by C. J. Box
It was Jenna Shober. She was alone and crying.
20
“How many more of these are there?” Smith asked, gesturing toward the perfectly round lake in the bottom of the alpine cirque. Vertical rock walls rose sharply on three sides of the water, and the fourth side was sloped and grassy. A trout nosed the surface and concentric rings rippled out across the still water until it finally flattened again.
“There’s at least two more cirques,” Farkus said. “They kind of stair-step their way down the mountain. The cirques trap the snowmelt so it can’t flow anywhere. We used to fish these lakes.”
The sky had cleared and morning was warming up. They’d been riding for five hours on the western side of the mountains, rimming the series of spectacular cirques Farkus had surprised himself by knowing about. He’d fudged his knowledge a little, because he hadn’t visited the area since way back in high school with some friends who’d backpacked up from the valley floor to fish the mountain lakes. He’d been drunk approximately the whole time, so his recollections were vague and imprecise. He remembered falling off a rock into one of the lakes while drinking a half a bottle of sloe gin. The water was bone-chilling. His lone trip up here was years before the Forest Service had shut down access roads into the area, but at last he had an idea where he was. He knew that if they kept traveling in a westerly direction, they’d eventually hit the creek and trailhead where he’d originally met Joe Pickett.
Farkus had actually become useful to Parnell, Smith, and Campbell. Plus, his tales of the Wendigo had helped distract Smith and Campbell, he could tell. Of course, he’d just made up the part about Wendigos being able to see in the dark, but they’d never know that. Smith and Campbell now seemed jumpy. Farkus could tell Parnell had picked up on that, too, and he no doubt feared a loss of control over his team.
For the first time since they’d stopped him and forced him out of his truck two days before, Farkus felt he might just have a chance after all. Since he knew vaguely where he was now and his companions were becoming less vigilant by the hour, he might be able to escape.
Problem was, it was this area where the game warden was headed to investigate the stolen elk. Which meant this is where Joe Pickett had encountered the Grim Brothers.
Parnell’s tracking device chirped. He read the display and announced they were practically on top of their target.
“How close?” Smith asked.
“Half a mile, maybe. Over the next ridge, I’d guess. We’ve been closing the gap all morning.”
“Are they still going the other way?”
“No,” Parnell said. “He’s coming at us right now.”
Smith drew his AR-15 rifle out of his saddle scabbard and laid it across the pommel of his saddle. Campbell checked the loads of his rifle, even though Farkus had seen him do it at least twice before.
“So,” Farkus said to Parnell, “are you gonna finally tell me what this is all about?”
“No.”
Farkus felt a knot build in his stomach as they got close to the ridge. Whoever they were after, if Parnell’s equipment was reliable, was just over the other side. Parnell had veered from the established trail into a thick stand of gnarled pine trees. When they were in the cover, Parnell dismounted, and Smith and Campbell did the same. For a brief moment, Farkus considered kicking the horse and riding away while the three of them were down. But which direction? If he went back the way they’d come, he’d be in the open for a hundred yards and a well-placed shot could pick him off, borrowed body armor or not. And if he thundered over the rim, he might ride straight into the Grim Brothers.
He sighed and dismounted with the rest of them.
Parnell motioned for them to come close and listen. He whispered, “Let’s get our weapons ready and tie up the horses here so they can’t see them. When we’re locked and loaded, we’ll crawl through the trees to the edge of the ridge and scope it down. Remember, those boys have body armor, too. So go for headshots.”
Farkus said, “They do?”
“At least that’s what we were told.”
Then: “Smith, you ready?”
Smith nodded once.
“Campbell?”
“Yes, sir.”
He turned to Farkus. “You stay here and don’t even think of trying to get away like you were a minute ago. If you try to run, I’ll shoot you so fast you’ll be dead before you hit the ground.”
Farkus swallowed and looked away.
“So,” Smith said to Parnell, “you’re thinking they’re down in this cirque?”
“That’s what I think,” Parnell whispered.
“Let’s not miss,” Smith said to the others. “The last thing we need is a wounded Cline brother coming after us.”
Farkus said, “Cline? I thought their name was Grim?”
“Shut up, Dave,” Parnell said, shooting Smith a punishing look.
Farkus stood off to the side with the horses, thinking Cline? Where had he heard that name? Something about Michigan.
When Parnell’s tracker chirped again, he read it and appeared startled. His scalp twitched above his forehead even though his face was a mask.
“What?” Smith asked.
“He’s on top of us,” Parnell whispered. “He’s coming up the rim right at us. He’s running up the side of the cirque.”
Farkus quickly dropped down to his hands and knees, wishing he could make himself even less of a target.
Parnell and Smith raised the barrels of their AR-15s, pointing them through the trees toward the lip of the rim. Campbell quickly slung his scoped rifle over his shoulder, because his scoped weapon wasn’t useful at close range, pulled his Sig Sauer, and steadied it out in front of him with two hands.
Farkus heard the rapid thumping of footfalls and saw a flash of spindly movement from the other side of the rim and then a full set of antlers. The big five-point buck mule deer with a satellite phone wired to its antlers came lurching up over the side in a dead run.
Parnell and Smith turned it into hamburger.
21
“We didn’t know Diane was missing until she’d been gone for four days,” Jenna Shober said in a low, soft voice rubbed raw with sandpaper from two years of crying. “Can you imagine that?”
“No,” Joe said.
They were in the living room. He assumed she’d head back to his office but she only made it as far as the couch. She’d folded into the far corner of it with her back against the armrest and her hands clamped tightly between her legs. Her head was tilted slightly forward, so when she talked to Joe she had to look up. But she spent most of the time staring at her knees, recalling what happened from a script so obviously seared into her being that at times she seemed to be reading from it.
“If we’d known right away-even a day after-we could have done something,” she said. “Brent would have done everything in the world to find her. She couldn’t have been that far from the trailhead in just one day-only as far as she could run. So at least we would have had a known radius where to look. She usually ran four miles in and four miles out-eight total. Sometimes when she was in hard training, she’d double that. But because the trials were just a month away, her training schedule was pretty regular and eight miles total would have been about right. She loved to run in the mountains. She’d rather run in the mountains than in the best facilities in the world.
“She started her last run on a Tuesday. We didn’t find out she was missing until Friday night, when her fiance finally called.”
“Tell me about him,” Joe said.
She looked up. “His name is Justin LeForge. He’s a triathlete, one of the best. I don’t know if you’ve heard of him or not. He’s placed in the top three at the Hawaiian Ironman, and he won a big race in Nice, France, and the Wildflower in California.”
Joe shook his head. “I’m not familiar with triathlons, sorry.”
She continued, “Anyway, Justin and Diane seemed like the perfect couple. They were beautiful-thin, fit, athletic,
attractive. Ken and Barbie in track clothes, one of my friends said. A little odd when it came to politics and worldview, but young people can be like that. They met down in Colorado Springs at the Olympic Training Center. Brent thought Justin was the greatest, and he bragged constantly about his future son-in-law. But everything wasn’t as it seemed.”
Joe said, “What do you mean when you say they had odd political beliefs?”
She laughed a dry laugh. “They were certainly counter to her father’s, for one. Brent has always been very involved politically. We give a lot of money to candidates, and as a big developer he is used to being, um, close with them. There’s a lot of federal money these days, you know. It has to go to somebody, is the way Brent puts it, so it might as well be him. Anyway, Justin was a big fan of that writer Ayn Rand. You know her?”
Joe said, “I read Atlas Shrugged in college. It was pretty good until that last speech. I never could finish it because of that ninety-page speech at the end.”
“Justin said he was an Objectivist, like Ayn Rand. You know, staunch capitalism, anti-big government. Lots of kids go through that.”
Joe nodded, urging her on.
“Justin and Brent butted heads a few times, and Diane was right there in the thick of it. I always wondered how much of her new philosophy she truly held and how much was because of Justin. And how much of it was simple rebellion, mainly against her dad. They’re both strong-willed people, Brent and Diane. The funny thing is Justin is just as bullheaded as Brent, but Diane never seemed to see the similarity.
“They were selfish, both of them. Part of it came from Objectivism, I guess. I’ve never been around two people more self-absorbed than my daughter and her fiance. They lived in the same house but they never really lived together, if you know what I mean. She did her thing and he did his. It was all about running, working out, eating food as fuel. It was all about their bodies-how they looked, how they could trim a second off their best time. They looked at their friends, relatives, families-and the rest of the world-as their support team. I used to complain about it, how Diane would only talk about herself when she called and never ask about her brother or sister or me, but Brent just sloughed it off and said that’s how athletes had to be when they reached a certain level. And as you could see, Brent is a little like that.”
Joe said, “Back to the four days between her disappearance and you finding out about it.”
“Oh,” she said, squirming farther back into the couch, making herself smaller. “I’m sorry. I went on a tangent.”
“It’s okay,” he said, stealing a look at his wristwatch and deciding: Pizza tonight. Delivered.
“Well, as I said, we didn’t hear from Justin until Friday night. It was a maddening conversation. He said he didn’t have much time to talk because he had to catch a flight for a race in Hawaii. It was like, ‘By the way, I’m not sure where Diane is. I haven’t seen her since Tuesday. Gotta go, wish me luck.’ ”
“Man,” Joe said, sitting back.
“That’s how he was. That’s how he still is. Cold as a fish.”
“How did he explain it?”
“He didn’t, really. He said she’d left him a note Tuesday morning saying she was going to drive north of Steamboat Springs and go for a run in the mountains. This in itself wasn’t unusual. Her car was gone, of course. Later, much later, he said he figured she decided to get a room in Steamboat and use it as her base to train from for a few days. He said they’d been fighting and she probably needed a little time away, that it had happened before and it was no big deal. Can you imagine that?”
“No,” Joe said, deciding if he ever met Justin LeForge he’d smack him in the mouth.
“That’s when Brent contacted the authorities. We didn’t have much to go on, and you can imagine how angry and scared we were. At the time, we didn’t even know which mountains or in which state. On Monday, the sheriff in Walden, Colorado, got a report that her Subaru was reported at a trailhead across the border in Wyoming. That’s when things finally started to happen. Search-and-rescue teams, helicopters, news alerts, all of it.”
Joe nodded. “I was on the search team.”
“Thank you,” she said sincerely. “A lot of good men and women spent days trying to find her. But by that time, she’d been gone over a week. All I could think about was that she’d fallen and broken her leg and was waiting for help that never came. I was terrified she was suffering up there somewhere. I was horrified that she wouldn’t be found at all or that her body would be found. I can’t even tell you how awful that week was. Or how everything is coming back now.”
Joe said, “About Justin. ”
She waved her hand. “I know what you’re probably thinking-that maybe he had something to do with it. We did, too, eventually. Especially when he just stopped caring and calling. But according to the police, his alibi was airtight. He was training all Tuesday and Wednesday with his coaches. The note she left him was in her handwriting. When my husband hired Bobby to investigate, the first thing we asked him to do was to check out Justin’s alibi. But Bobby said there was no doubt Justin’s story held. In fact, Justin found a girl-another runner-who testified Justin was with her from Tuesday through Thursday. He was cheating on my daughter, Mr. Pickett.”
She looked at her hands. “I no longer suspect Justin, even though I despise him. He just didn’t care. And as tough as it was for me to accept, I realized he didn’t care enough about Diane to hurt her. She really meant nothing to him. He’s got a new girlfriend now, and he’s moved from Colorado. We haven’t heard anything from him in months, although I still follow his races on the Internet. When Bobby told us about your statement, Brent called him on his cell phone and left a message that there might be some new information. Justin hasn’t returned the call.”
Joe sighed. Her pain gave him a knot in his stomach. That his report had given her a glimmer of hope made his palms cold.
She looked up. “I hope you can forgive my husband for the way he acted earlier. If there is such a thing as being obsessed to the point of insanity, that pretty much describes Brent now. I’m watching him fall apart in front of my eyes. Sometimes, I think it would be better if some hunter found her bones. At least then it would be over. If the news didn’t kill him, he might finally be able to recover. But this not knowing. ” She let the sentence trail off.
“It’s been so hard on Brent,” she said suddenly. “He worshipped his daughter, even though she distanced herself from him in the end.”
Joe thought about that.
Suddenly, the front door burst open and Sheridan flew inside the house, running straight for her bedroom. Joe looked outside and saw her pickup truck in the driveway with the door open and the motor running.
“Crap!” Sheridan said, seeing Joe and Jenna Shober. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were there.”
“What’s up?” Joe asked.
“I forgot my basketball shoes,” she said. “I’ve got to get them and go. Practice starts in ten minutes. Sorry.”
With that, she ran into her room and ran out with the shoes. “Sorry to interrupt,” she called out over her shoulder. “See you later, Dad.”
“See you later,” Joe said, even though Sheridan had shut the door and jumped back into her truck.
“She’s pretty,” Jenna said.
“Thank you,” Joe said, distracted.
Jenna reached out and squeezed Joe’s hand. “Hold on to her tight,” she said. “Don’t let her go.”
Joe knew what she was thinking. The same thing he was thinking.
She took out a large envelope from her purse. “We meant to show you these things earlier,” she said. “But things got heated and Brent forgot. These days, he gets so wrapped up in the how that he forgets about the why. He just assumed you’d jump up and go find our daughter. When you didn’t, he lost it and forgot about the envelope. When we got to the motel, I slipped it into my purse and lied about going shopping. Brent would never have approved of me coming here
myself to talk with you.”
Joe nodded, still dumbstruck from seeing Sheridan and imagining what it would be like if she left one day and never came back. He paid polite attention to a postcard she handed to him.
“This was sent to our Michigan address a year ago,” she said.
The card was a generic COLORFUL COLORADO postcard with faded images of Pikes Peak, the Maroon Bells, a skier turning down a slope, and the Denver skyline. He flipped it over. It was postmarked from Walden, Colorado, but over the border.
The handwriting was crimped and severe, as if the author had struggled with the words. He guessed the sender was male.
Jenna:
I’m sending this to you on behalf of your daughter Diane. I saw her and she is fine. She says not to worry about her. She asks that you not share this message with her Dad.
It was signed, A Friend.
Joe handed the card back. “Any idea who sent it?”
“No. But it gives me hope.”
He kept his voice soft. “Her disappearance wasn’t a secret. I mean, anyone could have sent this to you. It could be a cruel hoax, or it could be someone well-meaning trying to ease your pain.”
She looked down. “I know that. But I want to think it’s real.”
A moment went by as Joe tried to form his question as diplomatically as possible. “So, did you show it to Brent?”
She shook her head quickly but didn’t look up.
He sat back. “Why not?”
She looked away. He could see moisture in her eyes.
“You didn’t want him to know,” Joe said.
She whispered, “It’s tough.”
Joe was confused. He knew he was on thin ice. Finally, he said, “Jenna, is it possible the relationship between your husband and your daughter was, you know, a little too close when she was growing up?”
