Every Precious Thing by Brett Battles Page A

was a typical living room, albeit one that could use some straightening up. Clothes and a couple of boxes lay haphazard on the couch and the nearby stuffed chair. A few more boxes were scattered across the floor.
    He doused the light and turned his attention to the door, once again wishing he had proper lock-picking tools. As he’d done at Pearson’s house, he tried the knob. Tools, he realized, weren’t going to be unnecessary. The door was unlocked.
    He pushed it open wide enough so he could stick his head in. The mess wasn’t contained to what he’d seen through the window. There was stuff everywhere. Even in the kitchen at the other end of the living room, he could see that all the doors to the cabinets were hanging open. It felt like the place had been systematically ransacked.
    With growing dread, Logan stepped inside, made his way over to the hallway, then paused.
    Dead silence.
    Son of a bitch .
    Hoping Diana was just a light sleeper, he tiptoed down the hall, running his light through the bathroom as he passed. It, too, had been strategically picked over. There were two more doors at the end of the hall. The first led to a small bedroom that contained only a bed and a nightstand, and nothing else.
    The last door opened into the master bedroom. Diana’s room. It turned out to be the messiest in the whole place.
    It was also unoccupied.
    Diana was gone, and Logan had a very strong feeling she wasn’t coming back.

C HAPTER F IFTEEN
     
    D IANA HAD BEEN caught by surprise. She’d convinced herself that if nothing had happened by now, they had acted in time, and everything was going to be all right. But that unrealistic dream had shattered the moment a man walked into The Hideaway with a picture of Sara.
    Diana had been smart enough to avoid the guy for the most part, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t on the verge of panic the whole time he was there. That’s why she had foolishly allowed herself to sneak away for a moment and call Richard.
    Dumb. Dumb. Dumb .
    At the very least, she should have waited until she got home to make the call.
    Damn him ! His heart was in the right place, but even more than she did, he let his emotions control his actions at the worst possible times. Of course, when a situation had anything to do with Sara, they both had emotions that ran about as high as they could get.
    Richard didn’t tell her what he’d done until the next morning. He didn’t know if he’d killed the man or just knocked him out. The only thing he did know was that he’d destroyed the phone the picture was on. She didn’t have the heart at the time to point out there had to be other copies out there.
    Once he confessed, she immediately called the hospital, saying she heard there’d been a fight near the bar, and was wondering if anyone had been hurt. What she learned was that a man had been brought in, but his condition didn’t appear to be life threatening. What little relief Diana took from that was outweighed by the fact that the man had come into The Hideaway and asked about Sara at all.
    She and Richard should have skipped town then, but she wanted to keep an eye on things. “Just a few days,” she’d said.
    Then, the very next night— that night—another man came into the bar, and on his phone was the same picture of Sara. This time she did wait until she got home to call Richard.
    “We’re leaving,” she told him.
    “What happened?”
    “Another one showed up.”
    “Where is he?” She could hear what he was thinking in his tone.
    “No,” she said quickly. “We’re getting out of town. Now. We leave him alone. Understand?”
    She raced through her duplex, going through all her possessions, and grabbed only what she needed. Before leaving, she scrawled a note to her landlord, then added a postscript for her boss as an afterthought. She stuffed the message in an envelope and put it on the kitchen counter. She would have liked to talk to Mary Ralston, The Hideaway’s owner, but there