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

by T. J. Brearton

  “I told you, honey. Speculator.”

  “Oh. Speckle-ator.” She sounded like she was getting sleepy. “Daddy?”

  “What?”

  “I had a dream.”

  “Yeah? Mommy said. What was it?”

  “My bed.”

  “The dream was about your bed?”

  “Someone came into the room and was circling my bed and they wanted to sell it and keep it for themselves.”

  It wasn’t unlike Petrie, or any six-year-old, to tell a story with contradictory statements. But his smile faded as he considered what it might have to do with his separation from her mother.

  Or maybe that was overanalyzing.

  “Yeah, but it was just thoughts in your head, right? Nothing that can hurt you.”

  “Yeah. Love you, Daddy.”

  “Love you too,” he said, but Petrie had already handed the phone back to Marty.

  Marty cleared her throat. She sounded like she was maybe getting sick. “How’s it going down there?”

  “Wasn’t the worst dream she’s had.”

  “No. Not that… No.”

  “Uhm, we’re expanding the search.”

  “Good.” Marty sighed. “I hope you find her. It rained pretty hard tonight.”

  “Here too.” Cross looked out the motel window at the wet and shining asphalt. The storm had just abated, but tree limbs were down, and the lights in the room had flickered before he went out to the car for his things.

  He wanted to tell her about David Brennan. How Katie’s husband had come up with $5 million, the paper trail for which could put him in jail, the way things were shaping up. He wondered what she’d think of that.

  He said, “Alright, Marty, I got to go.”

  “Take care of yourself, Justin.”

  He skipped a shower. After rinsing his pits and brushing his teeth in the bathroom, he put on a fresh shirt. He picked up his weapon, checked through it, gathered his badge and wallet.

  There was a knock on the door.

  David had changed clothes, too. Dressed in cargo pants and a skin-tight athletic top, he looked like a member of an insertion team about to be dropped into a Columbian jungle. A determined glint shone in his eyes. “I’m going over there with you, alright?”

  “Yeah. That’s why you’re here.”

  They left for the fire station.

  * * *

  The fire chief had moved the fire trucks outside and set up long tables in a horseshoe shape, folding chairs beyond them, arranged classroom-style. The space was set up for organizing the search, bringing the volunteers up to speed when they arrived. First Cross needed to formulate the plan with Burt Frost, a short, burly man with sparkling eyes and a deep voice.

  “What have we got for maps of all interior outposts?” Frost asked, scanning what Laura Broderick set out on the tables.

  “Unfortunately we don’t have one single map that shows them all,” she said. “We have several, and that’s what I’m trying to piece together here. And I’ve got Mindy Atkins on the phones, talking to everyone who ever sold their land to the state. If they had a cabin, we’re going to take this topo map here, and we’re going to mark it down. Hopefully by morning we will have a lot of them. But I doubt we’re ever going to get all of them.”

  The door banged open. Captain Bouchard and Trooper Farrington brought Abel Gebhart into the fire station. Gebhart looked furious. He locked eyes with Cross as the police referred him to the maps.

  “Show them what you showed me,” Bouchard barked.

  Gebhart reluctantly had a look. “This is our family cabin right here,” he said, pointing.

  “That’s Indian Lake,” Cross said.

  “Yeah. We have a fifty-acre piece of land. Cabin is dead center.”

  Cross looked at Laura Broderick. “That’s north of Route 28. That’s thirty, maybe forty miles from where Sloan heard the scream.”

  “Who’s Sloan?” Bouchard asked. “That’s the civilian? The hiker?”

  “Yeah.” Cross looked at Gebhart. “What else did your brother know about?” Cross circled an area with his finger called Blue Ridge Wilderness. “You go hunting in this area?”

  Gebhart just glowered. “Maybe.”

  “What about down here?” Cross pointed to Black River Wild Forest, about twenty miles southwest.

  Gebhart shrugged. “It’s possible.”

  David, who’d remained standing quietly by, stepped forward. “Hey – my wife is out there. Okay? This isn’t about your civil liberties, so just answer the question.”

  Gebhart squared up with David, getting red in the face. “The fuck you say to me?”

  Cross moved closer. “Alright, gentlemen, let’s—”

  Gebhart cocked a fist back, hitting Cross in the nose with his elbow. Cross saw stars and stumbled back. David reached for him and missed.

  Gebhart glanced at Cross then took a swing at David anyway, landed a punch on his neck. David stayed up, turned in to Gebhart, and shoved the man to the ground. Then David got on top of Gebhart, raised his fist to hit him.

  “You fuckin…” David managed. His whole face shook with rage. But he didn’t hit Gebhart, and the cops pulled him off.

  Gebhart scrambled to his feet.

  Trooper Farrington grabbed Gebhart from behind and put him in a hold. But Gebhart was going wild, trying to pull free, yelling obscenities, spit flying from his lips. Another trooper moved in to assist. The two wrestled Gebhart to the floor.

  Cross shook off the pain stabbing through his nose and eyes. “Get him up!”

  The troopers hauled Gebhart to his feet. Farrington was getting out his cuffs, but Cross took Gebhart by the arm. He yanked the man back toward the maps. “Show us. Now!”

  Gebhart bared his teeth and stabbed a finger at the maps, then swept it in an arc. “This! Okay? We’ve been all over this whole area! Blue Ridge, Little Moose, all the way down to Black River, to Atwell. There are a shit ton of cabins back in there. Happy?” Gebhart jerked away from Cross.

  Farrington got a hold of the man again, locked cuffs around his wrists, red-faced and huffing from the effort. Bouchard had a grip on David but didn’t have him cuffed and let him go. He jammed a finger in David’s chest. “Is that it from you? Am I going to have to bring you in? Think you can help your wife from jail?”

  David glared at Abel Gebhart as he was led away. Gebhart took a parting shot from the door. “You’ll be hearing from my lawyer. All of you.” The door slammed shut and he was gone.

  David walked over to some of the chairs and sat down. The fifty-odd people in the room were all staring.

  Cross looked at the maps again.

  Laura Broderick acted like none of it had happened. She continued as calmly as before. “These are the two interior outpost cabins for Snowy Mountain.”

  “DEC cabins.”

  “Correct.”

  “And they’re both active?”

  “No. One of them was decommissioned. The other one is still there; that’s, ah, Doug Frechete who’s caretaking there. We talked to him already; he hasn’t seen anything.”

  A bright red drop landed on the map.

  “You’re bleeding,” Laura said.

  Cross looked at it a moment before realizing it had come from him. He wiped his nose with his thumb, wiped his thumb on his pants.

  “These are too far north anyway,” Cross said. “What about in here?”

  “One decommissioned outpost here, Fort Noble. One here, Cedar Lakes. I think that one was let go in ninety-two.”

  Cross grabbed a marker from a pile nearby. He circled the two locations on the map. “What about right here in the center? West Canada Mountain Primitive Area?”

  “No ranger cabins there.”

  “What’s a ‘primitive area,’ exactly?” Cross asked.

  “Primitive area means, among other things, forest that hasn’t had a fire in a few hundred years so it’s old growth – not that fresh, crisp green, but tangled and messy.”

 
; “How much of this land in here was acquired by the state?”

  “Well, all of it.”

  “What I mean to say is – is Gebhart right? Private hunting cabins in here that were left when it was turned into the Preserve?”

  “For sure.”

  “How many? He said ‘shit ton.’ Can you quantify that?”

  Cross heard some chuckles. His silly joke managed to lighten the mood.

  Laura scratched her jaw. “Tough to say. This part of the park is a bit better for growing marijuana. So you’ve got hunting cabins and you’ve got outlaw cabins. Between this primitive area and down through here in Black River Wild Forest, I’d say forty? Fifty? I really don’t know.”

  Cross turned to Frost and Bouchard. “Well, this is our search area. Right here.”

  Frost clucked his tongue, looking it all over. “That’s a bit to cover.”

  “I know. But we’re putting two choppers in the air at first light. Right, Captain?”

  Bouchard nodded. “And three planes. Look for smoke; look for any signs.”

  Frost spread his hands out over the map, avoiding the splotch of Cross’s blood. “I think we do our bump lines like this,” he said, and he made arrows with a marker. “Go the way the contours are rolling.”

  Cross looked at David, sitting a ways away. “David? Anything to add? Let’s say Katie was taken to one of these sites. And something happened. What would she do? Would she stay put? Or try to walk out?”

  David slowly rose. He gave Bouchard a quick glance and approached. He scrutinized the map, as if he could visualize his wife amid the elevation colors and grid lines.

  “She’d stay put, unless she was scared by something.”

  “So we focus on hunting cabins,” Cross said.

  “It’s conceivable she could find her way to a decommissioned ranger outpost,” Bouchard said. “Maybe she could even walk out.”

  “Sure,” Laura said. “But – when’s the last time you went hiking? Like, off-trail, backcountry hiking? You’ve got cliffs, you’ve got tight stands to go around, you’ve got creeks and rivers to traverse, and for every obstacle you circumnavigate, even if you’ve got a compass, know your way around in the wilderness, I mean – it can get disorienting real quick. We search for a hiker a week, at least. I go out hunting, and I’m walking in what I think is a straight line, then I look at my compass – my heart does a flip; I’m turned 180 degrees around in the opposite direction. Point being, getting disoriented happens to even experienced woodsmen.”

  “What’s her visibility like out there?” Cross asked. “I’ve been hiking a few times – you can see roads in the distance.”

  “It all depends,” Laura said. “You’ve got summits with a view, and plenty of others where there is no view, no bare rock, trees all around. This area here is packed with vegetation. Like I said, real easy to get disoriented, real easy to get injured…”

  Laura stopped herself. Cross thought everyone was suddenly especially aware of David Brennan.

  He smiled thinly, then he left, probably to smoke a cigarette.

  Bouchard caught the eyes of another trooper, jerked his head at the door. The trooper went out to watch David.

  Then Bouchard drew near to Cross. The captain was looking at the knuckles of his right hand, grazed from the melee, presumably. Blood welled at the highest knuckle point, like a raspberry drupelet. “Let’s talk a minute,” he said to Cross. They walked to the coffee station. Cross poured a cup of coffee.

  Bouchard took a napkin and dabbed the blood. “You think he’s going to make it?”

  “I think if we don’t let him come with me in the bird, he’s going to go completely nuclear.”

  Bouchard shook his head vehemently. “In the air with you? No way. Wick wants to talk to him, for one thing.”

  “Is that what he said?”

  “That’s the vibe I’m getting. All of them – the Calumets, David – they’re being looked at.”

  “Well, until there’s some indictment… I mean…”

  “I’m not even sure why I’m letting you go up.”

  Cross looked at Bouchard over the rim of his coffee mug. “Yes you are.”

  Bouchard crumpled the napkin, stained red, and tossed it. “I was ready to reassign you not too long ago, Justin.”

  “But you didn’t. Hikers came forward; I know where she is. She’s in there, right on or around West Canada Mountain.”

  Bouchard lowered his voice and darted his eyes around, probably checking to make sure David Brennan hadn’t wandered back into the firehouse. “What if she’s dead up there? Huh? You telling me you think it’s a good idea to have that man with you inside a tiny helicopter, looking down at his wife sprawled out on the rocks, or something? Anyway, it breaks with so many protocols I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

  Cross sipped his coffee.

  Bouchard tried not to look at him as he fixed his own cup. He flexed his wounded hand, studied it. Then he cut a look at Cross. “Goddammit,” he said. “Alright. One trip.”

  Chapter Forty

  The sunlight surprised her. Katie got up slowly from Hoot’s cot, her muscles stiffer than ever. She stared at the bloody smear on the cabin window as she took the liquor bottle of water from her pack and drank the last few ounces. Time to replenish her supply.

  Amazed that she’d ever been able to find sleep, she lifted her bruised arms above her head and gave herself a sniff. The smell could’ve knocked over an elephant – she’d never been this ripe in her life.

  When I get out of this, I’m going to shower for a month.

  The sumptuous thought was met with discouraging debate. You’re miles from anywhere and no one knows where you are. Leno is still out there. You have no food or water.

  She went through her running warm-up, just static stretches, rotating her hips then bending and touching her toes. Her lower back was tight – it had been since wrestling with Carson that first time – but it was livable.

  Her right leg was a different story. She couldn’t straighten it out to get the full length.

  It didn’t fare any better from a seated position. She couldn’t even flatten her leg on the floor. Each time she tried, the pain shredded through her. The final attempt was so bad she became light-headed.

  She didn’t need a physical therapist to know she had a disabling injury – her leg was going to continue to be trouble and would surely get worse if she didn’t take care of it.

  She rose slowly to her feet, determined to quiet the doubts. She needed a compression bandage. And she needed to locate water. If some old mountain man had lasted out here for years without any modern amenities, she could too.

  Twin Mountain to Spruce to a trail which led to Haskell Road. That was the route Hoot had indicated. Once she made it to the trail, she could just walk out.

  Unless, of course, Leno anticipated her and made his way to the trail, too. He didn’t have a gun, but he could still be lethal.

  She had to plan for at least a two-day trip. Surely there would be places she’d have to double-back, go the long way around, and she had to accept the idea she’d likely lose her bearings at one time or another.

  Maybe three days, then. Even Hoot had thought so. It seemed like a lot when it had only taken six hours to come in.

  Of course, Carson had used GPS. And he’d dragged her like a pack mule, only letting up a couple of times.

  Like when they’d heard the hikers.

  When she’d screamed.

  Katie looked through Hoot’s things for something to wrap her thigh in as she considered it. Carson had brought them close to a trail by mistake. He’d had the advantage of GPS, but the trail hadn’t shown up.

  Did it make more sense to try to go back out the way she’d come in? Why did Hoot lay out an alternate route? Maybe she’d run into that same trail…

  Of course, they were a ways from the original cabin on Jones Mountain, if that, in fact, had been where Carson had brought her. She’d followed Hoot for four
hours to get to Twin Mountain. If she’d had her wits about her, she might’ve paid more attention to which way they’d gone from the first cabin to get to Hoot’s. But Leno had been behind them, and she’d struggled just to keep Hoot’s dogged pace.

  Maybe Hoot knew of something he hadn’t told her, such as a big lake, or rapids, a waterfall impeding the more direct route.

  She riffled through a box of trinkets in the corner, and her hand closed around something smooth. She held it up and let it dangle. Katie was no military expert, but she thought she was looking at a Purple Heart. Hoot was old enough to have been in Vietnam. He’d survived war, survived living off the land for God knew how long, only to wind up killed in cold blood.

  Because of her.

  No, because of Leno.

  -Either way, right now, Hoot’s body is rotting up by the chapel.

  She needed to at least bury him. He’d saved her life.

  In his pack she’d found a green canteen with the initials “B.T.” inked on one side, plus a compass and a pocket knife. She had both rifles and Leno’s pistol so she was well-armed, but she needed something reflective, too, for signaling planes or even people she might encounter from a distance. She held the Purple Heart medal in her palm, moving it around in the light.

  There was no way she could take the man’s medal. She lay it back in the box. The glass surface of the compass was probably better anyway.

  Unfortunately, Hoot didn’t seem to own a single map, but there was a small cooking pot she crammed in her bag. She set the bag aside for now.

  She found a wool scarf among Hoot’s few clothing items and duct tape with his tools – barely anything left on the spool. She wrapped her leg with the scarf, cinching it tight to the point her vision blurred with tears. Holding the scarf end with her teeth, she wrapped it all in the remains of the duct tape.

  Her wrist bandages were in tatters, and she pulled them off, leaving a small pile behind.

  With the sun just rising and shining through the trees, she left Hoot’s cabin, scanning for signs of Leno.

  Leno’s pistol wouldn’t stay safe tucked into her running skirt and she didn’t want to leave it in the cabin. She decided to bury the handgun and the second rifle; one was enough for her to keep, and she didn’t know how to shoot the pistol anyway.