by Mason Cross
“She left a note.”
She took a deep breath. “Why did you come, if you weren’t going to listen to me?”
“I’m listening. Do you still have the note?”
She sighed. “The cop from Missing Persons took it. I have a picture, though.”
She showed him on her phone. He stared at it for a long time, just like the Missing Persons cop had done. Trying to intuit meaning from the spare words on the page. He handed the phone back to her and she could see that hint of concern in his eyes again. Maybe he had just been playing devil’s advocate, hoping he could find a nice, pleasant explanation for Rebecca’s disappearance. His next words confirmed it.
“Is the spare key still there?”
12
It took Gage a while to find the place. The suburbs were a never-ending maze of closely packed cul-de-sacs and curving crescents that got his hackles up. He hated these little identikit communities. Everybody in their little boxes, just like the song. Gage had never understood the urge to invest so much of one’s time and being into a trophy home. For him, it was enough to have somewhere to shelter, sleep and eat. It was much more interesting to do your living elsewhere.
He knew this was a product of his upbringing among the mountains and forests of British Columbia. His mother had died before he had been old enough to form a memory of her, and from the time he was old enough to walk, his father had never made him feel welcome around the house. This was fine by him. Gage had been only too happy to spend long summer days hiking and fishing, and then cold winter days hunting deer in the snowy forests. After dropping out of high school and joining the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, he had relished spending his days outside, patrolling the roads and the logging tracks in his jurisdiction. The RCMP acted as the provincial police force, covering a patch that was more than three hundred thousand square miles. The sparse population and terrain made the region a favored destination for fugitives, from both sides of the border. He gradually built a reputation as one of the go-to guys for manhunts north of the 49th parallel. Over a five-year period, he helped track down a dozen prison escapees, several drug smugglers, and even one would-be domestic terrorist who fancied himself an outdoorsman. Gage knew the country, knew where experienced and inexperienced prey were likely to flee. Occasionally, the hunts would take him into more urban environments: Vancouver and Victoria. Some of the rules changed in the city, but he found the fundamental principles were adaptable.
He would have been content with that life, had matters not been taken out of his hands.
After his career in the police was brought to a premature end, Gage realized that his experiences so far had furnished him with talents that were of value on the open market. The money was better, much better, and he enjoyed the work. If the RCMP was squeamish about his methods, that was absolutely their loss.
He had been thinking about the three men in the bar as he drove back out to the western suburbs of Las Vegas. He knew they weren’t telling him everything, but he was fairly certain they had given him all of the useful intelligence they had on Dominic Freel. A last known address and a known associate was a pretty good start—far more than he had to go on with some jobs.
Gage had a feeling there was more to this job than met the eye. A lot of clients expected a no-questions-asked service, and in most cases that was fine. He relished the small mystery, wondered how easy it would be to untangle.
After what felt like an eternity of driving through the streets, he found the one he was looking for: West Pine Avenue. The sky was full dark now, the hints of stars showing through because the smog was lighter at this distance from the city. Gage slowed and made an initial pass of the address: 32. The driveway was empty, the windows in darkness. He passed the house without slowing, turned the corner, and parked at the curb out of sight of the house.
13
The backyard lay in the shelter of a pair of tall cypress trees. I stood by the back door while Sarah Blackwell knelt to retrieve the spare key from a plant pot. I was thinking about the question she had asked back in the living room. Not a question, really, more like an accusation: “You know what they’re running from.”
Sarah was quick on the uptake; she could see I was dwelling on something. But it had led her to the wrong conclusion. I had been thinking about another empty house, years ago in Manhattan. I had been telling Sarah the truth when I said I didn’t know what they were running from. What happened in New York didn’t explain why she had been living here, nearly three thousand miles across the country with this guy Freel. It didn’t explain why they would move into a quiet suburban community, and then pull a disappearing act at a moment’s notice. At first, at the back of my mind I had wondered if this could have something to do with Winterlong, but having spoken to Sarah, I was satisfied that it didn’t. Whatever the explanation was, I had a gut instinct it was something to do with the husband.
I was surprised that it smarted a little to think of this guy in those terms. The husband. It was ridiculous to feel that way, of course. Those weeks in New York were a lifetime ago. We had both emphatically moved on. Or perhaps that was just wishful thinking.
Regardless, I hadn’t expected ever to hear from Carol again. The only reason I was here was because her neighbor was concerned. And now I was concerned too.
“I never thought B&E would become one of my bad habits, “Sarah commented as she slipped the key into the lock. “I’m a pretty boring person most of the time. Neglecting to sort my recycling is about as rebellious as I generally get.”
I was grateful for the small talk. “It’s a slippery slope. One day you’re failing to recycle, the next it’s burglary. You’ll be dealing crack on the corner over there by Thursday.”
As I glanced in the direction of the street to see if there was a corner, I heard the sound of an engine approaching. Slow. One of the neighbors returning home, or someone unfamiliar with the street looking for an address. Sarah had opened the door and was looking at me expectantly, as though she wanted me to make the incursion first.
“Wait a second,” I said, lowering my voice.
She looked out at the street and we watched as a car approached. It slowed a little before it got to 32, but then passed by. In the couple of seconds it took to pass by our field of view down the side passage, I saw that it was a dark Jeep, impossible to tell the exact color in the streetlight. It picked up speed again after it passed.
I exchanged a glance with Sarah and we turned back toward the door. She pushed it open, and I could smell the stale air of a place that’s been sealed up for weeks.
The house was exactly as Sarah had described it. It looked like the kind of property a prospective renter or buyer would be shown around, not a place that was actually in the process of being lived in. Taking the role of the realtor in that scenario, Sarah showed me from room to room. Only instead of demonstrating the floor-level lights in the kitchen and commenting on the roominess of the bedroom closets, she ticked off all of the places she had searched on her previous visit. I was impressed; she had done a good job for a civilian. I told her so, as she showed me into the final bedroom, where she had found the notebook.
“That’s because I’m not quite a civilian. I was a reporter, remember? Sticking my nose into other people’s business is a habit that dies hard, I guess.”
“Tell me about it,” I said.
“Talking of which, interesting use of the word ‘civilian.’ You were in the military, I take it?”
“Something like that,” I said, making a note to be more careful of what I said to Sarah Blackwell. I played the beam of the flashlight on my phone over the interior of the bedroom closet. It was spick and span; like it had never been used. I switched the beam off again—I had kept the brightness on the lowest setting and made sure to stay away from windows, but it made sense not to draw attention from anyone who might happen to pass by the house.
“What do you think?”
I looked back at Sarah. Her face was lit by the glow
of the sodium lights from the street outside. “I think you’re right. They knew they weren’t coming back.”
We went back downstairs. I checked the drawers in the kitchen, finding all the usual cutlery and cooking implements, and the drawer everybody has that’s filled with junk. I had been optimistic about that one; people leave all sorts of interesting things in the junk drawer. Things they don’t want to carry around with them but don’t want to throw away. But in this case, I was out of luck. All that was in the drawer was some utility bills and some A A batteries. The bills were addressed to D. Smith: no new information. I opened the cupboards and found the trash, glancing over at Sarah.
“I checked that too,” she said.
I took a look inside anyway. The trash bag had been removed and there was nothing in the receptacle itself but dust and a lone popcorn kernel.
There was a small room leading to the back door. I opened the door and stepped in. A laundry room. Washer and dryer, a shelf holding a box of detergent. In the corner there was a wicker laundry basket, shaped into a right angle with a curve to fit into the corner. I opened the lid and saw that it was almost as empty as the trash. Almost, but not quite. There was a single sock and a pair of jeans at the bottom. They were flattened, like they had lain at the bottom of the pile for a while, and had been ignored when the rest of the laundry was removed. I reached in and pulled the jeans out, shaking them into shape.
“You’re thorough,” Sarah said approvingly.
They were men’s jeans. A thirty-four waist. They were dusty and torn at the knees, and there was some kind of oil stain on one leg. I could see why they had been abandoned. Not expecting much, I started to go through the pockets. In the last one I checked, I found a balled-up piece of paper, which I took out and unfolded. It was a receipt. I like receipts: they contain a whole lot of information in a small space. This one was from a gas station, dated March 12th, 19:17. Thirteen gallons of unleaded, two cans of soda, two sandwiches, a Snickers bar. The name of the station was Grady’s Rest Stop. There was no address, but there was a phone number. The area code wasn’t one I was familiar with.
“520. Is that around here?”
Sarah shook her head. “Nope.” She took out her phone and tapped it in, looking up from the screen a second later. “Arizona.”
“Why were they in Arizona on March 12th? I thought they stayed close to home the whole time”
She thought about it. “I think they did go away somewhere for a couple days in March. Rebecca said something about a trip.”
This was a break in the routine, and breaks in the routine are always worth investigating.
The sound of a car alarm going off a couple of streets away reminded us of where we were.
“We should probably go,” Sarah said.
We retreated to the back door. We locked it behind us and replaced the spare key and headed back over to Sarah’s house. A minute later, we were back in Sarah’s kitchen looking at a pinpoint on a map on the screen of her tablet. The pin identified the location as Grady’s Rest Stop, Navajo County, Arizona. There wasn’t a lot to see on the screen: just the pinpoint and a line running vertically up the screen indicating the highway. Sarah pinched her fingers on the screen to widen the focus, having to repeat the action a couple of times before we zoomed out far enough to see anything else on the map.
“It’s in the middle of nowhere,” she said.
The rest stop was almost two hundred miles east of Phoenix. There were a few small towns dotted around, not much more than wide spaces in the road by the size of them. The nearest town that looked as though it might have a population over three figures in the area was called Iron City, ten miles from the rest stop. I asked Sarah if Carol had ever mentioned it.
She shook her head. “Never heard of it.”
“She say anything about the days they were away in March?”
“I think she said they had been visiting friends for the weekend. I didn’t exactly lose sleep wondering ...” I realized Sarah was staring at me with a look of concern.
“What?”
“I’m going to make some coffee.”
I didn’t argue. I wasn’t feeling anywhere near as tired as I had an hour before, but maybe I looked it. While Sarah brewed a pot, I sat down at the kitchen table with the tablet. I switched to the satellite view and zoomed in on some of the smaller towns on the map, wondering if any of those had been Carol and Freel’s destination on the mystery March road trip, rather than Iron City.
The closest place to the rest stop was a town called Corinth. When I zoomed in, I realized that something didn’t look quite right. It took me a second to work out what it was: no cars. On closer inspection, I could see that the roofs of some of the buildings had collapsed in, and there were empty lots where buildings had been demolished, or fallen down. I zoomed out and saw the remains of an open cast mine southeast of the town.
“A ghost town,” I said to myself.
“What?”
I turned the screen to show her. “This place Corinth: looks like an old mining town.”
“Abandoned. Lot of them about,” Sarah said. “Some of them are tourist attractions. I went to one once when I was a kid. They had a Wild West show, a theme restaurant. It was fun.”
“This one doesn’t look quite as touristy,” I said. “And it’s pretty far to go on a whim. Did they go away any other time, that you noticed?”
She shook her head. “Like I say, the reason it was noticeable in March was because they never went anywhere. The car was always in the driveway every day. When they went anywhere, they were back within an hour or two. That means this is important, somehow.”
I had pulled up the Streetview now, mildly surprised that there even was one. Google hadn’t attempted to map the whole town, but the camera car had passed through Main Street on its way back to the highway. I swiped along, looking at the boarded-up stores and the dilapidated single-story homes. Just from a glance, I could see why Corinth hadn’t been renovated as a tourist attraction like the place Sarah had spoken about. From the looks of things, this place had been abandoned in the eighties. The remaining signs advertised pawn shops and Pepsi. No picturesque Wyatt Earp ambience here. An older building passed by on the screen, older than the rest, and something about it made me stop. I stared at it for a second while I worked out what it was that had caught my eye.
I reached for Carol’s notebook and leafed through until I found what I was looking for. One of the sketches. An old building. I held it up against the screen. It was the same building.
I heard Sarah gasp next to my ear and realized she had circled around the table without me being aware. I definitely needed to get some sleep.
“That’s it. This is where she was.”
“It’s not much to go on,” I said, “but maybe it’s a start.”
“We can set off first thing in the morning,” Sarah said.
I shook my head. "We’re not going anywhere.”
“What do you mean?”
“I told you, I do this for a living. And one of my rules is I work alone.”
Sarah leaned back on the edge of the worktop and gave me a sardonic smile. “That’s great. And I would be very interested to hear the rest of your rules. If I were employing you.”
I adopted a suitably chastened expression. “I didn’t mean to be a dick. But you contacted me because you were worried, right?”
She didn’t say anything; nodded briefly after a second.
“And now I’ve spoken to you and seen the house, I’m worried too. I think your instincts are dead on. Something isn’t right with this. Why would they just disappear like that, with no trace? Why wouldn’t she call you? If it was a temporary thing, they’d be back already. If it was nothing to worry about, she would have returned your calls.
“But it’s more than that. Somebody broke into the house the other night and searched the place. They weren’t as thorough as you, otherwise they would have found the notebook. But maybe they didn’t need to b
e.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe they found what they were looking for. The point is, Ca ... Rebecca has disappeared and somebody’s looking for her or her husband. I told you your instincts were right, but my instincts are usually pretty good too, and I don’t like what they’re telling me.”
Her eyes had narrowed as I started to say “Carol,” but she didn’t pick me up on it. For the time being, she was more focused on the last thing I had said.
“You mean having to drag me along would cramp your style.”
“It’s not like that,” I said. “But I don’t like the idea of bringing you along when I don’t know exactly what I’d be getting you into. Once I work out what’s going on, I’ll need your help.”
She looked at me with skepticism, but I could see she was taking it on board. After all, she had been worried enough about the men who showed up the other night to call the cops.
“So you’ve said that a couple of times—you do this for a living. You’re a bounty hunter or something?”
“Not exactly. I’m good at finding people. Yes, sometimes people pay me to go after bad guys ...”
“And sometimes you help to find people out of the goodness of your heart.”
I smiled and gave her just enough time to feel bad about the sarcastic tone before I replied.
“I just want to make sure she’s safe.”
She considered it for a moment, holding my gaze. “You promise?” she said at last. “You’ll call me as soon as you know more?”
“I’ll call you even if I don’t find out more. We’re a team on this one.”
“Even though you don’t do teams.”
“I’m fine with long-distance teamwork.”
She sighed. “All right. She’s in some kind of danger, isn’t she? I wasn’t just being paranoid.”
“I don’t think you were being paranoid.”
We drank our coffee and Sarah told me I could take the notebook with me. She had already photographed each page—the journalist showing through again. She suggested that maybe my prior knowledge of our quarry might mean the notebook would tell me something she had missed. As I was leaving, I stood at the door for a second and surveyed the street. The kids who had been playing earlier were long gone, probably fast asleep in bed by now, and the night was quiet but for the sounds of cicadas and the far away traffic noise from the parkway. No sign of any pedestrians or cars.