HIDING PLACE by Meghan Holloway

by Meghan Holloway

  HIDING PLACE

  Meghan Holloway

  The following is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in an entirely fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by A. Meghan Holloway

  Cover and jacket design by Mimi Bark

  ISBN 978-1-951709-48-8

  ISBN 978-1-951709-69-3

  Library of Congress Control Number:

  Available upon request

  First trade paperback edition August 2021

  by Polis Books, LLC

  44 Brookview Lane

  Aberdeen, NJ 07747

  www.PolisBooks.com

  For Rickie.

  Every woman should be lucky enough to have a friend so ready to say, “I’ll bring a shovel,” when you tell her there’s a body.

  Part One

  one

  HECTOR

  She was sitting on the cinder block that served as my front stoop when I arrived home.

  I parked my truck in front of the Airstream trailer. The days were beginning to lengthen as spring struggled to loosen winter’s grip on the land. A slant of dying sunlight gleamed on her hair and glinted off the side of the tin can I called home. I had scrubbed and scraped, but the red MURDERER scrawled across the aluminum exterior had never fully disappeared.

  Frank’s ears pricked when he noticed our visitor, and he let out a low whine. When I opened the door, the standard poodle leapt down and loped over to greet her. I leaned against the front bumper to wait.

  She called herself Faye Anders. She had a driver’s license that backed it up. I studied it two months after she moved to town when I pulled her over for having a broken tail light. She was compliant with my request for license and registration. She was unfailingly polite. And she was terrified.

  She arrived in Raven’s Gap, Montana four years ago with her young son, Sam. She had purchased an old property on an oxbow of the Yellowstone River at the east end of town. The inn was decrepit when she purchased it, but it was a prime location. After she finished remodeling the interior and opened it to visitors, The River Inn remained full from March until October.

  Despite the business the inn brought to town, its proprietor remained aloof. As far as I had ever seen or heard, people knew her name and that her huckleberry pancakes were so good a man would sell his mother for a stack of them. But that was it. Only this year had she put her son in the public elementary school in Gardiner.

  I knew a woman in hiding when I saw her.

  She ran her fingers through Frank’s topknot, and the poodle leaned against her bent knees. Faye’s son, Sam, was not with her, I realized, and I glanced around to see if he was playing in the surrounding meadow. Nothing moved through the new growth of alpine wildflowers except for the wind.

  When I turned back to the woman on my doorstep, she was watching me. I folded my arms across my chest and waited for her to break the silence.

  It only took her a few moments.

  “I need your help.” Her voice was quiet and held the educated, upper crust clip of the East Coast. She paused, and I could see she was waiting for me to respond. When I did not, she continued. “Sam didn’t come home from a school field trip today.”

  “What did the school say?”

  Her fingers tapped a nervous rhythm on her thigh. “His teacher said she counted him with the class just as they were loading onto the bus, but when they got back to school, he wasn’t with his class.”

  “Did you go to the station?” There was a time when family and friends had to wait a specified amount of hours after someone was missing before reporting the individual to the police. Those days were gone.

  She dropped her gaze to Frank’s topknot as she parsed his curls. “No,” she said. “I came to you.”

  I studied her. She was a young woman, in her early to mid-thirties, but there was a wariness about her that made her seem older. Her face had a stillness to it, an alert and careful watchfulness that reminded me of a prey animal. “I’m off duty for the day. Go to the station and report him as missing.”

  Her eyes met mine, and for an instant, I saw the terror I had seen when I pulled her over before that composed, still mask fell in place. “I can’t do that. Missing persons reports are available nationwide through NCIC.”

  It was a quiet acknowledgement of what I had already guessed about her. She was in this remote western outpost of civilization to avoid being found.

  I had no desire to become entangled in someone else’s issues. I had my own to deal with.

  “Like I said, I’m off duty. You need help finding your boy, go to the police.”

  “You’re still wearing your badge,” she said, a hard edge creeping into her voice. “And Frank is a search and rescue dog.” She withdrew a neatly folded t-shirt from the pocket of her jacket and held it out to me. “I brought this so Frank would have something of Sam’s to smell. I just need—”

  “Go through the process of reporting him missing.” I whistled for Frank, and he reluctantly left Faye and came to my side. “When the call comes from the SAR team, Frank and I will look for him.”

  She drew a small Glock from a concealed holster at her side and placed it across her knee. I stiffened and straightened.

  “I’m afraid I can’t take no for an answer,” she said softly. “I know where Sam is. I just need you to help me bring him home.”

  “You’re going to threaten a police officer?” I did not reach for my own weapon.

  She arched an eyebrow. “I’m not threatening you. I’m asking you, and I need you to know the only answer I will accept from you is a yes. And like you said, you’re off duty.”

  She was either stupid or desperate. I stared at her for a long moment. Though her gaze was straightforward and the pistol balanced on her knee was compact and deadly, there was tension around her eyes and a tremor in her fingers. My bet was on desperate, but desperation made people do stupid things.

  I sighed. “Put the fucking gun away before I have to arrest you.”

  She stood as I approached, the Glock disappearing under her jacket. My gaze swept over her and took in the slight difference in the shape of her jeans at her right ankle. Another concealed holster. The woman was bristling with weapons, but she did not pull any more on me.

  She moved aside to let me enter the Airstream. I opened the door, and Frank darted within. Faye followed close on my heels and stood in the open doorway.

  “You said you know where he is?” I asked.

  “The school field trip was to Broken Arrow Ranch to see the new foals.”

  “Grant Larson’s ranch?” I took the department-issued holster belt off and sighed at the immediate relief to my lower back. I knelt to place it and my badge in the safe under the sink.

  “I’ve heard that you and Senator Larson are friends.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” I said. The department’s standard issue was a Sig Sauer P226, but I only carried it when on duty. I grabbed my CZ P-10 C before I closed and locked the safe. “Let me change and get my bag.”

  I avoided looking at the ceiling in my cramped bedroom as I changed out of uniform. I had hung most of the material there within the first year of my wife and daughter’s disappearance. Maps with Winona’s usual route in and out of town highlighted, memories of things she said that might be a link scrawled on Post-it notes, receipts, photos printed from the CCTV camera footage around town in the weeks leading up to that one day. Tacks were shoved into the map at the locations she visited regularly. At the center of the web, I pinn
ed a photograph of Jeff Roosevelt. That space was blank now.

  I knew the man was a predator. I had watched him for fifteen years. But until a woman moved to town four months ago, I had not realized he was a serial killer. He was dead now, at the hands of that same woman, but not before killing three others. The phone call from the coroner last month killed my hopes of finally laying my girls to rest.

  The remains of fifty-six women were found in the greenhouse in the woods. DNA testing was ongoing, and the FBI were still working to identify the women. But Winona and Emma had not been found in Jeff Roosevelt’s thorny, rose-filled mausoleum.

  Anger burned bitter and dark in my gut.

  I checked the magazine in the CZ and chambered a round before I tucked it into my concealed holster. The backpack in the corner was always ready for call outs from the local Search and Rescue team. I left the bedroom and filled two canteens at the sink, water for Frank and for me.

  “Larson and his men will help us look for your boy.”

  She remained silent, and when I turned from the sink, screwing the caps on the canteens before tucking them into my pack, I found her leaning in the doorway, gilded by the dying sun. She was a small woman, slightly built with a chin-length cap of dark, wavy hair. Her gaze had been on the surrounding hills, but now she turned to me.

  “What is the likelihood of us being able to search for Sam without anyone knowing we’re there?”

  “On Larson’s land?” I chuckled, and her brows drew together. “Slim to none. Unlike you, he and his men don’t bluff with their guns.” She had the presence of mind to flush and look away. “You got a history with Larson I need to know about beforehand?”

  She took a long moment to answer. “Not with Senator Larson, no.”

  I wondered if I was going to get shot tonight. “Let’s go, then.”

  She climbed into the passenger’s seat of my truck. The winter had left my drive rutted and rough, and I needed to haul dirt and gravel in to smooth the furrows before the snowmelt turned them into gullies. When I reached the state road, I turned west toward Gardiner.

  Faye remained quiet as I drove. I glanced at her from the corner of my eye. I had dealt with a number of missing child cases. Almost all of them were an instance of a child going to a friend’s house without telling his parents, or a kid innocently enjoying the thrill of hiding from her parents when they called for her, not realizing the genuine panic.

  The more dire cases were not ones I worked as a police officer, but the ones I worked as a member of the local search and rescue team. In this area of the country, the wilderness was mere steps away. Yellowstone was as dangerous as it was beautiful, and a child wandering away could be gone in seconds.

  Frank and I had been on eight rescue operations that ended not with relief but with a call to the coroner. Three of those operations involved children.

  Regardless of whether I worked a missing child case as a police officer or a member of the search and rescue team, one thing always remained the same: the agony of the mother. I had dealt with more tears, panic, and terror on missing children cases than on any other.

  But the woman sitting next to me was composed. She stared straight ahead, face blank, eyes dry. She was not frantic. Had I not seen her terror when she pulled her gun on me, I never would have guessed at her desperation. Now, the only thing that gave away her tension were her hands clenched in her lap.

  The drive passed in silence, and I was content not to break it. Grant Larson’s ranch sprawled over four hundred fifty thousand acres. The valley floor stretched into rolling hills before the terrain became more rugged and wild. The Absaroka Range flanked the lowlands in the east, the Gallatin Range in the west. Larson was known the world over for his horses, both the ones he bred and trained and the wild herds that roamed his backcountry after he rescued them from the Bureau of Land Management’s slaughter pens.

  When I turned off the interstate north of Gardiner and passed between the brick gates that marked the entrance of Larson’s ranch, it was fully dark.

  Faye finally spoke as we approached the guard house. “Don’t mention Sam’s name, please.”

  I glanced at her as I slowed to a stop as the guard stepped out and held up a hand to halt my progress. I could not see her face in the shadows. “And your name?”

  “Using my name won’t be an issue.”

  I buzzed down the window as the guard approached. Frank tried to stick his head out the window but I ordered him to stay in the backseat. Larson hired his own security detail, and I knew what type of man he preferred to watch his back and secure his land. I kept my hands visible as the guard arrived at the window.

  “I’m Hector Lewis. My friend’s son got left behind at a school field trip today,” I said. “I’m with the Raven’s Gap Police Department and a member of the search and rescue team. I brought my dog with me to help find him.”

  The man stepped back and spoke quietly into the radio clipped to his shoulder. He came back a moment later. “The boy is with the senator at the east barn. You have permission to drive on. Do you need a map?”

  “No,” I said. “I know where it is.”

  I thought the news of Sam being with Larson and not lost in the wild Montana spring night would bring Faye some relief, but, if anything, she was even more tense as we traversed the mile-long drive to the sprawling compound of Broken Arrow Ranch.

  The house was a massive structure of glass, stone, and timber. Each of the surrounding outbuildings and the three barns shared the same stone and timber construction. It was a beautiful estate, the grounds immaculately kept, wealth and prestige on full display.

  I turned and followed the drive that branched around to the east barn. The way was well lit, and a number of vehicles were parked beside the barn. I parked near the wide entrance and left Frank in the truck as we entered the barn.

  The interior was even more impressive than the exterior. The stalls were larger than my Airstream. When my wife first took the job here eighteen years ago, she joked that she wished a stall had been given to her as housing. It certainly did not look like any barn I had ever mucked stalls in, but the smell of hay, horseflesh, and shit was still present. I breathed in that old familiar perfume and felt a pang of longing.

  Faye did not pause to admire the barn or the horses that watched us from their stalls with large, limpid eyes and inquiring whickers. She headed straight toward the cluster of people standing before a stall at the far end of the barn. A palomino stretched her neck toward me over her stall door. I stopped to let her sniff me before I followed Faye.

  Kneeling in the hay next to the newborn foal, his jeans stained and his sleeves rolled up past his elbows, Grant Larson looked like a ranch hand, a man who spent more time in the saddle than out of it, an expert in horseflesh. He did not look like the wealthiest man in Montana or the senior senator of the state.

  Sam looked to be both too old and too young for his age. He had to be eight or nine years old, but he was small for his age and appeared even slighter crouched beside the tall, broad-shouldered figure of Larson. He could have easily passed for a boy closer to five than ten. Even though his eyes were wide with wonder as he gently stroked the damp neck of the newborn, his face held the same still wariness his mother’s did.

  “You’re not the vet,” one of the hands leaning against the side of the stall said as we approached.

  “No,” I agreed.

  Our voices drew Larson’s and Sam’s attention, and the boy started to stand when he caught sight of his mother. Larson’s hand on his shoulder held him in place. I could not see Faye’s face, but she stiffened.

  “Slowly,” Larson said, voice low and calm. “Remember what I said. Once you’ve earned an animal’s trust, it’s a matter of honor that you not break it. Any fast movements will startle Boadicea, and she’ll think she needs to defend her colt from us.”

  Sam nodded and moved with conscientious slowness as he touched the little foal’s forelock
and then stood and exited the stall. The mare watched him with only a flicker of her ears.

  The boy walked straight to his mother and held her gaze for a long moment before she pulled him into her arms. “I was worried,” Faye said quietly.

  “No need to be.” Larson followed Sam from the stall and gave her the smile that charmed Washington. “I apologize for not calling earlier to let you know your boy was safe.” When she said nothing, he glanced back and forth between us. The mare stamped a hoof in the stall. “Boadicea went into labor sooner than expected. We’ve been a bit preoccupied this evening.” His gaze turned to me, and he extended a hand. “Hector. It’s been too long.”

  I shook his hand. “Handsome colt.”

  His grin held all the pride of a new father, but his expression sobered as he met my gaze. “I wish Winona were still here to train him.”

  The words slipped like a knife between my ribs. My wife had lived and breathed horses. My exit from the circuit was involuntary, but Winona willingly gave up chasing the cans after my right knee, hip, and shoulder were crushed by a bull. Barrel racing was not the extent of her talent, and as soon as I finished rehabilitation and we moved to her hometown of Raven’s Gap, the job offers came rolling in for her. She had worked at a number of local ranches for years. Working at the Broken Arrow was a dream come true for her, and I could still remember her excitement when Larson approached her about training his Thoroughbreds.

  “The Friesians are new,” I said.

  He turned back to the stall. “Beautiful, aren’t they?” He offered his hand to Faye, who hesitated before accepting. “Grant Larson.”

  Her pause was almost imperceptible. “Faye Anders. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Senator Larson.” While her words may have been charming, her tone was flat. “I apologize for any inconvenience.”

  He stared at her for a long moment, expression considering. “Not at all. Your boy stepped right up to help me with the foaling.”