The Weight of Night

by Christine Carbo

  Monty showed us the incident room where Ali, Herman, Ken, Tara, and other officers, rangers, and volunteers gathered. The room buzzed with concentration, intensity, and chatter. Karen Forstenson, one of their best rangers, efficiently manned the volunteer table, where she kept track of at least forty volunteers in groups of four performing searches in well-documented grids so that no one overlapped. Ali clicked away at her computer, Herman made marks on a map on the wall, Tara sat with Mr. Kelly in a corner going over surveillance tapes, Ken took phone calls, and Emily used the photocopy machine in another corner by a big ficus plant. On top of busy, everyone looked cranky, as if they were all fighting off migraines. Or maybe I was simply projecting my own caffeine headaches onto them all.

  When Ali spotted me and Ray, she announced that we should move to the smaller conference room next door for a quick briefing. Monty, Ray, Ken, and I filed in behind Herman and Ali and took seats around the table.

  “Everyone comfortable?” Ali closed the door with her foot, shutting out the rest of headquarters and the busy din of volunteer workers checking in at the main table with the results of their searches.

  “Gretchen Larson.” I held out my hand to Ali, then introduced Ray to her. I hadn’t met either of the agents yet, and took them in. Herman stood by the counter along the wall, his arms folded in front of his chest. He was just a tad shorter than Ken, which wasn’t saying much. Ken was tall, at least six-two, and built like a professional football player. Herman was right in there with him—at least six foot. His thighs were massive in his navy blue FBI uniform pants and he had his sleeves rolled up casually, displaying well-muscled forearms and an expensive-looking shiny silver watch. He also wore glasses, designer frames on his eyeglasses.

  Ali motioned for Herman to take a seat, and he pulled out a chair and sat, keeping his legs firmly planted apart in front of him. Ali stood behind him, more disheveled. Curly, almost frizzy dark hair shot out in tentacles. She had olive skin, not so different from Monty’s, and was in her midthirties. She spoke with some kind of an accent—East Coast, I thought by the way she said, or rather didn’t say, her rs: comf-tible. No matter how long I’d been in America, it was harder for me than it was for natives to pick up on specific regional or state accents. I mixed up New Jersey, New York, Boston, and Maine. I also couldn’t hear the difference between southern states, and those from Texas sounded exactly the same to me as those from Georgia.

  Ali had no watch, no earrings, no rings, no makeup. She seemed the type to charge right ahead, no matter the obstacles. She also seemed like the type who wanted to be the center of everything and to do things her way. That was okay by me, but I couldn’t decide if I liked her or not. I liked that her channel was set on “go,” that she seemed the type, like me, to roll her eyes when someone who knew very little about you told you to smile when your face looked serious and long. Because, obviously, whoever tells you that has no clue about the kinds of things Ali Paige probably has seen in her line of work, or the kinds of things I’d done in my life from the ripe old age of fifteen. But, still, she reminded me of a spoiled mean girl in some ways. Perhaps it was her sideways glare that seemed to come straight from the devil.

  “Gretchen, Ray”—Ali swung a chair out from the table and straddled it, elbows on its back—“what have you got?”

  I filled them in about the yurt site, the tire tracks and traces of fabric that we’d need some time to process, and then about the three sets of prints, including the one smaller unidentified set.

  “Smaller.” She tapped her foot nervously on the floor. “That’s interesting.”

  “But we’ve already compared it to all of the available prints at the Coreys’ campground site and there’s no match. Jeremy’s shoe print is from some kind of a jogger, his mom confirms a Nike shoe. The one at Minsky’s site is also a jogger, even possibly a Nike, but it’s not a match. Although we don’t know how long ago the print was made. Seeing as how we haven’t had rain in over a month, we don’t know how long it’s been there.”

  “Shoes can be changed,” Ali said.

  “What about the tire tracks?” Herman asked.

  “Some kind of large truck with a trailer, I’m guessing a flatbed trailer if he’s hauling a yurt around. They fold up, but it would still be pretty big to haul around.”

  Monty sat still, his face set and unreadable. Clearly he somehow annoyed Agent Paige because she looked at him, held out a palm, and said, “What?”

  “I didn’t say anything,” Monty said.

  She looked like a pissed-off big sister. “You didn’t need to. Do you have a problem with us figuring out this Minsky situation?”

  “Ali,” Herman chimed in. “He didn’t say anything.”

  Ali shot him her signature glance, and he rolled his eyes ever so slightly.

  “I think it needs to be checked out,” Monty stated. “But I still think it’s a long shot. It doesn’t fit.”

  “We’ve recently learned that Minsky has hit up more than just his niece for extra money in the last six months. We have reports from AFT that he’d sold some gold he’s been hanging on to for a while at a local pawnshop, but it must not have been enough because he also tried to sell off some of his firearms. We have no idea what he needed the money for, but maybe he’s also planning on getting some ransom money from the parents. Guy finds out his niece has married some musician that’s hit it big. Maybe it’s too tempting, especially with a family that’s shunned you, disowned you.”

  “Why wouldn’t they get a ransom call then, a note, something?” Monty asked.

  “Maybe he’s keeping the kid for a few days to make the whole damn family squirm. Payback.”

  Monty slowly nodded as if he was considering it. Then he said, “What about the tracks near Fish Creek? They don’t match.”

  “Vehicles can be borrowed, loaned, taken . . . ,” Ali said. “Minsky’s part of a network, an antigovernment, anti-law-enforcement network. He’s not completely a loner. Word has it that they’ve been helping a leader of a paramilitary group who’s been hiding out in a compound we have yet to find.”

  “That’s all very interesting, but don’t you think it’s an entirely different law enforcement matter?” Monty pressed. Ali glared at him for questioning her in front of everyone, but she had brought it on herself by questioning Monty when he hadn’t said a word.

  “Tracks found outside Fish Creek where the boy was last seen are consistent with tires that come on a Chevy or Ford truck,” I inserted, drawing her attention away from Monty. “Tracks found at the yurt site don’t match that brand. They’re a generic brand, Cooper, probably fitted to an old Toyota pickup.

  Ali stood up and went to the large whiteboard at the front of the room. She wrote Minsky’s name on it with “uncle” beneath his name. Next to it, she jotted down Mr. Kelly’s name and the word “vehicle” with a question mark by it and the words “dark-colored, possibly black, navy, dark gray” underneath. Next to that, she scribbled the details I’d just given about the extra shoe prints at the site and the type of vehicle tracks that were there, possibly from a trailer or flatbed truck.

  Monty took some notes and Ken sat nodding, chewing a piece of gum vigorously, his eyes sharp and energized.

  “Have you looked at other missing boys in the area?” I asked.

  Ali turned, holding her chalk an inch away from the board. “We haaave.” She drew out the word as if she was addressing a child, clearly insulted that I’d asked something so simple. “First thing.”

  “Okay, of course, I just wondered if there were any similarities.”

  “No, there aren’t,” she said more professionally. “There haven’t been any abductions like this in many years. There are missing children, but most are older, assumed runaways.”

  “But does that matter? The number of years?”

  “Typically”—Ali gave me an impatient glance, but not her signa
ture full-on glare, which I was thankful for—“a serial abductor can’t wait for too long before they strike again, because whatever twisted thing that makes them do it can’t be suppressed for too many years in a row. Plus, once they begin, activity usually intensifies or increases.”

  “Studies show,” Herman piped in, “that your average male serial killers average six to eleven victims over a nine-year period. And females, like health-care workers, about seven to nine victims over the same time frame.”

  “That’s correct,” Ali said.

  I nodded, reminding myself that just because we found a sub-adult’s male bones the day before did not mean there was any relation. The bones we found were much older by at least ten to twenty years, and I wasn’t the detective here, nowhere near a detective. I was only trained in forensics, and quite glad to stay that way.

  Ali turned back to the board and continued to jot bits of information on it when the door opened and Tara walked in. She had her hair pulled back in a tight bun and looked serious, but her color was back from yesterday. I was glad to see it.

  “Excuse me,” Tara said, “Mr. Kelly thinks he’s recognized one of the trucks leaving the gates of the park at twelve thirty p.m.”

  I sat forward, and I saw Monty do the same.

  Ali dropped her chalk. “I’ll be right back. Everyone stay.” She pointed at us all as she and Herman left the room, following Tara out.

  Ken looked at me and whispered, “I guess we don’t move a muscle. The boss has spoken.”

  “I guess not,” Monty said, then glanced at Ray, then me. He studied me for a moment, and I looked down at my hands on the table, my fingers laced together.

  “It was a good question,” Monty said.

  I looked up at him and gave a one-shoulder shrug. “It was just a thought.”

  We all sat and continued to wait for a few more minutes. Monty checked his watch a number of times, and I could tell he was impatient with having to wait. Finally Ali and Herman came back in.

  “He’s a bit fuzzy about it,” Ali announced. “But when he saw it, the look and age of it rang a bell . . . an older truck, some kind of Chevy with back cab windows. Tara’s working on identifying it as we speak, but we can’t see the license plate on it. There’s no plate on the front, which is the side the cameras are trained on for exiting vehicles, so the driver potentially had that thought on his mind. We’ve caught a sticker on the front bumper, though, that seems to be an old parking sticker for the old CFAC aluminum plant. So, good news, we think it’s local. That might help run down a registration, if we can stick to this county.”

  “Did you get images of the driver or passengers?”

  “No, there’s a lot of glare and too shadowy inside. Looks like it could be a male wearing a cap, but we can’t make out any facial details. There’s no one in the passenger seat, and we can’t see the backseat.”

  “What about coming in?” I asked, referring to the possibility of the cameras catching a better glimpse of the man when it entered as well as him needing to stop to either pay or show a prepaid pass to enter. If he’d stopped, one of the on-duty attendants manning the entrance booths would have had to have dealt with the driver.

  “We don’t have it coming in. Not yet anyway, so it’s possible he came in through the Camas Road entrance, which doesn’t have cameras. We’re repulling in that station attendant as we speak to see if she can recall anything. We’re looking back further. It’s possible he came in the day or even days before and has been camping out in the park.”

  Tara came back in. “Okay, so we’ve identified it as a late eighties or early nineties Chevy Z71 1500.”

  “Thank you.” Ali said, looking at the clock on the wall. “It’s late. Shit. Nothing’s easy.” Montana Department of Motor Vehicles was several hours past closed. “Herman,” she said, “get the attorney general on the phone ASAP. We need to get someone back into the records office to run a printout for us.”

  “I’m on it,” Herman said, walking out.

  It was hopeful news. If Mr. Kelly was correct, it was a lead. If we could find the person registered to the truck, we might make some progress. Since we had tire tread prints from the Camas Road near the bridge where Mr. Kelly saw the vehicle, not far from the campground, we might be able to match the tread to the registered vehicle if we could find it. Ali told Monty, Ken, and Tara to wait around for the printout and that she expected them to help track down the Chevy truck registrants on the list.

  “Divide and conquer,” Monty said, agreeing with her. He stood tall, shoulders back—galvanized, I thought—to finally have a lead better than the Minsky one.

  • • •

  Ray and I headed back to the lab, not saying much after leaving headquarters. Monty had walked us to the door, always the gentleman, I had thought, even among all the chaos, and I thanked him. He had shrugged and said, “For what?”

  “For seeing us out. You’ve got your hands full.” I tossed my head toward the incident room.

  “You mean with both the cases or with the agents?”

  “All of the above,” I said.

  “You’ve got yours full too,” he said, and I laughed because that was indeed true. It felt like a week had gone by since we’d found the bones in Essex. We said good-bye, and as we headed out of the canyon, it was beginning to feel like another endless day.

  By the time we reached the valley, the brilliant yellow canola fields shone like neon in the dark. More and more farmers were turning to that crop in the last five to ten years, since the demand for canola oil had gone up and farmers found it to be a useful rotation crop.

  Often at sunset, after a long day, I ran along these types of roads—paved and gravel ones that traversed farmland, often for miles past fields bathed in coppery light and pastures with cows and grain silos. I passed farmhouses with old, peeling red barns and grazing horses. I ran until my legs ached and sweat covered me, in the heat or the cold. It was one of the tricks I used to calm my anxieties and achieve a healthier night of sleep.

  The doctors told me long ago that exercise would help. But for me, it had become more than a doctor’s prescription. Over the years, it had become a way to quell my thoughts and apprehensions, and it was the best tool I had to try to keep the self-hate and awful memories at bay. Right now, as spent as I felt from working several separate crime scenes in the park for two days in a row, I craved one of those runs because too many thoughts were streaking through my head. I wondered about the boy. Where had he gone? Had he really been abducted, and if so, at what point did Jeremy realize that things were changing for him irrevocably?

  And the bones in the grave, they kept pushing into my mind as well, and now I couldn’t quit thinking about our visit to the old hotel. Even though Kyle hadn’t been there, what the hell was wrong with him? He had a loving family, and he was choosing to ignore them, reject them. Many kids who got mixed up in drugs were born into ugly, dysfunctional situations from the start. Not Kyle. Other than watching his mom and dad divorce, he had a pretty cushy life from what I could gather. What I wouldn’t have given to stay in the loving cocoon of mine before it all went horribly wrong—in the days when we skied, sledded, and skated together, then found refuge before our fireplace in the blue wood-paneled house with slate roofing. In the days when we picnicked, picked berries, boated, and fished, the summer sky staying light nearly all night so that I could see the rust-colored church spire peaking over bushy summer trees from my bedroom window until well past two a.m.

  But that was then, and this was my life now. Sometimes it felt so strange to think of how I had been responsible for shattering my ­family. When I was younger, I could never have guessed that life was so fragile, and that a strong family could crumble—a broken string of beads falling to the floor and scattering everywhere. My mother swung from bouts of depression with vacant stares and silent periods after the death of my brother, when she cou
ldn’t bring herself to utter a single word to me, to great bouts of anger. She screamed at me, glared at me as if I was an enemy within the gates. If I left anything messy in the sink, she’d yell at me, “Can you not clean up after yourself at the very least? Can you not quit making messes everywhere?”

  Messes. Such a euphemism. But I needed to stop obsessing and screw my head back on straight again. When we returned to the lab and unloaded, Ray left to get some food and rest. The crime lab was quiet except for the steady hum of refrigerators and the equipment.

  I was starting to get another headache, since I’d been abstaining from caffeine and sticking to herbal tea. I craved coffee, but went to the small break room to make myself some more tea. I patiently waited for the water to boil, clicked the kettle off, and poured the steaming water into my coffee mug. I walked down the empty hall back to my office and sat at my desk. I tried to keep my office as cheery as possible. Pictures of golden Tuscan settings hung on the walls, and a citrus-scented orange candle, a few nice pieces of pottery, and a potted plant lined the top of a bookcase on one wall. I liked my office and was happy to linger a little longer before going home. Besides, I still had work to do.

  I pulled out the file on the Essex site and took out all the pictures. As is true with every crime-scene photo shoot, there were loads of them from every possible angle. I found the ones of the skull to study. I looked at the coronal sutures again and at the deep gash above the left ear. Something about it rang a bell, so I pulled up the NamUs database to look into all incidents of unidentified and unclaimed remains in the area as well as all missing persons.

  I started my search with the early 1970s. Three early teenage girls had gone missing in the late seventies and in the early eighties, all three on the north end of the valley, none of them ever found or heard from again. Then there was a long break with some older missing teens—sixteen-, seventeen-, and eighteen-year-olds who were presumed runaways—during the late eighties and early nineties. Then, in 1991, Nathan Faraway was reported missing on Halloween night after not showing up at his sister’s friend’s house as he was supposed to. His friend, Monty Harris, and Monty’s brother, Adam Harris, and Adam’s friends Todd Wright and Perry Milliken were the last to see him and underwent intensive interrogation.