The Disappeared

by C. J. Box

  Joe waited thirty seconds before saying, “What can I do for you, Nate?”

  “I was hoping you could sort out a problem for me and a couple of friends of mine.”

  Joe waited again. Nate’s phone etiquette was aggravating.

  “Help you with what?”

  “A falconry issue.”

  Licenses to hunt with falcons in the state of Wyoming were issued by the Game and Fish Department. Once an apprentice falconer had successfully passed a test based on the California Hawking Club exam—the California Hawking Club was the gold standard of falconry associations in the country—a permit to hunt with a falcon could be granted.

  “So you’re finally going to request a permit?” Joe asked. Nate had never bothered to get a permit. Joe thought part of the reason his friend had never requested one was simply to annoy him.

  “No can do.”

  “Then what is the issue?”

  “We need to talk to you in person about it.”

  “Who is we?”

  “Two friends of mine. They’re right here with me and we’ve been discussing a problem. It turns out they both have the same difficulty. When I heard about it, I thought of you. I told them I was friends with a game warden.”

  “Okay,” Joe said.

  “We can come to see you tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow is no good. I’m going south to Saratoga. Can you just tell me the problem over the phone?”

  “Nope. These falconers want to explain it to you in person. I’m just the facilitator of this meeting.”

  “So they’re falconers.”

  “Good ones, too.”

  “So hand them the phone, Nate.”

  “Let me see if they’ll talk to you.”

  Apparently, Nate covered the microphone on his set because Joe could hear a spirited but muffled conversation between Nate and the two men.

  After a minute, Nate said, “Nope. They want to talk with you in person because you never know who might be listening in. They want to talk to you face-to-face to find out if you can be trusted to help them. I told them you could, but you know how falconers are.”

  “You mean paranoid?”

  “Where will you be in Saratoga?” Nate asked, as if he had no intention of arguing with Joe’s insinuation.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “How long will you be there?”

  “I don’t know that, either. At least a week.”

  He heard another round of muffled conversation.

  Then Nate said, “One of these guys needs to go down there anyway. So do I. So I’ll call when we can meet with you.”

  “It may not be that simple, Nate,” Joe said. “I’ll be on assignment and I’ll likely be in the field. I don’t have an office there yet...” Then he paused. His phone was silent. Nate had punched off after he said I’ll call when we can meet with you.

  “You drive me crazy,” Joe said to no one.

  . . .

  DCI AGENT MICHAEL WILLIAMS picked up on the first ring. He sounded cordial. Joe identified himself and said, “I’ve been asked to take a look at the Kate Shelford-Longden case and I was hoping, since you wrote the incident report, I could ask you a few questions.”

  Silence.

  “I said I’ve been asked—”

  “I heard you.” Williams’s voice was tight. “Who asked you to look into it?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “You don’t have to. I can figure it out. Look, I don’t have time right now to talk to you about it. I’m sorry.”

  Joe frowned. “Can I call you back later, then?”

  “Not really,” Williams said.

  “So you can’t talk about it because someone in your office might overhear you?” Joe asked.

  “That’s part of it. Hey, are you calling from your cell phone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I have your number.”

  “So you’ll call me back?” Joe asked.

  “Thanks. Have a good day.”

  Williams disconnected the call and Joe stared at his phone.

  6

  TWENTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD SHERIDAN PICKETT TOPPED A SNOW-COVERED hill on the Silver Creek Ranch, driving a white company pickup with a dozen horses trotting behind her. The two-track road she was on had been recently plowed, but it had partially drifted in during the night. She turned the dial on the dashboard to switch the transmission into four-wheel-drive high. It engaged as she drove down the hillside and bucked snow toward the curve of the North Platte River. A bald eagle high in a riverside cottonwood tree watched her descend.

  It was a cold and still morning. The truck tires squeaked on the snow as she drove. The meadows on the other side of the river blazed pure white in the sun beyond the trees and the thick willow walls of the riverbank stood like hedgerows. A large herd of bronze-and-white pronghorn antelope picked over the windswept open ground in the distance, and the surrounding mountains glowed azure except for their snow-covered peaks.

  She parked the truck on the bank of the frozen river and pulled on a thick pair of work gloves before getting out. She shooed away the horses who’d followed her to the river so they wouldn’t crowd her while she worked. They retreated into an impatient knot about twenty feet from the trees. Condensation clouded above their heads and their snouts bristled white with frost.

  Sheridan retrieved a double-bladed ax, a shovel, and a stall fork from the bed of the truck and stepped out onto the ice wearing Bogs boots. She shuffled to the lip of the thick part of the ice and swung the ax blade down through the skin that had formed overnight on the wide hole they’d cut a month before with a chain saw. She cut the overnight ice into large plates that bobbed and clicked together on the open water, then moved them aside with the shovel and the stall fork. When she gathered her tools and shuffled back toward the pickup, she noted that the horses were again advancing so they could go to the river to drink.

  “Get back.”

  The lead horse, a roan, turned on his back legs and the others followed suit.

  *

  SHERIDAN’S JOB IN THE WINTER was vastly different from the duties she carried out during the May-through-October guest season. After breaking the ice at six places along the river for the horses to get to water, and opening big bales of hay with a forklift so they could eat, she’d select five to ten horses a week to ride and tune up in the vast indoor arena until she’d ridden them several times—all one hundred and thirty mounts. Otherwise, they’d get “bronc-ey” and forget they were there on the ranch to provide safe and comfortable rides to guests of all skill levels. Horses were naturally lazy, and unless they were ridden hard and reminded of their jobs, they’d spend all their days grazing, sleeping, and standing around. Either that or figuring out unique ways to hurt and injure themselves.

  But compared to her first season at the ranch that summer, winter was positively restful.

  She’d been one of twenty-one full-time horse wranglers, most of them like her: fresh out of college and unready to commit to a full-time profession. Except for her supervisor—the tall, lean, handsome cowboy Lance Ramsey—all the wranglers were women. The reason, she’d been told, was that cowboys would rather work on the real cattle ranch that adjoined the property than at a guest resort. That, she learned, was partly true. It was also true that male guests were much more likely to participate in horseback riding—and listen to instruction—if their host was a young woman. Especially if the young woman wrangler looked good in a pair of jeans.

  But the wranglers worked hard. Their mornings began at five when breakfast was ready in the chuckwagon tent. At six they called in the “jingle horses”—called that because they’d respond immediately to bells—who would lead all the other grazing horses to the barn and corrals. After grooming and saddling up to eighty mounts and matching them up with guests, the first session would take place, the guests riding with designated wranglers. Sessions lasted from one to three hours and included basic beginner training in the outdoor rodeo arena, personal
lessons, and private rides, all the way to wilderness trail rides. A second session would occur in the afternoon after lunch and sometimes stretch into team penning and barrel racing for expert riders. Most guests were exhausted by four-thirty in the afternoon and ready for a cocktail at the saloon, but some requested evening rides, and the credo of the Silver Creek Ranch was to accommodate each and every guest no matter how outlandish their request.

  Sheridan, like the other wranglers, worked six days per week from dawn to dusk. After all the riding sessions were complete, the horses were unsaddled, fed grain, assessed for injuries, and pushed off back to the meadows to graze. The next morning, with the ringing of bells, the activities would start all over again.

  She’d learned a lot about horses—her mom had tried in vain to teach her while she was growing up—but even more about the hospitality business. As far as Sheridan was concerned, the jury was still out as to whether she liked it or not and as to whether it was something she wanted to pursue.

  The people who came were generally wealthy visitors from the East Coast with a few internationals thrown in, and—with a few exceptions—most of them had not been to a guest ranch before. Although many had ridden horses, and a few of them were fine riders, most were spending their first time around horses and Western horse culture. A surprising number of the guests assessed their skill level at riding much higher than it actually was, so matching horses with them was a special skill in itself.

  Until being hired by the Silver Creek Ranch, she hadn’t spent much time around wealthy people before. She hadn’t known what to expect.

  During training, she’d been encouraged to engage with the guests, and to let them stay anonymous, even though some of them were well-known and used to special treatment. There were tech industry moguls, entertainers, old-rich bankers and new-rich hedge fund billionaires, even supermodels. But for the most part, nearly all of them were there with their families and they’d turned out to be surprisingly normal. She’d also learned very quickly that just because someone was extremely wealthy didn’t mean he or she was extremely smart. And that despite their money, families were families in various shades of conflict, dysfunction, and love. It was a good thing to know.

  In many instances, she heard from guests that their week on the ranch was the first time in years they’d eaten together as a family. Sometimes, the guests struck up friendships with staff employees and invited them to dinner as well.

  Sheridan’s favorite category of guests was twelve-year-old girls. That was the time in life when a special connection to a horse seemed to occur—after childhood and before the social pressure of dating. Young girls looked up to her and actually listened, and many became accomplished riders very quickly. It wasn’t unusual for some of the girls to later text her or send a direct message to find out how their horse was doing. Sheridan always replied that the horse missed them as much as they missed their horse.

  Just as there was a rhythm to each week from when new families arrived, unplugged, and settled in, there was a rhythm to the summer for the staff as well, she’d found. The first few weeks had been intense, especially for first-timers like herself. It was like some kind of super high school, with cliques, factions, and social circles that formed as quickly as they dissipated.

  Hormones seemed to color the very air they breathed. Hookups happened—sometimes with remarkable speed—and breakups were found out almost at the same time as they occurred.

  After staff and hospitality training, many of the employees went en masse to bars and saloons in Encampment, Riverside, and Saratoga. They played as hard as they worked and no one got enough sleep. Several new employees got into trouble when they crashed ATVs or were thrown off horses.

  A month into the season, though, it had smoothed out. Sheridan found herself too physically tired each night after turning out the horses to do much of anything else. Each day was a new adventure, and the first couple of months on the ranch had gone by in a blur.

  Of the one hundred and thirty employees at the resort, the wranglers were considered elite because horseback riding was the most popular activity. Sheridan had applied for the wrangler position as a lark, and was as shocked as her family that she’d gotten the job. She was even more surprised when she learned that there had been three hundred applicants for the ten open slots, and that she was the only Wyoming-born wrangler of the entire crew, which gave her a kind of special status among the other employees. Her boots, hat, and Cruel Girl Western clothing had all come via her sister April’s employment at Welton’s Western Wear in Saddlestring, so she looked the part. Wranglers from other states consulted her for fashion advice, and even male employees looked to her for what was “authentic” and what was not. That she’d been chosen to be offered a full-time position on the ranch—meaning her own apartment overlooking the indoor arena on one side and the Sierra Madre range from the other—was a point of pride.

  She also secretly liked the fact that she knew her mother envied her.

  And then there was Lance Ramsey, the boss of the equestrian division. Lance was twenty-six, single, tall, laconic, gentlemanly, and the most knowledgeable and experienced horseman she’d ever met. Nothing riled him, and both the wranglers and the guests admired and respected him. He was from Montana, which was practically Wyoming, and he had a way about him that relaxed even the most hyperintensive type A guest. Lance’s name was atop the guest surveys nearly every week as the most personable and professional wrangler they’d met during their stay.

  One of the most charming things about Lance, she thought, was that he seemed to have no idea that nearly every female guest had a crush on him. If anyone mentioned that fact, he’d blush and kick at the dirt with the point of his boot.

  Lance had asked Sheridan to stay for the winter season over the other wranglers, even those who were more experienced. That meant a lot to her.

  *

  SHERIDAN FINISHED OPENING the last of the water holes by midmorning. As she walked back to the ranch pickup and twenty-one horses—most of them sorrels—rushed past her to get to the water, she caught a glint of light on the southern horizon.

  The ranch itself was vast and the skeleton staff of twenty-eight people who worked there during the winter, primarily department heads and maintenance crew, kept pretty good tabs on one another.

  So it was unusual to see a vehicle that was not from the ranch parked high on the summit of the foothills to the south. Hunting season was over, she knew, and if there were any outside contractors on the place, she should have been briefed. The ranch fleet consisted primarily of white pickups emblazoned with the Silver Creek Ranch logo on the front doors, like the truck she was driving. This truck was darker.

  She tossed the tools back into the bed of the pickup and didn’t stop to look directly at the trespassers. She’d learned from growing up riding along with her father that it was best to proceed with normal activities when being spied upon, so as not to alert the spy. In her dad’s case, he was usually being watched by hunters who might be in the wrong hunting area, or who were poaching.

  Sheridan opened the rear door of the pickup and found a set of binoculars in the seat back. She removed the caps from the lenses and raised the glasses inside the cab so she could see clearly through the rear passenger window.

  The pickup on the horizon was gray and had a camper shell on the back. There was writing on the front door, but it was too distant for her to make out what it said.

  She took in a quick breath when she focused on the cab itself because she could clearly see a pair of orbs side by side through the driver’s-side window but not the driver himself. The orbs turned out to be the lenses of binoculars looking directly back at her. There was someone else in the cab, but she couldn’t see who it was due to the sun’s reflection on the windshield.

  Cell signal strength varied depending on where she was on the property, but she was relieved to see she had one bar on her phone. The call went straight through to her boss. He was out of breath when he
answered. She assumed he was on the back of a horse in the arena.

  She said, “Lance, I’m down at the S-curve of the river and I see a truck over on the hills to the south. Two people, it looks like. Are you aware of any contractors on the place today?”

  “Nobody told me about anyone working out there. Can you see a license plate?”

  “No. The truck’s in profile. And whoever is driving it is looking back at me with binoculars.”

  “How long has he been there?”

  “No idea. But I know it isn’t one of ours.”

  “Stay put,” he said. “I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

  It was almost as if the trespassers were listening in, because the truck moved forward and slipped out of view on the other side of the hill.

  “They’re gone.”

  “I’m still on my way.”

  Lance had been particularly anxious and jumpy of late, she thought. Coming to check on her seemed like an overreaction.

  “Well, okay. But before you come, I need to ask you to clear out your things from my apartment just for the time being. You know, your toothbrush and razor. You’ve also got some clothes in the closet.”

  There was a long pause. Then a pained, “Why, Sheridan?”

  “I’ve got a situation. My dad is driving down here tomorrow. He’s going to be staying in town, but he might just show up here first. If he does...”

  She heard him gasp, then recover.

  “Okay,” he said. “I understand, I think.”

  “Thank you, Lance.”

  “Don’t go chasing those trespassers until I get there, okay?”

  “Okay. I don’t think I’d try to drive the truck across the ice, you know.”

  “Good. Now stay put and I’ll get there as soon as I can. Get a license plate on that truck if you see it again.”

  “Right, boss,” she said with a smile.

  7

  LATER THAT AFTERNOON, WYLIE FRYE KICKED OFF A PAIR OF CROCS and shed a heavy blanket as he neared the thick cloud of steam that was the mineral hot springs pool. He reached out through the steam to grasp the metal railing and muttered a curse before descending the moss-slick steps into the water itself.