She Once Vanished, page 31
“But Kristy didn’t send you anything related to him. She was looking for the bushy-bearded fan that had shown up at several shoots.”
“It’s possible that Starr was following the tour, waiting for the right opportunity to take Elysse. In fact, he probably was. If he was following the tour, he knew who Kristy was. Kristy might have caught him in several photos, and she could have just as easily been sending me pictures of him as of Marvin.”
Kenzie inclined her head. “Yeah. I guess so.”
“And if she had written down anything about me being hired by Dain to investigate Elysse’s disappearance…”
“Then Dain could be in trouble, too.” Kenzie rubbed her forehead as if she were getting a headache. She frowned. “I can ask Cameron and the investigators if there was anything to indicate that Dain had hired you… but if there was a note in a notebook, or a sticky note, or if it was in her digital filing…”
“He could have taken it from the scene or destroyed it. So we have to assume that he does know.”
“Even if he doesn’t know that Dain hired you, it’s pretty easy to figure out that you are a private investigator. So he knows that you didn’t just happen to be talking to Kristy because you are a fan.”
It was not hard to figure out Zachary was a private investigator. He advertised the fact. Made it as easy as possible for people looking for a private investigator to find him.
“Well, this is a pretty mess,” Kenzie observed. “But it’s not the first time you’ve been in this kind of situation, and it won’t be the last…”
Zachary hoped it wouldn’t be the last.
69
Since meeting with Detective Cameron, Zachary had been calling and texting Dain without any success. This had been making him very anxious, so he was relieved the next day to receive a text from Dain just after lunch telling him that he wanted to see Zachary and Kenzie if they could make some time for him.
Zachary wasn’t sure whether it was because he wanted to get an update on the investigation into Elysse’s kidnapping, or to see if they knew anything about what had happened to Kristy, or maybe to show them the progress he was making on his manuscript. Social media influencers did seem to be very self-focused, so maybe he was excited about what he had written and hoped they would celebrate it with him. There was no indication in his text what he wanted to talk about.
In the end, it all boiled down to one thing. Zachary would let him know what progress they had made. How they had discovered that Elysse had, in fact, been kidnapped by Jordan Starr in a bid to pump up his company’s brand and was still being terrorized by him. But the police were now on the case and no longer believed that Elysse had just gone off on vacation as she had reported. They recognized that she had been kidnapped and everything she had said had been under duress. They would find Jordan Starr, and they would put him in jail.
Elysse would be able to leave her home in Oregon without fear. Maybe Dain would be able to join her and they could rekindle their relationship. Or not, if Elysse no longer wanted to continue their relationship. She could let Dain know that calmly instead of having a big blow-up and running away from any further contact. He could have the resolution he needed and go on with his life.
Poor sap. Zachary knew what it was like to be dumped by someone he had been with for a couple of years. Even though they’d had a tumultuous relationship, even though Bridget had been scathing and verbally abusive, Zachary had still been hurt when they broke up.
Devastated.
But maybe it wouldn’t be the same for Dain. He had other women in his life, after all. They had an open relationship. Maybe it wouldn’t bother him as much for him and Elysse to go in separate directions. As long as he knew what had actually happened to Elysse and knew that she was okay.
It might be best if Dain stayed in Vermont and didn’t go back to Oregon to be near Elysse.
When u want us? Zachary texted Dain back. Can we bring dinner?
He thought that would be a nice gesture. Kenzie wouldn’t be free until the end of the workday. Dain was going to need some emotional support when they explained everything to him and told Dain he might be in danger himself if Jordan Starr had figured out that he was the one who had hired Zachary to investigate what had happened to Elysse.
Sure, bring chicken, Dain texted back. How soon are you free?
Zachary called Kenzie at the medical examiner’s office so that he wouldn’t be trying to text two different conversations simultaneously and sending a response to the wrong one.
“Hey, Zachary,” Kenzie answered in a calm, measured voice that meant he was testing her patience. “We’re still on for couple’s therapy.”
Zachary looked at the clock on his laptop screen. He had forgotten the instant Dain texted, that couple’s therapy was that afternoon, after which they normally went out for ice cream, and didn’t plan to do anything else in the evening, since therapy could be very taxing. They might not feel up to anything else afterward.
“Zachary?” Kenzie prompted.
“Shoot. I forgot,” Zachary confessed. “Dain just texted and asked if we could go over there for dinner and I said yes. But I’m not sure about doing that after therapy.”
“Yeah, chances are, we aren’t going to want to deal with other people,” Kenzie agreed, sounding irritated.
Of course she was irritated. Why would Zachary say yes to Dain when they were supposed to have therapy that afternoon?
Some days, he needed space after therapy to think things through and recharge. Sometimes, he wanted to be close to Kenzie, to do something special with her, and to show how much he appreciated her being there for him and everything that she put into the relationship. Therapy could bring up tender feelings that he wanted to act upon.
“I’m sorry,” he told Kenzie. “Now I don’t know what to do. Should I cancel therapy today?”
“I already have the time off. And it’s too late to cancel; you need to let Dr. Boyle know at least twenty-four hours ahead of time so she can have the chance to get someone else into that time slot.”
Zachary was normally frugal, but he could give up the money for that one session if he had to.
“Can’t you tell Dain you’ll have to see him another day? It’s inconvenient if you make changes to our schedule now.”
“Uh… yeah, okay.” Zachary put Kenzie’s call on speaker and switched to his messaging app to renegotiate with Dain. He hated having to backtrack when he had just made the arrangements. But it wasn’t like Dain had gone out of his way to accommodate Zachary. In fact, he was expecting them to accommodate him on the spur of the moment and to bring dinner. Though Zachary couldn’t blame Dain for that when he was the one who had offered.
Sorry, forgot we already had an engagement, he tapped out to Dain. Tomorrow?
Need to see you today, Dain responded almost immediately. Urgent.
Zachary rolled his eyes. Now what?
“He says he can’t wait,” he related to Kenzie. “He needs to see us today urgently. Or me, anyway.”
“Do you think it really is urgent?” Kenzie challenged.
Zachary considered. Was it? Or was Dain expecting everyone else to adapt to his schedule? Being a minor celebrity might just have gone to his head and he expected everyone to jump just because he told them to. He already had Kenzie on the phone, so it would be a pain to try to call Dain and evaluate from his voice whether it was really an urgent situation or not. As far as he knew, there wasn’t anything that needed to be dealt with urgently.
“I don’t know,” he mumbled to Kenzie. “I’m trying to negotiate by text. Give me a few seconds.”
Have previous engagements, Zachary tried again. Maybe we could phone or video chat instead?
No! need you HERE
“He’s freaking out a bit,” Zachary told Kenzie. “I think I should go see him. Maybe… you could see Dr. B individually and we could do couple’s next week.”
“What’s going on? What is he freaking out about? I don’t want to see Dr. B alone. If you think it is that important, you’ll have to call Dr. Boyle to tell her to scrap it.”
“Okay. I will. I’ll cancel, and I’ll tell Dain that we’ll come out for supper tonight, like I told him initially. He said to bring chicken; are you okay with that?”
“He told you to bring chicken?”
“Well, I asked if we could bring something, and he said chicken.”
Kenzie sighed loudly. “Okay. So we’ll go for dinner tonight and bring chicken. You don’t need me to take the afternoon off.”
“No. But if you need to—”
“I’m going to stay here and finish up a few things. I could use the extra time to catch up after our road trip. I’ll still leave a bit early so we can get a bucket of chicken and drive out to Dain’s.”
“Okay. I’ll get the directions. I appreciate you—”
“Don’t forget to call Dr. B to cancel. I have to go.”
She terminated the call abruptly. Zachary still had his mouth open to respond to her, but she was gone.
“Okay,” he muttered aloud to keep himself focused and on track as the phone vibrated in his hand with another incoming message. “Call Dr. B to cancel. Then deal with Dain.”
70
Eventually, Kenzie returned from the medical examiner’s office. She and Zachary went to the restaurant for take-out fried chicken and then headed out on the highway toward Dain’s house. The savory smell of the chicken quickly filled the car’s interior and Zachary’s stomach growled several times. He hoped that the smell wouldn’t stay in the car any longer than the chicken was actually there. He didn’t want to get into a car that smelled like fried chicken every day for the foreseeable future.
“Dain wouldn’t tell you what he wanted to talk to you about?” Kenzie asked. “Or what he wanted from you? Other than fried chicken?”
“No, he said he needed to see me face-to-face. And with all that I have to show and tell him, that’s probably the best thing anyway. It’s hard to explain something that complex efficiently over email or a phone call. This way, he can see the backup and exactly what we’re talking about. And who, too. He should know what Jordan Starr looks like so that if he runs into him, he knows it. He could be going by another name or approach him on some other pretense.”
“Do you think Starr would really go after any of us? Dain, or you, or me?”
“We all hold pieces to the puzzle. He can’t be sure what we’ve told each other or how much we’ve figured out. He got rid of Kristy, so we know he’s not going to balk at violence. If he’s decided to wipe out his back trail… anyone who might know enough about him to put the story together to tie him to Elysse’s abduction or Kristy’s murder… then we all have to be on the lookout for him.”
“How do you think Dain will take it?”
“Well… as a brash young man, he’ll probably think he’s indestructible. Nothing can hurt him or kill him. But we’ll tell him about Kristy if he doesn’t already know… I hope he’ll see reason and won’t do anything stupid.”
Zachary stared out at the highway, listening to the thrum of the tires against the asphalt and thinking it through.
“We need to let the police get up to speed and chase down all their leads. Before they can arrest Starr, they’ve got to find him. I hope that if he doesn’t get any chance to confront any of us in the next few days, he’ll have to go back to his office in Salt Lake City if he hasn’t already. He’s taken a couple of weeks off for the Elysse kidnapping and now has more time off to clean things up. Who knows how many times he’s run out to Oregon to check on Elysse or to confront and threaten her? He should be out of vacation days.”
“Unless he isn’t taking them as vacation days.”
Zachary’s mind went to sick days. But if he were honest, he had never worked in corporate America and didn’t know how it actually worked. Could Starr take off all the time he wanted to, and it just had to be classified as vacation days, sick days, or leave without pay? Or would he be warned that he was missing too much work when he hit a certain number? Would he be fired without warning?
Or was he high enough in the organization to take whatever time he wanted? Or work remotely from wherever he wanted to?
“I mean,” Kenzie said, “we don’t know that he is taking vacation days off for this. It’s just as possible that other people at the company are in on it. What are the chances that he would do something huge like this without any help from anyone else? Or without the approval of someone else in the company, higher up in the command structure than he is?”
“You mean they aren’t days off. They’re just regular workdays. Get the holiday campaign going. Run off that report. Go to Vermont and kidnap that girl, torture her, put her in Mystic Mountain togs until she is discovered…”
Kenzie shrugged. “Could he do everything he has without any assistance? What about money? Was he using his own money or an expense account or company credit card? If he’s using his own money, then how is he going to be repaid? He’ll just get more money as that company gets bigger and more successful? That’s not the way it works. Is he relying on the profit that he’ll make when his company shares increase in value? Stock options? Or is he getting cash bonuses as he completes each step?”
Kenzie was right. The plan might have started higher up in the company. Or it might have started with Starr but been approved by someone further up the chain so that he could get the money and other resources he needed to carry out the abduction and ongoing threats.
“I don’t know if anyone else is in on it,” he admitted. “Nothing we’ve heard has pointed to anyone else, but… you’re right… there could be someone inside the company who knows what’s going on and is making sure he gets paid for his… extracurricular activities and has the freedom to travel to take care of all of this.”
“Well… I guess that’s up to the police to figure out. They can get the cops in Salt Lake looking into it.”
“Yeah. Some stuff you can’t learn on the internet. You need boots on the ground, like we did on our road trip. Most of that stuff… we couldn’t have found out through phone calls and emails. We had to be there.”
They were quiet for a while; Zachary focused on his driving and Kenzie gazed out the window. It wasn’t a long drive, but long enough for Zachary to get wound up about where Jordan Starr was and when they would cross paths, or whether the police would find him first. Driving was normally relaxing for him, but thinking about what Kenzie had said was not.
Following the GPS and Dain’s instructions, he pulled into Dain’s yard. It was a modest farmhouse, not a mansion. Isolated enough that he would not have to worry about Elysse Allan fans showing up unexpectedly. Zachary tried to marshal his thoughts and line up everything he needed to present to Dain, as he had to Detective Cameron, to show him what was going on and the care Dain needed to take to make sure he was not Starr’s next victim. A step-by-step progression through the facts they had uncovered, leading to the only possible conclusion. That Jordan Starr was Elysse’s captor, not just six months ago, but on an ongoing basis.
Would Dain want to go after Starr himself? To hop on a plane and fly across the country to Elysse’s house to be her knight in shining armor?
Zachary grabbed the bucket of chicken from the car and tried to stay focused on that and on the information he would present to Dain to keep himself from compulsively checking whether the car was properly locked, which he tried not to do if he was with Kenzie or someone else.
Kenzie joined him on the doorstep and Zachary pressed the doorbell.
He had barely taken his finger off the bell when the door opened. Dain had obviously been watching for them, eagerly awaiting his chicken.
Only it wasn’t Dain who opened the door.
71
Zachary found himself staring not into the eyes of the man he had been studying on his computer screen for the last couple of days, but into the barrel of the gun held in the man’s hand.
Starr changed his aim from Zachary to Kenzie and back again, making sure they both saw that he was the one with the power. He could shoot one or both with ease.
“Let’s not do anything stupid,” he told them with the shortened vowels of a Utah accent. “Come on inside and bring that chicken. I’ve been here all day and I’m starved.”
Zachary glanced at Kenzie, checking to see what she wanted to do. If she wanted to run for it, he would cover her, standing in Starr’s way and not letting him out the door, to give her as much time as possible. If she wanted him to cooperate, he would, watching for a way for them to get out of the predicament. Fried chicken was really a two-handed meal, so what was Starr going to do with the gun while he ate?
Kenzie gave a slight shake of her head. She didn’t tense and look back at the car. He knew without words that they would go into the house and do their best once they got the lay of the land.
So he stepped in the door with the chicken, standing between Starr and Kenzie. Subtly, so Starr would not notice and get angry about it. Just keeping her covered. Protecting his mate the best he could.
Starr sniffed the air. “Smells darn good. Is it still warm?”
“Sure,” Zachary agreed. “It wasn’t that long a drive.”
“Stupid idiot here doesn’t have a lick of edible food in the house. It’s all greens and sprouts and unprocessed crap. I’m not a rabbit. When I want food, don’t give me carrots and lettuce.”
“This has been driving me crazy in the car,” Zachary said, taking the bucket to the dining room table and pulling the lid off. “It smells so good; my stomach has been growling the whole way.” He peered into the bucket. “No sprouts here,” he said with a smile.
