The Disappeared

by C. J. Box

  “Not that I’m complaining,” Gordon said. “I wouldn’t trade it for anything else in the hospitality industry. My owners have put hundreds of millions of dollars into this property to make it the best in the world—and it is. It’s a privilege to make this place hum. We’ve reached out to the entire world to tell them about us, and we’ve been rewarded by nearly one hundred percent occupancy.

  “Our market isn’t the one percent,” Gordon said. “It’s one percent of the one percent. Those people who can choose to holiday anywhere in the world. Convincing them to come out here to the Wild West and get dusty may sound to some like a crazy idea. But we did our research.”

  While Gordon talked, Joe scribbled in his pad and nodded to encourage him to keep going.

  “We hire over two hundred employees to serve ninety guests,” the GM said. “That’s an astounding level of service. Our guests include household names in entertainment, politics, and business. We’ve hosted the president’s son-in-law.”

  He went on to fire off a laundry list of celebrity names. Even Joe had heard of a few of them. He knew his daughter Lucy would know them all and be impressed. Sheridan had let a few names slip in phone calls with her mother.

  “They come from around the world for a seven-day ranch experience like no other,” Gordon said. “These are people who are used to being treated like kings and queens and they come here to be cowboys and cowgirls for a week. Our research showed that in the back of many men’s minds is the desire to be a cowboy, and that many women want to play cowgirl as long as they can retire to a luxury cabin at night and enjoy the finest food and wine available anywhere. Once they know that...”

  He continued. “We’re in contact with our guests at least six times from their first inquiry to when they show up. We know as much as we possibly can about every guest in order to make this the best vacation they’ve ever had in their lives.”

  Joe recalled the questionnaire he’d seen of Kate’s.

  “Why a week minimum?” Gordon asked before answering his own question. “Because it takes a full three days to get our guests to unplug and disengage from their phones and the rest of their busy lives. You can actually watch their protective armor melt away on day three. Then they become real people, which is why they came here in the first place. There are no categories of guests, no special status for anyone. They’re all our guests and they’re all treated with courtesy and respect equally, whether they’re celebrities or newlyweds on a once-in-a-lifetime honeymoon.

  “Our staff sign nondisclosure agreements promising not to publicize our client list on social media and not to talk about them in town. That guarantees privacy. Our guests really appreciate that.

  “You know,” Gordon said, “we do a lot of good in this valley.”

  Joe looked up for more.

  “We’re one of the biggest employers in the county. We contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars to the community and endow even more to ensure top-tier medical facilities. Every year, we host inner-city kids to experience nature for the first time.

  “So,” Gordon said, thumping his pencil on the desktop like the tail of an excited puppy, “this is why it’s so disconcerting to have a guest just vanish. And for that incident to become a news story in our biggest overseas market. So if you can help solve this thing, we’ll be eternally grateful. And you can bet we’ll show our appreciation to Governor Allen.”

  “Two hundred and fifty employees are a lot to keep track of,” Joe said. “How are they vetted?”

  “Thoroughly,” Gordon said. “More thoroughly than any other resort I’ve ever worked at. Every one of them has to have character references before they go through two background checks. If they sail through, there’s fairly intense hospitality training. We get the best of the best. Like your daughter Sheridan.”

  Joe blushed with pride, but kept to the task at hand.

  “Not that there is never any drama,” Gordon said with a bemused grin. “You can’t take two hundred single twenty-somethings from around the country and put them into one place and not have some drama. June is the first round of employee romance and it’s inevitable. Many of the breakups occur the first of July. Some go on. Our Human Resources Department calls that period As the Wagon Wheel Turns.”

  Joe smiled, thought of Sheridan and Lance Ramsey, and frowned.

  Joe said, “No one who’s looked into this case before me has suspected any of the staff.”

  “And neither do we,” Gordon said. “We did our own internal investigation as well.”

  Joe looked up. “What did you conclude?”

  “We concluded that something happened to Kate after she left the ranch. And that whatever happened to her had no connection to her week here.

  “This isn’t like a normal company where the employees show up and do their shift and go home,” Gordon said. “It’s like one huge extended family during the season. Our people stay together here in one place, they work hard together, and they’re with each other twenty-four-seven. Nothing that happens in one corner of the ranch isn’t known by everybody else that night. There are no secrets, is what I’m saying. If one of our staff had something inappropriate going on with Kate, we all would have known about it.

  “Look,” Gordon said, leaning forward at his desk and lowering his voice, “I’ll give you a glimpse into how we operate, so you’ll know why it doesn’t make sense to suspect anyone here.”

  “Okay.”

  He continued. “Unlike the vast majority of resorts, we encourage our people to interact with the guests and treat them like normal people. Our guests are a little surprised at that the first three days and then they understand the purpose of that is to set them all at ease. And that happens ninety-five percent of the time. Our guests enjoy our staff and sometimes invite them to dinner with them, or even extend an invitation to visit in the off-season. We don’t discourage that. But we absolutely draw the line at any kind of fraternizing. Like between a guest and his or her wrangler or fishing guide.”

  “So it’s never happened?” Joe asked.

  “Most of our wranglers are beautiful girls,” Gordon said. “Your daughter included. I see how one could assume that male guests might proposition them. I see that. But our wranglers are a tight-knit group and they look out for one another. They go to church together. They just don’t entertain that sort of thing.”

  “So it’s never happened?” Joe asked again.

  “It’s extremely rare,” Gordon said. “And if it does, that staff member is immediately dismissed. That’s only happened one or two times in the whole time I’ve been here. We’ve let go a housekeeper and a fishing guide.”

  “And nothing like that happened between an employee and Kate?”

  “Absolutely not,” he said, thumping his pencil so hard it popped out of his grip and he had to retrieve it. “Every morning during the season, we have a daily standup.”

  Joe scribbled daily standup in his notebook and Gordon picked up on it.

  “While our guests are at breakfast, all of our departments get together for a briefing,” Gordon explained. “They talk about what’s on the schedule for the day, but they also talk candidly about guest satisfaction. They play psychologist to unlock the desires of every guest so when our customers leave this place they’re raving about it. But they also discuss problem guests—there are a few here and there—and how to deal with them. If Kate were creating any issues, we would have known about it and addressed it. But our investigation found that Kate was very popular among the staff. Our head wrangler, Lance Ramsey, spent the most time with her and he said she’d fallen head over heels for the place. Especially riding.”

  Joe asked, “Is it unusual for a single woman to book a week here?”

  Gordon nodded. “It’s not the norm, but we get a few every year. Most of our guests are families.”

  “Anything odd take place with the other singles?”

  “Of course not. They all returned home safely.”

  He said it
definitively, but Joe noted a flutter of his eyelids as he said it. It was a tell. Joe waited a moment for Gordon to continue, but he didn’t finish whatever thought had entered his mind.

  So Joe prompted him. “Are there any similarities in personality or circumstances with the single guests? I ask this because you guys obviously know a lot about your customers.”

  “Well,” Gordon said as his neck flushed slightly, “we do and there are.”

  As he said it, the GM slid his chair back and opened a file drawer on the right side of his desk. He withdrew a folder and placed it on his desk.

  “They’re all British women,” Gordon said, not quite meeting Joe’s eyes. “All successful British women, many professionals like Kate. Some married, some not.”

  Joe raised his eyebrows with interest.

  “This is how we market our property,” Gordon said.

  He slid a Silver Creek Ranch tourism brochure across the surface of the desk to Joe, who picked it up. It was printed on heavy paper, and as he thumbed through it, he was impressed by the high quality of the scenic photography. There were deep orange Western sunsets, big skies, guests on horseback or fly-fishing. He’d seen many of the images on the SCR website and in the missing case file before, but he was struck by how atmospheric and well-done the photos were.

  “This is how our exclusive tour operators in the UK market the property,” Gordon said, withdrawing two glossy brochures from the file.

  Rather than a sunset or a horseback ride, the cover of the first brochure, from a tour operator called Western Dreams, was a dusky photo of cowboys lined up on a fence with their backs to the camera. Joe recognized that they were watching a rodeo rider inside the arena, but the rider himself wasn’t shown.

  What was shown in sharp detail were eleven backsides in tight Wrangler jeans.

  He thumbed through the brochure to see more of the same. Rugged young wranglers on horseback, cowboys adjusting the flank straps on saddles while older women looked on, a stoic horseman leading a herd of horses toward the camera.

  “Different approach,” Joe said.

  Gordon had a slightly embarrassed grin. He said, “Certain British women come over here for a different reason than our American family guests. Our UK tour operators have figured that out and they market directly to them. It seems some British women really want to be around young cowboys.”

  Joe had some familiarity with the phenomenon. It wasn’t unknown among the dude and guest ranches in the Bighorn Mountains near his base. In fact, he’d once been in the Stockman’s Bar in Saddlestring on Wednesday night—the night a local dude ranch sent its guests to town as part of their weekly activity schedule. He’d witnessed a lone woman dude ranch guest in her fifties—in fact, she was British—seduce a young local cowboy with multiple Coors Lights and shots of Jim Beam and then leave the bar with him. Joe had been struck by how young the ranch hand was and how predatory the woman.

  And Joe had once encountered two faux cowboys from the East who dressed up in Western wear solely to attract older women dude ranch guests and later fleece them.

  “It’s simply a market niche,” Gordon said somewhat defensively. “Different markets have different niches. We provide the same experience to all of our guests and we don’t cater to anything untoward. But it is what it is.”

  “Was Kate on the prowl, then?” Joe asked.

  “We have no information at all that she was. We would have known. You’re welcome to talk to Lance or Sheridan, in fact. They spent the most time with Kate while she was here.”

  “Was Kate disappointed by all the female wranglers?”

  Gordon huffed a laugh. “Not that she indicated. We ask all of our guests to complete a thorough exit survey on their last day while the experience on the ranch is fresh in their mind. I’ll give you a copy of her exit survey, as I did with the other investigators, if you’d like. You can believe me when I tell you Kate didn’t even mention the gender of the wranglers. Her only comment was that they were all excellent.”

  Joe asked, “Have you met Kate’s sister, Sophie, and Billy Bloodworth?”

  Gordon’s face twitched involuntarily. Another tell.

  “Unfortunately, I have,” Gordon said. “They came out here a few days ago and one of my maintenance guys pulled their vehicle out of a snowdrift. They were snooping around, but they didn’t want to admit it, I guess.

  “I told Sophie how sorry we all were about her sister. She seems like a sincere person. That Bloodworth guy, though.”

  “What about him?”

  Gordon sat back and crossed his arms across his chest. “He kept pumping me for the names of famous people who’d stayed here. He was very persistent and even rude. But I didn’t give him a single name. Even when he listed some of our actual guests, I wouldn’t confirm the names. I thought he was a pain in the ass looking for some kind of sensational angle for his cheap tabloid.”

  “Did they mention they might have a suspect?” Joe asked, recalling the photo on Kate’s phone the night before.

  “No, but Bloodworth acted like he blamed me and this ranch for Kate’s disappearance,” Gordon said. “As if this place had lured her here to be kidnapped. He kept calling the ranch ‘posh,’ as if there was something wrong with that. I think it was more about his own class anxieties, if you want my personal opinion.”

  He adopted an English accent and said, “What kind of people can afford a posh place like this when the homeless are starving? Questions like that.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I threw them the hell out of here,” Gordon said. “I don’t have time for that. And I called our security guys and asked them to escort them off the property so they wouldn’t take any more photos of the buildings.”

  “Ah,” said Joe.

  Gordon glanced at his wristwatch again. “Anything else, Mr. Pickett?”

  Joe read through his notes. He could tell that Gordon wanted to move on.

  “On Kate’s registration, she was marked as an ‘FIT.’ What’s that mean?”

  “It’s travel industry terminology for ‘Foreign Individual Traveler,’” Gordon said. “It means she booked direct through a tour operator. It means she didn’t come as part of a group.”

  “Thank you. What’s ‘glamping’?”

  “Glamorous camping,” the GM said. “Guests stay in tents or tipis, but with all the comforts of our lodge as well as great food.”

  When Joe looked up, puzzled, Gordon shrugged and said, “It’s a thing.”

  Joe nodded toward the whiteboard.

  “What’s the ‘wind turbine project’?”

  “We were approached by representatives from Buckbrush about constructing fifty turbines on the property. They tried to sell it to us as a way of making the resort green—which they claimed would attract socially conscious guests. They might have a point, but we weighed that against spoiling the view shed with those monstrosities and decided against it. Not that they’ve given up on it, though. There have been reports about Buckbrush vehicles sneaking around this winter.”

  “Interesting,” Joe said. Then: “Which employee is SP2?”

  “Sheridan Pickett,” Gordon said with a rare smile. “I believe you know her. Steve Pringle is our head chef, so he’s SP1.”

  “Contractors,” Joe said. “How are they vetted?”

  “Unless they’re directly involved with an activity here like a celebrity wedding, they aren’t,” Gordon said with hesitation. “We simply can’t do background checks on every vendor or contractor we work with. Think about it. We’re talking food suppliers, mechanics, construction companies, and all the specialty people associated with the operations of a large-scale ranch. It would be a daunting challenge. But understand that contractors have little or no interaction with guests.”

  “The DCI agent you spoke to listed two particular contractors for follow-up interviews,” Joe said as he found the names in his notebook. “He thought I should talk to Ben and Brady Youngberg as well as Jack and
Joshua Teubner.”

  “Our farriers and our fish hatchery guys.” Gordon nodded. “I can see why they’re worth talking to. I don’t know a lot about either of them myself, but their names came up when we did our internal investigation. We didn’t interview them ourselves.”

  “I met the Youngbergs last night,” Joe said. “Things almost got Western.”

  Gordon squinted at Joe, not comprehending.

  Joe moved on. “Could I get a complete list of your outside contractors?”

  Gordon sighed and said, “Sure. I had a list compiled a couple of months ago. I’ve handed it over to Sheriff Neal and your DCI. Like I said, I’ve answered all of these questions before.”

  The GM pushed back and left his office to ask the receptionist to print off the list as well as to make another copy of Kate’s exit survey.

  While he did, Joe slipped his cell phone out of his uniform breast pocket and took several shots around the room, particularly the tasks listed on the whiteboard. He didn’t suspect Gordon of withholding anything, but he wanted to be thorough.

  *

  ON THE FRONT PORCH of the administration cabin, Gordon swept his arm to take in the enormity of the Silver Creek Ranch below while Joe clamped on his Stetson.

  “You should see it in the summer,” he said. “It’s a magnificent place.”

  “It looks pretty good now.”

  “Are you going to see your daughter while you’re here?”

  “Yup.”

  “You’ll find her at the arena,” Gordon said. “She’s a good one. You and your wife should be proud.”

  “We are.”

  “I wish we had a hundred more like her,” Gordon said. Then: “I’m sorry, but I’ve really got to get going to Denver to catch my plane.”

  With that, he mounted a four-wheel ATV and roared through the snow to the employee parking lot.

  *

  JOE WANTED TO FIND SHERIDAN. He also hoped Lance Ramsey would be there.