Hunting Season

by P. T. Deutermann

  Figure out what? she thought. Was he saying I’m a lesbian because I won’t date other agents? Is that what they think? Or that I’m too old for the newbie? She examined her “little-girl face.” Red hair, bright green eyes, okay, a couple of wrinkles here and there, but nothing substantial.

  Firm chin, healthy skin. So she looked younger than her thirty-seven years—and what was wrong with that? She worked out three, four times a week and was in better shape generally than some other male coworkers, if the annual physical-fitness test proved anything. There was nothing wrong with the old bod, either. Which was why the newbie had been asking, right? So relax. They’re just guys flapping their jaws. In general, she liked the Roanoke crew, and they liked her.

  She sighed and went back to her office. There were four cubicles in their office. One, belonging to Larry Talbot, the squad’s supervisor, was slightly larger than the others. The other three were Bureau-issue identical.

  Each contained a computer workstation, a single chair, and some file

  cabinets over and under the computer table. It was a four-person squad, with one semipermanent, budget-cut vacancy. The other worker bee in the squad was Billy Smith, who was generally conceded to be RIP, as in retired in place. The RIP designation was a little unfair to Billy, who had a serious blood-pressure problem, for which he would take a pill upon arrival in the office. It would promptly put him to sleep at his desk for an hour or so, and then he would wake up and do paperwork throughout the rest of the morning, until lunch, at which time he would take his next pill and slip back under again. He’d come down from some obscure Washington assignment three years ago and supposedly had two years to go until he was eligible for retirement. Larry Talbot had worked a deal: Billy would do the bulk of the squad’s routine paperwork, while Larry and Janet would do the legwork. Everyone figured the Bureau was simply looking the other way until Billy could take his retirement and go away.

  His repertoire of dark two-liner jokes had become notorious in the office, especially when he could catch someone off guard, as he had Janet when he asked her what it meant that the post office flag was at half-mast: They were hiring. Between those little bombs and handling all the squad’s paperwork, Billy had found a home.

  She sat down at her desk, checked E-mail, and grunted. Larry Talbot had left her a message: Today was the day they went out to tell Mr. Kreiss that they were sending the missing college kids’ case up to Washington.

  She was supposed to meet Talbot in the parking garage at nine o’clock.

  She looked at her watch. She barely had time to finish her coffee. She thought about that guy’s remark. Figure it out, huh? As she remembered, the guy talking to the newbie was a married man. She’d go figure him out all right. Maybe drop a dime, speculate to his wife about the guy’s sudden interest in redheads. Make his home life a little more interesting. But then she just laughed. Not her style.

  Edwin Kreiss waited in the doorway as the FBI car from the Roanoke office ground up the winding drive from the county road down below.

  He knew why the Bureau was coming: They were going to call off their search. It had been almost three weeks since the kids had vanished, and

  neither the Bureau nor the local cops had come up with one single clue as to what had happened. No bodies, no sign of foul play, no abandoned vehicles, no credit-card receipts, no phone tips, no witnesses, no sightings, and not the first idea of even where to look for them. His daughter, Lynn, and her two friends, Rip and Tommy, had vanished.

  Kreiss frankly did not care too much about the two boys, but Lynn was his only child. Had been his only child? He was determined to keep her memory in the present tense, even as he now lived with the sensation of a cold iron ball lodged permanently in his stomach. It had been there since that first call from the university’s campus security office. And here was the world’s greatest law-enforcement organization coming to tell him they were going to just give up. Special Agent Talbot, who had called that morning, hadn’t been willing to come right out and say that, not on the phone, anyway. But Kreiss, a retired FBI agent himself, knew the drill:

  They had reached that point in their investigation where some budget conscious supervisor was asking pointed questions, especially since there were no indications of a crime.

  Kreiss watched the dark four-door Ford sedan swing into the clearing in front of his cabin and stop. He recognized the two agents who had been working the case as they got out, a man and a woman. Special agents, Kreiss reminded himself. We were always special agents in the Bureau.

  Larry Talbot, the head of the Violent Crimes Squad, was dressed in a conservative business suit and was completely bald. He was heavyset, to the point of almost being fat, which in Kreiss’s day would have been very unusual at the Bureau. Special Agent Janet Carter was considerably younger than Talbot. She appeared to be in her early thirties, with a good figure and a pretty but somewhat girlish face, which Kreiss thought would make it difficult for people to take her seriously as a law-enforcement agent. Her red hair glinted in the sunlight. He stood motionless in the doorway, his face a patient mask, waiting for them. He and the other parents had met with these two several times over the past three weeks.

  Talbot had been patiently professional and considerate in his dealings with the parents, but Kreiss had the impression that the woman, Carter, had been frustrated by the case and was increasingly anxious to go do something else. He also sensed that she either did not like him or suspected him somehow in the disappearance of his daughter.

  Kreiss’s prefab log cabin crouched below the eastern crest of Pearl’s Mountain, a 3,700-foot knob that was twenty-six miles west of Blacksburg, in southwest Appalachian Virginia. The mountain’s gnarled

  eastern face rose up out of an open meadow three hundred yards behind the cabin. The sheer rock cliff was dotted with scrub trees and a few glistening weeps that left mossy bright green trails down the crumbling rock.

  The meadow behind the cabin was the only open ground; otherwise, the hill’s flanks fell away into dense forest in all directions. Two hundred feet below the cabin, a vigorous creek, called Hangman’s Run, worked relentlessly, wearing down the ancient rock in a deep ravine. A narrow county road paralleled the creek. There was a stubby wooden bridge across the creek, leading into Kreiss’s drive.

  The two agents walked across the leafy yard without speaking as they approached the wooden steps leading up onto the porch.

  “Mr. Kreiss?”

  Talbot said.

  “Special Agent Larry Talbot; this is Special Agent Janet Carter.”

  “Yes, I remember,” Kreiss said.

  “Come in.”

  He opened the screen door. Talbot always reintroduced himself and his partner every time they met, and he was always politely formal—using sir a lot. If Talbot knew Kreiss had been with the Bureau, he gave no sign of it. Kreiss kept his own tone neutral; he would be polite, but not friendly, not if they were giving up.

  “Thank you, sir,” Talbot said. Kreiss led them to chairs in the lodge room, an expansive area that encompassed the cabin’s living room, dining room, and kitchen. Talbot sat on the edge of his chair, his briefcase on his knees. Carter was somewhat more relaxed, both arms on the chair and her nice legs carefully crossed. Kreiss sat down in an oak rocker by the stone fireplace, crossed his arms over his chest, and tried not to scowl.

  “Well,” Talbot began, glancing over at his partner as if making sure of her moral support.

  “As I think you know, the investigation to date has come up empty. Frankly, I’ve never seen one quite like this: We usually have something, some piece of evidence, a witness, or at least a working theory. But this one …”

  Kreiss looked from Carter to Talbot.

  “What are the Bureau’s intentions?”

  he asked.

  Talbot took a deep breath.

  “We’ve consulted with the other two families.

  Our basic problem remains: There’s no indication of a criminal act. />
  And absent evidence of—” “They’ve been gone without a trace for three weeks,” Kreiss interrupted.

  “I should think it would be hard to disappear without a trace in this day and age, Mr. Talbot. Really hard.”

  He stared right at Talbot. Carter was looking at her shoes, her

  expression blank.

  “I’ll accept what you say about there being no evidence,” Kreiss continued.

  “But there’s also no evidence that they just went off the grid voluntarily, either.”

  “Yes, sir, we acknowledge that,” Talbot said.

  “But they’re college kids, and the three of them were known to be, um, close.”

  Close doesn’t quite describe it, Kreiss thought. Those three kids had been joined at the hip in some kind of weird triangular relationship since late freshman year. Tommy and Lynn, his daughter, had been the boy-girl pair, and Rip, the strange one, had been like some kind of eccentric electron, orbiting around the other two.

  “We’ve interviewed everyone we could find on the campus who knew them,” Talbot continued.

  “Professors, TA’s, other students. None of them could give us anything specific, except for two of their classmates, who were pretty sure they had gone camping somewhere. But nobody had any idea of where or for how long. Plus, it was spring break, which leaves almost an entire week where no one would have expected to see them. Sir, they could be literally anywhere.”

  “And the campus cops—the Blacksburg cops?”

  “We’ve had full cooperation from local law. University, city, and county. We’ve pulled all the usual strings: their telephone records, Email accounts, bank accounts, credit cards, school schedules, even their library cards. Nothing.” He took a deep breath.

  “I guess what we’re here to say is that we have to forward this case into the Missing Persons Division now.”

  “Missing Persons.”

  “Yes, sir. Until we get some indication—anything at all, mind you-that they didn’t just take off for an extended, I don’t know, road trip of some kind.”

  “And just leave college? Three successful engineering students in their senior year?”

  “Sir, it has happened before. College kids get a wild hair and take off to save the whales or the rain forest or some damn thing.”

  Kreiss frowned, shook his head, and got up. He walked to a front window, trying to control his temper. He stood with his back to them, not wanting them to see the anger in his face.

  “That’s not my take on it, Mr. Talbot. My daughter and I had become pretty close, especially after her mother was killed.”

  “Yes, sir, in the airplane accident. Our condolences, sir.”

  Kreiss blinked. Talbot was letting him know they’d run his background, too. Standard procedure, of course: When kids disappeared, you

  checked the parents, hard. So they had to know he was ex-FBI. He wondered how much they knew about the circumstances of his sudden retirement.

  Talbot might; the woman was too young. Unless they’d gone back to Washington to ask around.

  “Thank you,” Kreiss said.

  “But my point is that Lynn would have told me if she was going to leave school. Hell, she’d have hit me up for money.”

  “Would she, sir?” Talbot said.

  “We understood she received quite a bit of money from the airline’s settlement.”

  Kreiss, surprised, turned around to face them. He had forgotten about the settlement. He remembered his former wife’s lawyer contacting Lynn about it, but he had made her deal with it, whatever it was. So far, the money had covered all her college and living expenses, but he still gave her an allowance.

  The woman had her notebook open and was writing something in it.

  He felt he had to say something.

  “My daughter was a responsible young adult, Mr. Talbot. So was Tommy Vining. Rip was … from Mars, somewhere.

  But they would not just leave school. That’s something I know. I think they went camping, just like those two kids said, and something happened. Something bad.”

  “Yes, sir, that’s one possibility. It’s just that there’s no—” “All right, all right. So what happens now? You just close it and file it?”

  “Not at all, sir,” Talbot protested.

  “You know that. It becomes a federal missing persons case, and they don’t get closed until the persons get found.” He hesitated.

  “One way or another.” He paused again, as if regretting he had put it that way.

  “As I think you’ll recall, sir, there are literally thousands of missing persons cases active at the Bureau. And that’s at the federal level. We don’t even hear about some of the local cases.”

  “How comforting.”

  “I know it’s not, Mr. Kreiss. But our MP Division has one big advantage:

  They get to screen every Bureau case—every active case—for any possible links: names, credit-card numbers, evidence tags, telephone numbers. They’ve even developed special software for this, to screen the Bureau’s databases and alert for links to any missing person in the country.”

  “What did the other parents say when you told them this?”

  Talbot sighed.

  “Um, they were dismayed, of course, but I think they understood. It’s just that there isn’t—”

  “Yes, you keep saying that. Any of them going to take up a search on

  ? their own?”

  “Is that what you’re considering, Mr. Kreiss?” Carter asked. It was the first time she had spoken at this meeting. Now that he thought of it, he had rarely heard her speak. Kreiss looked at her for a moment, and he was surprised when their eyes locked. There was a hint of challenge in her expression that surprised him.

  “Absolutely not,” he answered calmly, continuing to hold her gaze. r “Civilians get into police business, they usually screw things up.”

  “But you’re not exactly a civilian, are you, Mr. Kreiss?” she said.

  Kreiss hesitated, wondering just what she meant by that.

  “I am now, Agent Carter,” he said softly.

  “I am now.”

  Talbot cleared his throat.

  “Um—” he began, but Carter cut him off.

  “What I think Special Agent Talbot was about to say is that we ran a check on you, sir. We always check out the parents when kids go missing.

  And of course we knew that you had been a senior FBI agent. But your service and personnel records have been sealed. The few people we did talk to would only say that you had been an unusually effective”—she looked at her notes—”hunter. That was the term that kept coming up, sir.”

  Time to cut this line of conversation right off, Kreiss thought. He let his face assume a cold mask that he had not used for years. He saw her blink and shift slightly in her chair. He walked over to stand in front of her, forcing her to look up at him.

  “What else did these few people have to say, Agent Carter?” he asked, speaking through partially clenched teeth.

  “Actually, nothing,” she said, her voice catching. Talbot, beginning to look alarmed, shifted in his chair.

  Kreiss, arms still folded across his chest, bent forward to bring his face closer to hers.

  “Do you have some questions for me that pertain to this case, Agent Carter?”

  “Not at the moment, sir,” she replied, her chin up defiantly.

  “But if we do, we’ll certainly ask them.”

  She was trying for bluster, Kreiss decided, but even she knew it wasn’t working. He inflated his chest and stared down into her eyes while widening his own and then allowing them to go slightly out of focus. He felt her recoil in the chair. Talbot cleared his throat from across the room to break the tension. Kreiss straightened up, exhaled quietly, and went back to sit down in the rocking chair.

  “My specialty at the Bureau was not in missing persons,” he said.

  “I was a senior supervisor in the Counterintelligence Division, Far Eastern section.”
r />   Carter had recovered herself by now and cleared her throat audibly.

  “Yes, sir,” she said.

  “So what you said earlier pertains absolutely: Do not go solo on this, please. You find something, think of something, hear something, please call us. We can bring a whole lot more assets to bear on a fragment than you can.”

  “Even though you’re giving up on this case?”

  “Sir, we’re not giving up,” Talbot protested.

  “The case remains in the Roanoke office’s jurisdiction even when it goes up to national Missing Persons at headquarters. We can pull it back and reopen anytime we want.

  But Janet’s right: It really complicates things if someone’s been messing around in the meantime.”

  Kreiss continued to look across the room at Carter.

  “Absolutely,” he said, rearranging his face into as benign an expression as he could muster.

  For a moment there, he had wanted to swat her pretty little head right through the front window. He was pretty sure she had sensed that impulse; the color in her cheeks was still high.

  “Well,” Talbot said, fingering his collar as he got up.

  “Let me assure you again, sir, the Bureau is definitely not giving up, especially with the child of an exagent. The matter is simply moving into, um, another process, if you will. If something comes up, anything at all, pass it on to either one of us and we’ll get it into the right channels. I believe you have our cards?”

  “I do,” Kreiss said, also getting up.

  “I think you’re entirely wrong about this,” he told Talbot, ignoring Carter now.

  Talbot gave him a sympathetic look before replying.

  “Yes, sir. But until we get some indication that something bad has happened to your daughter and her friends, I’m afraid our hands are somewhat tied. It’s basically a resource problem. You were in the Bureau, Mr. Kreiss, you know how it is.”

  “I know how it was, Mr. Talbot,” Kreiss said, clearly implying that his Bureau would not be giving up. He followed them to the front door. The agents said their good-byes and went down to their car.

  Kreiss stood in the doorway, watching them go. He had fixed himself in emotional neutral ever since the kids went missing. He had cooperated with the university cops, then the local cops, and then the federal investigation, giving them whatever they wanted, patiently answering