Black Sheep

by CJ Lyons

  Eli Hale had warned against it, but if someone in Evergreen had Lena then there was no way Caitlyn could avoid them knowing she was looking for the girl, so she didn’t see a downside to alerting the authorities. Plus, an official report would let her use the NCIC database if any law enforcement officer reported a sighting of Lena or her vehicle.

  “That’s probably a good idea. You said she’s been gone five days now without word?” Caitlyn sat on the sofa—it was more comfortable than it looked—but the roommate kept pacing.

  “Yes. Is that long enough? It’s more than forty-eight hours, right? Gosh, I can’t believe anything could have happened to her.”

  “Actually that’s only in the movies. You can report someone missing at any time if you have reason to fear for their well-being. They’ll need a recent photo and information about her car: license plate, color, make, and model.”

  “That’s easy, I can do that.” She finally slumped into one of the dining room chairs gathered around a glass tabletop on a chrome pedestal. “What if she comes back? Will I get in trouble for reporting her? Will she get in trouble? We’re both applying for jobs right now—”

  “Don’t worry, neither of you will get in trouble.” If a law student had second thoughts about talking to the police when her friend might be in trouble, what did that say about the average person?

  Caitlyn shook the thoughts aside; local law enforcement PR was not her problem. She stood. “How about if I look at her room while you collect that information?”

  The roommate led her to the second bedroom door then hesitated. “Okay, but don’t move anything. She has a system.” She opened the door. “You know, she’s fine, I’m sure. Probably just found some interesting research—Lena is nuts about research, especially historical stuff. The rarer, the better.”

  Caitlyn didn’t burst the roommate’s bubble of denial. She stepped inside the bedroom. Obviously Lena wasn’t the neat freak of the two. The room was strewn with books and papers and photos and maps and notebooks, as if a tornado had torn through a library and deposited the debris here. Whiteboards with scribbled notes in a rainbow of colors perched on the windowsills and dresser. The only clear space was the twin-sized bed. It had a sage-green duvet trimmed with lace and a lace accent pillow. No personal mementos other than a Bible with a worn leather cover sitting on the nightstand and a few photos in cheap frames lined up on the dresser.

  Caitlyn sucked in her breath as she saw the first photo: the one of her and Vonnie as kids, bundled in snowsuits, covered in mud, laughing. Another of Lena in diapers, Eli Hale bouncing her in the air as Vonnie looked up, clapping in delight. One of Lena’s mom curled up on the porch swing of their house in Evergreen, smiling as she shucked peas.

  All ancient history. Taken before Lena could possibly remember. There were two newer photos: Lena, Vonnie, and their mom at Lena’s high school graduation, and one of Vonnie and Lena taken at a restaurant, the girls giddy, arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders, leaning toward the camera.

  The entire history of one family gathered on a dresser top. And now Lena was the only one left. Caitlyn’s smile at seeing Vonnie’s happiness faded, her lips tightening at the thought of telling Lena how her father died.

  Sighing, Catilyn turned to the papers. The maps were of the Qualla Boundary, home to the Eastern Band of Cherokee. One was dated 2010; the other was a reproduction of a map from 1883. There was a stack of bound books: copies of the Duke Law Review, along with Cherokee Supreme Court, Oklahoma U.S. District Court, and North Carolina State rulings. Beside the books were printed copies of individual federal and state cases. From the abstracts, it looked like they all dealt with the Cherokees’ assimilation of the blacks who’d once been their slaves but then became freedmen.

  She snapped photos with her phone. Article title pages as well as the whiteboards and the calendar scribbled with names and incomprehensible notes. Homework for tonight.

  “She was researching an article for the law review,” the roommate explained when she returned and handed Caitlyn a piece of paper with a photo of Lena and all her pertinent info printed at the bottom. “That’s one she posted on Facebook a few weeks ago. And a copy of her student ID, driver’s license, and car registration.”

  “She’s not carrying them with her?”

  “No, she is. But when she gets into a project, she gets a bit obsessed.” The roommate gestured to the research materials covering every surface of the room. “More than once she’s lost her purse, so she keeps copies of everything here. Easier to get new ones that way.”

  “I don’t suppose you have her credit card info as well?”

  “Sure. She only has her debit card, her mom didn’t believe in them.” She blew out her breath, straightening the photos Caitlyn had moved out of place on the dresser. “I hope she’s okay.”

  Caitlyn found a pile of papers that were stacked alone in the far corner as if they were an offshoot of the main research. They were copies from the State Archives in Raleigh, all dealing with Qualla Boundary land grants and census information.

  “Do you know what all this is about?” She raised the first photocopy, a title page with old-fashioned print labeled DEED BOOK R, 1880–1882: RECORDS OF EASTERN BAND OF CHEROKEES, and showed it to the roommate.

  “That’s what I was telling you about on the phone. After she realized she couldn’t prove her dad innocent”—she stumbled while putting the sentence together, too polite to flat-out proclaim Eli Hale guilty—“Lena began working on her law review paper. It’s really about the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, but she wanted to see if there were any precedents set with the Eastern Band Cherokee who remained in North Carolina. I guess since her family lived there, right on the edge of the reservation, she was interested. I’m not sure what she found, but her family was mentioned in some old record, and she got obsessed with ‘vindicating the family name.’ Whatever that means.” She finished with a shrug.

  “So she went to Evergreen to research her family roots?” Caitlyn looked at the dates on the archives. “Like back to the eighteen hundreds?”

  “Yeah. She wanted to look at as many original documents as possible. And they weren’t all at the archives in Raleigh. She thought some of them might be in Cherokee in the tribal records.”

  Even if they were, it wouldn’t take a crackerjack researcher like Lena five days to find them—not to mention five days of not contacting her roommate. The roommate must have thought the same thing because her hand went to her mouth.

  “Oh my God. Something really did happen to her, didn’t it?”

  Caitlyn wished she had an answer.

  * * *

  Goose tilted his chair back and ducked his chin into his favorite thinking position. Something was going on with Bernie. The kid was never what you’d call normal—too lost in his own fantasies, half here and half inside his head all the time—but last few days he’d been acting downright weird.

  Skipping out early from club parties, coming late to Church, disappearing in the middle of the day and coming back smelling of dead meat and urine.

  If it was anyone but Bernie, Goose would think he’d gone all serial-killer psycho. Funny, if he had to bet on any of the Reapers pulling a Manson or Dahmer he’d have tagged Poppy. Even though the dude was in his early sixties, he had eyes dead as steel that could look daggers through you. Thought nothing of beating the crap out of anyone, Reaper or not, who got in his way—or better yet, watching as he ordered one of the other MC members to do his dirty work.

  As the new club enforcer, now it was Goose’s turn. It was an honorary title more than anything. At least Goose hoped so. Poppy’s first order was for him to find the animals the MC had taken from that schmuck over in Pigeon Forge. Not exactly Tony Soprano work. Of course, Poppy had added: And find the bastard who stole them from us so I can kill him. Slowly.

  Hard to tell if Poppy was kidding or not. But in his almost year and a half with the Reapers, Goose had never seen them come close to actually killing
anyone. Beating the crap out of them, sure—just like they spent most weekends beating the crap out of each other. Pent-up frustrations of being a one-percenter, living on the outer fringes of society’s bell-shaped curve, outside the law, beyond conforming, true free spirits.

  At least that’s how the MC liked to think of themselves. Really they were a bunch of guys—mostly out of work like Goose, who used to be a software engineer in Asheville—who liked to ride, drink, and screw around without anyone telling them what to do.

  The ultimate Peter Pan fantasy. Especially when you added in the women who practically threw themselves at the Reapers and the excitement of low-level illegal activities like the deal that had gotten them those damn animals in the first place.

  Goose had his suspicions about who stole them. Especially as that was right around the time Bernie started acting all hinky.

  The trick was getting the animals back, making Poppy happy, without Poppy knowing the kid was behind it—not easy given that every time Bernie tried to lie his ears turned red—and then convincing Poppy there was no need to keep looking for the thief.

  Given Poppy’s psychopathic tendencies, a real balancing act.

  “Hey, Goose!” Poppy’s roar thundered through the empty bar from his office in the back. “I got a job for you. Bring that computer of yours. And your gun.”

  Gun? Goose scrambled to his feet. He liked the Reapers, the way they’d accepted him without question, always generous with a drink or a loan or a place to crash after he lost his job. But sometimes he worried they carried this idea of living on the fringes of society to extremes.

  He grabbed his laptop and headed behind the bar. Weasel, the MC’s vice president, was already in Poppy’s office. Goose paused outside the door, listening, wondering what the hell Poppy was going to ask him to do this time. Hoping it was better than hunting for a bunch of stupid animals that were probably dead from the cold by now anyway.

  “No more half-assed fuckups,” Poppy was telling Weasel. “This time we do things right. I don’t want to take any chances.”

  “Not my fault.” Weasel was a small man, barely five-eight, but he made up for it by being the nastiest son-of-a-bitch Goose had ever met. The guy was in his forties, had a shaved head displaying his Reaper tatts, and a line of ex-wives and -girlfriends a mile long, each skankier than the last.

  “Did I ask whose fucking fault it was? Goose,” Poppy bellowed. “I said, get your ass in here.”

  Goose popped through the door as if he’d just arrived. “Sorry, had to grab my laptop. Whatcha need?”

  “There’s a fed coming to town. Nosing around. Thinks we have something to do with some law student that’s gone missing.”

  “You want me to find the student? See if I can track him online?” Goose asked. Computer searches were much more his forte than hunting lions and leopards through the mountains.

  “No,” Weasel said, yanking on the lapels of his leather vest as if shaking off an insult. “I’ll take care of her.”

  “Wait.” Poppy leaned back so far his desk chair creaked. “You can do that?” he asked Goose.

  “Sure. Give me her name, Social if you’ve got it, and I can dig up her latest credit card charges, maybe even phone records, GPS if her car has it, you name it. Plus, if she uploads a photo to Facebook or anywhere, I can tell you when and where that picture was taken.”

  Poppy inclined his head, obviously impressed. “Guess having a geek around can come in handy. Weasel, catch him up with the info he needs.”

  Weasel frowned as he dug in his pocket for a paper. “Want me to take care of the fed while brainiac here sits on his ass surfing porn?”

  “No. I want you to keep looking for the girl. She gets found, the feds get off our backs. We don’t need no extra attention with the poker run this weekend. And you”—he aimed a finger at Goose like he was pulling a trigger—“take your fancy toy with you and work on finding where this girl has been and where she might go while you tail this fed and bug her room, her phone, her car, anything you can get your hands on. She’ll be staying at the VistaView so you need to get cleaned up before you head over there. No colors.”

  The VistaView? The tribal casino was the one place usually off limits to the Reapers—a way of keeping peace with the locals without scaring off the tourist trade. Most of the Reapers didn’t have the cash to lose gambling, anyway.

  “Sure thing, Poppy.” Goose turned to leave, then turned back. “Why do the feds think we have anything to do with this law student going missing?”

  Poppy played it cool, not a flicker of emotion in his expression. But Weasel tensed.

  “We don’t have anything to do with her going missing,” Poppy said. “But apparently she stopped here on her way out of town, I dunno, asking directions or something. We got to be proactive, get ahead of things. Last thing we need is trouble with the feds. That good enough for you?”

  “Yeah, sure. Knowing she was here helps me start track her movements. Did anyone see what kind of car she was driving? That’d help, too, if it’s new enough to have GPS on it.”

  Weasel answered. “Honda Accord, about ten, twelve years old at least. I think it was dark red, hard to tell, it was night and she was only here a few minutes.”

  “You talked to her?”

  “Yeah.” Weasel turned and glared like Goose was asking for a three-way with his old lady or something. “I talked to her. Told her how to get to the interstate. She drove off and that was all.”

  Poppy handed Goose the slip of paper Weasel had given him. “Here’s all the info you should need.”

  “Okay, I’ll get right on it.” Goose left the office but didn’t shut the door the whole way. He glanced at the paper. Lena Hale. Age twenty-six. Black. Five-nine, one forty, brown hair, brown eyes. Social Security number, car registration info, address, phone number. How the hell did they get all that from a thirty-second encounter? And why was the club interested in some law student from Durham?

  “As soon as he finds her, you take care of business. No fuss, no muss, you understand?” Poppy said to Weasel. Goose leaned forward, straining to hear more details. It was his job as enforcer to take care of club business, not Weasel’s.

  Unless they were talking about killing the law student. God, he hoped not.

  “And the fed?” Weasel asked.

  “We need to know how much she knows and who else she’s talked to first. Then we’ll decide.”

  Decide? As in possibly killing a federal agent? The muscles in Goose’s neck bunched. No way in hell would he let that happen.

  “It’s a plan.” A chair scraped back. Goose took his cue and hustled back out to the bar. He was working on the laptop when Weasel emerged.

  “Haven’t found her yet, hotshot?”

  Goose shook his head. “Just setting up search parameters so it can run while I head over to the VistaView and start working on the fed. Oh yeah, they got a name?”

  “Tierney. Caitlyn Tierney.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Emotions churned through Caitlyn as she drove west toward the Smoky Mountains, but she boxed them up to be dealt with later. She had a case to work.

  The Butner chaplain couldn’t have known it when he reached out to her last night, but Caitlyn had a good deal of experience with missing persons cases—which was actually, despite Hollywood, fairly unusual for a FBI agent, especially now when ninety percent of the Bureau’s resources were devoted to counterterrorism and financial crimes.

  Caitlyn’s first assignment after the academy was working with a multi-agency FAST team: Fugitive Apprehension Strike Team. After that assignment she’d been transferred to Boston, where she worked the Violent Crimes Task Force before being loaned out to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children after Katrina to locate kids taken by predators who’d used the storm to cover their actions.

  But she never thought she’d be searching the mountains where her dad had taught her to hunt. It was eerie, as if things were always supposed to b
e this way. Her dad teaching her how to track and shoot and most of all to think like whatever animal they were after. The FBI fine-honing those skills, even though they’d intended to forge her into an entirely different kind of hunter. And now Eli Hale, the man who’d shaped her life, who’d started her on this path, sending her back home to search for his daughter.

  A shiver shook her but it had more to do with the sun slipping behind the mountains and the spitting snow than anything else. She cranked up the heat, turned on the defroster, and pressed down on the accelerator.

  She’d left a message for Uncle Jimmy at the casino and he called her back just as she headed down Route 19 through Maggie Valley. She pulled off into the empty parking lot of Ghost Town in the Sky to talk to him.

  “So you’re coming for a visit? What a great surprise. Can I ask what prompted this? I figured we’d never see you back around these parts ever again.” He and Aunt Lacey had brought her cousin Bernie for a visit a few times when Caitlyn lived in Pennsylvania, but she and her mom had never returned to Evergreen. Not while she was growing up, at least. Jessalyn had gone back for Lacey’s funeral ten years ago. Caitlyn wasn’t sure if she ever made the trip from Charlotte to Evergreen any other time. If so, Jessalyn had never mentioned it.

  “I’m trying to trace a missing girl. Lena Hale.”

  “Lena—you mean Eli Hale’s youngest?” Disapproval sharpened his tone. “Why would she come here?”

  “I don’t know, but her roommate said she was heading to Evergreen and she’s gone missing. Would you check your records and see if she stayed at the resort?”

  “I guess I could. But there are plenty of other hotels around here now that the VistaView has become such an attraction.”

  Hard to imagine Evergreen needing more than one hotel, but a lot could change in twenty-six years.

  “Thanks, I appreciate it.”

  “No problem. There’ll be a room ready and waiting for you when you get here. Just tell the girls at the front desk to call me soon as you arrive.”