by M K Dymock
“Went up to Cliff’s yesterday,” Blake said as they drove to the office. His plan was to drop off William there, point him at the few reporters who’d shown up from bigger cities so Blake could have some peace. He had no intention of the mayor being there when he went to the Dawsons’ to take Keen’s laptop.
“Cliff called me about it this morning. Sad to see bad things happen to such a bright girl.”
“Apparently, she was going over some of the city’s account sheets. I wouldn’t imagine Cliff would allow her to look at anything of a private sort.”
William gave him a side-glance. “No, of course not. She was just adding up the vendor bills for the county fair last month.”
“But would those sheets be kept in the same place as anything more private?”
“What are you asking?”
“This is just me talking, William. Nobody else.”
William smiled his campaign smile, showing off the bright new white caps he’d done about a year ago. “Let’s focus on finding this girl, then we can talk about city business. It can wait.”
One thing Blake learned as a cop is things never wait. The more people look for one thing, the more they find a whole lot of other stuff no one intended. The deeper you bury secrets, the more apt they are to pop out where you don’t want them.
After dropping off the mayor, Blake knocked on the Dawsons’ front door, which no one answered. He debated waiting, but she hadn’t returned his text, and he did have a search warrant.
He pushed open a door no one had bothered to lock.
The house stayed in shadows, blinds drawn tightly. Judging by the smell, the garbage hadn’t been taken out in a while. A glance into the kitchen showed a few dishes in the sink but not enough to prove two people had been living here. He paused at the door to Keen’s room; the warrant had been specific to only her belongings and not the entire house. At this point, he only wanted one belonging—her computer.
He found her laptop tucked into a case between her bed and desk. After pulling on a few gloves, he unzipped it only to check it was there and had its battery. Blake sat at Keen’s desk and pulled open each drawer. Unlike the clean order of the room, the drawers were messy. He now knew where some of the chaos of the room had been hidden.
He’d expected to find pens and papers, but instead found items like underwear, a sports bra, and a pair of running shorts. His phone rang; Charlie called to report a few families not allowing searchers on their land based on their constitutional right to be idiots. Blake grasped the laptop with one hand as he called the office with the other. He would need another warrant. They sent the county attorney to the closest judge, who stood by waiting to sign anything necessary. Another friend of the mayor’s.
Charlie requested his presence for the difficult residents. Blake tucked the laptop into his bag for later. He spent the rest of the morning walking through the homes and yards of people who’d said no to being searched, warrants in hand. One old hippie spouted off about his First Amendment rights and Big Brother’s overreach.
“It’s your fourth,” Blake said.
“Huh?”
“It’s your Fourth Amendment you think we’re violating. Illegal search and seizure. But this isn’t illegal, we have a warrant.” While they found some questionable behavior, they didn’t discover anything related to Keen.
Back at the office and in privacy, he booted up Keen’s computer. The desktop photo was of her and Jacob standing at the edge of the Gorge where the river dropped into the canyon. Going by the boots, khaki pants, and bandana tied around her head, they’d been out hiking. Her computer desktop, much like her room had been, was organized and clean. It wasn’t until he opened a folder called “Projects” that he found the chaos. Inside was several folders, files, and images, half organized and half not. He made a cursory glance, but nothing jumped out at him.
He opened a search window and typed in terms such as “city files” and “Lost Gorge budget,” but nothing of interest came up. In the toolbar icon, a folder flashed, showing Keen had mail. He clicked on the icon.
Blake ignored the emails sent since Monday and focused on the ones received the few days before. One in particular caught his attention. On Saturday night, Keen had sent herself an email. When he clicked on it, he saw an Excel file attached to it named “GLW-Log.”
He clicked on it, but it required a passcode. He typed in his wife’s birthday and it opened. The mayor owned a company called Green Living Wellness, a company that sold herbal supplements. His own wife was a stakeholder; William made sure of that, even placing her on the board of directors.
He cussed out loud.
A ring of his phone prevented further cursing. He slammed the laptop closed.
He pushed the talk button. “What?”
Clint talked on the other end. “Mina messaged me; said she found a body on a trail in the Pines.”
“At the Pines?” Blake asked. “Where everybody’s supposed to be done looking?”
“Yep.”
“I’m coming. Text me the coordinates.” He opened the office safe and tucked the laptop inside, slamming the door with a quick turn of the lock.
36
Once the clouds lifted, a hint of snow lined the peaks. Even the lower elevations, though nothing in the region could be considered low, saw temperatures at freezing. For the first time, one could feel confident Keenley would not, could not find her way out. She would die of exposure, which was the better option. Coyotes would eventually ravage the body, carrying away all trace of her. And if by chance the body was discovered, there would be no evidence. People would wonder how she came to be in that part of the country.
The entire town showed up for the morning search. Everyone was on edge at the thought one of their own had been taken. Elizabeth and Daniel had aged in the last week—a gaunt and haggard appearance that was reflected, but to a lesser degree, by those who helped.
It was easy to put on a sympathetic smile. This would all be over soon.
It was a sign of Elizabeth’s desperation that when Gauge told her he had something to show her about Keen, she didn’t hesitate to get in a truck with him. Worst case scenario, he’d kill her. Not a thought that concerned her.
But now, in a truck sandwiched between him and his father, she had a lot more than second thoughts. The smell between the two of them left a film on her tongue that tasted a lot like whiskey and B.O. She didn’t mind the whiskey, although it had been a long time since she’d tasted it. If there was a way to get wasted by breathing in fumes, she’d open her mouth and suck it in.
“Sorry, I had to borrow my dad’s truck, and he said he was coming with it. Mine wouldn’t start,” Gauge said.
“It’s all right.”
“It better be; it’s my truck,” Ferguson said. “What a bunch of crap. You think if one of my boys was missing, they’d so much as turn over a rock.”
A rock is where they’d probably find them. “Well, considering it is my kid missing, I’m not about to complain about the amount of people.”
“I guess it’s different with girls,” he said. “You worry about them more.” Ferguson had a maddening way of swinging between jerk and almost tolerable.
Gauge shifted the stick into reverse, which forced her to push her legs over to the passenger side of the truck. Ferguson gave her a wink, and she straddled the middle again as soon as they were in first.
“What did you want to show me, Gauge?”
He gestured to the bike shoe, which now perched on his dashboard. “I found tracks like those.”
“A lot of bikers wear them.”
“But a lot of bikers don’t go where I found them. And there weren’t any bike tracks around them. You said people don’t wear those shoes when they ain’t biking.”
“No, not usually.” Not unless their bike has been stolen and dumped in a bog. “Why didn’t you tell the sheriff?”
“Because he thinks Colt had something to do with it, so I figured he might think I was
lying.”
The old truck lurched onto the highway along with several other cars heading to their assigned search places. She longed to be in each car so that no matter who found her child, she’d be with them.
“She probably just run off with some idiot she knew you wouldn’t like.” Ferguson seemed to be one of those people who needed to keep a running commentary about everything, but Elizabeth ignored him.
“She ain’t like that, Dad.” Gauge, however, apparently still cared about his father’s opinion.
“What do you know what she’s like? I got twenty bucks that says you never spoke more than three words at a time to her.”
Gauge clenched the steering wheel, and Elizabeth was close enough to feel his body tense.
“She be off with her boyfriend—”
“They broke up,” Gauge mumbled.
“If you’re going to talk, then talk loud enough to be heard. I don’t know how many times I got to say—”
“I said they broke up.”
“Oh, and you think you got a chance now. You stick with Sally’s little sister. A twelve-year-old’s more your speed anyhow.” Ferguson rolled down the window to spit.
“Don’t listen to him, Mrs. Dawson,” Gauge said. “He don’t know her.”
You shouldn’t either. “Did you and Keen get to talk much? I know she liked to talk to the customers.” That was a big whopper of a lie. Keen rung people up but with a quiet hello.
“We was friends. We went fishing, even.” He blushed a deep red. That was news to Elizabeth, and she couldn’t imagine it being true.
Elizabeth closed her eyes against the breeze. She wondered at the boy sitting next to her. A boy who said he was friends with her daughter and spent a lot of time over the summer in a store that sold things well beyond what he could afford. Yet Keen never mentioned him. Had they been at the gas station together, or had he followed Keen?
Just a few months ago, Gauge had applied to be a horseback guide for a weeklong backpacking trip Daniel was guiding. Daniel didn’t hire him, told him to stick to hauling supplies. He said, laughing about it later, that Gauge would pee his pants or pull a gun the first time a tourist tried to start a conversation with him.
The Gorge passed by them in a blur of green and yellow leaves. The storm had kicked off fall, making it so the yellow outnumbered the green. “Where we headed?”
“About twenty miles from here is where I saw the tracks.”
“Twenty miles. How would she have ended up that far away without a bike?”
“I don’t know. I just saw the tracks.”
Sandwiched between two men she knew enough to distrust was an idiotic decision. The only thing that kept Elizabeth from jumping out of the truck was the thought that if they killed her, maybe they’d bury her next to her child.
Keen wondered if today would be the day she died. Each tedious step only took her a few inches and rarely straight.
What would it be like? She would lie down to sleep and never get up. Would she finally be warm again? Did she believe in an afterlife? Her parents hadn’t raised her with a religion beyond the wilds. Maybe that was enough—she could fade into the land and become a part of it.
For someone who had traveled so much, she had rarely left the mountain’s safe embrace. The few trips to New York had been miserable, although one weekend at the ocean mesmerized her. She wanted to go back to the ocean for a chance to see a whale jump. Her roommates had talked about a school trip to Europe, but she hadn’t the inclination nor the money to go. “The world is a big place, Keen,” her mother had said. “Don’t settle for this small corner of it.”
But she loved this small corner of it and its unmeasured vastness. She loved going to a grocery store where she could run into an old teacher or a friend on a hiking trail miles from town. How could such a large place be so small? And she had her parents. She knew what it was to be loved, to be adored.
Though her mother tried to shield it from her, Keen had experienced the way her mother’s family treated Elizabeth. Her grandmother had actually said, “Oh, Elizabeth, you’re always in the way, aren’t you?” when her mother inadvertently blocked the path in the kitchen. It had been day one of a three-day visit.
Keen was twelve and she’d understood in that moment how much her mother needed to be loved, but was afraid of it all at the same time.
She took a breath and another shaky step. She stumbled into the dirt; it took a minute, but she forced herself back up. If she died today, it would be on her way home.
The storm had scared off much of the mosquito and fly population, but the smell that greeted Blake as he made his way through the thick, browning growth had drawn them back in full force. The smell had been what alerted Mina to the body. She’d followed Sol’s instructions to hunt for the trail of the woman he lost in the rain. While she was fairly sure Keen had left the mountain trails, her mentor had given her a challenge and she was eager to prove herself.
Blake knelt before the body, wanting to cover his mouth and nose against the odor, but knew it would be easier to breathe once acclimated. The legs were missing, probably carried away by coyotes. Flies worked on the remaining pieces. Long chestnut hair, unlike Keen’s, protruded from the scalp. The body lay facedown; the head twisted, nothing much remaining of the face. Blake kept his gaze from the face and focused on the scene. Disengage to do the job, as if that was possible on scenes like this. Hard to say how long the body decomposed there. More than days, but considering the fluids, less than weeks.
Little light broke through the aspen trees surrounding the site. They couldn’t tell if the woman died there or if animals had dragged her in. The body lay at the foot of a twenty-foot cliff above and 100 yards from the nearest trail. The thick growth of grasses and bushes between the top of the cliff and the trail made the trek more arduous than it should be and concealed the body well.
Clint knelt next to the body, taking measurements and photographs. State crime scene technicians had been called in, but would be a few hours. Blake made notes of the clothes, or what was left. Bright yellow windbreaker, sunglasses, pink and gray camel pack—by all rights this should be Keen. The town only had one missing woman.
Once Clint finished documenting the site, he stood next to Blake as they stared at the body. “We should know her,” Clint said.
“We probably do.” A body, and one more likely out there. “I want Sol out here before the state techs take over the site. I’d finally convinced him to go home and get some sleep; don’t know how much he got before I called him on the way out.”
“You want to see if we can find any ID without moving the body while we wait?”
Blake debated how much doing this would raise Sol’s ire at disturbing the site versus having a quick ID. “Might as well. Let’s stay where you’ve already walked.”
Both of them slipped on plastic gloves; Blake insisted his people keep a clean pair on them at all times. He squatted down and unzipped the pocket of the camel pack without moving the body. Inside was a couple of Ziploc bags with a few peanuts and raisins, a small tube of sunscreen, bug spray. Nothing identified her as anything more than prepared.
“Blake,” Clint said, “something’s underneath her.” He knelt on the other side and nudged the body over, pulling out a phone in a black case. “Don’t think animals brought the body here.”
Blake gazed up the cliff to its edge. “No, not likely the coyotes would’ve also carried in the phone.” He leaned over the body. “What kind of phone is that?”
Clint handed it over, grasping it by the edges so as to not smudge anything. “Looks like an iPhone.”
The screen didn’t light up at Blake’s touch. “I’ve got a charger in my backpack. Maybe it’s not broke so much as dead.”
Blake trampled back through the underbrush to the trail where he’d dropped his backpack on the way in. Every night he charged his phone and his portable charger since one day last year his daughter had a fever of more than 100, and Grace couldn’t g
et a hold of him. He’d been out chasing down some errant cattle on the road for a few hours and his phone died.
It took about a minute after plugging it in before the screen glowed. Blake hit the home button and smiled when the screen booted up without a password. Finally, something went his way.
The smile faded when he saw the screen’s background and knew whose phone he held.
37
Elizabeth stood ten feet away from a cattle trough, staring at empty hills buried under low clouds. The wet sagebrush gave off a mountain fragrance not unlike rosemary. A cow and her calf grazed nearby, offering a sense of peace Elizabeth wanted to scream and interrupt. Why should this cow get to keep her offspring and she lost hers?
“The tracks are over here,” Gauge called out.
He pointed at small indentations in the mud around the trough as she approached. He fingered the edges of it. “See what I mean?” he said, eyes wide with excitement.
She knelt next to him and saw a vague footprint, but not a sign from her daughter. “No.”
He held the shoe he’d taken from the store, which he set down next to the print. “See.” He pointed at a small cleft in the mud in the center of the sole made by the shoe’s clip. “It’s the same design. There were probably more prints, but they was washed away in the rain. This one is close to the trough, protected it.”
Ever since they found the bike, Elizabeth concluded that until she held her daughter, she would relinquish all hope. Daniel would wake up each day certain to find Keen; she knew that. But she couldn’t maintain that façade—the hope hurt as much as the despair.
“Maybe,” she said. But maybe you made that footprint yourself. “Even if it is the same, somebody else could’ve made it.”
“You said only people who bike wear it.”
“So somebody else biked here.”