When the Wolf Prowls

by Vanessa Prelatte

  “That’s correct,” the man replied. “I’m Luke Coalbank. Now that that’s been established, I have some questions for you. Who the hell are you, and what do you think you are doing, holding a gun on me on my own ranch? Has something happened to my family?”

  Rick indicated that the man could put his hands down and tossed his ID back. Luke Coalbank caught it easily in one hand, observing, “I’m still waiting for your answer to my questions.”

  “The answer to your first question is that I’m Special Agent Rikovsky from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. Indicating Dawn, he added, “This is Detective Cimarron from the Mountpelier Police Department.”

  “Identification?”

  Rick produced his and flashed it. Dawn followed suit.

  “Okay. That answers one of my questions.” Luke said. “What about the others? What are you doing here, and where’s my family?”

  “Before we answer those questions, you need to answer another one of mine.”

  “What question?”

  “You said that you owned this ranch. According to our information, the owner of this ranch is Benton Coalbank.”

  “Ben was my brother. He died last year. The ranch belonged to us jointly. When he died, Ben’s wife and children inherited his half. Now, I’ve answered enough of your questions. Tell me what’s going on. Where are Alison and the kids?”

  “They aren’t inside?”

  “If they were, do you think I’d be asking you?” Luke Coalbank retorted. “There’s no sign of them inside. What’s happened to them?”

  “What makes you think something has happened to them?” Rick temporized.

  “The fact that you’re here, for one. Some things I noticed inside, for another.”

  “What things?”

  “Come inside and I’ll show you.”

  But Rick shook his head. “Can’t do that until our back-up arrives. When they get here, we’ll need to go room to room and systematically clear the house. Look, you’re sure you checked the inside of the house thoroughly?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure. There’s no sign of anyone inside.”

  “Suppose you tell us about what you saw when you searched the house?”

  “For one thing, the land line in the living room is the old-fashioned type that’s hard-wired directly into the wall. That line’s been cut. For another, there are traces of what looks like dried blood in the floor grout between some of the ceramic tiles in the kitchen.”

  “What about upstairs?” Rick questioned.

  “That’s the first place I checked, even before I checked the living room and kitchen.”

  “Why? If it were me, I’d have checked downstairs first. Why did you walk upstairs before you looked around downstairs?”

  Luke paused for a beat. “I didn’t exactly walk up the stairs,” he admitted.

  “You didn’t walk up the stairs? Then how did you get up there?”

  “I climbed a tree and entered the house through an upstairs window,” Luke said.

  “Why in the world did you do that?”

  “I was worried that there was something wrong, even before I got here.”

  Rick exchanged a glance with Dawn.

  “Tell us about it,” Dawn said. “Why were you worried about your family even before you arrived here?”

  “I’ve been deployed overseas for the last eight months, but I kept in touch with Alison and the kids pretty religiously,” Luke began. “Mainly by snail mail, for security reasons. I got letters from all three of them – Alison and the two kids, Sherri and Danny – pretty regularly. Then about four weeks ago, I realized that I hadn’t heard from them for a while. They hadn’t answered any of my letters. I was off field rotation for a few days, and I had access to a telephone where I could place international calls. I don’t usually do so, and I hate the expense, but I called them. Allison picked up the phone and told me how glad she was to hear from me. I told her I’d been worried because I hadn’t received any letters recently. She paused for a minute, then told me that the letters must have gotten lost in the mail. She’d make sure that she and the kids wrote to me soon.

  “I asked to talk to Danny and Sherri, but she said they had gone fishing down at Sedgemoor Creek. We exchanged a few more words, and then I hung up.

  “Shortly after that, the letters started coming again. First one from Allison. Then one from Sherri. Both of them were pretty brief, but nothing about them raised any alarm bells. But then the one from Danny came. After I read it, I knew immediately that something was wrong, and I had to get back home to them. Fast.”

  “What was in the letter?” Rick asked. “Do you still have it?”

  Wordlessly, Luke reached into a pocket, pulled out a folded slip of paper, and handed it to Rick. Rick accepted it and read Danny Coalbank’s letter:

  Dear Uncle Luke,

  It’s almost the end of this school year. Soon – summer! When you come home, hanging out plus maybe tubing along the river is the plan.

  Gotta go now,

  Daniel

  “It’s kind of a strange letter, but I don’t see anything in it to cause any alarm,” Rick said.

  “It’s there,” Luke responded. “First, the signature. My nephew has always gone by Danny. He’s never signed a letter Daniel in his life. As for what alarmed me in the content of the letter itself, you wouldn’t see it. No one would except for Danny and me. Because it’s in code.”

  “Code? Are you serious?”

  “Dead serious. Danny has always been fascinated by codes, and he and I mess around with them sometimes when we write back and forth.”

  “How does it work?”

  “The code is based on the date. Danny wrote it on the fifteenth of the month. That means you can figure out the coded message by transcribing every fifteenth letter in the message. Go ahead – count the letters. Not in the greeting or the closing – just the three sentences in the body.”

  Rick obliged. “Okay – I get it. It spells out danger.”

  “Yeah, it does. I figured Danny was sending me a signal. They were in danger, and they needed help. I needed to get home ASAP. I went to my colonel, laid the whole thing out, and requested emergency leave. To his credit, he didn’t give me any grief. Just granted me leave right away.

  “My unit was stationed in … well, suffice it to say that my communications options were limited right then. It took me a couple of days to make it to a point where I could access any kind of modern communications. The first thing I did was to try and contact my family by email. But all the emails bounced. I tried them on their land line next. All I got was one of those fast busy signals you get when something is wrong with the line. Next, I tried to call one of our neighbors, Harlan Appledore. He lives on a ranch about seven miles away from ours. I got a message that the number had been disconnected. After that, I put in a call to the County Sheriff, Lyman Tankerton. Tank’s a good man. I’ve known him pretty much all of my life. But he wasn’t there; he was away on vacation. I talked to the Deputy Sheriff, a green kid who’s so wet behind the ears that you could turn him upside down and use him for a mop. I explained my concerns and asked him to get in touch with Harlan and have him check on Alison and the kids. You could have knocked me over with a feather when he told me that Harlan was dead. He was killed in an accident a few weeks back.

  “But the Deputy Sheriff told me there was no need to worry. He’d actually seen and spoken with Alison when she’d been in town grocery shopping just the day before. When I asked him about Danny and Sherri, he said that Danny wasn’t with Alison, but her new boyfriend was with them, and he was holding Sherri. She was all snuggled up to the boyfriend, as a matter of fact. There was no sign that anything was wrong.

  “I realized that I wasn’t going to get any help from the Deputy Sheriff. He was convinced I was making a mountain out of a molehill. Danny was just joking around with me, he said.”

  “Did you consider that possibility?”

  “Yeah, I did. But my instincts were telli
ng me to follow it up and get back here myself. So I wrote back to Danny, again in code, and let him know I was on my way.”

  “Back up for a minute. The Deputy Sheriff said that Alison had her boyfriend with her. Did you know about this new man in her life?”

  “Yeah. She’d mentioned him in her letters once or twice, right after Christmas. His name is Marc Foxe. They had attended the same university, and for a while, they had been involved in a pretty serious relationship. But that was all over a long time ago. Alison insisted that he was just a friend now, and it had been very sweet of him to visit her and offer her some support.”

  “Did she mention if he was staying with them at the house?”

  “She said he was staying at a hotel in Rye. I’d have had a problem with it if she had let him stay at the house. Alison told me he’d put out a few feelers about them giving their relationship another go, but she’d told him that friendship was the only thing in the cards. She was still grieving for Ben, and wasn’t ready for anything else.”

  “How did he take it?”

  “Graciously, according to Alison. Anyway, to get back to my own story: I calculated that it would take me about a week to get home. That would have put me here next Monday. That’s what I indicated to Danny when I sent him the coded message. But I got lucky. I managed to snag a ride from a buddy in the Air Force back to the States a couple of days earlier than I expected. I arrived in New York late last night, booked an early morning flight to Denver, then hopped on a puddle jumper down to Pueblo. A buddy of mine from my unit lives in Pueblo and said I could borrow his jeep. I got some transpo from the Pueblo airport, picked up his jeep, and drove here as quickly as possible.

  “I got here just before ten o’clock. There’s a path through the trees on the other side of the house that’s just wide enough for a jeep to pass, so I took that way. I parked the jeep out of sight and walked up to the house.

  “There’s a tree growing right outside the window of my bedroom. I came and went that way times without count when I was a kid. Like I said before, I climbed up the tree and let myself in through my bedroom window. After I was inside, I went over to Danny’s room. I expected to find Danny there. I wanted to talk to him alone before I did anything else. But he wasn’t in his room, and that made me even more uneasy.”

  “Why? Why did you expect to find Danny in his room?”

  “Because Danny and Sherri don’t go to regular school; they’re enrolled in Colorado’s online school program. My sister-in-law is pretty easy-going, but she does make them adhere to a schedule of some sorts. From ten to twelve, they are expected to be in their rooms doing their assignments. Danny wasn’t in his room. On top of that, the window in his bedroom had been boarded up. As soon as I saw that, I knew I was right. Something was seriously wrong. That’s when I drew my gun.

  “When I left Danny’s room, I noticed that a hinge had been installed on the reverse side of the door. A padlock was hanging from it. I checked all the other rooms and discovered that there was a padlock on Sherri’s door as well.

  “In the master bedroom, the shotgun Ben always kept under the bed was missing, and all of his clothes had been removed. I knew Alison hadn’t done it. She’d told me she wasn’t ready yet. And when she did decide to sort through Ben’s things, she wanted me there with her.

  “After that, I went downstairs. That’s when I found that the land line had been cut, and realized that something bad had gone down in the kitchen.”

  He stopped abruptly and looked at Dawn and Rick grimly. “I’ve answered all of your questions, and I’m aware that you still haven’t answered the two most important of mine. One: Where is my family? Two: What business brought a CBI agent and a detective from the Mountpelier Police Department here with their weapons drawn? Answer me, damn it!”

  Rick glanced at Dawn and nodded.

  Dawn said, “We don’t know the whereabouts of your niece and nephew, Luke. But your sister-in-law is in a hospital up in Mountpelier.”

  “Alison’s in a hospital hundreds of miles from here?” Rick exclaimed. “What was she doing in Mountpelier? How badly is she hurt?”

  “She was hurt pretty badly, I’m afraid,” Dawn said gently. “She’s been in a coma for the last few days.”

  “Was it a car accident?”

  “No.”

  After Dawn gave him a brief outline of the case, Luke said ominously, “There was a dead woman in the trunk with her. I’m not sure what to make of that.” Studying their faces, he added, “Something tells me that you two know exactly what to make of it.”

  “Not exactly, no. We have a good idea, but we’re not at liberty to reveal the details of an ongoing case.”

  “I have a right to know. Especially since two of those details are my niece and my nephew.”

  “I sympathize, and we’ll keep you in the loop regarding anything we turn up about their whereabouts.”

  “That’s not good enough. Look, while you wait for your back-up, I’m going to continue my search, see if I can find any trace of the kids.”

  “I thought you said you looked everywhere,” Rick said sharply.

  “I haven’t checked the garage or the storm cellar yet,” Luke admitted. “That’s where I was headed when you two showed up.”

  “I’m afraid we can’t let you do that,” Dawn responded.

  “You planning on stopping me? You’ll have to shoot me, then. Those kids could be locked up in either location. I’m going to check both places. If you want to come with me, fine. But I am going to check.”

  Luke spun around and walked determinedly toward the garage. Rick exchanged a glance with Dawn and followed. Finding the kids was a priority. Between them, they could clear the two areas without back -up. And Luke was right. With two missing kids involved, time was of the essence.

  Luke, meanwhile, had reached the garage door and opened it. Inside sat a white four-door sedan.

  “That’s Alison’s car,” Luke said softly.

  “Stand back,” Rick ordered. “Detective Cimarron and I need to handle this.”

  Rick and Dawn scanned the interior of the car. Finding it to be empty, Rick tested the driver’s side door. It was unlocked, so Rick had Luke pull the trunk release while he and Dawn, guns drawn, covered it.

  Dawn had braced herself for the unpleasant possibility that they might find the bodies of Danny and Sherri Coalbank inside, and so was relieved to find nothing there but a spare tire, a car jack, and an emergency kit.

  They checked under the hood next.

  “Distributor’s been removed,” Rick observed.

  Luke, meanwhile was letting his gaze wander around the garage. Suddenly, his eyes widened.

  “You notice something that shouldn’t be there?” Dawn inquired.

  “No. Something that should be there, but isn’t. The gun cabinet. It’s empty, and it shouldn’t be. Ben and I kept some hunting rifles and a couple of handguns locked up inside. Bastard must have removed the weapons and hidden them where Danny couldn’t find them.”

  “Danny knows how to handle guns?”

  “Yeah. Ben and I taught him. He knows his way around them. But that’s not important now. What’s important is finding him and Sherri.”

  Luke spun on his heel and was out of the garage in a flash, sprinting toward the storm cellar at the rear of the house. Rick and Dawn, racing after him, saw him stop short. Catching up with Luke, all three of them stared at a hole in the ground not far from the double doors that led to the cellar.

  “I’ll be damned,” Luke said softly.

  “I take it that hole doesn’t belong there?” said Rick.

  “No. It does not. Neither does that.” Luke pointed to the padlock on the cellar doors.

  “Got any bolt cutters?” Rick asked.

  “Yeah. In the garage.”

  “I’ll get them,” Dawn offered.

  “They’re on a shelf to the left with all the gardening stuff, just inside the door,” Luke responded.

  When Dawn r
eturned with the bolt cutters, Luke snipped off the lock and flung the double doors that led to the cellar wide. He started down the steps, but Rick ordered Luke to step aside.

  Signaling to Dawn, Rick took the lead, and together, guns drawn, they descended the steps.

  Luke waited only seconds before calling urgently, “The kids. Are they there?”

  “No,” Rick answered him. “They’re not here.”

  “I’m coming down,” Luke answered. When he reached the bottom of the steps, Luke scrutinized the storm cellar. He contemplated the empty food and water containers briefly before shifting his gaze to the rear and side walls of the cellar. With a muttered exclamation, he shoved past Dawn and Rick and moved aside an old desk that was resting at an odd angle against the right-hand wall. A moment later, all three of them were on their hands and knees, examining the tunnel.

  “Danny,” Luke said. There was both pride and satisfaction in his voice. “He got out, and he’s making a break for it.”

  “You’re sure about that?” Rick wanted to know.

  “I’d bet my bottom dollar on it. And I’ll tell you another thing. He’s got Sherri with him.”

  “How do you know that?” Dawn asked.

  Luke reached into the tunnel with one hand. When he withdrew it, he was holding a bright turquoise hair tie. “That’s Sherri’s,” he said. “It must have fallen off when she crawled through the tunnel.”

  With a final look around the cellar, the three of them made their way back to the exit. At the foot of the steps, Rick said to Luke, “Look, there’s not much more you can do around here. The best thing for you to do now is to drive up to Mountpelier and see what you can do to help your sister-in-law.”

  But Luke was adamant. “No. I’m not leaving here,” he replied. “Not until I’ve found Danny and Sherri.”

  Chapter 39

  The back-up units from the Colorado State Patrol arrived just as Dawn, Rick, and Luke were emerging from the storm cellar. The State Patrol officers coordinated with Dawn and Rick to clear the interior of the ranch house. After it had been cleared, Rick put a call in for a CSU team and then allowed Luke back into the house.