Gone Missing: A gripping crime thriller that will have you hooked Page 26

  There was always next year.

  But thinking about it left a cold spot in his stomach. He moved away from the SOS rocks and joined Laura in culling wood for the fire.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  The darkness pooled around her, beyond the throw of the firelight.

  She remembered a discussion with David about how the fire shrank your pupils, made the night even darker. To see the stars you had to move away.

  She hadn’t remembered that camping trip with David until now.

  And how they’d lost their bottle of wine due to her husband’s tendency to leave caps only partly screwed on. Cheap jug wine they’d brought. David swore by it. Her husband was always playfully tearing down Katie’s more “cultivated” ways.

  Miss Manners, he would say. Which fork do I use for the salad? Fork number three or fork number eight?

  She craved her husband. Wanted to talk with him, feel his arms, smell his breath after he’d snuck a cigarette on the back porch.

  Davy (which he hated to be called), who left the caps of things half-screwed. Jugs of wine. Jars of pickles. Laundry detergent. You name it, he would extract product from the jar or bottle and then leave the cap hanging there, waiting for her to come along and spill whatever it was.

  “Do you do that on purpose?” She’d usually laugh it off. Sometimes, if it caused a stain, she’d get aggravated.

  She even had a theory that the habit, while a small psychological tic, hinted at a deeper truth – David was afraid of commitment.

  That was psychobabble at best, but it was true her husband was first a musician, then a motorcycle enthusiast who joined one of those clubs for a year and raised hell around the country, then a cook, a chef, a carpenter, and back to a musician again.

  “I’ve always been a musician,” David would say. He’d get that look in his eyes like she could never comprehend the life of an artist. And maybe she couldn’t. Katie was no good with a paintbrush or a piano. She needed a plan, an established order. She understood that there was intense training and precedent for a lot of the arts – but what did they say? It was the era of post-postmodernism and nobody knew what the hell they were doing anymore. Photographers, maybe, but that was about it.

  David never had a plan. He would sit down at their giant Yamaha electronic piano and play by ear. Sometimes he’d just fiddle around on it; other times his playing would capture her – he’d get into a flow which drew her into the room like one of those cartoon characters floating toward the scent of pie on a windowsill.

  Did you record that? she’d ask.

  Nah.

  Can you play it again?

  Probably not.

  It baffled her.

  Couldn’t commit to putting the lid firmly on a pickle jar. Couldn’t commit to a song, couldn’t bear to repeat anything.

  Yet he was committed to her.

  Katie watched the fire and felt warm in Hoot’s old woolen pants and sweater. She pulled the anorak jacket over her, its waxen, musty smell powerful but strangely comforting.

  She was going to survive this.

  She had clothing, she could make a fire. She had water enough for two more days. If necessary, she’d boil water from a river to purify it – she had the small pot with her. Getting giardiasis and diarrhea was the last thing she – or her baby – needed.

  But she turned her mind away from pregnancy.

  The column of smoke drifted up from the fire. The darkness surrounded her but the fire illuminated the tree boughs above. The smoke threshed the boughs and rose into the night sky.

  Why didn’t anyone see these fires she was making? Weren’t there people whose job it was to sit in fire towers all day and spot smoke?

  What was David doing now? Was he out in the woods, calling her name? How many searchers were there? Did they consider her worth thousands of dollars of resources? Was her father footing any bills? How much had Leno and Carson demanded?

  She heard the snap of a twig and sat upright, a chill rippling through her.

  Leno, who’d crawled away from her into the forest. How badly had he been hurt? She thought she’d shot him right in the gut. She’d seen the wound. But what if she’d been wrong? What if the bullet had just passed through his love handle? What if he’d made a strong recovery? He could be out there right now, closing in on her.

  She pulled the rifle close. She had three rounds left in the magazine. She’d done her best to plan for this; it just wasn’t something she thought about – guns, ammunition. She should’ve purloined the whole box of ammo from Hoot’s burlap sack in the cabin, or checked his pockets before burial, but she’d neglected to do so. She’d been too focused on getting out.

  Still, despite the urgency and the exhaustion, she’d taken water, rain clothes, a compass, a flashlight, a wristwatch, matches.

  You saw him dying. Leno was crawling away on his hands and knees. He slinked off into the woods and died. Maybe you couldn’t find him, but he’s probably face down in the dirt.

  It had to be true. There was just too much woods out here for him to have followed her. She’d been all over the place, avoiding obstacles and backtracking. He was an imagined threat, when the real dangers were almost scarier. She could fall and break an ankle. The coyotes could come back – she hadn't heard them again since building the fire, but they could be on to her scent, tracking her, waiting for her to fall.

  And she needed food. She had a few paltry items left in the bag – two of Carson’s granola bars, a small bag of oatmeal from Hoot’s cabin. She had no idea what the old mountain man survived on, but there’d been no freezer full of coyote meat, nor the power to keep it cold. She couldn’t imagine eating coyote after that unbelievable stink. They were probably killed for their hides anyway. If larger animals like deer couldn’t be properly stored, he probably relied on rabbits and grouse and other small game. Hoot probably had spent the majority of his time hunting and preparing food.

  What a life. Subsistence living. Just doing what it took to keep alive.

  That instinct, so powerful. The will to live. She felt it running through her, a kind of sanguine electricity.

  The thought of the blood channeling through the network of arteries and veins and capillaries.

  And the baby. Her heart pumping not just for one, but two.

  The heart her mother had given her. Faulty. Destined to break.

  Mom?

  There was no answer. The wind picked up a bit, spinning the cinders into a cyclone churning up from the fire, a dance of uneasy spirits.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Just before nightfall, Cross stole a moment and got a bite to eat. He sat by the open fire, shoveling in something that resembled hummus but tasted like chicken. The tranquility of the twilit wilderness was broken by the rattle of a portable generator, and an eerie light shone in the broken cabin windows.

  Laura Broderick was nearby, resting after her long hike in – four and a half hours for her, an experienced forest ranger. Granted, she’d been leading a group of less ruggedly-inclined CSTs and a civilian, David Brennan.

  David found Cross by the fire. Cross hadn’t seen Katie’s husband come into the clearing with Laura, but knew the man was around. Cross had been waiting for this.

  David looked tired but determined. “So, she was here?”

  “That’s what the forensics team is determining.”

  David stepped closer, his eyes glowing in the firelight. “Was… she… here?”

  Cross let out a deep breath. “I’m pretty sure she was the one who spelled out the letters with the rocks.”

  “Was she in the cabin?”

  “She was probably in the cabin, but we won’t know until…”

  Too late – Katie’s husband was already headed for it.

  Cross caught up. “It’s part of the investigation, David; can’t go in there.”

  “Let me look.”

  Cross grabbed him by the shoulder but the bigger man shook it off.

  Cross shot a look
at Laura, who scrambled to her feet. They might have to restrain Katie’s husband. Again.

  But David stopped on the porch, pushed the door open, and looked in.

  The place was bathed in cool light, giving the logs a sick, bluish look. The windows were each shattered. Various items strewn across the floor. The mattress in the corner lay bare, except for the blood stains, turned black by the special lamps. Two busy technicians gave them sharp looks, like cult members who’d had their strange ceremony disrupted by outsiders.

  Cross stood just behind David but didn’t touch him again. He was close enough to smell the man’s perspiration, hear a whistling in his labored breathing.

  David grabbed the edges of the doorway. Then he lowered his head and turned away, stepping off the porch and moving back toward the fire.

  He passed it and walked to where Katie had placed the rocks. Cross watched her husband as he looked over the site, knelt down, touched the stones.

  Cross intended to say something about tampering with evidence, but what was the point? They were just stones and it was the middle of the fucking wilderness. Everyone knew Katie had been here, and, without needing an autopsy, that Troy Vickers was dead on the rocks below.

  Katie’s kidnapper had met with some tragedy – fate, maybe, playing a role – and she’d gotten away. It wasn’t much more complicated than that. They just needed to find her.

  This had to be the worst of it for Katie’s husband. Not knowing anything was bad, but knowing she’d been here and gone, that she could be alive or dead, as close as a few hundred yards or lost miles away, had to be agonizing.

  David rose and met eyes with Cross.

  “We’ll find her,” Cross said.

  David gave everything another look – the stones, the eerily lit cabin – and then his gaze wandered toward the hulking mountains, black against a dark blue sky.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think we will.”

  * * *

  The next day, a group of searchers found a cabin in the valley of two peaks known collectively as Twin Mountain.

  Word came back that there were clear signs of a struggle. More blood, multiple sets of footprints in the mud. A rifle shell lay near the cabin doorway. Bloody bandages were found inside.

  A second forensics crew was deployed from Speculator. The site was four miles southeast from the first cabin, deeper into the West Canada Lake Wilderness. Cross made the trek with David and Laura Broderick and reached it in the late afternoon as a light rain fell.

  A field test determined a blood-type match: It looked likely that Katie had been at both cabins.

  Then, on the eastern summit, a body was discovered.

  It was in worse shape than Vickers – impossible to tell at first whether it was a man or a woman. Someone had buried it, but it had been disinterred, most likely by coyotes. The corpse was ravaged.

  David paced and pawed at his face and stared until ultimately it was determined to be male.

  Spent cartridges were found nearby, more shells from a rifle, and at least one spent cartridge from a handgun. Microstamping could eventually identify from which gun the cartridge cases had been fired, but Cross already had his suspicions.

  Two scenarios emerged once the preliminary medical examination had concluded: One, that the body was Johnny Montgomery. That someone, perhaps Katie, had managed to shoot and kill him. Skeptics, including Bouchard, keeping in contact by radio, didn’t think it was very plausible.

  The other scenario, advanced by Laura, was that the body was a man named Barry Turner, a hermit the locals in Speculator called “Hoot.” An army-issued rucksack and a Purple Heart medal had been found in the cabin. No one there had seen Turner for more than three years, but someone, likely Montgomery, could have found his cabin and killed him, then buried the body.

  Cross extended Laura’s theory: Turner had been helping Katie, but Montgomery had found them.

  It gelled with the idea that Vickers and Montgomery had been keeping in touch, Vickers had met with his tragic end, and Montgomery had entered the woods. Somehow, he’d been able to track Katie and Barry “Hoot” Turner to the mountain man’s cabin, and conflict had ensued.

  Just before dark, the forensics team found a pistol and a rifle buried behind the cabin, next to a rain barrel Turner must’ve used for his drinking water. Both guns were given to searchers to take back to the lab, and serial numbers could potentially reveal their owners. But inside, a homemade rifle rack had supports for two.

  Cross liked to think Katie had escaped, and she’d armed herself with that second rifle.

  The day had crackled with energy, the sense that the search was getting somewhere. Laura and the other forest rangers deliberated on the likeliest routes out of the woods from Turner’s cabin, and the search parties reconfigured under Frost’s direction.

  “If she just went due south from here, in six miles she’d run into Route 8,” Laura told Cross in private when they took a food break. Despite the long hours and days without modern amenities, Laura Broderick looked fresh and fit. Cross didn’t feel as perky. Laura continued, “The problem with that, though, is straight-up bushwhacking for half a mile, and Big Rock lake.”

  “What about east? The way we came in?”

  “Due east and she’d come across the Northville-Placid Trail in nine miles. Right, how we came. But that’s if she’d be in any condition to recognize a trail. Easy to miss. If she got turned around, though, and headed north… she could be trekking for fifteen miles before seeing a trail or a road. She veers northwest, its twenty miles. Even with a compass, moving at two or three miles an hour… you see how it can go.”

  “Anything else?”

  Laura looked away, but Cross knew she was analyzing maps in her mind; she’d committed the topography to memory. “Southwest. Over or around Spruce, then maybe to Haskell Road.”

  “Problems with that?”

  “Well, Indian River could be a problem. Haskell Road runs on the west side of it. Indian River has rapids. Not too bad in the late summer, but still treacherous in places.” Laura stuck out her hand like a blade. “If she cuts that line south-southwest, then she’s into a pretty boggy area between Baldface and Bethune. Through that way and you’ve got Fayle Road, maybe Mountain Home Road. If she was with Turner, and he advised her, my guess is that’s what he’d tell her to do, if he got a chance to tell her anything at all.”

  Laura dropped her hand and put both on her hips. “Any way you slice it, though, it’s shitty going. Real tough. For anyone.”

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Katie was ravenous.

  Five days. Since they threw her down and closed the door on the minivan, she’d had a couple of sandwiches to eat, some dry oats, not much else. All while hiking and climbing and fighting and running.

  Starving.

  She aimed down the rifle sights as she imagined a hunter would. The rabbit sat low to the ground, eating something at the base of a large tree.

  Katie pulled back on the bolt and a round entered the chamber.

  The rabbit popped up onto its hind legs with the sound, but it didn’t run.

  Two hours, this had taken. Sitting still, like she had done before. Listening to the forest come alive. Waiting for something to wander into her midst.

  She worried about more bears, coyotes; but she had to eat. She’d never been so hungry. The need for food had started to beat a drum in her head and she knew it wouldn’t stop until she did something about it.

  The idea that she might be extra-hungry because she was eating for two flitted through her thoughts even if she was trying not to think about it.

  It was impossible not to think about it.

  There were women who said they knew the moment they were pregnant. Katie had always thought hindsight was 20/20. Easy to say you “knew” conception had occurred that night on the dining room floor while you and the hubby went at it after two bottles of wine. But did you really know it at the time? Or did you just reverse-engineer your knowin
g?

  As it turned out, the insight took a different form. It wasn’t some kind of intellectual conviction, a mental thing – I’m pregnant.

  She just felt different.

  Yeah, well, you’ve been feeling all sorts of different lately. Hard to say about this.

  -It’s there. Period would’ve started by now. I’m peeing all the time, even while rationing water, my breasts are sore – I’ve changed. My body has been hijacked.

  Katie watched the rabbit. She had one eye shut. The little burrs that made up the gunsight were aligned. Her stomach flexed as she considered the meal. She’d never skinned an animal in her life. Maybe she would just cook the fur. Didn’t people have to pull out the buckshot from the flesh?

  No buckshot here, kid. This is a rifle.

  Could rifle bullets be too big for small game like this?

  Only one way to find out.

  She pulled the trigger.

  The gun kicked against her shoulder and the barrel arced up. She’d managed to keep her eyes open, at least, and could see the tree bark explode above the rabbit, which took off like a rocket.

  “Fuck.”

  Katie set the rifle down and lowered her head. She was on her stomach and rolled over, staring up at the trees. Her fingers found their way down to her midsection and she folded her hands over her belly.

  She breathed. Closed her eyes. Breathed some more.

  The rifle shot had been loud, and her ears were ringing. She waited patiently for it to pass.

  The forest was still. Not so much as a chirp from the woodland creatures. She needed to start all over again.

  She had two rounds left.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Hundreds of people combed the woods on the third day of the search.

  And then the fourth.

  Two main groups performed relays with the initial cabin as one locus, Turner’s cabin the other.