No Place Like Home

Chapter 4

Chapter Four

Fortunately, that conversation became moot when Ramirez received a call that required his immediate attention. He agreed to keep me posted but left after reiterating a directive I’d heard more times than I could count—to trust law enforcement to do their job. He added a stern warning. Something along the lines of my failure to comply would not only impede their efforts, but could also get Leah and Shelby hurt. Or worse.

Roughly translated: “Stay out of it, AJ.”

Yeah. Like that directive had ever been heeded in the past.

I listened to the rumble of his truck as it pulled away and fired up my laptop, jotting down what I knew to date and what I’d learned from our conversation. Something told me it was best to capture these thoughts now. I had a feeling that once the shock of Leah’s disappearance settled in, another set of emotions would arise.

Ones that could affect my already cloudy judgment.

As Ramirez had intimated, I didn’t want to do something out of anger, fear or guilt that would make things worse.

Without access to Leah’s phone, computer, or any of the items that had been left in her vehicle, I had no way of backtracking anything she’d done up to the point she’d disappeared. However, if she hadn’t been found, Ramirez’s law enforcement contact must not have made any headway, either.

I considered contacting her former coworkers but doubted that there would be anything helpful to glean from them. Besides, asking a group of reporters about my best friend’s actions would certainly perk up more than a handful of feelers, if not incite a few of them to start an investigation of their own. I wasn’t prepared for them to have this information…yet.

Not to mention Shelby could have shared it with them, but had chosen Leah to confide in. Leah, in turn, had confided in Ramirez. Meaning both had felt it was safer to only share the information with one person.

And look where that had gotten them.

I wasn’t about to follow them down the same path, though I wondered if I would have a choice.

One thing I was sure of—I had to find Tamryn.

A quick Internet search brought up her social media profile. I was surprised to find that her posts were more toned down than what they’d once been. There were definitely no gratuitous images of her or anyone else in compromising positions. Just pics with friends, heading to a movie, eating out or random quotes—typically hers—rounded out by an occasional cat or dog video that she’d reshared.

Compared to the previous iteration, Tamryn version 2.0 appeared pretty tame and a bit more polished.

Heavy emphasis on appeared.

Perhaps it was the price she’d paid to separate her personal but still very social life from the one in which she indulged in a variety of party-going festivities. Something told me she had a second, more private profile for that.

And to gain access to that secondary lifestyle, I’d have to crack the first.

Meaning, I had to focus on what I had in front of me—a profile that literally screamed:

Friend me and I’ll be your forever friend right back!

No wonder she had over a million loyal followers, I snorted.

After liking a few of her posts, I sent her a friend request. With any luck, she’d respond. Then I could direct message her rather than posing my query for the masses to view.

Within seconds, she friended me back with a quick:

Welcome to my world!

Now that we were forever friends, I carefully crafted my direct message. Too little and it would get lost in the circus; too much and I would probably get myself blocked or reported.

Finally, I settled on the following, grimacing as I sent it into the social media black hole:

Hey! Noticed we have some friends in common… Have you talked to Shelby lately? Am hoping to catch up. DM me…

Several hours went by without a response. I nibbled at my nails, scrolling her feed for activity. Had I been too aggressive and scared her away?

If she was knee-deep into whatever Shelby and Leah had gotten themselves into, or knew what had happened to either of them, perhaps she was in just as much danger. Then again, if she was involved, had I put them at greater risk?

I rose and paced the kitchen, only to kick Nicoh’s water bowl, dousing my shoes and pant legs while creating a lake on the tile. He lifted his head and huffed before tightening himself into a ball that defied the laws of Malamute physics and returning to his doggie dreams.

At least one of us was getting some rest, I mused.

After checking the non-existent messages on my social media account one final time, I closed the laptop and shoved it to the side, placing my chin on my hands as I contemplated my next move.

I could always reach out to my mysterious, often missing in action, biological father, Martin Singer. Or Bio-Pop, as Leah had aptly named him. It hadn’t been a term of endearment, though he’d defrosted a few icicles as we’d gotten to know him.

Then he disappeared on us. Again.

The last time I’d seen him, it was just before he’d packed up his meager belongings and moved out of the house he’d been leasing a street over from one of my friends who was in Dallas doing lawyerly things on a long-term contract. I hadn’t heard from Martin since and wasn’t even sure he was still in Arizona.

I still had the cell phone number he’d given me, though, and knew I could reach out whenever I needed to. Perhaps he could use his network—I still wasn’t entirely sure what that entailed—to help me get some information on the rental property scene and see if there were any rumblings from their end of anything hinky going on.

Question was—could I do it without mentioning Leah’s disappearance? I wasn’t convinced I wanted Bio-Pop that far into my business. Truth be told, I still didn’t trust him. And I was nowhere near figuring out his intentions, though my feeling was that they would always linger in the grayer realm.

True, he was my father, but he wasn’t the man who had raised me as his own. No, Martin had always been…something else, even longer than I had known him or of his role in my life. I could spend a lifetime getting to know him and still not uncover all of his secrets or the things that made him tick. It was a threshold I wasn’t sure I was willing to cross, even if presented.

It didn’t help that he rang all of Ramirez’s warning bells. I’d been warded off him and every time there had been an argument followed by a period of separation, Martin had been at the core of it.

If I plunged ahead and contacted Martin, Ramirez would eventually find out and I’d risk losing a lifeline in my efforts to locate Leah. He would simply cut off contact. For good this time.

Then again, if I contacted Ramirez instead and pressed him into being more forthcoming about what Leah had shared, I still could end up empty-handed.

I wasn’t a fan of either option.

In the end, I stabbed my finger at a name in the Contacts list on my cell phone and hit “Call,” grudgingly selecting the path of least resistance.

It wouldn’t be the first time I’d chosen the wrong path.