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

by T. J. Brearton

  She was a hostage, anyway. Whether or not Carson or Leno had her tied up didn’t matter; the woods had her now. And they didn’t seem to want to let her go.

  She’d gotten somewhat used to the plaguing sense of being lost. At first it was unsettling, even panic-inducing. A person normally spent all of their waking time well-oriented. They didn’t walk around thinking about north and south, but knew their route to work, to the grocery store. Anywhere else, they increasingly relied on GPS.

  It was an endless nagging in her mind that if she’d acted more swiftly when she’d been Carson’s captive – if she’d snuck the GPS from him while he’d slept off the drinking that first night – she could have hidden it from him, made up a story. Something.

  Or, that she’d missed something with the sat phone she’d recovered. She was too non-technical, and somebody better with those sorts of gadgets would’ve figured it out.

  And consuming her, night and day, the guilt playing on an endless loop in her mind: the theory that she had inadvertently alerted Leno when she’d activated the SOS feature on the phone, and that blunder had directly led to Hoot’s murder. She was horrified that she’d gotten someone killed.

  She rolled back onto her butt and listened as a second helicopter faded into the distance. She looked at the wristwatch looped through the belt of Hoot’s pants. Six forty-two in the morning. Normally she’d be taking a run about now. The last one hadn’t gone so well.

  Her wrists would likely bear scars from the plastic ties she’d endured, the ropes binding her to the bed. Her hands were filthy, dirt caked under her nails. She’d never been one to keep long nails, or paint them, but a few of them had broken anyway. There was a runnel of dried blood between her fingers that wound down the back of her hand.

  She lifted her shirt. Her skin was covered in scrapes and bruises. The bruise on her right side looked like a colorful Rorschach inkblot.

  She’d peed in the woods so many times it was starting to hurt – likely she’d gotten a UTI after wiping herself with leaves for the first couple days. But she was getting less and less water now, going infrequently.

  The matches were gone. No more boiling water anyway. If she wanted a drink it would be straight out of a river or pond, but she hadn’t seen one in a while.

  Weight loss, infection, incessant, maddening hunger, the edges of dehydration – but the worst was probably her torn quad.

  Her leg had swollen to almost twice its size from her hip to her knee. The skin was hot to the touch. She could only walk on it for ten, fifteen minutes at a time, then she needed almost as much rest.

  No, that’s not the worst.

  -Okay, maybe not.

  You probably lost the baby.

  -I don’t know that.

  Even well-fed mothers getting plenty of bed rest and not potentially lost for all time have miscarriages. Give it up.

  You’re a wreck.

  Your body is inhospitable.

  It happened days ago and you know it.

  It’s over.

  She turned her mind away. Had to.

  One thing was true: She hadn’t had a good poop since the outhouse at the first cabin. Just once, a piercing in her stomach causing her to run through the woods, hunched over, clutching the rifle against her churning stomach, until she’d found a suitable log to hang her ass over.

  If only her husband could see her now.

  If only she could laugh with Gloria about everything. Her hair, for one thing – greasy and tangled like a madwoman. She’d pulled at least five beetles out of it since starting out of the woods – and one good-sized spider.

  Maybe I’ll start eating the bugs, Glo.

  It wasn’t a half-bad idea. Some survivalists swore by eating insects, said they had protein.

  But you had to eat a lot, she figured.

  Maybe they even soothed the stomach, good for digestion?

  What do you think, Glo? Find an anthill somewhere, tuck a napkin under my chin, and go to town?

  She wondered if her little sister was out here in these same woods. Maybe she was miles away, maybe she was close. How was she holding up? Was she taking one for the team and roughing it?

  Doubtful. Even in such dire circumstances, Gloria probably wasn’t too far from a full bathroom. From a young age, Glo had luxuriated in long showers. It had driven their father nuts. He’d bang on the bathroom door and order her to shut the water off. Once she was old enough to say such things, she’d shout back, “You can afford it!”

  She’d been a rebellious teenager. She’d gone Goth at one point, preferring black eye makeup and a black leather jacket to the long maroon jumpers required by her preparatory school.

  She’d run away from school three times. When their father had found her and dragged her back for the third time, she’d gone ahead and gotten herself expelled.

  It was true: Toth Prep didn’t like it when you lit all your books on fire in the center of the student courtyard.

  There were all sorts of reasons, then, that the nickname “Glo” was so appropriate.

  First, her affinity for long showers. The water would dry her skin something terrible and so Gloria would apply globs of shea butter, making her positively shine.

  Second, as an ironic moniker during her black-clad-and-perpetually-dour phase, “Glo” was a riot, at least as far as Katie was concerned.

  And it was just icing on the cake that Glo finally touched a match to her gasoline-doused pile of books on a windy October day. The nickname took on a whole new level of meaning for Katie when she pictured Glo standing there in the firelight of her destructive streak.

  Of course, fun and games and a big sister’s nicknames were one thing, but their father, and the school, took it all quite seriously. Gloria went to counseling, saw a psychiatrist, and was prescribed Effexor for what was deemed her underlying depression.

  Their mother had died when Glo was eleven years old, and it didn’t take a shrink to deduce that Monica’s death was about the time Gloria shifted from long, womb-like showers to a perpetual kind of funereal fashion.

  In fact, Katie thought, it should’ve been obvious to anyone. But for some reason, when it was your family, when you were in the midst of it, it wasn’t. You accepted things at face value and didn’t dig too deep. You couldn’t dig too deep, she figured, because you were a part of that picture, too. It was hard to see objectively.

  It was hard to understand any other world where your mother hadn’t been taken from you, or what it was like for people who still had both of their biological parents. You couldn’t say, you didn’t know, so you just went on.

  Katie had coped by leaving the city. She’d found a remote spot, settled in, and now here she was.

  Now she was truly removed from the situation, as removed as it got.

  But not Gloria. Gloria had stayed in the city.

  I’m so sorry, Glo.

  The sound of the helicopters long gone, the woods were silent.

  Katie stretched out on her back. She had to keep her right leg bent at the knee.

  My big, fat leg.

  What do you think about my big, fat leg, Glo?

  Katie closed her eyes.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Katie’s sister had a checkered past, Cross discovered. Her run-ins with the law were fairly minor – she’d been arrested for destruction of property as a juvenile (though charged with criminal mischief as an adult), and had a few parking tickets and moving violations.

  But as he probed a little deeper, at first just surfing the net, the picture of a troubled woman became clearer. New York Now magazine had an article on Gloria’s whole foods store, shut down for a health code violation two years prior.

  He’d been aware of this from talking to David, but what he hadn’t known was how news of the violation had spread through the surrounding community and an anti-gentrification protest had formed.

  Cross found pictures of people with signs declaring, “Get out of our home,” and someone had written �
�Scum” on the storefront. Protestors called the whole foods store a symbol of the inequality plaguing their neighborhood.

  “These people come in with their money, they raise my taxes,” one Brooklyn resident said in a separate article by the Daily Post. “There used to be a bodega here, where I could afford groceries. Now I have to take the subway just to get milk and bread. And this place has violated city health codes. It figures. The rich are always cutting corners to get richer.”

  The name Calumet, another protestor claimed, was synonymous with this kind of corruption.

  “Jean-Baptiste Calumet is like a backward Robin Hood,” the protestor said. “Taking from the poor to give to the rich.”

  The protestor didn’t elaborate on exactly how, or the newspaper hadn’t reported it.

  Cross went through more articles, sitting at his desk in the Hazleton substation. He was anxious to be on his way to Brooklyn but wanted to finish brushing up first.

  The charges against the store were: one piece of equipment which had expired; a single bottle of ammonium-based sanitizer which had been left uncapped in the supply closet; and an employee in the bulk-pack room observed assembling cartons while also packaging exposed, ready-to-eat quinoa cakes. Allegedly the employee hadn’t washed hands or changed gloves in between tasks.

  Compared to other health violations Cross imagined, the charges against Gloria’s store were negligible; an oversight – a mistake anyone could make. It wasn’t listeria, anyway. But Gloria Calumet followed all of the rules, shut down the store, updated all the equipment – even appliances not yet expired or even close to expiration, applied for a re-investigation, and passed it with flying colors.

  Yet the renovations had come with a hefty price tag and the whole thing put the store out of business for over a year.

  Gloria also owned a restaurant, a place two blocks from the whole foods store called Sorrel, presumably after the bitter herb.

  Sorrel was high-end, a fusion of Asian and French cooking, according to its website. Its existence had surely added to the ireful anti-gentrification protests. In short, Cross figured, the yuppie hipsters loved Gloria Calumet, but she wasn’t such a big hit with the other residents, the more working-class, those who’d called the area home for generations.

  So what did it all mean?

  Cross shut down his work station and grabbed a cup of coffee from the kitchen to go. He wondered how much of a financial hole Gloria Calumet had found herself in after the health code violations. Couldn’t she have her father bail her out before she hit the skids?

  Maybe not with Sybil, the stepmother, holding the purse strings.

  Cross fired up the car and headed toward the interstate. He wondered if it was at all plausible that Gloria Calumet was behind her sister’s abduction. Had she hired kidnappers to abduct her sister in order to extort money from her icy stepmom?

  The organized crime thing seemed off the table. Not just because the feds didn’t seem to think it, but because of how high-profile it all was. The mob took people in the night, weighted them down with bricks, and sank them in the lake. They didn’t kidnap rich daughters for ransom. They had much more secure ways of making money.

  And all the other leads were blind alleys: Henry Fellows, the ex-partner, or Lee Beck, the lawyer. The feds had called Eric Dubois, the chef who’d been fired from the Dobbs Ferry restaurant, a dead end. But recently he’d gone to work, according to the Sorrel website, for Gloria Calumet.

  He’d even dated her, apparently.

  Cross wanted to talk to the two of them.

  Plus, he had something else he wanted to check out. Might be nothing, but it had been pinging around in his brain for a while now. The trip down to the city was two birds with one stone.

  * * *

  Five hours later, Cross sat at a table for one at Sorrel. It was early and the restaurant was empty except for a well-dressed couple in a corner booth and a bartender in a starched white shirt sliding wine glasses into the rack above her head.

  The dinner rush loomed, scents of butter and garlic wafting from the kitchen doors and cutlery and china clashing. The chef barked at someone. Cross wondered who it was back there, if it was Eric Dubois. He planned to find out in just a few minutes.

  A waitress picked her way through the tables and smiled at Cross. She held a black pad in her hands and explained to him that the kitchen wouldn’t be open for ten more minutes, but he was welcome to wait and have a drink. He ordered a Scotch, single malt.

  “Glenfiddich?”

  “Please. Is Gloria Calumet here?”

  The waitress, a pretty blonde in her thirties, gave Cross a little look. “No, she’s not… Is there something…?”

  “No, it’s okay. I’m a friend. She’s probably over at the store, yeah?” He shook his head mournfully. “I don’t know how she’s keeping up, with everything that’s going on.”

  The waitress glanced over her shoulder then back at Cross. She seemed to drop her guard. “I know,” she whispered. “It’s crazy. Are you… Do you know Ms. Calumet well?”

  “I’ve come to know her a little, yeah. I’m actually wondering about Chef Dubois. Is he—?”

  His phone rang, interrupting. The waitress looked wary again, but she pasted on a smile and promised to be right back with his drink.

  Cross took the call.

  “Hi, Dana.”

  “So, he’s in surgery again. Not looking good.” She meant Gebhart.

  “You’re in Albany?”

  “Yeah. Just to check in with things.”

  “He was supposed to be released, I thought.”

  “Complications with his breathing. He has a collapsed lung.”

  “Jesus. Alright,” Cross said, “Why don’t you—”

  “He talked to me.”

  Cross’s mouth hung open for a moment. “What did he say?”

  “He said he never dealt with Johnny Montgomery directly. He was renovating their house on Oak Street. His wife was the hirer. And she was the one to ask him about the hunting cabins.”

  Cross waited. “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. You think he’s talking about Janice Montgomery?”

  “I do.”

  Dana sighed. “Well there it is.”

  “Thank you, Dana. You need to get out of there, get home to your family.”

  “Okay.” She sounded ready to ring off but asked, “Where are you?”

  Cross looked around the restaurant. He watched as the bartender poured his drink, the waitress standing at the bar, chatting, her eyes darting to Cross. The bartender looked, too.

  Then a second waitress walked out of the noisy kitchen. She stuck her head back in the door, laughed at something, and stepped fully into the dining room.

  Cross recognized her from pictures.

  Quietly, he said to Dana Gates, “I’m looking at Janice Montgomery. Or, for all intents and purposes, Janice Connolly.”

  “Be careful.”

  “I’ll call you back.” He slipped his phone away. The place was dim, the kind of comforting lighting of a theater just before the movie begins, but he had good eyes and a clear view of the second waitress, Janice.

  Eric Dubois could wait. Standing just a few feet away was the thing that had been pulsing in the back of his mind, personified.

  She said something to the bartender, laughed, and walked away with a tray. She went about placing votive candles on the tables.

  The blonde waitress returned and set down Cross’s drink.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re very welcome. I’ll be back in a few minutes, okay? Tonight’s menu is going to be good. Did you still want to—?”

  He brushed a hand through the air. “No, no. Maybe after the meal.”

  She gave him a hundred-watt grin and swished away.

  Janice Montgomery moved table to table, coming closer. His mind worked quickly – now he just needed to decide how to play it out. But that sort of depended on her, and whether or not she’d been watching
TV.

  She was around the age of the other waitress, only her hair was darker, her manner a bit rougher, like if the two waitresses were to arm wrestle, this one would be the easy victor.

  She seemed disinterested in her work, distracted as she set out the candles.

  Cross imagined a young life spent on the streets, where Janice Connolly had met all sorts of interesting people. People like Troy Vickers, or her future husband, Johnny Montgomery.

  He took a sip of Scotch.

  He waited.

  When she reached his table, she paused, barely looking at him. “Do you mind?”

  “No, I don’t mind,” Cross said.

  She gave him a smile much less winning than her strawberry-blonde co-worker, and quickly set down the candle and made to leave.

  Then she halted.

  “You worked here long?” he asked.

  He watched the recognition work its way into her eyes, form the tight line of her mouth.

  He wondered how this was going to go down.

  “Uh, been here a couple years,” she said, recovering. She kept hold of the tray, a few candles left burning, and gave the front door a quick look. “Why? You writing a book?”

  He pulled on a lopsided grin and acted guilty. “I am, actually… Well, not a book. I’m writing an article for the Daily Post.”

  She showed him an unabashed look of disbelief but played along. “Uh-huh. Well, maybe you ought to think about that. I think the owner’s been through enough, don’t you?”

  Janice started away.

  “No, no,” Cross said, raising his voice. “That’s not really my angle.”

  “I don’t really care what your angle is.” She kept her back turned as she placed a votive on a table and moved on to the next.

  He knew she wanted to run, was considering it – wondering if she was trapped.