Free Thread of Betrayal by Jeff Shelby Page B

him. And I’d seen too many things to forget that you never knew as much as you thought you did about people. But it was so difficult for me to look at Mike and think he played some role in my daughter’s disappearance. I wanted to tell him we were on our way to California and to have him make calls and have him go to L.A. and start looking before we got there.
    But I just couldn’t take that risk.
    “All he saw was the report?” Lauren asked.
    “That’s what he said.”
    “And he said he hadn’t talked to Bazer?”
    I nodded.
    “So then one of two things is going to happen,” she said, knocking her fist lightly against the window. “One, he either sits tight and waits for you to call back. Which to me means he’s clean and on our side. Or, two, he digs into the report and finds the Corzines pretty easily. Because that’s where it would start, right? If you had seen that report, that’s where it would have taken you.”
    I nodded again. “I’d track the source which would take me to Rodney, who would have no reason not to tell me about the Corzines. So yeah. One or two.”
    “I’ll call them,” she said. “Tell them to notify us if they’re contacted by anyone.”
    “You think they will?”
    “I think you scared the hell out of them and they’ll do whatever we ask at this point,” she said, reaching for her phone. “So I’ll call them and we’ll wait to see what happens.”
    I stared at the long stretch of highway in front of us. The red rocks were getting taller and we were close to the Nevada border. Then we’d cruise through Las Vegas and into the high desert of California. Then head toward the ocean and Los Angeles.
    We had plenty of time to wait.

NINETEEN
     
     
    The red rocks in Utah gave way to wide open deserts and then the massive hotels in Las Vegas. After the city, a vast expanse of nothingness greeted us. We drove further, approaching the gateway into the part of California that didn’t look like California. Flat, brown and sandy. Baker and Barstow were about as un-Southern California as you could get, working class cities that housed the people who couldn’t afford the homes closer to the ocean. I’d been through Barstow numerous times in my life, but the only place I’d stopped was the McDonald’s housed in an old passenger train. It was a place you passed through, not a place you stayed and I held to that rule, pushing the rental up to eighty as we flew down the highway.
    Our phones stayed silent and that was the most disconcerting part. Sure, no one was calling us with bad news, but no one was calling us with good news, either. We tried small talk, but Lauren and I were both wound too tightly at that point to even fake it so we kept our mouths closed for most of the drive.
    We stopped once for food and once more for gas and by late afternoon, our highway speed dropped drastically as we became entwined in the gridlock that was Los Angeles traffic. The wide open deserts morphed into tight pockets of homes, long strip malls and not much open space. Despite having lived in San Diego for most of my life, I hadn’t spent much time in L.A. and it still felt like a foreign city to me. There was a vibe I’d never been able to identify, as if everyone else knew what it was and I was just looking around, clueless as to what I was missing out on.
    “I don’t know where to go,” I said.
    Lauren stretched in her seat. “I was just gonna ask.”
    “We could go to the airport,” I said. “But according to Morgan, she’s already gone.”
    She nodded. “She probably is.”
    “So where?”
    “Where would you go?” she said. “If you were her. You’d never been here before, your money is limited and transportation is probably limited to a taxi or a bus. Where would you go?”
    I thought. And thought some more. I tried to think in terms of someone else, try to think about a different missing kid, to somehow distance myself and be able to come up with a rational thought, a plan of