Missing in Conard County Read online

  They probably would say exactly that, she thought as she drove away with a wave. Not everyone, but some. She’d been listening to the arguments for a long time now. She did, however, listen to her dad.

  “Streets are flooding all the time down here, Kelly. Never used to see that. Houses that were safe except in the worst hurricanes are getting flooded at high tide, especially if we’ve had some rain. Streets undrivable. Things are changing. I’m glad you’re up there.”

  Things are changing. Maybe that was the only thing people would agree on. But behind her Bugle let out a low moan, reminding her she hadn’t given him a chance to take care of his business for a while now.

  “Bad, bad Kelly,” she said aloud. In the rearview, she could see Bugle cock his head inquisitively. “Next turnout,” she promised him. It’d give her a chance to give the binoculars on the seat beside her a good workout. At every opportunity she’d scanned the surrounding country because she couldn’t stop hoping she’d find some sign of the missing teens.

  The rabbit in her house seemed like a minor thing compared with that. So somebody wanted to make her uneasy. Big deal. They probably also didn’t want to mess with Bugle. She didn’t need the Glock on her hip to feel safe.

  But unless those girls were being held somewhere right around here, hope was nearly pointless. They were gone, one way or another, maybe not even in this county anymore. And if someone was holding them prisoner somewhere around here...well, something should give him away soon. A trip to a store, a pharmacy, extra food...if he had to care for three teens, he was going to need supplies. Supplies that wouldn’t be on his usual shopping list.

  Maybe.

  But so far nobody had come to the sheriff remarking that they’d noticed something unusual. The most unusual thing had been that dolt Spence poking at her, and that hadn’t been the first time she’d run into a jerk who liked to give a cop a hard time.

  In fact, given the kidnapping, she was surprised that she and other cops hadn’t suffered a whole lot more from impatient, angry people. They must seem like total failures.

  And from Kelly’s perspective, she felt like one. It seemed next to impossible that someone could have taken those girls and left no evidence behind. That was one of the almost unbreakable rules of crime scene investigation: take something, leave something behind.

  But if he’d left anything behind, they didn’t know what it was. They might stare straight at it and not know it. That glove was all they had. It linked to one of the girls, but not to the perp. No help until they had someone to charge.

  Sometimes she found that the most frustrating part of police work, to be able to develop a mountain of evidence that you couldn’t link to anyone specific until you put hands on the guy.

  How many men in this county—assuming it was a man—might be enough of a pervert to take those girls? Did any of them have families they were hiding this from? Or did they all live alone? How many of them were there, solitary men?

  Plenty, unfortunately. Women seemed more eager to leave this town and county than men by far. They wanted something more than the smell of cow poop and skunk in the morning.

  She found a turnout and let Bugle out without a leash. He needed to run off some energy. Then she pulled out the binoculars and began to scan the countryside from east to west toward the mountains. A tumbledown line shack that looked like it should have collapsed long ago. No houses immediately in sight, but yeah, she thought she could see one farther out. A couple of miles? Possibly next on her checklist.

  The mountains, for all they had prepared for winter, still looked dark and forbidding, probably because the sky was trying to work itself into an early version of night with lowering clouds.

  The air felt oddly warm, though. Strange, but maybe it was an effect of the approaching cold, sucking heat toward it from somewhere else. Her weather knowledge was miserable, but as she stood there studying the barren countryside and a few cattle that really needed to be on their way into a barn, she wondered if she should have majored in meteorology.

  Following in her father’s footsteps had seemed like the thing to do for so many years, but how often had Hector tried to talk her out of it?

  “You don’t know, muchacha,” he’d say to her. “The things we have to see. I’m not talking about risks. Sure there are risks but it’s more dangerous to cut down trees or catch crabs. No, I’m talking about what we see. Things that get stamped in the brain and never go away. Why would you want to do that?”

  Because that’s what he had done and she admired the heck out of him. He’d been right about the things stamped in her brain, however. Absolutely right. At least she saw a lot fewer of them here in Wyoming than she had during her brief stint in Fort Lauderdale.

  When Bugle apparently felt he’d run off enough energy, he came back to her with his tail wagging, ready to go on patrol again. It seemed he hadn’t noticed anything untoward, and only then did she realize how much she’d been hoping that he’d find another piece of evidence, like that glove.

  No such luck. She put him back in his cage in the backseat and wondered absently how soon it would get so cold that she’d need to put his quilted vest and booties on him. Not yet, anyway.

  By comparison with the last few days, the air felt almost balmy.

  Before she pulled back out onto the road, her cell phone tweeted at her. She almost laughed. She thought she’d been out of range for a while.

  “Hey,” said the now-familiar voice of Al Carstairs, “how are your rounds going?”

  “Nearly done, for today at any rate. You?”

  “Couple more houses. I’ll be out on 581 for the next half hour or so. Listen, when you want lunch, look me up. I’ve got a story about a Maine coon for you, and I found a scrap of pink cloth that even Gage isn’t sure means anything.”

  “Pretend you just heard me sigh. Okay, I’ll see you on 581. Maybe an hour?”

  “I’ll be there. I’m running back to my cabin first, though. Some people call me on the landline and talk to my answering machine. Can you believe it? An answering machine in this day and age.”

  She laughed. “Hey, you heard of voice mail?”

  “County won’t pay for the additional service. Nope, I’m a tape man. Play and erase. See you shortly.”

  A Maine coon and a good story. Sounded like it might be a nice lunch break. Plus a piece of fabric. Her heart did one of those nervous little skips it had been doing ever since this case exploded.

  She closed her eyes a few moments, sending a prayer for those girls winging heavenward, then pulled back onto the road.

  She believed in a benevolent God. Absolutely. But she also figured the human race had him or her so overworked that single prayers might get lost in the tsunami.

  “We make most of our own problems,” her father had told her once. She wasn’t sure if he was speaking as a cop or a dad, nor did it really matter. They’d just come out of Mass, and she’d donated her babysitting money to the poor.

  “What do you mean?” she’d asked him.

  “People don’t starve because God wants it. They starve because other people are hard-hearted.”

  That philosophy had stuck. So maybe her prayer was useless. A bad guy was involved in all this. He had made this problem. Unfortunately, entirely too many people were in the perp’s class, harming others for their own satisfaction.

  But that didn’t keep her from saying yet another prayer as she drove.

  * * *

  BACK AT HIS CABIN, Al got word of two missing cats, and he still had the ones dropped by the roadside to worry about. Kittens. If he hurried up, he could grab them and get to 581 with the missing cats who’d been out since last night.

  Cats were a piece of work, he sometimes thought. He loved them as much as any animals, but cats could be especially difficult. Somehow, they’d managed to keep their own minds and wills intact. They cou
ld be cuddly companions one minute and troublesome isolationists the next.

  As he jumped back into his truck, ready to rescue the local feline population, he felt a light weight land on his shoulder.

  “Regis,” he said, twisting his head to look at the gray squirrel. “You really don’t want to come along to look for cats.”

  But Regis, like the cats, had his own mind. He chittered, then settled into the space between Al’s collar and shoulder.

  And that, thought Al, was what he got for rescuing an infant squirrel last spring and nursing him to health before releasing him. Regis still had a bit of human in him.

  * * *

  FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER he’d rescued the family of cats, the kittens no more than a week old, and placed them on a towel together in a cage in the back of his truck. Mama immediately wrapped herself around them, protecting them. The two other missing cats showed up on their home porches, so he erased them from his mental list.

  Once he approached 581 he saw Salty, a schnauzer from an outlying ranch that shouldn’t be anywhere around here. So Salty was placed in a cage a distance from the cats and began to whine. Of course. He’d probably been having a great time chasing a ground squirrel, had indeed chased it so far he was too far from home.

  At last he turned onto 581, looking forward to seeing Kelly. She was occupying a whole lot more time in his thoughts than was probably good for him, but he was past caring. There were enough bad things to think about.

  Kelly was like a bright shining oasis in a world full of ugliness.

  Then he spied Misty. A beautiful golden retriever with a distinctive prance to her step, she seemed to be running in circles about a hundred yards inside the fence line of the Harris family ranch. He was surprised to see her so far out here. The Avilas had always been careful owners who tried not to let Misty slip her leash, but she was an accomplished escape artist. With the weather turning so bitter, perhaps one of the kids had let her out in the backyard without watching and she’d burrowed under the fence. Regardless, at the times she proved to be Houdini’s reincarnation, Al usually picked her up within or near the city limits.

  Al pulled his van onto the shoulder, grabbed a slipknot leash and climbed out. Misty had never been a problem to round up, so he expected her to come immediately when he called. Just after he slid off the seat and his feet hit the ground, he felt Regis dig in his claws. He had to smile.

  He closed the vehicle door so the animals would stay warm and gave thanks that the wind hadn’t really started yet. Just the faintest of breezes had begun to chill the air, starting to vanquish the unusual warmth of the last few hours, and now held a tang that hinted at coming snow.

  For the first time ever, Misty wasn’t in a cooperative mood. As she raced around, she tossed some kind of toy in the air, and although she occasionally glanced at him when he called her, she kept right on playing, pausing only to paw at the ground before returning to her private game of catch.

  “Hey, Misty,” Al called. “Come on. Don’t be a pain. Seriously.”

  Just then a sheriff’s SUV pulled onto the opposite shoulder of the road. It bore a rack of lights, and Conard County Sheriff painted in green on the tan background. K-9, Keep Your Distance was also labeled on the side. By that, before she even climbed out, Al knew it was Kelly.

  She had apparently taken in the situation before she pulled over to approach him, and grinned as she climbed out. “Having a problem, Al?”

  He had to grin back. Kelly was a wildly attractive woman to his way of thinking, but what he most liked about her was her sunny nature and readiness to tease. He also liked her dog, but Kelly left Bugle in her vehicle and sauntered toward Al, her khaki uniform and jacket looking scarcely heavy enough to withstand the chilling air. “Misty giving you trouble?”

  “She’s in a mood, all right,” Al agreed. Apparently, Kelly had had her own run-ins with the dog.

  Kelly whistled, but Misty barely spared her a glance as she tossed her toy in the air and caught it.

  “What in the world is she playing with?” Kelly asked.

  “I’ve been wondering. Rawhide bone? Heck, she knows I wouldn’t take that away from her.”

  Kelly chuckled. “She’s teasing you.” Then she turned to look at Al. “What in the dickens is that on your shoulder?”

  Al didn’t even have to glance. “That’s Regis.”

  “That’s a squirrel! You can’t keep them for pets.”

  “I don’t. Regis decides for himself. Sometimes he likes to ride shotgun. What can I tell you, Kelly? The squirrel has a mind of his own.”

  Al felt her staring but heck, what could he do about it? He’d rescued Regis as an abandoned baby, fed the animal until it was strong enough to take off into the woods and live the squirrel life. Except Regis kept coming back to visit.

  “Now I’ve seen everything,” Kelly muttered. “Someday I want to hear this story.”

  While Al wouldn’t have minded spending the next day or two chatting with Kelly, there was still business to attend to. “Misty, get your butt over here now.” This time there was an edge of impatience to his voice and Misty didn’t miss it. She froze, looked at him, then came trotting over with her toy.

  Al squatted down, ready to reward the dog with a good scratch and rub, but as Misty drew closer something inside him began to feel chillier than the day.

  “Kelly?”

  “That’s not rawhide,” she said too quietly.

  Al didn’t answer. He waited until Misty snaked through the fence and came to a halt before him, dropping her toy and looking at him with a proud grin.

  Al reached out, scratching her neck automatically as he looked down at the “present” she’d placed before him.

  “Tell me that’s not human,” he said.

  “I can’t,” Kelly answered, her voice unusually taut.

  Their eyes met and Al knew they were both thinking of the same thing: the three high school girls who’d gone missing weeks ago.

  “I’ll get an evidence bag while you put the dog in your van,” Kelly said. But he noted she walked to her SUV with a leaden step. All her natural vivacity had seeped away. She’d be calling for help, he thought, to try to learn where the dog found the bone. Before they were even certain.

  “Yeah,” Al said, speaking to the icy air. “Yeah.” Then he stood, slipping the loose leash around Misty and leading her to the back of his truck.

  “God,” he told the dog, “I hope it’s from a deer.”

  But he was very afraid it was not.

  Chapter Eleven

  Days 20–21

  An hour later, Cadel Marcus showed up with four of the K-9s he was training, and Jake wasn’t far behind with his dog. Soon deputies began to congregate, filling the shoulders of the road, cutting it off to traffic.

  The only thing they knew for sure was that a doctor at the hospital had said it was definitely a human thighbone, the growth plates hadn’t fully hardened and he wouldn’t be surprised if it belonged to one of the missing girls. The bone was now on its way to a forensics lab, but there was no time to waste.

  Gage was blunt about it. “Figure we’ve got twenty-four hours max,” he told everyone. “We’ve got to find the scene, find the body, find the evidence before this storm makes working impossible, or buries the remains again.”

  And none of that meant they’d find the perp.

  Al had used the time to take the animals in his truck home or leave them in his kennels, and now he was ready to take one of Cadel’s dogs to aid in the search.

  “Same commands you’ve heard Kelly use with Bugle,” Cadel told him. “Except these dogs are trained to hunt for cadaverine.”

  Cadaverine. The odor of death, something dogs could sniff even if it was way more than six feet underground. “Bugle doesn’t do that?”

  “Around here, not much call. Three of these dogs a
re in training for other police departments. One body hunter is probably all we’d ordinarily need in this county. Today is different.”

  Different in so many ways, with a severe storm moving in that could hide evidence until much later in the spring. That would give scavengers more time to devour it and disperse it. Important traces, like cloth and hair, could vanish in a strong wind. Even teeth...

  Al drew himself up short. He’d seen it in Afghanistan. He didn’t need to think about all the stages of decay.

  Kelly approached him, her face drawn. “I’d like to miss this day entirely.”

  “I think we all would,” he agreed. “I’m sorry. I had funny stories to tell you.”

  “Where’s that damn squirrel of yours?”

  “Being smart. When I got back to my place, he headed for his drey. I don’t know if he made himself a family yet, but I’m sure he’s got other squirrels to hunker down with.”

  “I definitely want to hear that story.”

  “You will.”

  As if they were hunting for someone buried in a landslide or avalanche, they all carried long, thin metal poles to stick into the hardened ground. It wasn’t easy, but they were thin enough to penetrate with reasonable effort. Even so, Al felt it all the way through his injured back.

  But what they all really wanted was for the dogs to alert. To give them a narrower area to search.

  They set out almost shoulder to shoulder, heading toward the area where Misty had been playing with the bone. Unfortunately, Misty had probably found it somewhere else and had carried it with her while she played.

  Cadel had spread his dogs out with other deputies so they covered a much wider area. They offered more hope than rods and eyes right now. At least they still had visibility, but it seemed like the winter night was moving in even faster than usual. Al wished he had some night vision goggles. Detail was beginning to vanish as the light grew flatter by the minute.