready. “Now, Isabel has always lived a rather unconventional life,” Mom said, “but she wouldn’t have just disappeared right before she was about to go on stage. That just isn’t like her at all.”

  “That’s what others we’ve talked to have said.” Mike flipped through one of the albums.

  “Others?” Mom asked.

  “We’ve talked with a few people. The owner of the club, her manager. We’ve got some more that we’ll be in touch with, and if there’s anyone else you can think of, that would be extremely helpful. Everyone agrees that this is very uncharacteristic of her, though you, being her family, would probably know her best. When was the last time you spoke with her?”

  “Oh, it was
at least a few weeks ago,” Mom said. “She was in Spain. Ibiza. She has a place there, and she’d just gotten back from... somewhere. I’m not sure. She travels around a lot and performs at all sorts of places. But I did know she was coming back here and had several engagements in California before she was going to be heading over to the East Coast.”

  “And everything seemed normal when you talked to her?”

  “Yes. At least, I can’t remember anything sticking out as odd. I can hardly even remember what we talked about, but it wasn’t any different than any other conversation we’ve had previously.”

  “And what about you?” Trish smiled at me as if we were friends, though I got the distinct feeling this was a tactic they used, the good cop/bad cop sort of thing. “When did you last talk with your sister?”

  I could feel myself blushing. I didn’t want to admit to them the last time we talked had been that fight we’d gotten into, because it was so long ago. Why hadn’t I talked to my sister more often? There seemed to be less and less of a need to, with Facebook and Instagram and text messaging. Talking on the phone was so... awkward. Unnecessary. If I wanted to know what Isa was up to, I could just check out her Instagram feed and watch a clip of her playing at a club in Paris, or in some warehouse in Rotterdam, or on the beach in Thailand.

  “The last time we actually talked was probably mid-April,” I said finally. “I know that’s a long time.”

  “It can be hard to stay in touch, with everyone’s lives being so busy,” Trish said. “No texts or anything?”

  “I’ve been texting her these past couple of days but she hasn’t responded.” I thought about the last text I had sent her—that picture of my father. Would there be any reason for the detectives to take my phone? I didn’t think so, but you never knew.

  “Yes, well, you wouldn’t have much luck getting in touch with her through her phone,” Mike said. “Her phone was found at the club, in the dressing room.”

  “It was?” Mom said.

  “Yes. And a pink Christian Dior wallet was found in the stairway from the VIP lounge, which contained Isabel’s driver’s license but nothing else. It looked like someone had probably gone through it and taken any debit or credit cards they’d found.”

  Mom gasped. “Well, then, isn’t that all the proof you need that something awful has happened to her? She wouldn’t just leave her wallet behind. Isn’t there some way you can track her credit card? Some way that you can know whether or not someone has used it?”

  “Yes, there is, but we need to get the order signed first. Once that happens we absolutely will be keeping an eye on that. But let us worry about those things.”

  “I want to do something,” I said. That’s the thought that had been running through my head, but I hadn’t meant to actually say it out loud.

  The two detectives looked at me. My mother did, too.

  “I mean... I just want to help.”

  “We know,” Trish said, giving me another sisterly look. “And that’s a completely normal response. The best thing you can do to help us right now is let us know if anything comes to mind that you think might help us figure out what happened with your sister.”

  “There is, of course, the chance that she might just turn up on her own,” Mike said. He looked at my mother and nodded. “I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up, but that has happened before. Sometimes a person just decides that they want to take a little break from life and they take off for a few days, a week, and then they get back in touch.”

  “No,” my mother said. “This is so completely out of character for Isa, there’s no way we’re just going to get a call from her in a few days saying that everything is fine.” She shook her head. “There’s no way.”

  “Now, does she take any medications or anything of the sort?” Mike asked. “That you know of?”

  Mom and I both shook our heads. “No, nothing like that,” Mom said.

  “So you’d say she was mentally fit?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Any illicit drug use?”

  Mom blanched. I could tell that this was getting to be too much for her, that she was trying her best to maintain her composure, but with each subsequent question, it was getting harder and harder for her to do so.

  “We’re not insinuating anything,” Trish said gently. “We’re just trying to get as clear a picture as possible.”

  “I don’t think so,” Mom said, her tone clipped.

  “There were no signs of foul play,” Mike said. “Nothing that would lead us to believe that a crime has been committed.”

  “The fact that my daughter is missing should be enough,” Mom said. “She wouldn’t just leave like that. Why would she show up to a gig only to vanish right before she was supposed to go on? You don’t know my daughter the way I do. I might not share her love of that sort of music, but Isa is one hundred and ten percent dedicated to what she does. She loves her fans. She knows how fortunate she is to live the sort of lifestyle she does, to be able to make a living the way she has. And did the owner there tell you—you said you talked to him, right?”

  “Yes, we did.”

  “So, did he tell you, then, that he was the one who basically gave Isa her start? She started playing there on Thursdays when she was sixteen! She’d sneak down to the city, tell me that she was going to be at a friend’s house. Foolish of me not to check and make sure, but I took her word for it.” Mom shot me a look. “It didn’t help that she had a cohort covering up for her.”

  I opened my mouth to say something but then stopped. She was mostly right; I didn’t know for the first few months what Isa had been up to back then, though I did know she wasn’t staying over at Lindsay Tucker’s house. I had just assumed it was some guy. When she did finally tell me what she was doing, I almost didn’t believe her. But then I did, because of course Isa would do something like that—the sneaking out, the lying to our parents, using a fake ID to gain entrance into the club and charm her way into getting a gig. As for me, with my straight A’s and strict adherence to the nine p.m. curfew, well, I couldn’t at all imagine the sort of courage—or was it brazenness?—it would take to do something like that.

  “The point is,” Mom continued, “that Isa would not allow anything to get in the way of her music. It just means too much to her. It always has.”

  “She does sound like she’s been very dedicated to that,” Trish said.

  I tried to focus on what they were saying, but I felt my mind start to drift. I watched as Mike glanced down again at the photo album, and Trish leaned forward, listening to what Mom was telling her. Who were these people? They didn’t know Isa at all. They had her photograph to go off of, the pictures she chose to post on her social media accounts. The stories that other people told about her. But they’d never met her, they’d never spent a day with her, or knew how she always had to bring a glass of water with her to set on her bedside table before she went to sleep, or that she never matched her clean socks and would just grab two from the drawer, not caring if they were a match.

  There was a part of me that said I should let the police handle it. They were investigating the case, they were the trained professionals—I should let them do their job. But there was a larger part of me that knew I couldn’t just sit back and do nothing. Isa and I might not have talked recently, but it seemed like if someone was going to be able to figure out what had happened to Isa, it would be someone who actually knew her.

  Chapter 7

  Jason

  There was an air of tension in the office that none of us were used to.

  The tray of coffees that Lena had picked up from Superior sat there on the coffee table in the conference room, getting cold. Cole and Ben were supposed to be over installing the security system at the new Parkington Hotel in Union Square, but they were sitting on one of the couches in the conference room instead, peering at the laptop on Cole’s lap. I had a bid for a new contract I should’ve been working on, but there was no way I was going to be
able to focus on that right now.

  “It’s so screwed up,” Cole said. “I’m on one of the forums right now and people are like freaking out about this. They’re throwing around all sorts of theories. Granted, most of them are probably high as kites right now, but still... Have we heard anything back from the police yet?”

  “No,” Drew said. “And don’t hold your breath. We’re not going to be the first people they’re going to update if and when they find any new information.”

  “I think I know what happened, though,” Cole said. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot.”

  Lena snorted. “This ought to be good.”

  But Ben and Drew were both looking at Cole as though he might actually be onto something, and I too was curious as to what he had to say.

  “She must’ve been kidnapped,” Cole said. “She’s a world-famous DJ. And she’s hot. She’s worth a lot of money—right? So someone must’ve slipped something in her drink, like a roofie or something, and while she’s passed out, they kidnapped her.”

  “Did you earn a certificate in sleuthing to come up with a theory like that?” Lena asked.

  Cole ignored her. “Most people really love Isa, because, you know, she’s awesome. But I did find this one thread on here, buried from like six or seven months ago, that’s sort of an... anti-Isa thread, I guess. It’s the people who feel like Isa has... wronged them.”

  “Wronged them?” Drew said. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I mean, anyone who knows anything about her knows she’s kind of feisty, and there’s been a few instances where she’s thrown a drink on someone who got a little too rowdy with her—”

  “But she didn’t throw a drink on the person who pulled her shirt down,” Lena said. “Wouldn’t that be classified as getting rowdy?”

  “These incidents didn’t happen when she was on stage,” Cole said. “A few of them happened before her set, a couple at the after-party. I’m just saying, there are some people out there who have publicly called her a bitch or whatever.”