Beverly Long - Power Play

Suspected? Her door had not been damaged or tampered with. No way to imagine the chaos inside. Yet she’d suspected? That didn’t make sense. But he needed to focus on what was most important. Hagney had lied when he’d said she’d been a no-call, no-show. He had definitely talked to her. “Where is she?” Trey demanded.

“I don’t know for sure. But she came to my house last night. Said that she had to get out of town for a couple days and needed some cash. I had a couple hundred bucks and gave it all to her. Then I dropped her off at the bus station.”

She had a car. Why the hell wasn’t she driving it? “Where was she going?”

“She didn’t say.”

There couldn’t be that many buses leaving Vegas at that time. He could figure this out. “Why did she need to leave town?”

“I really don’t know. She wouldn’t say, said it would be better if I didn’t know. Told me not to tell anyone, but I’m worried because I think she was really scared. After ten-plus years as a bartender, I’m a pretty good judge of people and I don’t think you want to harm her. I hope to hell I’m not wrong.”

“You’re not,” Trey said. “I tried her cell phone. It went right to voice mail.”

“She left her phone with me, with the battery out.”

The only reason she would have done that was because she was afraid that somebody would use the phone to track her. Who? The people who had ransacked her apartment?

He needed a better timeline. She’d walked out of Lavender at 2:30. She’d been back to her car by shortly after 3:00 which meant that she’d likely arrived home by 3:15 or so. He knew her car had been parked in the carport at 3:28 when he’d cruised by. “Did she walk to your house?”

“Yes,” Hagney said. “She was cold. I gave her one of my wife’s sweaters.”

“What color?” Trey asked automatically.

“Pink. A cardigan.”

“Okay. What’s your address?”

Hagney gave it to him and Trey quickly plugged it in and mapped the distance between Kellie’s apartment and Hagney’s place. His phone said it would take forty-six minutes to walk there. Of course, she could have taken a cab, but if she was cold when she arrived, the likelihood was that she’d hoofed it. His gut tightened at the thought of her being outside in the middle of the night, easy prey for any of the many crazies out and about at that time. “Hagney, what time was it when she arrived? The more exact, the better.”

Hagney sighed. “I didn’t look at a clock but I think I’d only been in bed for maybe fifteen minutes. I wasn’t sleeping yet. I left Lavender at 3:30.”

“You know that for sure.”

“Yeah. I have an alarm on my phone. It rings and I’m out the door. That’s the agreement I have with my wife. A few times I got home when the sun was coming up and she wasn’t too happy about that.”

“What’s your drive time?”

“That time of the morning, it’s twenty minutes.”

“How long were you home before you went to bed?”

Hagney laughed. “Like a minute. I’m beat at the end of a shift.”

Trey did the math. Hagney had arrived home around three fifty, gone straight to bed and believed Kellie had knocked about fifteen minutes later. That would have been 4:05. That made sense. If she’d run from her apartment around three twenty and it was a forty-five-minute walk, the timing worked, give or take a couple minutes. Close enough that he was satisfied she hadn’t gone anywhere else besides straight to Hagney’s house.

“How long were you at your house before you took her to the bus depot?”

“Not long. Maybe five minutes.”

Trey pulled up the address of the bus depot and mapped it to Hagney’s house. Eighteen minutes. Probably less at that time of the morning. Now, he just needed to figure out where she’d gone from there. “Thank you for calling,” Trey said. “I mean that. And if you do happen to hear from her, tell her to call me right away.”

“What are you going to do?” Hagney asked.

“Go after her,” he said. He hung up but didn’t put his phone away. Instead, he dialed Anthony’s cell phone. It rang four times and went to voice mail. He did not leave a message. He found his office number and dialed.

“Dr. McGarry’s office. How may I help you?”

“Dr. McGarry, please.”

“This is Dr. McGarry’s answering service. May I take a message?”

Of course. It was a Saturday night. His office receptionist wouldn’t be working. “I need to reach Dr. McGarry,” he said.

“One moment, please.”

He waited, thinking of the best way to tell his friend that his sister was in trouble.

“I’m sorry,” the woman said, coming back on the line. “Dr. McGarry’s status is that he’s unavailable for the next six hours.”

“But—” Trey said. He wasn’t answering his cell and wasn’t taking calls through the answering service. Based on past experience, Trey knew that he was likely in surgery.

“I’m sorry. One of his partners is taking calls if you need to speak to a physician immediately.”

“No. Thank you. I’ll call back.” He hung up.

In six hours, he better have found her.

The next call he made was to Rico. They weren’t high-priced physicians but each week, one of the partners was also on call, in the event that there was an after-hours emergency. They had a gentlemen’s agreement that if anybody was going to be suddenly unavailable or out of commission for any reason, they needed to let the on-call person know.

“Anything I can do to help?” Rico asked after Trey gave him a brief rundown.

“Yeah,” Trey said. Rico could data mine better than anybody in the company. “There is. Get me everything you can on Kellie McGarry. Age twenty-eight or twenty-nine. Not sure of her birth date. Moved to North Las Vegas about six months ago.” Information was power and Kellie had just given up all rights to privacy.

On one hand, he was incredibly happy that Kellie had escaped the destruction at her apartment. But he was really frustrated that instead of calling him for help, after he’d just offered it hours earlier, he was now chasing after her. What the hell kind of trouble could she be in and where could she be headed?

He knew that the right thing to do was contact the police about the damage at Kellie’s apartment. But that could delay him for hours. Instead, he simply turned the lock on the door and closed it behind him, leaving it how he’d found it. He walked out the front door of the building, toward the carport. He wanted a better look at her car.

From the outside it appeared fine. But when he looked inside, he immediately saw that the glove compartment door, which had been shut last night when he’d watched her get in her car, was now hanging open. She could have opened it, of course. But given the damage in her apartment, he thought it very possible that someone had been in her vehicle. He saw no obvious signs of entry but it was easy enough to get into a locked car with the right tools.

He put two fingers under his shirttail and then tried the door. It was unlocked. Last night, he’d watched her use her fob to unlock her car. For most people, especially people who lived in places where their car wasn’t in a secured spot, it was habit to lock the doors. He suspected it was her habit.

But if he was right and somebody had searched her car, they hadn’t cared enough to lock up after themselves. Hadn’t cared enough to shut the glove compartment. They hadn’t been careful. Just like they hadn’t been careful in her apartment.

He walked back to his truck. Hagney had said he dropped her off at the bus station. Trey quickly used his phone to see the early morning bus schedule. There were a couple options. She could have headed north toward Reno or west toward Los Angeles. This was like looking for a needle in a haystack. His only option was to go to the bus station, see if there was anybody working now who had been working the previous night, and hope they remembered Kellie. Rico would verify there had been no credit card activity, but he wasn’t expecting any. She’d gotten cash from Hagney and that’s what she’d be spending.