Close Range Christmas
Page 20
“He wasn’t dating anyone at the moment—at least, not that I know of. He ended a long-term relationship with a woman, Eve Shea, last year, though they were still friends. She told me Dane hasn’t been in touch with her. His daughter, Audra, is twenty-two. I’ve been trying to get hold of her, but her voice mail says she’s out of town, and she hasn’t returned my calls.”
“Maybe Mr. Trask is with his daughter.”
“He would have told me if he was going away. He had meetings scheduled for the next day and he wouldn’t have simply failed to show for them.”
Beck seemed to be considering all this. He studied her, not saying anything, until she began to feel uncomfortable, but Cara forced herself to remain still and wait him out. “You really should file a report with local authorities,” he said.
“I did,” she said. “A woman took my statement, but she didn’t seem very concerned. She told me she would put the report on someone’s desk, but not to expect to hear anything soon.” She pressed her lips together, afraid to say more. She could have told Officer Beck that she had dealt with similar attitudes from law enforcement before. They wouldn’t extend themselves to do anything they didn’t see as important. The woman at the sheriff’s department had sized up Cara as a lovesick admin pining for her hunky boss, who was probably off romancing another woman. She had hoped for better from the Ranger Brigade. “Are you going to look for him?” she asked again.
“We’ll look,” Beck said. “But you may not like what we find.”
Something in his tone chilled her. “What do you mean?”
“One of the sad statistics about national park visitors is that some of them come here with no intention of ever leaving. We have to deal with a number of suicides every year. If, as you say, Mr. Trask was troubled by something...” He let his voice trail away, though his eyes remained locked to hers, watching for her reaction.
She sagged back against the chair. “Dane would never take his own life,” she said, her voice shaking. “And when I said he was worried, I didn’t mean he was depressed. He was...preoccupied. Like a man trying to figure out a puzzle or solve a problem. That’s Dane—he’s a problem solver. Suicide wouldn’t be a solution to him.”
“Then it’s possible he met with an accident. He could have fallen and been injured. Some of the terrain in the park can be treacherous. It’s one reason we discourage people from hiking alone.”
“He told me once that Army Ranger training was all about learning to survive when the odds were against you. If he was injured, he wouldn’t give up. He’d try to get to help. Or, if that wasn’t possible, he’d wait for help to come to him.” She tried to fight back the image of Dane hurt and alone in the wilderness, waiting for more than two days now for someone to find him.
“We’ll do our best to search for him,” Beck said. “But we have a dozen officers covering more than a hundred and thirty thousand acres of territory, when you consider the park and the surrounding public lands. Did he say where he intended to hike?”
“No.” The word was almost a whisper. One man in that vast territory would be so easy to miss.
“We’ll start by searching all the trailheads and parking lots for his vehicle. If we find it, that can help narrow the search. And we might be able to borrow a Park Service plane. We can talk to campers and hikers, see if any of them spotted him or—”
A knock on the door interrupted him. “Come in,” he called.
The woman who had greeted Cara when she’d entered the Ranger Brigade headquarters eased into the room. She glanced at Cara then addressed Officer Beck. “We just had a call from Mike Griffen at park headquarters. Hikers off Dragon Point spotted a vehicle wrecked in the canyon. He wants someone to go with him to check it out and, since everyone else is away right now...”
Beck stood and, heart in her throat, Cara also rose. “Tell Mike I’ll meet him at the overlook,” he said.
“What kind of vehicle?” Cara asked.
Beck and the woman stared at her. “He said it was a late-model Ford pickup,” the woman said. “The hikers couldn’t get close, but they took pictures, and they said it didn’t look like it had been there long.”
Cara swayed but held steady. Dane might still be all right, trapped in the truck, but alive. She closed her eyes and said a brief prayer.
When she opened them again, the woman had left and Beck was staring at her. He put a hand lightly on her shoulder. “You need to stay here,” he said, his voice gentle.
“A late-model Ford truck,” she said. “It could be Dane.”
“All the more reason for you to stay here.”
“Oh no, I’m coming with you.” She slung her purse over her shoulder and clutched her car keys. “Just try and stop me.”
Copyright © 2020 by Cynthia Myers
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ISBN-13: 9781488067716
Close Range Christmas
Copyright © 2020 by Nicole Helm
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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