The Disappeared

by C. J. Box

  “I know that the last couple of days she was here she said she really didn’t want to go back. Kate seemed to love this place even more than most guests, and you could see a troubled look cross over her face when she talked about going home.”

  “Interesting,” he said. “Any idea what troubled her?”

  “Not really. A lot of guests say that. In fact, most of them. This is kind of a fantasy camp for some people and they don’t want to go back to their real world once they get used to it.”

  Joe asked, “Did she talk about any of the staff or any of the guests while you were with her? Did anyone interest her or annoy her?”

  “Not that I can remember,” Sheridan said, then paused. “She did mention that she didn’t like the way the Youngbergs looked at her when they were shoeing the horses. But she sort of rolled her eyes when she said it, like it was no big deal. I think I told her those two yahoos look at every female that way.”

  “As we know,” Joe said.

  Sheridan rolled her eyes in agreement. “That would have been really something if you and Lance fought them last night.”

  “Luckily, we didn’t. But I was impressed how Lance stood up for you.”

  “So was I,” Sheridan said, with a wistful smile that told Joe more than she probably wanted to.

  “By the way, where is Lance? I wanted to ask him some of the same questions.”

  “He’ll be here by Monday,” she said. “He’s got the weekend off and he went up to his cabin. He usually comes back Sunday afternoon.”

  “Is it here on the ranch?”

  “No—it’s about twenty miles away up in the Snowy Range. It’s been in his family for years and he really likes to go up there whenever he can. We can drive there in the early summer, but in the winter it’s really hard to get to and he has to snowmobile in.”

  Joe noted the we and Sheridan realized at the same time what she’d revealed.

  “Oops,” she said.

  “He seems like a good guy,” Joe said. “I hope he knows better than to do my daughter wrong.”

  Sheridan flushed and shook her head. “The things you say...”

  “So what do you think happened to her?” Joe asked. “You must have thought about it and talked about it with other people here.”

  “There were a million theories, as you can guess,” she said. “You’ve probably heard most of them already. That she got kidnapped on the highway, that somebody on the staff here grabbed her, that a ranch contractor targeted her and took her after her stay.”

  “I’ve heard all those,” Joe said. “What do you think?”

  Sheridan sat back. “You really want my opinion?”

  He nodded. “Next to your mother, you’re the smartest person I know. Plus, you’ve got a unique perspective on the whole case.”

  “I think it was something else,” Sheridan said thoughtfully. “I just don’t know what.”

  “Why do you say that?” he asked. But he’d felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck because he thought the same thing.

  “Because in each of those scenarios, her car isn’t accounted for,” she said. “Kate drove a 2017 silver Jeep Cherokee with Colorado rental plates. It couldn’t have just vanished from the face of the earth. Somebody around here would have seen it if any of those three things happened.”

  He said, “I’m going to tell you something, if you can keep it confidential.”

  “I can.”

  “Kate’s sister is here with a British newspaper reporter. I met them last night and they let it slip they think she’s still here—alive. They think some local has her locked up somewhere. In fact, I got a glimpse of a photo they took that could be her, but they wouldn’t let me get a good look at it.”

  Sheridan’s eyes got large. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “Nope.”

  “If they think they’ve found her, why didn’t they go get her out?”

  “I was wondering the same thing,” he said. “There’s more to this, but the journalist wouldn’t let Sophie talk to me about it.”

  “Does Sophie have red hair?”

  “Yup.”

  Sheridan shook her head. “I haven’t seen them myself, but I heard they harassed our GM the other day. And Lance told me he helped a maintenance guy pull them out of a snowdrift after they’d left. They’d trespassed here on the ranch and they got stuck because they didn’t know how to drive in the snow.”

  “That’s them.”

  “Do you know what they drive?” she asked.

  “No,” he said, thinking that he should know that. “Why?”

  “I saw a strange vehicle a couple of days ago and I called it in to Lance. There were two people in the truck and I had the feeling they were watching me from across the river. Could that be them?”

  “Describe the vehicle.”

  “It was a four-wheel-drive pickup with a camper shell,” she said. “It was light colored—maybe off-white or gray. I didn’t get a very good look at it and I couldn’t see any license plates from that distance.”

  “It sounds like the truck I saw this morning,” he said.

  Before he could continue, his phone went off in his pocket and he pulled it out and looked at the screen.

  “Nate,” he said to Sheridan. “I need to take this.”

  “Nate’s here?” she asked.

  “He’s helping me,” Joe said. “I think.”

  *

  SHERIDAN WATCHED HER DAD take the call. She felt both thrilled and disconcerted. The man who used to cook her breakfast and take her out on ride-alongs was speaking to her as if she were an equal. She wasn’t used to it and she wasn’t sure what she felt about it. She thought she liked it, that it meant she’d matured and he recognized that, but at the same time she had a feeling that something special was now lost between them.

  But maybe in a good way.

  And she felt guilty not telling him more about how she felt about Lance. That the head wrangler was her sun, her moon, her stars. That he’d carefully cleared all of his things out of her apartment before her dad had arrived. That he’d gone to his cabin in the snow for the weekend because he had nowhere else to go.

  “What do you mean you shot him and then hit him with a fish?” her dad said, his voice rising.

  Sheridan was confused at first, but then again it was Nate he was talking with.

  If there was anybody capable of shooting a man and then hitting him with a fish, it was Nate Romanowski, her master falconer. Even if she couldn’t imagine the scenario. Where did Nate get a fish in the middle of the winter with the rivers and lakes frozen?

  “What if he calls the sheriff?” her dad asked Nate.

  . . .

  JOE COULD FEEL Sheridan’s eyes on him as Nate said, “Come on, Joe. What’s he going to say? Is he going to tell them a guy came out and shot him inside his meth lab? He’s not going to involve law enforcement in this at all.”

  “I’m law enforcement.”

  Nate didn’t respond.

  “What if he bleeds out?” Joe asked.

  “Then there’ll be one less scumbag in the world.”

  “Nate.”

  Nate said, “I figure he’ll end up in the hospital using some lame excuse for the gunshot wound. His dad won’t let him die.”

  “Good.”

  “Hey, do you want a fish for dinner? I bet you could ask them to cook it up for you at the Wolf.”

  Joe took a deep breath and expelled it slowly while he tried to stay calm.

  “Tell me exactly what he said when you were torturing him.”

  Nate snorted at the word torture. Then: “He said he was in a bar texting someone to make a drug deal and overheard these two old guys talking about Kate—that she was still alive and in the area. Teubner said he listened but kept his head down, and he’s not even sure what the two guys looked like. He was high on his own product at the time.”

  “Which bar?”

  “The Rustic.”

  “That’s it
?” Joe asked. “Did he tell you when it was?”

  “He said he couldn’t remember, but he thought it was in October or November but he wasn’t sure.”

  “So two months or three months ago,” Joe said. “This makes the second time it’s come up that she might still be alive.”

  “What about the fish?” Nate asked. “You know I don’t kill things for sport.”

  “Meet me here,” Joe said. “I’m at the Silver Creek Ranch with Sheridan.”

  “I thought I was supposed to interview Sophie and the fop.”

  “I can’t afford any more casualties,” Joe said, and punched off on Nate in mid-chuckle.

  *

  “SO WHERE DID he get a fish in the middle of the winter?” Sheridan asked Joe.

  “From a fish hatchery,” he said.

  Sheridan grinned at the absurdity of it, and Joe had to agree.

  The phone was still in his hand when a text message appeared from Marybeth. It read: Check out this link and call me.

  “Your mom found something,” he said to Sheridan as he stabbed the hyperlink on his screen with his index finger and waited for it to load.

  What appeared was the online home page of the Daily Dispatch. Under a headline that read IS THIS KATE? was the grainy photo Joe had glimpsed the night before on Sophie’s phone.

  “Oh, no,” he said.

  “What is it?” Sheridan asked.

  “The fop strikes,” Joe said.

  He expanded the photo to fill the screen. It was presumably taken from a long distance and it was more out of focus than he recalled, but there it was: the back of a seated person with blond hair, seen through a window, the figure of a man looming in shadows in the background as if approaching her. Joe noted snow on the outside windowsill and weathered log walls that he hadn’t noticed previously.

  The byline of the story was credited to Billy Bloodworth.

  Is this a photo of missing Kate Shelford-Longden being held captive by a mountain man in the wilds of Wyoming, an area where primitive gun-toting Trump-voting “individualists” still occupy the mountains?

  The single photo appears to show Cowgirl Kate, the British PR MD long thought dead, being menaced by an unknown male while she cowers near a window. The photo was taken within the last week and obtained exclusively from a source by the Daily Dispatch.

  The exact location of this den of depravity is unknown at press time. Kate’s fetching sister, Sophie Shelford-Longden, who is on location in Wyoming to search for her sibling as part of a Dispatch investigative team, said she was cautiously optimistic that her sibling was still alive and being held against her will.

  “This is a remarkable development,” she said. “I can say within eighty percent certainty that the woman in the photo is my sister, Kate. It’s like my prayers have been answered.”

  Prior to the revelation of this photo, U.S. law enforcement authorities have been stymied thus far into the investigation into Cowgirl Kate’s disappearance, leading many to wonder if a thorough effort had even been made...

  “What a weasel,” Joe said to Sheridan. “He’s a lot more interested in headlines than actually finding her.”

  “Can I read it?” she asked eagerly. He sent her the link and speed-dialed Marybeth.

  “That story just appeared on their website,” Marybeth said. “They’re seven hours ahead of us, so it’s midnight there and likely very few Brits have seen it yet. But when it comes out in print tomorrow morning over there, you’ll have a full-blown tabloid scandal on your hands.”

  Joe grunted.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if more reporters start showing up now,” she said. “They’re really competitive over there.”

  “That’s all we need.”

  She said what he was thinking: “I can’t imagine Governor Allen and Hanlon are going to like this news.”

  “Nope,” Joe sighed.

  “Maybe you should brief them before they find out on their own.”

  “If I get a minute, I will.”

  He filled her in on developments since he’d last talked with her.

  “A fish?” Marybeth asked. “He beat a man with a fish?”

  “Yup.”

  “What’s with this Billy Bloodworth guy?” she asked.

  Joe said, “It’s obvious he has an agenda of his own. He’s been uncooperative with us, to say the least. I can’t tell if Sophie trusts him or whether she was duped to get involved in his trip over here.”

  “So there is no investigative team?”

  “He’s the investigative team. I wish I knew where that photo came from.”

  “Maybe Nate can visit him and bring his fish,” she said.

  Joe didn’t laugh.

  “I was kidding,” she said.

  *

  MARYBETH CHANGED THE SUBJECT by telling Joe what she’d learned about Kate’s ex-husband, Richard Cheetham. Although he’d given a few pithy quotes on her disappearance when it happened, she said, he’d stayed out of the story ever since. Apparently, he’d moved from London to an estate in the countryside in the Midlands and had recently remarried. Marybeth had found records of their divorce settlement and a few small news stories about the proceedings—enough information to indicate that he’d gotten a pretty good deal. He still owned nearly half the shares in Athena, and if Kate continued to shepherd the company well he received a steady income. Marybeth confirmed that the PR company had been profitable the last two years.

  Unless Richard had some other reason to harbor a murderous resentment toward Kate, she said, it seemed he had no transparent motive to hatch a scheme to go after his ex-wife while she was on vacation in another country.

  Marybeth’s conclusion was that Richard’s name should be moved to the very bottom of the suspect list, but not yet crossed off.

  He realized Sheridan was talking to him as well and he looked up.

  “Tell Mom hello,” she said.

  “Sheridan says hello.”

  “Tell her to call me tonight and we can catch up.”

  He said he would.

  “It sounds like you’re going to be busy,” she said. “At least it’s not snowing there today and you can get around easier.”

  He agreed, but said, “How do you know it’s not snowing?”

  “I checked the webcam,” she said.

  “What webcam?”

  “There’s a single webcam for Saratoga. It’s on the home page of the radio station there.”

  Joe hadn’t noticed a single closed-circuit camera around town when he arrived, which wasn’t unusual for a community that small. He’d apparently missed the webcam unit.

  “What can you see?” he asked.

  “The main street,” she said. “Including the porch of the Hotel Wolf.”

  “Can you see the Rustic Bar? It’s at the end of the block.”

  After a few seconds, she said, “Yes, I can see it.”

  For a minute, he didn’t speak.

  “Joe?”

  “I’m here.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I’m thinking.”

  “I hope my phone battery holds up long enough,” she joked.

  “Can I ask you to do something else?” he said, oblivious.

  “Of course.”

  “Find out who owns the radio station and see if they have a way of accessing their computer archives for the last couple of months. I don’t know if a webcam even has archives, but please check. We need to know whether or not we can find out who entered and exited the Rustic Bar in October and November. Maybe even December? I know it’s a long shot, but maybe it’ll help.”

  “Can you give me a specific date?”

  “I wish I could.” Then he went silent again.

  “Joe?”

  “I think I know how we might be able to determine the date,” he said. “But if you could make contact with the owner or his tech guy in the meanwhile, I’d appreciate it.”

  She agreed and said she’d call him back when she learned
more.

  “Can this be true?” Sheridan asked Joe, after reading the Dispatch article.

  “I doubt it,” Joe said.

  “I’m not so sure,” Sheridan mused.

  “Do you recognize the cabin?” Joe asked.

  Sheridan’s eyes flared. “If you’re asking me if it’s Lance’s cabin, it’s not.”

  “Sorry,” he said.

  *

  THERE WERE FOOTFALLS on the stairway outside Sheridan’s apartment, followed by a heavy rap on the door.

  “Nate,” Joe told Sheridan.

  Her eyes got large and she rushed to the door to open it.

  “There she is,” Nate said to Sheridan. “She’s a cowgirl.”

  “I’m a falconer first,” she said. “I’m playing cowgirl until my master falconer finally decides to show up again.”

  He smiled at her. “Every time I see you, you’re in the middle of some kind of trouble and we never get around to falconry.”

  Sheridan gestured toward Joe. “Blame him this time.”

  Nate turned serious. He said, “Falconry, as you know, is Zen. You can’t rush it. We need some uninterrupted time to resume your apprenticeship.”

  “Did you bring any of your birds with you?” she asked.

  “Not this time.”

  While Sheridan and Nate talked falconry, Joe called the Memorial Hospital of Carbon County. The receptionist made it very clear that she could not give out any information on patients other than to confirm they’d been admitted.

  “His name is Joshua Teubner,” Joe said, spelling the last name.

  The receptionist confirmed that he was there. Alive. Joe thanked her and cleared his throat to get Nate’s and Sheridan’s attention. Nate was telling her about recently seeing the gyrfalcon he’d hunted with two years before in the Red Desert.

  “I hate to break this up, but we’re going to Rawlins to visit Joshua Teubner in the hospital,” Joe said. “I need to look at his cell phone if I can.”

  “I’ll bring my fish,” Nate said. It made Sheridan cover her mouth so she wouldn’t laugh out loud.

  “Leave the fish here,” Joe said. “While we’re in town, I’ll brief Sheriff Neal on where we’re at.”

  “I’d like to tag along,” Sheridan said to Joe. “I’m pretty much done for the day.”