Missing in Conard County

by Rachel Lee

  “The cadaver dogs didn’t find anything,” she remarked to Al as she zipped the bags closed. “Why should Misty?”

  “Maybe the cadaver dogs didn’t get close enough.” He shrugged one shoulder as Gage joined them. A line of searchers, already looking cold, edged the road again.

  “I think,” Gage said, “that it’s time we got some luck on this. By the way, that rabbit left at your place? I sent it to the lab for forensics. Something not right about any of that.”

  “Tell me,” Al said dryly.

  “Okay, let’s see what Misty can do for us. Maybe Bugle can follow the scent.”

  “I don’t know,” Kelly answered honestly. “Misty may remember she smelled it before when she found the bone. Bugle wouldn’t be able to track it from here unless the victim passed this way.”

  “Good point.” Gage shook his head. The last three weeks seemed to have aged him. “All right. Go for it, Al.”

  Misty suddenly became eager. Maybe she wanted to get back to her toys. Maybe she just wanted an excuse to run around the countryside. Only time would tell.

  The rest of the searchers were told to keep back about twenty feet in case something turned up. They didn’t want the scents to become muddied.

  For a while it seemed as if Misty was prancing around the field as she had the day Al had found her with the bone. But Misty had her own methods of operation, and eventually the dancing gave way to a more directed movement. She did seem to know where she was going.

  Kelly followed a little more closely with Bugle but was careful not to get in the way in case Misty made a discovery. Behind her, crime scene techs were ready to get to work, the sooner the better given the increasingly bitter cold.

  Then Misty came upon the remains, over two miles in from a county road, in a gully now filled with tumbleweed. She jumped around, then wanted to dive in, but Al restrained her with a powerful arm.

  Bugle walked a little closer and announced with a whimper that he recognized the odor. At once he sat at attention.

  There was nothing left, Kelly thought as the team cautiously pulled away the tumbleweed. Nothing but some hair. Not even a scrap of cloth. Teeth and DNA would probably be necessary for ID, and the bones were pretty well scattered around.

  Gage stood at the edge of the gully for long moments, then said, “My God, I recognize that cross.” He looked up, closed his eyes and appeared to steel himself. “Mary Lou.”

  * * *

  A HALF HOUR LATER, Kelly felt so helpless and hopeless she could barely stand it. Bugle kept pulling her west, toward another county road, as if he was after something. Finally, she decided to give him his head.

  “Bugle scents something. I’m going to let him lead.”

  Gage nodded. “Go.”

  Al, who was still hanging on to a disappointed Misty, looked as if he wanted to go with her.

  “Take Misty home,” she said. “You’ll be able to find me at the road out there. How far will I go without my truck?”

  “Give me your keys. I’ll bring it to you after I return Misty.”

  She watched him and the dog trot away, then looked at Bugle. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  Because it was utterly unlikely that girl had gotten here under her own steam. If she had, there’d at least have been some patches of cloth left.

  Bugle put his nose to the ground but after about five yards lifted it, indicating that whatever he was looking for was in the air.

  It never ceased to amaze her that dogs could detect odors up to three hundred feet above their heads, and odors that might be weeks old, even in the air. The dang air was moving all the time, right?

  But maybe he wasn’t getting the scent out of the air. There was enough dry grass and brush around to have caught those odors and retain them even through the cold they’d been having. Or maybe some of the predators that had gotten to Mary Lou’s body had left their own trail and he was following them.

  Sometimes she really, truly wished Bugle could talk. She’d have loved to question him for hours about how he perceived the world.

  But he was on a determined trek, and since she couldn’t do anything back at the body, she might as well keep following. As the sky grew more leaden, and the wind stiffer, it occurred to her that once Al caught up to her with her truck, she could perhaps do one more swing of welfare checks along this road.

  There’d been enough badness over the last few weeks. They didn’t need people dying in this storm.

  The hike was fairly long, well over a couple of miles before they reached the crossroad, but at least the quick pace of the walk was helping to keep her warm. She wondered if Bugle was glad of his quilted vest or if it annoyed him. But these temperatures must be as dangerous to him as to anyone else. In one of her pockets she’d tucked his booties in case it started to snow heavily. Right now he was okay, but if ice started to build up between his toes, he wouldn’t be.

  Not that there was any danger of that yet. Snowflakes were in the air, but so light it hardly seemed possible a killer storm was headed in over those mountains.

  At last they reached the road, but Bugle wasn’t done. He tugged her to the right and she followed, after closing the sagging ranch gate behind her. She just wished she knew what he was after. She guessed she’d find out when he discovered it.

  So much of this county looked all the same—ranchlands and fences and wide-open vistas until you ran up against the mountains—that if she hadn’t known which county road she was trotting along, she might have been anywhere.

  But then something caught her eye. Something she remembered about the way the road looked. Too recently familiar. Hadn’t she stopped here the other day? Somewhere just up ahead?

  At that moment, Bugle came to a halt. Full stop. He sat, telling her he’d found it. She stared at him, then looked around, trying to figure it out until she remembered.

  The glove.

  The glove.

  This was where they’d found that glove, and he’d tracked it from Mary Lou’s remains. Her heart began to race and her stomach tried to flip over. A connection. No way to know what it meant, but it was a connection according to Bugle, and she absolutely couldn’t afford to ignore it when he was doing his job.

  She had yet to see him make a mistake when it came to his olfactory sense. This dog said that body was linked to this spot where the glove had been found.

  Pulling off her own glove, she reached under her parka for her radio and called.

  * * *

  AL HEARD KELLY’S radio call shortly after he returned Misty to her owners and expressed his gratitude. He offered them absolutely no idea of the grisly task she’d been asked to perform; let them think she’d helped him round up another dog.

  They wanted to talk about the storm, but he eased away from that, just warning them not to let Misty out off her lead.

  “If she decides to go for a run, I may not have time to find her.”

  He looked at the kids, the usual aides to Houdini-dog, and they nodded solemnly with wide eyes.

  He picked up Kelly’s truck, leaving his own behind, and headed out to the county road where he’d promised to meet her. So Bugle had tracked the glove all the way from the remains. Although she didn’t mention the body directly, only that he’d followed the trail from where she’d started her walk. Damn, dogs were amazing.

  Not that this was going to tell them enough to find the other girls or the kidnapper. But it was still an essential link.

  He listened to the chatter. Gage asked Kelly to flag the location and said he’d send some deputies out her way if she found anything else. Right now they were busy searching the current area for other signs.

  “So far,” Gage said irritably, “our dogs have found two raccoons and a fox. Yee-haw.”

  “Must have had a fight over the body,” someone else remarked.

 
“Not on the air,” Gage snapped. “How many police scanners do we have in this county? Keep it all under your hat. Face-to-face or shut up.”

  All that skirting around the word body and someone had blown it with one statement. Al might have been amused under other circumstances. There was nothing amusing about this.

  When he caught up with Kelly, she was standing by the road and the pin flags she’d used to mark the spot Bugle had led her to. They might not survive the storm, probably wouldn’t, but he was sure she’d marked the GPS coordinates and saved them. Routine for her.

  He offered to let her drive as she piled Bugle into his cage and into the warmth of the SUV. She shook her head and climbed into the passenger seat.

  “I am so cold I’m not sure my fingers could manage the steering wheel,” she said as she fumbled at the seat belt clasp. “Dang, that dog dragged me quite a distance in this icy weather. Three miles? Maybe more? He seems fine, though.”

  “Well, he does have that quilted vest.”

  “It’s not like I’m running around out here naked,” she answered a bit tartly. “Damn, Al. The glove. The body. So they’re linked but where do they get us?”

  “That the glove fell off a truck and Bugle says it was near the body. That’s good for something.”

  “You’d think. But who?”

  Which, of course, was the big question.

  He let the vehicle idle, blowing heat into the compartment, while neither of them said a word. He suspected they were both trying to figure out what this could mean. That the kidnapper lived somewhere along this road? Or that he’d just driven through here? Hardly a guided tour of his whereabouts.

  “I was thinking of driving out along here for a final welfare check,” Kelly said after a few minutes. “Might as well since I’m here. But could you drive? Slowly? I want to use my binoculars to scan the countryside. Just because I didn’t notice anything a few days ago doesn’t mean nothing is out there. I saw a tumbledown line shack that’s probably empty, but there’s another house up this way a few miles. Maybe the guy noticed something.”

  Without a word, Al put the SUV in gear. Unlike many vehicles, it proved to be capable of moving at five miles an hour. Kelly kept her binoculars pasted to her eyes. Big binoculars, the kind he used to carry. Those long lenses could see a long way.

  “Just don’t hit a rut,” she muttered.

  Yeah, it would jam those eyepieces into the bones around her eyes. An unpleasant experience.

  Then all of a sudden she said sharply, “Stop!”

  He obeyed, trying not to ram the binoculars into her eyes. The instant the vehicle stopped rolling, she hopped out and resumed scanning the countryside.

  He put the vehicle in Park and locked the brake before climbing out to join her. “What did you see?”

  “I thought I saw something like chartreuse. There’s nothing that should be that color out here.”

  “Where?”

  She lowered the binoculars and pointed. “Believe it or not, near the base of the line shack.”

  “Oh, that’s not a line shack,” he said as he began to scan the area she indicated, adjusting the focus to make the building even larger to his eye. “Old ranch house. Man, somebody must have abandoned it two generations ago. It was tiny! Nobody could...”

  His voice trailed off as his gaze fixated.

  “Al?”

  “I see it, too. It looks like some fabric poking out of a boarded-up window.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  He lowered the binoculars, eyed the terrain and figured they might be lucky to have suspension after this drive. Lucky if their axles weren’t broken. “It’s going to be rough.” It also might be a humongous waste of time, although at this point it was beginning to feel like wasting time was all they were going to do, anyway.

  “All right, let’s go. And put your gloves back on. You need those fingers.”

  He could sense Kelly’s impatience in the way she leaned forward against her seat belt, but she didn’t press him to a higher speed. She evidently was as aware as he that Bugle was in the back and didn’t want him to be banged around inside his cage.

  Steadily, with plenty of stomach-dropping dips and jaw-jolting rocks, they approached the shack.

  And there was no question but what something green was fluttering from a boarded-up window. Detritus blown there by the wind? Maybe, but it looked more purposeful.

  This time Kelly leaped out before the vehicle fully stopped and ran toward the fluttering green strands. She leaned her face toward it and called loudly, “Girls? Are you in there? Is anyone in there?”

  The wind almost snatched her words away, but he heard the response of faint cries.

  “We’re coming in to get you out. Sheriff.”

  Well, that settled that, Al thought. He couldn’t even begin to describe the feelings that twisted up his insides. Good. Bad. Relief.

  God help them. He feared they’d find nothing good.

  Going round to the other side of the shack, he found the cellar doors, heavy steel, chained and padlocked.

  “Kelly,” he said, “I’m going to use my gun. Call the sheriff to send an ambulance and more help while I open this up.”

  Then, standing to one side and hoping a ricochet merely bounced away into the weeds, he fired at the padlock.

  He heard faint screams from inside, but he had to get this damn thing open. If he’d had his own truck, he’d have had bolt cutters. But he didn’t, and his gun it was going to have to be.

  “One more time,” he shouted, hoping that was all it would take.

  Kelly came round. “Help is on the way. We could wait but I’m not sure...”

  He agreed. More than anything, those girls needed to be freed. They probably needed a lot of other things, like medical help, but primarily they needed to know they were safe now.

  He leveled his gun again and took another shot at the lock. This time, probably with the help of the cold, it shattered and released the chain.

  Kelly beat him down the steps. He listened to girls sob. And he waited for the sirens.

  They had the teens. Now they just had to find their tormentor. He went to Kelly’s SUV and hunted up the blankets he was sure she must carry for use at accident scenes. When he found them, he took them downstairs and fought back a wave of fury as he saw the girls’ condition. Scarecrows. Filthy scarecrows.

  It had been a while since he’d killed anyone, but he wanted to kill right now.

  Then he heard Chantal’s friend say, “I know who took us.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Day 22

  Walton Revell tried to blame the kidnapping on his friend Spencer. There was the stuffed rabbit, after all. Jane defeated him, however, because she’d seen him.

  And when he was arraigned before Judge Wyatt Carter and looked into the black gaze of Al Carstairs, he knew he was peering into hell. For the first time it occurred to him that he might be safer in prison than in walking away from the sheriff.

  He was remanded into federal custody for the kidnapping, but there were also charges of murder and attempted murder, and a whole bunch of other things that added up to false imprisonment and torture. Maybe some other stuff, too, but the feds would put him away for life, whether the state decided to pursue the other charges. His public defender, who looked as if she’d be happy to kill him herself, didn’t hold out much hope.

  Not even a plea bargain.

  Finally, Walton Revell began to wonder what had possessed him and why he’d ever thought this would be a good idea. All he’d done was end his own freedom, not make slaves out of the girls.

  Now he’d be a slave to someone inside the pen. Great thinking, idiot.

  At least he had the pleasure of seeing Spence have to explain why he’d put the rabbit in Kelly Noveno’s house. “She was taking too long,” Spence
answered simply. “They weren’t finding them girls. I admit I took it out of the car when I saw it along the road, but I got mad when she wouldn’t answer my questions about the investigation and I decided to give her a scare. Speed her up.”

  He got a B&E for entering her house. The county attorney said there might be additional charges, like interfering with evidence, but no one seemed in much of a rush to hang Spence. No, Spence was all too eager to hang Reve, ready to talk about how they’d often discussed what it would be like to have some women as slaves.

  He thought they were just kidding around.

  Apparently, Reve hadn’t been.

  * * *

  LEGS AND HANDS SHACKLED, Reve was led out toward a cell. The FBI would be coming to get him as soon as the blizzard passed. Yeah, the same FBI who hadn’t shown much interest until they got word the arrest was made.

  “Better late than never,” Kelly remarked.

  “Well, we didn’t have a heckuva lot to go on when we first contacted them,” Gage said. “I’m more interested in what they’ll do now.”

  The storm had arrived. The outside world looked dangerous and bleak, but Al insisted Kelly and Bugle come to his place. He could tell she was dragging anchor, as if someone had let the air out of a balloon that had been overinflated.

  He had some idea of how she’d been beating herself up, but now that could stop. The girls’ families were with them at the hospital, and he told Kelly they’d go visit once the storm passed and it was possible to move around again.

  She simply nodded. He was sure she was thinking of the lost Mary Lou, but there wasn’t a thing that could be done about that.

  At his place he barely unlocked the door before Regis darted in, but he didn’t come alone. He had a bunch of smaller squirrels with him. His kids? Who knew. He brought out a bigger bowl of sunflower seeds and a small bowl of water and let them take up residence in his Christmas tree.