by Rawlin Cash
“Mr. Hunter?” she said.
The question came out as more of a gasp.
“How did you know?” he said, his face stark, tense.
She shook her head. She’d assumed the husband would be Indian, like the wife and child. This man was white.
“I don’t know. I just. When I saw you. I knew.”
“I’m here to find out about my wife and daughter. What have you got?”
“Straight to business,” she said, getting in behind the receptionist’s computer and logging in.
She was about to start reading the report she’d spent the day preparing when, as if from nowhere, Chuck Goad, the Deputy Chief, stepped out of his office.
“Dana, can I see you for a minute?”
Dana knew something was up. Goad was the type of officer who took the ‘chief’ part of his title a little too literally. He was a slob, with poor hygiene, bad breath, and a penchant for staring at her chest when he spoke to her. She pitied his wife, a girl called Estelle who’d gone to high school with Dana’s oldest sister. She was ten years younger than Goad and Dana couldn’t fathom what had persuaded her to hitch her cart to this pig.
“Is that the husband?” Goad croaked before Dana had even shut the door.
“Yes, sir.”
“Get rid of him.”
“He’s just trying to find out what happened to his family. He must have got on a flight as soon as he got the call.”
“Ongoing investigation. He’ll find out when everyone else does.”
Strictly speaking, Goad was right. Information on an open investigation wasn’t supposed to be shared with anyone, not even the family of the victim. But this guy didn’t even know the basic facts yet. He hadn’t pried. He’d just walked in the door.
Dana knew it was better not to argue. She’d tell this husband as much as she knew, rules be damned, and tell Goad she’d sent him away with nothing.
“Is that all?” she said, turning to leave.
She opened the door and saw the husband on the wrong side of the reception desk. He was typing on the computer, trying to pull up his wife’s file.
“Sir. Sir. You can’t be back here.”
The man straightened up and shoved the keyboard. She knew he wouldn’t have been able to access anything.
“What’s going on here?” Goad’s voice oozed from behind her.
“I want to see what you’ve got on my wife’s disappearance, and I want to see it now,” the husband said.
The way he was standing, Dana got the distinct impression if they didn’t give him what he wanted, he’d take it anyway.
Goad drew his revolver.
“Step back from that computer and get the hell out of here.”
The man looked from Goad to Dana, and then back to Goad.
“You going to shoot me for asking a question?”
“I’m going to shoot you for pissing me off,” Goad said.
Dana caught the man’s eye and wordlessly plead with him not to push it. She sympathized with him. If her family disappeared, she’d damn-well want to see the file too, but this wasn’t the way to go about it. The man was looking at her. She flitted her eyes toward the window. Across the parking lot was a diner and the man followed her eyes toward it.
“Fine,” he said, and turned and left.
Dana turned to Goad. “The chief would have given him the file.”
“Chief ain’t here, sweet cheeks, I am.”
Four
Dana pushed open the door of the diner. The husband was sitting at the counter. That was good. It would be less conspicuous than joining him in a booth.
“Thanks for meeting me,” he grunted from his seat.
She sat three stools away from him and nodded.
“I’ll have a coffee and the meatloaf, Carla,” she said to the waitress, silently chiding herself for her lack of discipline. There were plenty of salads she could have ordered. Her sisters would have had a salad.
“Fries?” the waitress said.
Dana hesitated, then nodded.
She looked over at the man. He was facing forward and had taken off his coat. His arm rippled with muscle. He looked like he’d stepped off the set of an action movie. She felt her chest pound while reminding herself he was a distraught husband and father, not a pickup at a bar.
He had a cup of coffee and the local newspaper in front of him.
“Mind if I borrow your flier section?” she said.
He slid the advertisements to her.
In her bag was the report. There wasn’t much to go on but it covered the basics. The wife’s sister lived in a trailer community on the edge of town. A number of native families lived there and it didn’t hold the usual negative connotations associated with a trailer park. It was more like a year-round campsite with a lake for swimming in the summer, communal barbecues under the shade of tall pine trees, and a driveway lined with tidy flowerbeds. It was three in the afternoon when the wife and daughter set off for the grocery store. The store was a mile away and when they were gone more than an hour the sister started to worry. She tried the wife’s cell. No answer. The grocery store clerk. He hadn’t seen them. She borrowed her neighbor’s car and drove to the grocery store and then up and down the highway a few miles in each direction. After another hour spent driving around town, she went to the police station.
Given the town’s history, the police were inclined to take any word of a missing Indian woman seriously. They filed an initial report and notified whatever cruisers were out. It was still too early to start an active search. Less than four hours had passed since they’d been seen.
When she was still missing the next morning, they bumped up the file. The required twenty-four hours was waived. An officer drove out to the trailer park to speak to the sister, neighbors, the grocery store clerk. Dana started calling Alaska.
“I was out hunting,” the husband said. “No cell. Otherwise I’d have called you right back.”
“Hunter, the hunter,” Dana said.
Hunter nodded.
“I’m Dana.”
She reached down and took the report from her bag. She slipped it into the pages of the newspaper section and after a few minutes, passed it to Hunter.
“I’m sorry there isn’t more to go on.”
“Any leads?”
“Not really.”
“Not really?”
“You probably know the record of this town and missing native women.”
Hunter nodded.
“That’s the only real lead we have,” Dana said. “And that’s not saying much. None of those have ever been solved.”
“Someone knows something,” Hunter said.
“Yes. Someone does. But I wouldn’t expect much help from the police.”
“They in on it?”
“In on it?”
“You don’t get this many missing women from a lone actor,” Hunter said. “This isn’t one man gone bad.”
“Given the timespan, I’d say you’re right.”
“In the wild, you’ll get an animal that goes bad. Gets a taste for blood. Starts killing for no reason. But it’s only with people that you’ll get a whole pack goes rabid at once. A whole town. A whole country.”
“There are good people in this town.”
“And there’s a pack of bad ones too. Here or somewhere. And someone’s got to put them down.”
“You’re not saying you’re thinking of taking things into your own hands?”
Hunter said nothing.
“I’m a police officer,” Dana said.
“And you yourself just told me not to expect the police to get to the bottom of this.”
Dana was about to answer when she stopped. That was true. In all of these disappearances, there was a family left behind. A father. A husband. Brothers. They always wanted justice, or revenge. But there was no one to take it out on.
“What would you do if it was your family that was missing?” Hunter said.
Dana nodded. She�
��d want revenge too. But that didn’t mean much if you couldn’t find the person who did it.
“They’re like ghosts, these men. These people,” Dana said. “Everything’s normal around here. Kids go to school. People walk their dogs. Everything’s normal.”
“Until it isn’t.”
“No one’s ever been charged in relation to any of these disappearances, Mr. Hunter. That’s not because we’re all in on it. It’s because whoever’s responsible knows how to hide their tracks.”
“Someone knows something,” Hunter said for the second time.
His words made Dana think of the federal agents who periodically came in to poke around the case. They often forced jurisdiction, even when there was nothing for them to latch onto. It was like they wanted control of the case.
Dana’s meatloaf arrived.
Hunter stood up to leave.
“Thanks for the file,” he said again.
“Just don’t do anything stupid,” she said, spreading the thick gravy over the meat with her fork. “Don’t make me regret printing that out.”
She was about to take her first bite when the flashing lights of a police cruiser pulled into the station.
She looked at Hunter and he looked at her. Then he pushed himself up from the counter, opened the door, and was gone.
She looked down at her dinner ruefully.
“Damn it,” she said out loud.
She put a twenty under the plate and grabbed her jacket.
Five
Hunter ran into the street without thinking. A car narrowly avoided him, its horn honking.
Two cops emerged from the cruiser and hurried into the station. Hunter followed.
“What’s going on?” he demanded as soon as he entered.
Instinctively, he knew it was something to do with Chianne and the child.
“Sir?” one of the police officers said.
The deputy chief from earlier, the guy who looked like a child molester, came out of his office.
“Mr. Hunter, I’m not going to warn you again. You get out of this station and let us do our job or I’ll have you arrested.”
Hunter ignored him, addressing the two cops who’d just arrived in the cruiser.
“What did you find?” he said, as if he was the ranking officer.
The cops looked from Hunter to the deputy chief.
“Don’t look at him,” Hunter said. “Look at me. What did you find?”
The deputy chief, his name tag said Goad, was approaching Hunter now, his short legs waddling like a duck.
“I’ve warned you enough times,” Goad said.
Hunter waited until he was in range and shot a quick jab at the man’s neck. It was a light jab, only meant to shut him up.
Goad doubled over and grabbed his throat, coughing and choking.
Hunter turned back to the two cops. Both had drawn their revolvers. They were young, inexperienced, jumpy. Hunter knew they might let off a shot.
With his foot, he shoved Goad from his knees to the floor.
Standing over the deputy chief he said, “Tell me what’s going on or I stomp on this asshole’s head.”
Dana Lawson, the officer from the diner, was there now too, her hands upraised in a gesture meant to diffuse the situation.
“Hunter,” she said.
She said it the way a friend would, as if she knew him well and had said his name a million times.
Hunter looked at her, taking in her face, her upturned hands, palms forward. He nodded toward the two officers.
“They were about to give me an update.”
Dana looked at them and nodded. “Go on,” she said. “What have you got?”
One of the officers looked down at Goad, still writhing on the floor.
The other said, “Two bodies. Woman and child. Found in the forest outside town.”
Hunter heard a sudden ringing in his ears. His vision narrowed. He took a step back and reached out for the wall. He couldn’t process the information. There was a chair behind him and he sat on it.
Dana came over and put a hand on his shoulder. The touch startled him but when he saw it was her he took a breath.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Hunter shook his head.
The two officers were helping Goad to his feet. Hunter scarcely noticed as they came over to him. One still had his gun drawn. He was too close and Hunter easily could have taken it from him. He didn’t. Instead, he sat passively as the other officer cuffed him.
Goad was back on his feet, holding his neck tenderly.
“That’s right. Assault on an officer. You’re in trouble now you little shit.”
“Goad,” Dana said, “he just lost his family.”
Goad looked at her, his beady eyes bulging, then turned and made for the door of his office.
“I want that man in the jail,” he said as he left, his voice strained.
Hunter looked up at Dana and said nothing. He looked at her as if she could somehow explain to him what was happening, as if the details of her face held some secret code that would explain what was happening.
She was speaking, trying to comfort him, but he didn’t register a single word.
“Where did you find the bodies?” Hunter said to the officer that was cuffing him.
Goad’s shrill voice came out of his office. “Don’t tell him another thing, Barnes.”
Barnes gave Hunter a look, as if to say, ‘you heard the man,’ and lifted him to his feet.
Hunter was led to the holding cell, a square, brick room with a bench around three sides. It was like the waiting room at a greyhound station.
“Wait here,” Barnes said to him.
Hunter sank onto the bench and let out a guttural, choked sound.
When he looked up he saw Dana standing outside the cell, looking at him.
“The chief will let you out in the morning,” she said.
Hunter gathered himself. He nodded and she was gone.
Six
Chief McCloud straightened his collar and gave himself a final once-over in the bathroom mirror.
All thing’s considered, not bad for sixty.
“Coffee’s ready,” his wife called from the kitchen.
He joined her at the kitchen table and poured some cream into the mug. His wife, Grace, was stirring hers and when she was done, he took the spoon from her.
“That was Dana,” Grace said. “Goad put a guy in the cell last night. She wants you to hurry down there and let him out before he gets there.”
“Can’t it wait until after breakfast?”
“Apparently it’s the husband from Alaska,” Grace said, the look on her face telling him there would be no breakfast, no anything, until that man had been released from the cell and given a full apology.
She was an active member of the local tribal council. The chief was too. Neither of them was happy about the disappearances, and neither of them trusted Chuck Goad about as far as they could throw him. Forty years ago, when Grace was working as a domestic servant for Goad’s mother, Goad had called her a squaw, pushed her up against the wall, and put his hand up her skirt. She never told her husband, he already hated working with Goad and the information would have made it impossible, but she never let her guard down where that man was concerned.
“All right,” the chief said. “Let me finish my coffee at least.”
It was seven fifteen. The chief would be at the station by seven thirty. That was still an hour before most of the staff would get there.
He kissed his wife goodbye, she told him to stay safe, and he got himself to the station by seven twenty-five.
Dana was already there waiting for him.
She’d brought in a box of glazed doughnuts, a blatant bribe, and he picked one up. She intercepted him at the coffee machine.
“That’s him. That’s the husband.”
“What happened last night?” the chief said, looking over at the man.
“He punched Goad in the throat.”
The chief let a smile appear on his face before regaining his composure.
“I take it he’ll live.”
“He’s fine,” Dana said.
“The husband’s white,” the chief noted.
“Yeah,” Dana said.
“Why’d he hit Goad?”
“He was here when Barnes and McCluskey came in. They’d found the bodies. The husband wanted to know where they’d been found and Goad wouldn’t tell him.”
“We can’t have people running around, taking the investigation into their own hands, mucking up our crime scenes,” the chief conceded.
“Wouldn’t want to confuse our crack CSI squad,” Dana said, the sarcasm plain in her voice.
The chief gave her a scolding look but they both knew he was too fond of her to do anything more.
“So I take it you want me to let this guy out.”
“I’m only here to make sure you got something for breakfast,” she said, looking at the doughnut. “I knew Grace would have you down here on an empty stomach when she heard what Goad had done.”
The chief nodded. Between his wife and Dana, he’d have more than an empty stomach to worry about if he didn’t do right by this husband.
He walked to the cell and found Hunter sitting on the bench already eating a doughnut, a cup of black coffee by his side.
“I take it you’ve had a chance to cool off?” the chief said, and instantly regretted his tone.
This man had lashed out because his wife and daughter had just been found dead, not because he was a drunken brawler who needed to sober up.
The man looked at him but said nothing.
“What I mean is,” the chief continued, trying to reset his tone, “I need to know you’re not going to punch any more of my officers if I turn you loose.”
Hunter took a sip of his coffee. When he saw that the chief was native his look softened.
“I can’t promise that,” he said.
“Well, can you tell me what you do intend on doing while you’re in Forks?”
