Maximum Exposure

by Allison Brennan

  “Go on your trip. Read my proposal. And tell me yes when you come back.”

  The smile disappeared. “Don’t be cocky. I don’t want to do this.”

  “Yes, you do.” He visibly relaxed. “We have ten minutes before you have to leave to catch your plane. Tell me about this trek to Colorado Springs. Who, what, why, when, where, how.”

  “College student Scott Sheldon, missing for six months after walking away while on a camping trip with friends.”

  “Dead?”

  “Probably.”

  He stared at her. “You’re going because of Karen.”

  “No, I’m not.” But there was some truth to his observation. Karen disappeared while she and Max had gone to Miami for a wild spring break their senior year. She was definitely dead—the police had found evidence of a violent death with an extensive amount of blood—but her body was never found. Max had spent a year of her life searching for answers, and still no one knew what happened beyond a theory that couldn’t be proved. And a killer had walked away.

  She swirled her wine in her glass, but didn’t drink. “Scott’s mother wrote to me. She doesn’t know what happened to him. If I can find out—well, she might be able to sleep better.”

  Adele Sheldon had said, I need to know what happened to my son. I need the truth.

  Max was good at uncovering the truth. Not everyone appreciated it; not everyone was truly strong enough to handle it. But Adele Sheldon was a grieving mother with no body to bury. She accepted that her son was dead, had told Max that if he were alive, she’d know in her heart. I’m in limbo, Ms. Revere. I want to bury his body.

  Ben didn’t say anything for a minute. He leaned back, a sad and wistful expression on his handsome face. She wished she had something to say, something cutting or witty, but her mind was blank. They were both thinking about Karen, a girl they’d loved, and Scott Sheldon, a boy they didn’t know. All hostility she’d felt toward Ben for his ridiculous idea to give her a television show dissolved.

  “What happened to the kid?” Ben asked.

  “I won’t know until I talk to his friends or find his body.”

  “You’re searching for his body?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  He leaned forward. “This would be a great report for your television show.”

  “I don’t have a television show,” she said, glaring at him again.

  He smiled, picked up her wineglass, and drained it. “Not yet.”

  Chapter Two

  Max woke up at 4:30 A.M. in a luxurious suite of the Broadmoor resort in Colorado Springs, cursing Ben for her uneasy sleep. Seeing him and talking about Karen had brought up all the memories, failures, and frustration of that year in Miami after Karen disappeared. Max often had insomnia—she fell to sleep easily enough, but if she woke at two or three in the morning, it was rare she could go back to sleep.

  She’d stayed at the Broadmoor many times in the past; it was one of her favorite resorts. The executive suite had a fireplace, balcony and breathtaking view of the snow-covered mountains. Max appreciated quality accommodations, and didn’t mind paying for them. She pulled herself out of bed and decided to wake up with strong coffee and a bubble bath.

  Ten minutes later, she sighed as she sank into the hot, scented water. She sipped the sweetened coffee and closed her eyes.

  When she should have been relaxing in the deep tub, her thoughts instead went back to Miami, back to when she was twenty-two and enjoying spring break with her best friend and roommate. Columbia had hooked them up their freshman year and it should have been hate at first sight—Karen was everything Max was not. Karen was short, Max was tall; Karen was chatty, Max was reserved; Karen was a slob, Max was neat. Blond hair to red hair; brown eyes to blue; middle-class family to wealthy family.

  Yet, somehow, they worked. It was books, Max believed—they both loved books, both were lit majors, and they had the same sense of humor. Better, Karen didn’t lie. She was as blunt and straightforward as Max, and Max ended up trusting Karen more than she did anyone.

  She’d needed Karen at a time in her life when everyone she’d known and grown up with proved to be untrustworthy. Her friends, her ex-boyfriend, her family. Max had wanted to be far from home, moving from California to New York, and she didn’t look back. Max didn’t want to care for anyone except herself. She understood—because she had always been honest with herself—that the reason she didn’t want any close friends was because she had abandonment issues. First her mother dumped her on her rich grandparents’ doorstep and walked away, sending her sporadic postcards that had ended abruptly when she was sixteen; then nine years later, her friend Lindy was killed the week of their high school graduation. She didn’t want to get attached to anyone it would hurt her to lose.

  But Karen was the type of girl who latched on and didn’t let go. When Max was irritated with her, she called Karen a parasite, impossible to get rid of. But now, more than ten years after they’d met, Max knew Karen was exactly what she’d needed to reconnect with the flawed but compelling human race.

  Karen wasn’t perfect. She was a flirt. She drank too much. She slept with the wrong guys and got her heart broken more times in their first year of college than Max had in her lifetime. They needed each other—Karen to bring Max down off her pedestal and enjoy living again, and Max to protect Karen from herself.

  But in the end, she couldn’t protect Karen. Karen had disappeared, and though Max and law enforcement knew she was dead, they’d never found her body, nor brought her killer to justice.

  The one time Karen lied to her had proved fatal.

  Max sighed and stretched. The water had cooled uncomfortably, so she quickly finished her coffee, pulled the drain, and rinsed off under a hot stream of water through the dual jets. She dressed in layers, since the early spring morning was cold, then dried her thick hair and put on make-up while drinking another cup of coffee.

  Finally, she felt ready to start the day.

  She called room service for breakfast and more coffee. She didn’t like to eat in her hotel room, but she couldn’t bring her desk down to the restaurant and she had work to do.

  After room service left, she ate a blueberry scone and reviewed her e-mail. While on the flight yesterday, she’d planned her day, but Max preferred to remain flexible when starting an investigation. She had the basics of the case, but it wasn’t so cut-and-dried as she’d have liked.

  First, there were jurisdictional issues. The college was in the county, not the city of Colorado Springs. The campsite where Scott Sheldon had disappeared was in a national park, putting the location under the federal government. The National Park Service rangers were responsible for the initial search and rescue, but they had a joint operation with the county and adjoining cities. Adele Sheldon had told her she filed the missing persons report with the college and with Colorado Springs PD, and Detective Amelia Horn was her contact. Why CSPD? Neither the college nor the campsite was in the city. Who was really in charge? Detective Horn had nothing to add when Max spoke to her, pointing out that CSPD wasn’t in charge.

  Max pulled out a trifold board she’d created last night and set it up on the credenza. The time line was clear, even though it made no sense.

  Last Halloween Eve, nearly six months ago, was a Friday. Scott Sheldon told his roommate that he was going camping with three friends—Tom Keller, Arthur Cowan, and Carlos Ibarra. They planned to be back Sunday morning.

  According to the statements by Scott’s three friends, they’d been drinking and joking Friday night. At some point, Scott got angry—no one claimed to know exactly what set him off—and he grabbed his backpack and left. When he didn’t return, they assumed he was sleeping in the truck, which was parked an hour’s hike from the campsite.

  The next morning, Scott still hadn’t returned. The weather turned from overcast to rain, and Keller, Cowan, and Ibarra returned to the truck. When they didn’t find Scott, they looked for him in the area, but the rain came down hard
and heavy. They left—there was nothing in the notes saying that they went back to the campus on Saturday, but that was implied. It snowed late Saturday night and the boys said they trekked back to the campsite Sunday morning and looked for Scott. They didn’t call the rangers, they didn’t alert campus security, nothing, until Sunday afternoon.

  That was the part of the story that set off Max’s instincts. Why had it taken them so long to tell anyone that Scott was missing? Why did campus security wait until Monday morning to notify the park service? By that point, the storm was so severe, they could search for only a few hours each day. By the end of the week, the roads to that area of the mountain were impassable.

  There was no doubt in her mind that Scott Sheldon had died on that mountain, but the question was how and when. The fact that he was missing for nearly forty-eight hours before the three boys had alerted anyone told Max they were lying about something.

  She reviewed her notes until eight when she called Chuck Pence with the park service. He was based in Colorado Springs, near the police station, but Pence was on the search and rescue staff and had led the effort to find Scott. His specialty was working with tracking dogs.

  He wasn’t there, and the staff said he was already in the field. Max left a message and reviewed her schedule. She’d wanted to talk to Pence first for more background on the search and what, if anything, they’d found that hadn’t made it in the official files, but that would have to wait. She considered talking to Detective Horn again, but after their phone conversation, Max suspected it would be a waste of time. If she learned anything new, she’d talk to the police. She’d go to the college first and talk to Scott’s roommate, then track down the others.

  While she drove the thirty minutes to the Cheyenne College campus, she got two calls, which she sent to voice mail. The first from Ben. She wasn’t going to talk to him about the television show until after this case, and she was already thinking of more ways she could tell him no—since the blunt no she’d already given him didn’t work. The second call came from her editor. Max didn’t have anything good to tell her, and Emma was going to be disappointed.

  Max had written four true crime novels, the first about Karen’s disappearance and the subsequent investigation. The latest book was coming out this summer, and Emma wanted another proposal. But Max didn’t have a case that excited her. She read the crime blotters, tracked the news—there were a lot of interesting cases, some even more interesting than Scott Sheldon’s disappearance. But nothing jumped out at her as thrilling enough to invest several months of her life into research and interviews, then another six to nine months verifying facts and writing the book. Writing the last book had nearly gutted Max. She’d investigated claims of elder abuse in a Miami facility and uncovered a ten-year reign of terror by the director she dubbed the Wicked Nurse of Miami. Not very creative, and her editor had cut all but two references to the nickname from the book, but it was still the way Max thought of the bitch who seemed to take pleasure in making sick, old people suffer.

  She didn’t want to go through that again, not yet. She briefly considered the Scott Sheldon case, and maybe there was something here that would warrant a full-length book, but Max didn’t see it yet. She first needed to talk to the people involved—maybe shining a new light on the matter would get them to talk—or slip up, if they were harboring a violent secret.

  It was nine when she arrived in the visitors’ parking lot. The campus was small, at least by Max’s standards—three thousand undergraduates, half of whom commuted to the campus, and an even smaller graduate program. A typical liberal arts college, where students predominately majored in the humanities and arts, though there was a new earth science building and a recent influx of students majoring in environmental science and conservation. Not a surprise, considering the campus was in the Rocky Mountains.

  The grounds may have been modest, but they spread out and up the mountainside, with tree-lined cement trails winding around the perimeter. A quad, of sorts, was built around a possibly natural waterfall, which filled a small lake. A stream meandered out, and judging from the marks in its banks, it was lower than it had been in the past. Still, the campus seemed like a rather idyllic place. No towering redwoods and pines as in California and much of the Rocky Mountains, but this place still had the fresh clean air and crisp cold Max loved.

  She used to go skiing all the time—in far colder weather than this. She still skied when she could, but more and more she spent her hours investigating or planning an investigation. This was the first winter she hadn’t spent time at her cousin’s resort in Vail. Too many cold cases had grabbed her interest, and she’d also been finishing the book about the Wicked Nurse of Miami.

  Her work—vocation, really—consumed her, and taking time off to have fun just hadn’t seemed important after the tragedies she immersed herself in. And as her editor, who was probably her closest friend in New York, had told her, Max was a workaholic.

  Max had downloaded a campus map, but each path was well marked with signs and arrows directing her. She was looking for Rock Creek dorm, where Scott Sheldon had lived for the two months before his disappearance. His roommate had been Ian Stanhope, an environmental science major from Denver. Scott had been an environmental science major as well—and in fact, Scott and Ian seemed to have lived parallel lives.

  Both were strong but not straight-A students; both were at Cheyenne on partial merit scholarships. Both had one younger sibling—Scott, a sister; Ian, a brother—and parents who divorced while the boys were in junior high school. Had they become close friends or bitter enemies? Sometimes, similarities made you hate a person because they highlighted—often unintentionally—your own flaws.

  She didn’t have a sense of who they were as people, only who they were on paper. Scott hadn’t been involved with athletics; Ian was on the baseball team for the college, a D-III school. Through social media, it appeared that Ian had many friends, lots of direct and indirect connections to college, his high school, and Denver. Scott’s profile had been taken down, probably by his mother or sister, but his mother told her that he’d been soft-spoken and reserved, with only a few friends growing up.

  How few? Had he made friends during his two months at Cheyenne before he disappeared? Was he homesick? Did he like college? Were his grades okay or was he struggling? Was there a girlfriend his mother didn’t know about? Ex-girlfriend? His mother said he didn’t have a history of depression, but a family might miss that, especially if the depressed person tried to keep it from them. Or if the onset was sudden. These were all things she would find out.

  She knocked on Ian Stanhope’s door again and considered that he might not be there. Classes, socializing, studying.

  A small guy came out of the room next door, backpack over his shoulder. “If you’re looking for Ian, he’s probably at the gym if he doesn’t have class.”

  “Can you point me in the right direction?”

  “South exit, right, and follow the signs to Cougar Stadium.”

  Max followed the directions and less than five minutes later was standing in the lobby of a rather impressive athletics facility for a small college. The gym portion was well equipped with several weight machines, treadmills, and an area for free weights. It was clean and bordered on two sides by windows, which looked out into trees. Half the machines were being used.

  She referred to a photo of Ian, then looked around. She spotted him working with free weights. Ian watched her approach, a mixture of apprehension and pleasure in his expression.

  “Ian Stanhope?” she asked.

  “That’s me.” He grinned and wiped his sweaty face with his shirt. He was a good looking nineteen-year-old with blond hair that fell into his eyes. That he didn’t push it away bothered Max. Could he even see through the mess?

  “I’m Maxine Revere.” She handed him her business card. “I need a minute of your time.”

  “Why would a reporter want to talk to me?” he said, a half smile still on his face
.

  “Do you have a class?”

  “Not until noon.”

  “Great.”

  He looked from her to her card. “You’re from New York.”

  “Yes.”

  He lost his smile and didn’t move. He tossed his head, moving his clump of overgrown hair to the side. “What do you want to talk to me about?”

  “I’m looking into Scott Sheldon’s disappearance, from last October. You were his roommate.”

  “I wasn’t on the camping trip.”

  “I promise, I won’t take too much of your time.”

  He mumbled, “I have class.”

  “At noon, right? We’ll be done before then.”

  Usually, for Max, the direct approach worked best. She didn’t like playing games or manipulating people into talking to her. But sometimes, she needed a gentle touch. She couldn’t tell if he was more upset or worried, but something was up with him.

  She said, “How about if I give you twenty minutes to shower and change, and I’ll meet you at the student union? Coffee, brunch. My treat.” There was always the chance he would bail, but she knew where to find him.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Other than your roommate has been missing for six months?”

  “I mean, no other reporters have been around here asking about Scott. Like, ever.”

  “I specialize in cold cases. Twenty minutes enough time?”

  “Yeah—the quad has a food court,” he said. “I’ll meet you there. The student union is just vending machines. Gross stuff, really.”

  She walked out, noting that Ian watched her before he disappeared through the locker room doors.

  She’d definitely thrown him off, but she didn’t know why. Ian hadn’t been part of the foursome who’d gone camping, so what did he have to worry about? Unless he knew something he hadn’t told the police.

  While she waited, Max checked her e-mail and text messages. Ben had sent her a message asking if she’d read his proposal. She didn’t respond. The truth was she had read it on the plane—and she still wanted to say no. The proposal was outstanding, and he’d addressed all her concerns, even though she hadn’t told him what they were. He even resolved issues she wouldn’t have thought to question, as if he’d known she’d come up with problems on the fly.