A Panicked Premonition

by Victoria Laurie

  Mulligan groaned and said, “Listen, Abby, I’ll talk it over with my wife again and get back to you in a week or two, okay?”

  “Sounds great, sir. Thank you for your time.”

  Once I got off the line with Mulligan, I went back to Candice’s office and found that I was the last person to get off the line with my assigned clients. “Any luck?” Candice asked me.

  “Yes. He made Mrs. Schultz’s and Roger Mulligan’s appointments just fine.”

  “Nobody picked up at the Roswells’,” Brice said.

  “I got through to Sylvia Ramirez and Chris Wixom,” Dutch said. “Both said Dave made his appointments on time, took some photos, and left. They didn’t report anything unusual about the visit, or Dave’s behavior.”

  “There wasn’t anything unusual about his behavior according to Roger Mulligan or Barbara Schultz either,” I said. “Although he wasn’t able to fix the motor on the door at Mrs. Schultz’s house.”

  “He couldn’t fix it?” Dutch said, his mind momentarily drifting into business mode.

  “No. She said he mentioned something about needing more tools or something.”

  “I’ll get Hector to go out tomorrow and replace the motor,” Dutch said.

  I shook my head. “You’ll have to wait until next month. Mrs. Schultz is headed out of town to visit her daughter and son-in-law.”

  Dutch smirked. “He’s a very important man, you know,” he mocked. “He’s met the chancellor!”

  I laughed. “So you’ve had the pleasure of meeting Mrs. Schultz?”

  “Longest appointment of my life,” Dutch said with a roll of his eyes. “She’s sweet, but she’s a nut.”

  “Well, at least we know that Dave was there and tried to fix the door. That suggests he was feeling okay even right after he went off the road.”

  “Who was the last person we’ve reached so far to have seen him?” Candice asked.

  Dutch looked to Brice, who shook his head, reminding us he hadn’t reached Dave’s final appointment. “I guess that would’ve been Chris Wixom. He left his place just before one.”

  “Who’s the last person on the list, again?” I asked.

  “Andy and Robin Roswell,” Brice said. “He would’ve arrived at their place around one fifteen or so.”

  “We’ll need to follow up with them and see how he was when he left their place and if he mentioned where he was heading,” Candice said, inching over to ease the sheet away from Brice’s fingers. I smirked, because it was clear that Candice was taking charge of that. My best friend was all about the details, and doubtless Brice would’ve followed up with the clients, but this way, Candice would make sure it got done.

  “Dutch and I called a couple of the hospitals in that area this morning. Nobody had a patient come in under his name or a John Doe fitting his description, but maybe we should call a few more north of the area in the direction of his house just to cover our bases.”

  Dutch pointed at me. “Good thinking,” he said.

  Candice glanced at the piece of paper she’d claimed and walked over to her desk to type a search into her laptop. “What’re the hospitals you guys called this morning?” she asked. Dutch rattled off the list, Candice typed, and a minute later she was scribbling on a couple of sticky notes; she handed us each one and said, “Call. See if he’s been admitted.”

  “On it,” I said, and headed off to my office to start making the calls.

  Chapter Four

  A few minutes later I walked back into Candice’s office. I shook my head at her, then at Brice and Dutch when they came in again too. “No luck?” Candice asked.

  “No,” the boys said together.

  “So what do we do?” I asked.

  “Wait,” Candice said with a hint of excitement. “Does Dave’s truck come with LoJack? If he’s got an antitheft device on his truck, I might be able to trace it.”

  “If it cost extra,” I said, “you can pretty much lay money down that Dave didn’t buy it.” He’d driven his old pickup into the ground, and only after it was towed away and his “old lady” refused to loan him her car did he finally break down and get himself a proper construction site vehicle. The F-150 had been a huge splurge for my frugal friend. No way did he say yes to anything aftermarket unless it was absolutely necessary.

  “I told him to get the security package,” Dutch said with a sigh. “He refused.”

  “Can we track his cell?” I asked.

  Dutch, Brice, and Candice all traded looks with one another. We were on dicey ground here. The FBI has very strict rules about whose phone they’ll try to track through its GPS, and if we conducted that kind of a search without a warrant, we’d be very clearly stepping outside the boundaries of the law.

  “We should call Dave’s wife,” Candice said. “Maybe she has the same phone plan as Dave, and she’ll be able to track it using a tracking app.”

  “Oh, that’s a good plan!” I said.

  Candice made the call after I gave her Gwen’s number, and put the call on speaker. The poor woman was nearly beside herself with worry. “He was in an accident?” she cried when she heard the news.

  “At this point, we don’t think he suffered an injury,” Dutch said, trying to reassure her. I felt conflicted about telling her that Dave was probably fine, since something in my gut was telling me that Dave wasn’t okay, despite what every one of our clients had said to us. There was something about Dave’s condition that was bothering me. Regardless, I let it go, because I didn’t see the need to further upset her.

  “Gwen,” Candice said, pulling the conversation back. “Are you and Dave on the same phone plan?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Why?”

  “If you call your carrier, they should be able to assist you in tracking Dave’s cell. If we find his phone, we’ll find Dave.”

  “I’ll do it right now. Call you back,” she said, and hung up. We waited anxiously for Gwen to call back, and it took a little while, but she finally did. “I found him!” she said when we answered her call.

  “Where is he?” Dutch asked.

  “Is he okay?” I asked.

  “Is he hurt?” Candice asked.

  “Why didn’t he show up this morning?” Brice asked.

  There was a pause on the other end of the line before Gwen said, “You guys all asked that at the same time, so let me just say that I found his phone, which he’s still not answering, on Lost Creek Boulevard, not far from Quaker Ridge Drive.”

  It was our turn to be silent while we processed that. “We were just there,” I whispered to Dutch. He nodded at me but said to Gwen, “We’ll head out there right now, Gwen. Try not to worry.”

  “Thanks, you guys. But I am going to worry until I hear from him. I can’t imagine why he hasn’t come home, or called!”

  After clicking off the line with Gwen, Candice looked at me and said, “Was Lost Creek the site where Dave’s truck went off the road?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “There was no sign of Dave when we were there.”

  “Maybe he went back,” Brice said. “Maybe something fell out of his truck, or came loose when he went off road, and he’s there right now looking for it.”

  “What if he leaves again before we get there?”

  Candice waved to us to go and said, “You three go check it out. I need a quick shower and a change, and on the way to the condo, I’ll call Gwen and ask her to let me know if Dave’s phone looks like it’s moved from that location. I’ll meet up with you in a half hour or so.”

  Brice, Dutch, and I hurried to Dutch’s car, and he drove much like Candice does when she’s on a mission, which meant that I was white-knuckling it all the way back to Lost Creek. Candice never called to tell us that Dave was on the move, so I was hopeful that we’d find him there, sifting through the grass looking for a missing part of his truck. But when we final
ly did arrive, there was no sign of Dave, or his truck. “Shit,” Dutch said when he pulled over to the shoulder again.

  I called Candice. “Hi, honey, have you heard from Gwen? Is Dave on the move?”

  “No,” she said. “I literally just hung up with her. She said she can see that his phone is still there.”

  “Well, he’s not,” I said.

  “Dammit,” Candice swore. “Do you see his phone?”

  “Dutch,” I said, getting out of the car and motioning for him to follow me. Brice followed too. We crossed the road and I said to Dutch, “Call Dave’s phone.”

  He did and the three of us listened, but we didn’t hear anything. Fanning out a little, we all cocked our heads and strained to hear, and that’s when Brice went sprinting off to the left. Dutch and I hurried after him and as we caught up, we could hear the faint sounds of a cell phone on its last ring.

  “Call it again,” I said to Dutch. He did, and Brice moved quickly but carefully down the side of the embankment before thrusting a hand toward the grass. He came up with Dave’s cell and walked it back to us.

  “Did you guys find it?” Candice asked, and I realized she was still on the line.

  “We did,” I said.

  “The battery is just about dead,” Brice said, holding up the dust-covered phone.

  “I have a charger in my car,” Dutch said.

  After plugging the phone into the charger, Dutch hit the home button and said, “Anybody know what Dave’s code is?”

  We all looked at each other blankly. “I’ll call Gwen,” Candice said. “Back in a sec.”

  She clicked off and we waited. And waited. Finally my cell rang again with her number. “Everything okay?” I asked.

  “I had to let Gwen know that we’d only found Dave’s phone, not him. She’s pretty upset and I had to calm her down. I’m on my way to you guys right now.”

  “Did she know the code?” I asked.

  “She said to try his birthday and if that didn’t work, then we should try her birthday. I have both sets of digits.”

  Her birthday worked and we were able to access Dave’s phone, which yielded nothing useful. Dave had about thirty unanswered calls and texts, most of them from either us or his wife. There were no searches in his phone that seemed suspicious, and, what was even more odd, his maps app hadn’t been used to help him navigate to any of his appointments.

  While we sorted through Dave’s phone, Candice arrived and came over to hop into Dutch’s car.

  “Did he have a nav system in that truck?” Dutch asked, as Candice—freshly showered and changed—settled into the seat next to me.

  I shrugged. “It would’ve been extra, but Dave might’ve found the added expense worth it.”

  “He had it,” Brice said. “I remember driving with him to a site to look at a finished room and he used it.”

  “So he might not have noticed that his phone was missing when he got back onto the road,” I said. “And that’s why he hasn’t been in touch.”

  “It still doesn’t explain why he missed his poker game and hasn’t been home yet,” Candice pointed out.

  “No,” I said with a frown. “It doesn’t.”

  “So where the hell is he and what the hell happened to him?” Dutch grumbled.

  My husband appeared irritated, but I knew better. I knew that he was just as worried about Dave as I was, if not more so. Dutch had a soft spot for the contractor, especially when it came to allowing Dave extra time to finish projects or the fact that for almost a solid year Dave had dinner with us every night. I should also point out that Dutch is the cook in the family, and a very good one at that.

  “What about surveillance footage?” Candice suddenly said.

  We all looked curiously at her, so she explained, “I’d like to see if we can find Dave in his truck on one of the tollway cams or traffic light cameras. If we can find out where he was geographically after the last client meeting, we might be able to narrow down where he is.”

  Dutch and Brice traded uncomfortable looks. “We’d need either a warrant or a really good reason to ask APD for that kind of access,” Brice said.

  “You have a really good reason,” I said. “One of your workers has gone missing.”

  Dutch looked at his watch. “Has Gwen filed a missing persons report?”

  I pulled out my phone and called her. She answered with a, “Have you found him?”

  My heart sank. She sounded so frantic, and we really had nothing more to tell her. “Not yet,” I admitted. “But we’re trying to narrow down a few leads. Quick question for you, though—have you filed a missing persons report on Dave yet?”

  There was a pause, then, “No. When he didn’t come home, I just called around to all of you. Should I file one?”

  “I think you should, Gwen. The more eyes on the lookout for Dave, the better. Plus, it might give us access to traffic cams to help us figure out what direction he went in.”

  Gwen’s voice was shaking with emotion when she said, “What if he went off the road, Abby? What if that first accident he had yesterday gave him a head injury, and maybe after his last appointment he was driving home and blacked out or something, and his truck went off the road?”

  I pressed my lips together anxiously. I’ll admit that a very similar thought had gone through my own mind. We were in an area of town with lots of massive hills and great big limestone bluffs. If Dave had gone off the road somewhere around here, he could very well be in real trouble. And it was the real-trouble part that was eating away at me, because my radar was humming with that kind of vibration. Still, it wouldn’t help things to make Dave’s wife any more upset or worried than she already was. “Gwen,” I said gently, “we have no reason to believe that anything bad has happened to Dave. And until we either find him or find a definitive reason to be worried, let’s you and me stay positive, okay?”

  I heard her inhale a big breath and blow it out. “Okay,” she said. “Yeah, okay.”

  “Great. Now, if you could call in a missing persons report to APD, that might help move things along.”

  “Don’t I have to go to the station?”

  “No,” I said. “You can file that over the phone, and there’s no waiting period, so make the call and text me after you’ve done it, okay?”

  “I will,” she said.

  After she hung up, I tucked my phone back into my pocket and looked at my companions. With a shrug I said, “I’m out of ideas about what else we can do.”

  “What if we drove Dave’s route home from the accident through the rest of what would have been his workday and then the route he likely drove home?” Candice suggested. “I know it sounds weird, but it might give us some insight into where he could be.”

  “It doesn’t sound weird to me,” I said. As soon as Candice suggested it, I wished I’d thought of it, because as we retraced his steps, I’d have my radar on and reaching for anything about Dave that I could get.

  Dutch nodded while looking thoughtfully at us. “How about you two retrace the route he would’ve taken from Lost Creek Boulevard to the rest of the clients on the list, and Brice and I can take the route he would’ve taken home?”

  Candice consulted her spreadsheet. “His last appointment was on River Run Lane,” she said.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “The Roswells’. Nice house. I gave the estimate on that one. That street ends at Wilshire, which has an exit onto MoPac. Dave would’ve taken that north to One Eighty-three and then home. We’ll start at Wilshire and head to his place.”

  “What if he stopped to get something to eat?” Brice said. We all looked at him. “If he finished with the Roswells sometime after one, he could’ve been hungry.”

  “He loves In-N-Out Burger,” I suggested.

  “No In-N-Outs on MoPac, but there’re a couple on One Eighty-three,” Dutch said.
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  “Okay,” Candice said as she opened the passenger side door. “You two take Dave’s route home, and Abby and I will retrace his route to all the clients. We’ll text if we find anything; otherwise let’s all meet back at your place, Dutch.”

  Candice and I headed to her car and got under way. About ten minutes into the drive, my phone pinged with an incoming text from Gwen. “Dave’s missing persons report has been filed,” I told Candice as I forwarded the text to Dutch.

  “Good,” she said. “The more eyes out there, the better.”

  Candice followed the directions from her phone for the first house on Dave’s list after he’d seemingly run off the road, and we immediately found ourselves in a very wealthy part of town, where the homes weren’t measured in feet so much as in number of garage bays. I saw one mansion with a six-bay-door garage, and another that looked like it might have a helipad to the side of the house. Every single home, of course, stood majestically behind a very tall security gate, and most had privacy walls. The glimpses of opulence that I’d snagged were all from the vantage point of the driveway as we hummed past.

  We moved steadily until we came up over a steep hill to look down a row of mansions, each with its own majestic view of the Colorado River. As we crested the hill, I thought to myself that if it was true that money didn’t buy happiness, buying some of those views might be a pretty swell consolation prize.

  Sure enough, Candice’s first stop was in front of a white eight-foot privacy wall, bisected by a big black iron gate, which was the home of Mrs. Schultz. Candice parked on the side of the road opposite the house, and we got out and wordlessly looked around.

  I moved across the street, stepping onto the driveway, which allowed a view of the front of Mrs. Schultz’s mansion. It was an impressive structure, perhaps not quite as big and audacious as Murielle’s place, but still way above my pay grade.

  Through the gate I could see a Town Car parked near the front door, and a man in a black suit was loading luggage into the trunk. I eased back from the driveway, not wanting to appear like a Peeping Tom.