Every Precious Thing

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The flight arrived in Los Angeles at 11:44 p.m. Though it was on time, Dr. Erica Paskota glanced at her watch, annoyed. By the time she retrieved her rental car-with the special package that had hopefully been slipped into the trunk-waited for her two men who weren’t scheduled to arrive for another thirty minutes, then drove the three-plus hours to Braden, she wouldn’t arrive until after four a.m. at best.

Her man on the scene had been watching the woman for four weeks, but there had been no sign she’d had any contact with the target. Erica had begun to assume it was a dead end, but had left her watcher in place because caution was the best course.

Then there’d been the beating the previous night. The watcher had not seen the actual fight, but he had seen the man in the bar not long before he was attacked. That, in itself, wouldn’t have been enough to draw the doctor’s interest, but the picture the injured man had been showing around was.

Someone else was looking for the same person she was. Why? Who was he? And the woman bartender they’d been watching-did she actually know something?

Whatever the answers, this needed to end now. It had been going on way too long. Though she had other matters that required her attention, she could no longer trust this issue to anyone else. She had decided to fly out herself and lead the search. It was the only way she could be sure of a satisfactory ending.

She glanced at her watch again, even more agitated than before. She was sure the ending she craved lay to the East, but she wasn’t getting there any faster as her plane endlessly taxied through LAX.