Missing in Conard County

by Rachel Lee

  As she buttoned him into his caged backseat and climbed into the car that held not one bit of the warmth she had filled it with on her way over, she wondered what Al was doing.

  Patrolling? Rounding up escapees in answer to calls? Someday, when she had the time, she thought she might like to go on a ride with him and see what exactly filled his days. It probably wasn’t much different from what she did on a lot of days: patrolling in case she was needed. Answering calls that came in if she was nearby. Often the job wasn’t exciting. Boring, even. Then there were the other times.

  Domestic disputes were the ones she hated most, and they were reaching the time of winter when they ramped up in both number and savagery. Cabin fever, she often thought, was lousy for relationships.

  Not knowing what she’d find when she drove onto each ranch and knocked at the door put her on heightened alert. Most people would be friendly, some would even want her to come in for coffee and cookies because they were so glad to see a fresh face.

  Her anxiety eased a bit and she smiled through the windshield at a day that was sacrificing all its clouds in favor of bright sun. At this latitude the sun didn’t get that high, not like Miami or Puerto Rico, but once the snow covered the ground it would be every bit as blinding.

  Right now it was just turning into a beautiful day. She felt a twinge of guilt for even noticing.

  She was a little over five miles out of town, driving slowly over a dirt road that was bad now and would be even worse come spring. Thank God it was frozen, but it was like riding on a rubbery roller coaster. To the west the mountains rose like dark sentinels, promising a safety she had never managed to feel. They were close here, and seemed to loom over the county below. The mountains to the east were farther away, beautiful but not quite as dominating. Or threatening. Odd thought.

  Just then Bugle started barking his strange half howl, and he persisted demandingly until she pulled to the side on a grassy turnout and put the SUV in Park. “What the heck, Bugle?”

  As if he could answer. She could see nothing at all in any direction but dried grasses, scrub and tumbleweed. Oh, and the nearby mountains that right now felt as if they were pressing on her shoulder, leaning in.

  He hurried to the left side of the truck and pressed his nose to the window, still howling his fool head off.

  She wasn’t stupid enough to ignore it when her dog acted like a fool. Something had gripped his attention.

  “Okay,” she said. She reached for the gloves on the seat beside her and pulled them on, leaving the car to run to keep it warm.

  One thing for sure, she was leashing that dog. If he wanted to chase a rabbit, she wasn’t going to chase him. He waited impatiently while she opened the door and hooked the long leather lead to the ring on his collar. Then, without so much as a command, he jumped down and began to pull her back the way they had just come. To the point where he’d begun to lose his calm.

  Well-trained K-9 or not, Kelly was well aware that he was still a dog. Before she let him pull her completely away from the vehicle, she grabbed a tennis ball, his favorite toy, and shoved it in her pocket. She might need it to get his attention, the way he was behaving.

  But he’d raised his head, as if pulling something out of the air. She waited while he sniffed and then blew to clear his nose for a fresh sniff. Okay, maybe not a rabbit.

  Then he lowered his head and began to pull her along the shoulder, weaving a bit as he went. The odor he pursued hadn’t settled into a straight line, but neither had it behaved that oddly. An animal carrying something? But what? Or was he tracking a scent from something left beside the road?

  If he hadn’t been so determined, she might have called him back to her vehicle, but she’d learned to read Bugle well. He was onto something that to him was awfully important. Considering his training, what he believed to be important often turned out to be important to her.

  She hadn’t realized how long she had driven past the point where he started his frenzied barking. Nearly half a mile. With every step she grew more aware of the icy wind. She couldn’t imagine what had gotten into the car, but something obviously had, and he was determined to get to it. With each few steps, he grew more focused. More intent. Her K-9 was on the hunt.

  She pulled her snorkel hood closer around her face but didn’t zip it into a narrow opening. As a cop she knew how important her range of vision was to her safety. Better to have a frozen nose than be blindsided.

  Finally Bugle paused. He lifted his head again, turning it a little this way and that, then dived into the field beside the road. Not far. There wasn’t even a turnout here, just some sagging barbed wire. But when he dipped three feet into the runoff ditch beside the road, he stopped and sat. Then he looked at her and pawed at the ground.

  She recognized the signals. He’d found his target. But what the hell was his target? Sudden worry made her heart accelerate as if she were running the last lap in the Kentucky Derby. She began to breathe more rapidly, which made her chest ache and her sinuses feel as if they were about to crack from the dryness.

  Damn weather. Carefully she approached the spot Bugle sat facing. He reached out one paw, touching nothing, but seeming to point.

  She saw a dark heap, small, unimportant. Until she got closer.

  A glove. A man’s glove. Nothing important. Something like that could have blown out the bed of any pickup truck.

  It would have meant nothing at all except for her dog’s intense interest in it. Target.

  One of the missing girls? But none of them should have a glove like this. So if...

  She didn’t allow herself to complete the thought. She didn’t dare hope, not anymore. Not after the last days. But hopeful or not, she had to treat it as evidence.

  “Bugle, guard.”

  Now that he’d found the object of his fascination, she had absolutely no doubt he’d stay put. Not that she’d have had any doubt anyway. Bugle did his job with all the panache and dutifulness of the cop he was. Maybe better.

  She trekked back to her vehicle and pulled out a rubber glove and an evidence bag. The glove had been worn. There’d be DNA evidence inside it if the cold hadn’t killed it. It might be important, or it might just be some kind of mistake. Heck, it could be a glove belonging to one of the girls’ fathers. Bugle sure wouldn’t miss that. Probably nothing, she told herself with each step as her nose grew colder. Probably nothing at all.

  But she trusted Bugle’s instincts and could not ignore them. She thought about driving back to pick up the dog and glove, then decided against it. She needed to scour the ground with her eyes to see if something else might be there. This was a very isolated part of the county, mostly grazing land, few houses, but someone could have come along this road and dropped something else. Or left a track, not that the ground was lately in any condition to take tracks.

  She took the walk more slowly this time, forcing her attention to the shoulder right in front of her. It yielded nothing at all, and the rusting barbed wire appeared untouched. Somebody had some work to do, she thought. She didn’t envy anyone who had to replace all that fencing.

  Then she reached Bugle, who was still at attention but starting to shiver a bit. So much for a fur coat. As soon as she reached his side, she squatted, snapped on a rubber glove after removing her own insulated one and picked up the ratty old glove to insert in an evidence bag.

  As soon as it was secure, she said to Bugle, “Search.”

  But he sniffed around a small area and seemed to find the exercise pointless. Okay, the glove was it.

  Taking his leash in hand again, she joined him in a quick jog back to the vehicle. He seemed glad to jump inside the warmth. For that matter, she was glad, too.

  Dang, it was so cold. She wondered how the coyotes managed it, because she knew they were out on their rounds despite the weather. She received the occasional call to check out an injured animal. Pers
onally, she thought self-respecting coyotes ought to join bears in hibernation.

  Her fingers barely wanted to hold the marker as she scribbled the important information on the evidence bag: her name, the date and time, the location where the item had been found. Then she sealed it, and no one would be able to open it without leaving evidence of tampering.

  So careful. She hoped like hell it would do some kind of good for the missing women.

  Just a clue. She’d been repeating the words like a mantra at the back of her mind for days now. Just a clue. She hardly dared to believe this might be it.

  * * *

  THE REST OF the day was devoted to knocking on doors, drinking quick cups of coffee or tea as she talked to the ranchers, their families and their hired hands, if they had any. A pointless waste of hours, she thought as she pulled up to the last house on her list.

  The road had taken her the long way around, but the ranch house itself wasn’t that far from the outskirts of town. There just wasn’t a direct road to it.

  She had to knock twice, and her stiffening hands didn’t appreciate it. She had grown so cold with all of this that her nerves burned when jarred. Just one more, then she could drive back in the heated comfort of her car and hunt up a hot drink and meal. Loads of coffee today hadn’t done her much good. In fact, no good at all. She’d quit after a single sip because, while she didn’t want to offend, she also didn’t want to ask to use people’s facilities. Her mouth felt as dry as cotton now.

  Bugle had it easy, she thought wryly. Every time she let him leap out, he took care of business.

  After her third knock, the door opened. A bleary-eyed man of about thirty-five stared back at her and shook his head a little.

  “Sorry to bother you, sir, but you’re Walt Revell, the current owner?”

  “Uh, yeah.” He looked at her again. “Is... What happened?”

  “We’ve had three young women missing for nearly a week now and we’re trying to find out if anyone might have seen something unusual that might help us out.”

  “Oh.”

  God, she thought, was this guy drunk or drugged? Or had he worked all night? Mussed hair, clothes that needed ironing... Well, according to records he lived alone. He probably wasn’t good at looking after himself.

  He shook his head. “Heard about that at the tavern. Damn shame. But I didn’t see nothing.”

  She doubted he could see past the end of his nose. “Thanks for your time.” She handed him her card. “If you notice anything that seems unusual or out of place, give us a call, please?”

  “Uh, sure.”

  The door closed even before she finished turning away. Guy probably wanted to get back to sleep.

  As she walked back to her vehicle, she saw that Bugle had his nose pressed to the glass. He was probably sick of being cooped up and wanted to be let out to play.

  “In a bit,” she said to him as she climbed back in and turned her truck around to head back out to the road. “Soon, Bugle.”

  He gave a low groan as if that answer didn’t please him at all.

  * * *

  JANE AND CHANTAL hardly twitched a muscle. At some point, they had been drugged again, probably because it was impossible to go indefinitely without water. At least the wire bindings had been replaced with chain. Kinder to the flesh, maybe, but no less miserable or escapable.

  They both realized that Mary Lou was gone for good. They just hoped she wasn’t dead, although in the darkness and quiet they sometimes whispered about it. Neither of them any longer nurtured much hope that they would survive this. At their age, that was an especially difficult conclusion to reach.

  They’d lived relatively sheltered lives in this out-of-the-way county where, yes, bad things happened, but not all the time. Living on a ranch, or living in town, they hadn’t feared walking the streets in the evening or even felt it necessary to lock their doors. Companies that wired houses for security would go broke out here except for some of the businesses.

  But that didn’t mean they were totally insulated. The news got through, either in newspapers or on the evening television. They’d heard or read stories of what could happen to young women who were kidnapped by unscrupulous men. The questions floating around in their heads now were whether they were to be sex slaves or sacrifices. Both possibilities terrified them equally.

  But they certainly didn’t expect to be let go. That left them only a need to fight to survive. No other motive existed any longer.

  They huddled as close together as they could, giving in and sitting up to eat the food bars placed nearby, forced to drink water because their bodies demanded it. Sometimes the water knocked them out. Those were the merciful times.

  It had gotten to the point where Jane told Chantal that she hoped one of those bottles would contain a lethal dose of whatever was putting them to sleep.

  Chantal wanted to argue with her, but her arguments were growing wearier and weaker. To fall into sleep and never awake again was beginning to appeal to her, too, though she refused to admit it to Jane.

  So cold. Under the ratty blanket, pressed close to each other, they still grew miserably chilled. Unfortunately, not chilled enough to never wake up. They ached from confinement, from cold, from the hard floor. They hated the smelly blanket that did little enough of what a blanket was supposed to do.

  They pressed icy bare feet together, rubbing them to stimulate circulation. They switched sides trying to warm one half and then the other.

  Survival drove them, but they couldn’t even explain why. Giving up would have been so much easier.

  Nobody would ever find them, Chantal thought. Ever. But even as she grew more dazed with time, she squashed that thought every time it occurred.

  “You know this county,” she said to Jane, her voice little more than a cracked whisper from a sore throat.

  “Yeah. If we’re in Conard County.” Jane didn’t sound much better.

  “It doesn’t matter. People around here won’t stop looking for us. They won’t. You know that.”

  “Then why aren’t they here already?”

  Chantal had no answer for that. Instead she said, “They’ll come. They must be looking over every inch.”

  “So? We’re buried in a basement.”

  Chantal couldn’t argue with that, so she fell silent. But then Jane said, “You’re right. They’ll even look in basements.”

  To that they clung as much as they could.

  “Just eat another food bar,” Chantal said. “If the bastard shows up when I’m awake, I don’t want to be too weak to give him a hard time.”

  So they choked down the dry bars and risked a few sips of water.

  Keeping up some strength seemed to be all they had left.

  * * *

  NOT TOO MANY miles away, Al Carstairs had resumed his usual duties in animal control. Mostly. Like everyone else, he was knocking on doors asking if anyone had noticed anything unusual. Like everyone else he was getting a lot of negative shakes of the head.

  How could this guy have been so invisible? How was it nobody noticed something odd about a guy pulling three girls out of a car and putting them in his? God, they must have been drugged, and as such Raggedy Ann would have seemed more like a human body.

  But nobody had noticed?

  Well, it was New Year’s night, and he guessed a lot of people were either at home nursing hangovers, or sitting in the bars, roadhouses and taverns that dotted this county, enjoying the hair of the dog that bit them. Rusty had said more than once that his tavern had been hopping.

  The girls had left early, too. With the next morning being Sunday, most people who went out to enjoy themselves probably hadn’t called it an early evening. So it was entirely possible that not one soul had driven by during the time when the car went off the road, and the abductor moved them to his vehicle.

  What i
f someone had stopped? The guy could have said, “My sister and her friends had too much to drink. I need to get them home.”

  And if the person who had stopped wasn’t from these parts, why would the individual mention it to anyone? Why even question it?

  Kelly had apparently been the first person to come upon the car once the girls were gone. No one else had reported a car off the road. A dead silence seemed to have filled the county that night.

  He cussed, which didn’t please the stray black Lab he’d picked up. Molly, her name was, and while she had a loving home now, there was no question she hadn’t always enjoyed one. She was the only dog he’d ever known that would cower at a cuss word, even one in passing conversation.

  He’d have loved to find out who her first owners had been so he could give them a piece of his mind. But she’d been dumped at Mike Windwalker’s clinic by a guy who said he’d found her beside the highway. And the guy didn’t even live in these parts.

  No help. Not that it mattered now. Molly had a good home; she just liked to run. Usually she’d run for a couple of hours and then show up at her family’s door. This time she’d stayed out longer than usual and Al had been advised the family couldn’t find her.

  Well, she’d wandered farther than usual. Much.

  Then there was a raccoon back there who’d gotten herself tangled in some barbed wire while attempting to heist the contents of a trash can. She needed to see the vet as well as get a dose of rabies vaccine. Mike would probably keep the animal for a while to make sure it wasn’t already sick. Unfortunately, even though it was the wrong time of year, she appeared to be pregnant.

  But while he was usually very focused on the animals he looked after, it was different now. Now all he could think about was the missing girls. Acid chewed at his stomach lining, his mouth tasted sour and a beer sounded too good to a guy who’d been dry for five years now.

  Not that alcohol had ever taken over, but he’d become nervously aware a year or so after he left the service that it could easily become a favored crutch. That he could become addicted. So he’d quit on his own. Not another drop. It hadn’t been that hard because he’d taken charge of it before it took charge of him.