The Bear

by Dustin Stevens

  Not until Reed motioned with a finger, signaling for him to continue, did he say, “What’s your angle in this?”

  A tiny hint of offense rose in Reed, dissipating as fast as it arrived. Thus far, everything Martin had said could be gleaned from the front of tomorrow’s newspaper, but from this point forward, things promised to move a bit deeper.

  The man had agreed to meet purely out of loyalty to an old friend, but he didn’t know them, and couldn’t know what they were working on. Warner was twenty miles south of where they were sitting, and a formal case hadn’t even been opened for Serena Gipson.

  The request wasn’t unreasonable, one Reed would likely make if sitting on the opposite side of the table.

  “Two nights ago, there was a disappearance in Warner,” Wyatt said.

  “Young girl, same age, same exact physical description as DT,” Reed added, Martin shifting his gaze to track whoever was speaking.

  “I was in over my head, asked Detectives Mattox and Billie to give a hand,” Wyatt finished.

  Some of the red faded from Martin’s cheeks as he thought on that for a moment. Eventually giving a small grunt, he asked, “You think it’s related?”

  “Unknown,” Reed said, “but right now there isn’t much to go on. Pickup was a pure snatch-and-grab. Aren’t many cameras in the area.”

  “Girl was a student, worked downtown, took the same way home every night,” Wyatt added. “No boyfriend, no family money.”

  All of which was the polite way of saying right now they had very little to go on, not quite clutching at straws, but not far from it, either.

  Martin glanced up as Shirley arrived, unloading a pair of Dr. Peppers and a sweet tea. His mouth formed into a closed smile, nodding in thanks as she did the same, disappearing without saying a word.

  Shifting his gaze down to the newly arrived red plastic cups, his eyes glazed, his mind drifting to the topic at hand.

  “The girl worked for the local office of one of the big investment firms,” Martin said, his voice lowered slightly, delivered in near-monotone. “Morgan Stanley, or one of those things, just north of downtown. Big runner, had been since college.

  “Every morning, she’d be up at 5:30, regardless of the weather, banged out five miles before heading into the office.”

  Already, Reed could see where the story was going. Much like Serena Gipson had a routine, a set pattern that was easy for the kidnapper to prey on, Darcy Thornton was the same way.

  Six in the morning in Muskogee wouldn’t be quite as easy as the late evening in Warner, but it wouldn’t be impossible, perhaps made easier by whatever route she chose to follow.

  Five miles was a long way.

  “Unlike your girl, this one had a steady boyfriend. They’d met online five months earlier, had been together ever since, were even talking about shacking up once her lease expired.”

  Glancing up, he added, “Before you ask, we hounded the hell out of that poor kid, but it didn’t go anywhere. He is a research assistant at a lab over in Tulsa, was onsite that entire night working on something under a deadline.

  “Combed through his financials, followed him for weeks afterward, but it didn’t amount to anything. Not to mention, the kid cried his eyes out when we told him what happened.”

  Regardless of what type of offense it was, one of the golden rules drilled into a young detective was to always start with the spouse. More often than anybody would like to admit, if they didn’t do it directly, they played a role or had some hand in bringing it to fruition.

  At the same time, there was nothing worse than encountering the good ones, having to deliver the news and watch their world shatter, sending them into an abyss of self-doubt and second-guessing.

  “Ever get a call? Request for ransom?” Reed asked.

  Martin slowly dragged his chin in either direction. “Nope. Never a word from her or anybody claiming responsibility for it again. Not a ping on her cellphone or a charge on her credit cards. Nothing.”

  Spreading his hands wide, he said, “It was like one day she was here, and the next she wasn’t.”

  If the physical appearances of the two girls were the start of coincidences too large to be ignored, this pushed things into an entirely different category. Small flashbulbs began to go off in Reed’s mind, little details aligning.

  “Us either,” he said. “Family hasn’t heard anything, nor have the police.”

  “Who aren’t even treating it as an actual investigation,” Wyatt said.

  Lifting his shoulders slightly, Martin managed only, “I’m not surprised.”

  “What about the recovery?” Reed asked. “What happened there?”

  “Got a call from a local farmer,” Martin said. “Guy was out checking his fields recently and spotted a patch that wasn’t growing. Too big to be a pest, too small to be washout, he went in to investigate and said it looked like something had dug up the soil after he’d done his planting.

  “No-till operation. Whoever did it must not have realized he’d already got his seed in.”

  Reed felt his eyes drift closed for a moment, his right hand shifting to Billie’s scalp. Without thinking about it, his fingers began to flex, digging through the soft fur. At the same time, she nudged herself a bit closer to him, the striated muscle of her core flush against his leg.

  It was only through dumb luck that the body of Darcy Thornton had even been found. That meant whoever had taken her was smart enough to keep her confined for at least six months without her ever having a serious chance at escape or making any contact with the outside world. They’d also been able to dispose of her twenty miles from where she was taken, in a field they knew would likely swallow her up for eternity.

  And had they been just a bit earlier, likely would have.

  “The coroner mentioned something about the body being wrapped,” Wyatt said, pulling Reed’s eyes back open. “That she’d hardly had a chance to decompose because of it.”

  “Yeah, I heard that,” Martin said. “Like I mentioned, I’m not working it, so I didn’t see anything, but the working theory around the office is that they wanted to slow the process down.”

  “Decrease the chances of it being found,” Reed said, already putting together what Martin was saying.

  “Right,” the man agreed, adding, “with summer heat coming, probably trying to keep down the smell, gas emissions, that sort of thing.”

  Once more, Reed fell silent. He mixed what he’d just learned with the tangle of facts and semi-theories already floating through his mind, none strong enough to really be deemed workable. He considered each piece of what Martin had said, some of it confirming things they already knew or suspected, but none of it really adding anything extra to the mix.

  “Outside of the boyfriend, did anybody ever really rise to the level of being a firm suspect?” Reed asked. “Anyone you guys looked at specifically? Anything that just didn’t seem to gel?”

  Pressing his lips into a tight line, Martin shook his head, a touch of sadness on his features. “I know they went through all the usual paces, looked at her friends, neighbors, coworkers. Nobody had a bad thing to say about the girl, couldn’t even think of who might want to hurt her.”

  Pausing, he looked at each of them in turn. “Believe me, boys, I feel for you. This wasn’t my case, but we’ve all had ones like it. Times when we’re out grasping, looking for commonalities that might lead to something.

  “Hell, I know my guys went all the way to Longtown to look into a disappearance down there a few years ago, but it never amounted to anything.”

  Chapter Forty-One

  Reed emptied the Ziploc baggy of kibble he’d brought along into the plastic bowl his mother had given him before leaving the house. The tiny morsels had barely hit the bottom of it before Billie picked up on the distinctive sound, bounding over from the grassy expanse in the center of the small city park on the edge of Muskogee.

  Hardly able to contain herself as he poured a bottle of water into
a matching bowl, she fell to the meal as Reed pulled back, assuming a post along the side of the SUV. Matching Wyatt’s stance, he folded his arms, one foot raised against the rear tire.

  Standing in silence for a moment, each continued mulling the results of the conversation with Thad Martin. Having said nothing since leaving the diner a few minutes earlier, both stared at the spread before them.

  No more than a couple of acres, the park was cut down the middle by a wide, looping arc of sidewalk. One side was left as nothing more than open lawn, a man on the far end tossing a tennis ball for a goldendoodle that seemed mildly interested at best.

  On the opposite side of the walk was a sprawl of new playground equipment, the midday sun gleaming off the bright green paint.

  “Well, what did you make of that?” Wyatt asked, the sound of his voice causing Billie to lift her eyes their way, her muzzle just inches above the dish.

  The question was a fair place to start. Martin had certainly given them quite a bit to think about, the layers of not only what he said but how they impacted their own investigation not lost on Reed.

  “Few things,” Reed began. “First, the differences. Darcy Thornton came across our radar because she looked like Serena Gipson, and she was about the same age, but that’s basically it.

  “One works in finance, the other’s a student. One is single, lives at home, the other has a boyfriend and her own place.”

  “One lives in tiny Warner, the other in Muskogee,” Wyatt added.

  “Right,” Reed agreed, dipping his chin just slightly. “Which brings me to the second thing, which is the pattern. Gipson led us to Thornton. Thornton led them to Suzanne Bonham in Longtown.”

  Martin hadn’t known much about the Longtown case aside from the fact that she was a woman who had gone missing almost two years prior. Despite their pressing, he admitted to having not seen a photo of her or knowing her age, having only heard the name mentioned for the first time the day before after the body of Thornton was found.

  What had caused them to look into her disappearance he didn’t know, the mention of her meant far more as confirmation that what Reed and Wyatt were doing was perfectly valid than as a possible future avenue to look down. The sort of thing older cops say to younger ones to give them hope as they work through a tough case.

  Hey, hang in there, we’ve all been through these sorts before.

  “You think it’s connected?” Wyatt asked.

  Glancing over, Reed nodded grimly. “I don’t think it’s a question of whether or not it’s connected. I think it’s more a matter of how many others are out there.

  “Which leads to the third thing, and the biggest by far.”

  “How they’re all connected,” Wyatt said, piecing together where Reed was taking things.

  “Exactly,” Reed said.

  Taking him back to the first point. At a glance, there seemed to be very little commonality between Gipson and Thornton. Barely enough that anybody would see the two and immediately establish a motive for the culprit to take them both.

  “Where is Longtown?” Reed asked.

  Raising a hand, Wyatt pointed out ahead of them, motioning toward the south.

  “Thirty, thirty-five miles southwest of Warner, maybe fifty from where we’re now standing.”

  His knowledge on the place consisting of seeing the name on a turnoff from the freeway as they headed east from OKC a couple of days before, Reed nodded. He tried to impose it onto a map of the area, visualizing it in relation to Muskogee, Checotah, and Tulsa.

  “As small as it sounds?”

  “Meh,” Wyatt replied, a hint of non-committal in his voice. “Depends on what you’re comparing it to. Twice the size of Warner, but that still only makes it maybe three thousand, give or take a handful.”

  Accepting the information with a nod, Reed slid his gaze to Billie, watching as she finished her lunch and moved on to the water. The sound of her lapping it up found his ears, one of the few constants between this case and most of the others he’d worked the last couple of years.

  Whether the size was sixteen hundred or three thousand, the towns were small. Microscopic, even. Which made what was happening all the more likely to be connected.

  If he was still in Columbus, or over in Oklahoma City, or down in Dallas, or any of a hundred other places, he wouldn’t think much of a string of disappearances, especially stretched over a two-year period.

  In The Bottoms alone, he knew there to be a dozen or more people who simply vanished every year. No rhyme or reason, not even the interest by those around them to file a report.

  Simply, gone.

  In places like this, though, the math didn’t fit. Not with the population sizes. Not with the demographics. And certainly not with the overall crime statistics in the area.

  People didn’t just suddenly jump from stealing the occasional tractor to nabbing young women.

  “Reservation?” Reed asked.

  “You know,” Wyatt said, “I thought about that. You think this might be a hate crime?”

  The possibility was certainly in play. Gipson was half Native American, and the picture he’d seen of Thornton bore out similar.

  At the same time, those features weren’t uncommon in Oklahoma. With more recognized tribes than any other state in the country, as much as a quarter of the state’s population was believed to have some quantifiable amount of Native American blood, depending on which statistics were used.

  The very town they were now standing in derived its name from the Muscogee band of the Creek Nation, the official reservation just west of them covering more than three hundred square miles.

  “Could be,” Reed conceded. “Could also be someone is smart and playing across jurisdictional lines. Either staying off the reservation, avoiding the federal authorities-”

  “Or living there, making sure to grab and dispose of victims outside the bounds, so if they’re ever caught it becomes a nightmare to prosecute.”

  Grunting softly, Reed let his chin dip slightly. He continued to ponder everything Martin had said, letting it feed into what he knew, the number of unanswered questions seeming to rise with each passing moment.

  Again, he let his gaze drift down to Billie, watching as she finished the water and raised her muzzle toward him, twin ropes of moisture hanging from either side.

  Things were spiraling. They were trying to take in too much, their thinking spread too thin.

  They needed to winnow things down. While what had happened to Thornton, and Bonham, and whoever else, was tragic, they couldn’t solve them right now. What they needed to do was use them as guideposts, service markers to help them look for Serena Gipson.

  The girl that reason said was probably alive. The one they still had a chance with.

  The one Reed had been within arm’s reach of just over thirty-six hours before.

  “Okay,” he said, his vision glazed slightly, letting his thoughts tumble out aloud. “We’ve got two new things we haven’t looked at yet.”

  “The girl in Longtown,” Wyatt said.

  “And the place where Thornton was found,” Reed added. “We’ve also got now – if Bonham is connected – three different incidents going back. Could be more.”

  His mouth pulled into a tight line, Reed thought on the disparate pieces of information. The geography of the various cases made it tough, each a lengthy drive from the others. So did the fact that there was just the two of them, working without any sort of official support.

  And the part to not be forgotten was that each moment they spent looking was another Serena Gipson was likely being subjected to the same things Darcy Thornton had been.

  “We’ll start at the college this afternoon, really hammer on any sort of extracurriculars Gipson might have been involved in. She was studying nursing, so maybe there was a mobile unit or some type of community service thing where she might have crossed paths with Thornton or the other girls.”

  It was thin. Reed knew that even as he said it, t
hough that was where they had to start concentrating. With barely a physical description of a white male who looked like a thousand others in the area, they had little else to go on.

  “Alright,” Wyatt said.

  “I’m also going to call my computer guy again. He’s been digging into stuff all morning. I imagine he’s got some things for us by now. I’ll have him add Suzanne Bonham to the list, see if it shakes anything loose.”

  As far as working plans went, it wasn’t the greatest Reed had ever devised, but it was a start. It gave them a direction and would let them continue to pound away with the hope that something turned up.

  “Sounds good,” Wyatt said, he and Reed both pushing away from the side of the SUV, ready to be on their way.

  A path that didn’t even make it as far as the front seat.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  The banana was gone, nothing more than a peel lying atop the nightstand. As was the bottle of water, a few stray droplets dotting the inside of the plastic, but everything else had been drained a half hour before.

  Not because Serena Gipson wanted to give in to the demands the man had left in the note but because she knew that she needed the sustenance both provided. If ever she was going to get out, or even survive long enough for someone to find her, she had to keep forcing them down.

  No matter how much satisfaction it might give the bastard.

  Seated on the edge of the bed, her right leg was extended beside her. Free of the heavy bandage that been covering it when she awoke, she could now see the full breadth of what he’d done to her, the sight enough to make her gag the first time she saw it.

  What exactly the design was supposed to be, she couldn’t quite tell. A single outline, the shape resembled some form of basic cookie cutter, vaguely reminding her of a gingerbread man. Comprised of a basic ovular body, hands and feet stuck out at even intervals. From the top sprouted a round head, matching ears sitting wide to either side.