The Bear

by Dustin Stevens

  A moment later, it rang just twice before being snatched up, the voice of Deke filling the car.

  “Hey, man.”

  The sound of the response caused Billie’s ears to twitch as she inched her body a little further into the gap between the seats. Seeming to feed off the growing adrenaline within Reed, it felt as if she was going to push right over the center console, wanting to burst straight through the windshield in search of Serena and whoever held her.

  Reed knew the feeling.

  “Hey,” Reed said. “Sorry to bother, but I just talked to one of Serena’s professors and got some new information you might find helpful.”

  “No apologies,” Deke replied. “I was just about to call you anyway.”

  Flicking his gaze to the rearview, Reed saw his right eyebrow rise slightly. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” Deke replied. Exhaling audibly, there was a clatter of keys, followed by the sound of a desk chair rolling over a plastic mat. “You want to go first, or you want me to?”

  “Shoot.”

  Another burst on the keyboard could be heard, followed by, “Seven.”

  Jerking his gaze from the mirror, Reed focused on the phone, feeling a renewed jolt pass through his system. “Seven women?”

  “Seven years,” Deke corrected. “I went back a full ten in the area, and it looks like seven years ago is when this all started.”

  Palpitations rose through Reed’s chest as he chewed on the information for a moment. Sitting in silence, he considered what it meant, more questions playing across his mind.

  “Walk me through it.”

  “Not a lot to walk through,” Deke said. “Used the same parameters as before. Missing women, dark hair, dark eyes. Same age range, twenty-five miles out from Warner in every direction without hitting reservation land.

  “Starting where I’d already left off, the pattern continued back for another two years before going cold.”

  “Nothing before that?” Reed asked.

  “Nada.”

  Already fearing what the answer might be, Reed asked, “How many in total?”

  “Nine,” Deke replied, his tone betraying the gravitas of the situation, a sigh easing out with it. “The six I sent you earlier, plus three more.”

  Feeling his eyes slide shut, Reed clamped his left hand around the outside of his thigh. Squeezing tight, his lips peeled back over his teeth, his entire body clenched before slowly releasing.

  “Plus Serena Gipson.”

  “Right,” Deke said. “Still nothing in the system on that one yet.”

  Once more, the urge to grab hold, to clench his body with everything he had, to seize every muscle fiber until it ached with lactic acid, rose in Reed. Nine women in seven years was one every nine-and-a-half months. It was more than enough to establish a pattern, the geographic spread likely the only thing that hadn’t made it more obvious already.

  And still, Carver Ecklund was insisting on ignoring it, more concerned with an impending election and protecting his legacy than with doing his job.

  “Can you send me over the new information on those?” Reed asked.

  “Already done,” Deke replied.

  Casting a glance to the passenger seat, Reed looked to the map he’d been outlining earlier, folded so a handful of red circles stared up at him. “I’m actually on the road right now. Can you text me the names and locations until I get a chance to pull it up on the computer?”

  “Give me one second here,” Deke replied, his voice a bit detached as he worked.

  “Thanks,” Reed mumbled, his focus still on the map and the new trio of markers that would soon be adorning it.

  Three more women, snatched out of their lives, never heard from again.

  “Alright, it’s sent,” Deke said. “You said you had something for me now, too?”

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  For the briefest of moments, Reed considered running back to his parents’ house. He thought of swinging through the den and printing out everything Deke had just sent him about the most recent findings to add to the collection piled on the seat beside him.

  Making it as far as turning over the engine, bringing the vehicle to life and causing Billie to retreat a bit into the backseat, preparing for movement, he stopped before engaging the gear shift.

  While running home would give him something to do, and it would give more data to what he already had, there was only so much a trio of cases from five-to-seven years prior could give him. If anything, they would only confirm what he already had, telling more stories of young women who found themselves momentarily alone and were plucked away from their existing lives.

  Ladies with dark hair and eyes, the sharp features of at least some amount of mixed heritage.

  They would lead back to more small towns in the area, giving him other frustrated detectives or town sheriffs he could speak to, all still carrying the strain he could now feel permeating him.

  But they wouldn’t help. Not right now.

  For as bad as what had befallen each of them was, for as much as Reed hoped nothing more than to help solve their disappearances, provide some tiny bit of elusive closure to everybody involved, that couldn’t be his focus at the moment.

  That had to be on Serena Gipson.

  Fifteen hundred miles east of where they were now sitting, Deke was currently scouring through the back history of the most recent victims, seeing if any of them had visited the places Trixie mentioned. Casting his gaze over to it again, though, Reed couldn’t help but feel like it was a losing proposition.

  Places like fairs and farmer’s markets pedaled in cash. They didn’t have cameras on the grounds, didn’t seem like spots that would have fancy hashtags and viral online campaigns.

  Lifting his gaze to face forward, Reed drew in a deep breath. He allowed it to lift his shoulders as he stared out the front windshield, the sun slipping further down to the west. Almost a month from the summer solstice, it was still a couple of inches above the horizon, promising at least two hours of daylight or more.

  Slowly pushing out the air, he dropped his head back against the seat, letting his eyes glaze as he stared out.

  “Got to slow down,” he whispered. “There’s too much information, too many data points.”

  Trying to wrangle nine different cases into a usable format would be too much. Going back that far proved that there was a clear pattern, that Serena was part of something much larger, but experience bore to reason that anything from that many years prior wouldn’t be of much use.

  The initial encounters had probably been clumsy, as the perpetrator would have still been figuring things out. Any tendencies or errors that were made had likely long since been brushed aside, years of practice and effort correcting them.

  If all nine were even connected, the parameters left deliberately vague, the geography quite close to the reservation.

  His focus had to be on the most recent. Darcy Thornton, and Suzanne Bonham before her. Things that those two shared with Gipson, any ways they might help illuminate the way for him.

  “Okay,” Reed whispered, blinking himself back to the present. Flicking his gaze to the rearview mirror, he looked to Billie in the backseat, her ears standing erect as she stared back at him. “If this was back in The Bottoms, how would we go about it?”

  Drawing another breath, Reed forced himself to take it a piece at a time. He peeled back some of the adrenaline coursing through him, narrowing his focus.

  He might be a long way from home, and he might essentially be working without a badge or weapon, but at the most basic level, this was a case like any other. A matter of there being someone behind all this, with their own set of motivations and intentions spurring it on.

  Going back seven years, the instances were within a set geographic boundary, all involving women who had specific characteristics.

  Those three things were his landmarks. Time. Region. Victimology. Everything he did from this point forward had to fit within that framework.
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br />   Without moving his gaze, Reed shot a hand to the middle console. Taking up his phone, he slid his focus to the screen, scrolling past his most recent call to an unlisted number from earlier in the day.

  Pressing send, he put it on speakerphone, allowing the sound to fill the interior of the SUV.

  A moment later, it was answered, the man on the other end sounding slightly out of breath, as if he’d been running to get there.

  “Martin,” Thad Martin said, the word clipped and short.

  “Hey, Thad,” Reed said, raising his voice as he lifted his head from the seatback behind him, “Reed Mattox.”

  The line became muffled for a moment as if the receiver was being covered, no sound making it through, before the man responded. When he did his voice was lowered, saying only, “Any luck on your end?”

  The fact that he was careful not to speak too loudly or to use names was not lost on Reed.

  “Depends on your definition,” Reed said. “Got a new lead from one of her professors though, a list of places where our guy might have spotted her.”

  “Yeah?” Martin asked. “You thinking of maybe cross-referencing it against what we’ve got in the file here?”

  The notion had occurred to Reed, though he doubted there’d be any mention of the places Trixie had given him. Things like a powwow were pretty obscure, could have been months prior to her disappearance.

  If the detectives working the cases had thought to ask, let alone write it down, was a longshot at best.

  “Actually,” Reed said, “I was hoping to get a few minutes of facetime with the boyfriend.”

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  The Bear was back in his observation perch, reclined in his chair in the adjoining room, stretching his legs out before him. Crossing them at the ankles, he propped the heels of his boots on the corner of the table, settling them just past the video screen as to not obstruct his view.

  By his elbow sat the empty remains of his own dinner from Cisco’s, the smells of charred beef and barbecue sauce filling the small space. The taste of the meal still rested heavily on his tongue and in his stomach, the extra effort spent in getting across town a rare treat befitting the occasion.

  Tonight had been a long time coming, a culmination of weeks of preparation. Going back to the notes he’d jotted down so long ago, not the slightest idea at the time if he’d ever need them, it had been an unexpected joy to find them still valid.

  A joy, a hope, that buoyed him through so much effort expended on researching, tracking, and ultimately obtaining.

  Now, at long last, things were moving forward. The base layer had been laid. The girl was here, she had been given the initial treatment, had his mark placed on her.

  The road thus far hadn’t been without bumps, but that was to be expected. Someone that complied without a moment’s complaint or question wouldn’t be what he wanted. She wouldn’t have the mettle to hold up for everything that remained, certainly wouldn’t be a valid fill-in for the departed.

  Pressing his shoulders back into the chair, The Bear could feel the rounded plastic edges digging into his shoulder blades. Paying it no mind, he extended his body until it was almost parallel to the ground, using the angle to shove a hand deep into the front of his jeans.

  Finding what he was searching for, he grasped the chain of his pocket watch between his index and middle finger, sliding it free.

  Dropping his bottom back flush against the seat, he held the timepiece up before him, letting it rotate at the end of the chain. Serving as a backdrop was the video screen just a couple of feet away, a silent black-and-white canvas for the watch in the foreground, the real star of this show and every other he’d been a part of.

  Raising his opposite hand, The Bear squeezed the hasp on the side of it, the front faceplate springing open. In the faint light of the room, he could just barely make out the image tucked inside, the years having caused most of the color to fade.

  Making it almost as monochromatic as the visual playing on the screen nearby.

  “Mama always said I would be a prisoner to you,” The Bear said aloud, his voice swallowed up by the block walls surrounding him. “Funny how that’s all worked out now, isn’t it?”

  The Bear had first met Molly Comstock in his junior year at Northeastern State. The daughter of an Osage woman and an insurance salesman in Broken Arrow, she was a dark-eyed beauty with wide cheekbones and glossy hair, the kind that left him short of breath, unable to find the words whenever she was nearby.

  Seated in alphabetical order on the first day of a required class, the two had ended up side-by-side. In such proximity, they had shared space but barely a word for more than two months before Molly fell ill during the final few weeks of the semester.

  Despite knowing every single person in the class, it was he who she had reached out to, asking for his help to get her caught up before exams.

  Extending his thumb, The Bear ran the pad over the surface of the watch, the movement one he had done no less than a thousand times before. Barely able to even feel it beneath his touch, his entire focus was on the photo, blocking out even the screen many times the size of it a few feet away.

  Given the benefit of hindsight and all that it entailed, he should have seen that initial interaction for what it was. Had Molly never gotten sick, she likely would have never even known his name. She would have continued to wear her painstakingly put-together outfits and flip her perfect hair and talk to every person in the room who she deemed worthy.

  Which was to say, everyone who met certain social criteria, most of which was predicated on how high they ranked on a traditional attractiveness scale.

  A scale The Bear held no illusions as to where he sat on, then or now.

  But at the time, he’d been too overwhelmed by her presence, by the way she smiled at him whenever he approached or the way she placed a hand or her head against his shoulder as they worked, to see things for what they were.

  The way she had dubbed him her Eddy Bear, even using a special voice whenever she referred to him as such.

  “Mama saw through you from day one,” he whispered, his thumb continuing to move back and forth. “Said you showed up here, and saw all this, and your eyes lit up with dollar signs.”

  Growing up, The Bear had never considered his family wealthy. In a world that was largely driven by liquid worth, the sheer value of the land they owned or the cattle that grazed it didn’t register with him.

  Those things were a way of life, something to be sacrificed for and protected.

  Not once did he ever think that someone would look at where he came from and aspire to it, seeing a better stature for themselves.

  Sliding his fingers around the back of the watch, The Bear snapped it closed. Too many times he’d sat and tortured himself over the years, replaying the story time and again, each pass still managing to cause the ire he felt within to spike.

  Closing his fist around the watch, he squeezed it tight, feeling the muscles and tendons in his hand and along his wrist pull taut. Holding it out before him, he stared at the implement, letting the vitriol he felt roil through him, before slowly releasing. Pushing out a long breath with it, he allowed the tension to uncoil, his arm falling back to his lap.

  Seven years, and still she managed to do this to him. Just the thought of her, a few moments spent on everything she’d done, and he was right back to where he was so long ago, wrath filling him, rolling from him in undulating waves.

  Seven years, and the only things that lingered were the photo in the house and the watch in his hand. The only gift she had ever given him that amounted to much at all, the time displayed chosen deliberately, a reminder to The Bear forevermore of the moment that everything changed. That he finally saw things for what they were, slapped into submission by the harshest of realities.

  That he finally became who he now was, shifting from her Eddy Bear into The Bear.

  Lifting his gaze to the television before him, The Bear stared at the new girl
on screen. He watched as she sat with her leg extended at an angle beside her, the container of food he’d brought propped in her lap.

  Bit by bit, she was working her way through it, the progress slow, but steady, nonetheless.

  A good sign. If not for what he hoped she might become, then at least to give her the strength to come in a close second.

  Because, as The Bear had learned more than once at this point, one was often just as good as the other.

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  The sun had slipped further toward the western horizon as Reed pulled into the parking lot of the same diner he’d met Thad Martin at earlier in the day. Now in the last moments of being a complete circle before starting to disappear, it was the color of straw, shining bright across the prairie. Illuminating the front of the SUV, it passed through the windshield, adding to the bit of adrenaline Reed had in his system, warming him a half-dozen degrees.

  Despite the place still being open - a handful of neon signs along the front displaying as much, hawking various offerings inside - most of the spots out front were vacant. Only a trio of cars filled the diagonal spaces, the simple fare offered inside no match for a Friday night crowd with something a bit more upscale in mind.

  What that might consist of in Muskogee, Reed didn’t pretend to know, his focus solely on the third car in line. Recognizing the sedan as the same government-issue vehicle Martin had been driving earlier in the day, he pulled in beside it, barely putting the SUV in park before the front door to the diner swung open.

  From it exited the man himself, a plastic bag in one hand, a to-go cup in the other. Raised to his face, a straw was stuck into the corner of his mouth as he spotted Reed and lifted his chin in greeting, striding out into the parking lot.

  Earlier, when Reed had called and ask to speak with Darcy Thornton’s boyfriend, it was clear that Martin had some reservations on the matter. For several minutes he had hemmed and hawed, batting around the notion, before finally relenting on the condition that he be allowed to sit in on it.