“Yes, it’s true,” Drew said. “He called me—”
“Why wasn’t I informed immediately?”
“Clay didn’t want—”
“I don’t give a damn what Clay thinks he wants,” Blackjack said. “I’ll be there in the morning.”
In the background, Drew could hear Blackjack’s wife Ren asking for the phone. A moment later he heard her voice.
“Drew? Is Clay all right?”
“He’s fine, Mrs. Blackthorne.” He was surprised that she sounded so genuinely concerned. Clay was Blackjack’s son, not hers.
“What about that poor young woman’s family?” Ren asked. “What’s being done for them?”
“I don’t know,” Drew admitted. He hadn’t even thought about the girl’s family.
“Would you please find out what you can?” Ren said. “I’d like to visit them tomorrow.”
“You’re coming here?”
“Of course we’re coming,” Ren said.
A moment later, Blackjack was on the phone again. “You tell that son of mine I’ll have him out of there by morning.”
“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” Drew reminded him.
“I don’t give a damn what day it is,” Blackjack said. “Clay will be out of jail tomorrow morning or I’ll know the reason why.”
Drew found himself holding a phone that had been disconnected. He set it down quietly.
He’d never known his father. The man had sired him and moved on. He wasn’t sure he envied Clay his father. His cousin had been forced to fight all his life to be his own man. Blackjack had stepped right in to solve his son’s problems without giving Clay the opportunity to solve them on his own. Drew would have hated that sort of interference in his life.
That was simply another example of how hard it was to be a parent. There were a thousand things you needed to learn. When to step in and when to step away. When help was wanted and appreciated and when it would only be resented. Parenting was a quagmire. Drew couldn’t understand why so many people stepped into it. Maybe it was like quicksand. It didn’t look as dangerous as it was.
Sarah seemed to have a handle on it. As much as any parent could.
Which brought him full circle to the decision about whether or not to go back out into the cold to look for a body on Bear Island.
“Hell,” Drew muttered. Someone had been out on Bear Island the same night a young woman was murdered. He owed it to Clay, and to himself, to at least check it out.
He headed into the kitchen, set his glass on the counter and grabbed his coat from the rack on his way back to the garage. He opened two of the four garage doors, drove his pickup out and backed it up to hitch it to the boat trailer.
Forgotten Valley bordered the confluence of the Gros Ventre River with a tributary of the Snake that was navigable. Drew simply drove to the ramp built on his property and launched the fishing boat. He’d done enough adventuring on the river with Clay when he was younger that he knew where he was going. The small boat engine was surprisingly quiet as he headed upstream in the moonlight.
Few of the homes that bordered the river were lit. Drew knew it was more a case of people not being in residence than of people being asleep. It was a sad truth that most of those who could afford to own homes in Jackson Hole didn’t live in them year-round.
Drew was as guilty as the rest, even though he believed that, with its majestic Grand Tetons, its forests of pine and spruce and aspen, and its abundance of wildlife, Jackson Hole was one of the most beautiful places in the world to live.
It was also the kind of place that gave you too much time alone with your thoughts.
Drew still hadn’t figured out what to do with the rest of his life. He wasn’t sorry to be wealthy, but it gave him almost too many options. He had no interest in doubling or tripling his money. He had no interest in a life of leisure. He wanted to do work that was satisfying and fulfilling and made the world a better place. Being a lawyer had filled that role until now.
But he wasn’t sure he wanted to go back to the cutthroat world of large law firm practice. There had to be something else that he would enjoy as much—or more. He just hadn’t found it yet.
Drew saw the outlines of Bear Island ahead on his left and wondered where he ought to go ashore. He’d kept an eye out, but so far he hadn’t seen anyone else crazy enough to be on the river at this hour of the night, not even the police.
He looked for some sign of life in the houses that were connected to the island, and saw lights on in the one where the murder had occurred earlier in the evening. He guessed the police were still working the scene. The last thing he wanted to do was get caught trespassing.
Drew heard splashing ahead and wondered if he was going to have to deal with a moose that had decided to swim the river. The dopey-looking animals, which could weigh as much as a thousand pounds, were surprisingly aggressive. Or maybe an elk had wandered from the reserve on the north end of town and decided to take a moonlight swim.
Drew was smiling at the image he’d conjured when he heard an honest-to-God shout for help. A female shout for help. He turned up the power on the tiny boat engine as far as it would go and raced toward the sound.
All he could think was that the bad guys needed to dispose of another female. The one female he knew they had was Kate Grayhawk.
“I’m coming, Kate!” he shouted. “Hold on!”
“I’m drowning,” he heard in the distance. “Heeelllp!”
As he rounded a bend in the river, Drew saw someone splashing in the water not more than twenty feet from shore. As he headed in the girl’s direction, he saw her head slip beneath the surface. “Hey!” he shouted. “I’m here!”
He saw the head bob up again and wasn’t sure whether she’d heard him or not. He brought the aluminum boat as close to her as he could get, then leaned over and caught hold of her shirt.
Wet hair covered her face, and he couldn’t see who it was he’d dragged over the edge of the boat and into his arms. “Kate?” he said anxiously, shoving her hair back. “Is it you?”
Then the moonlight hit the girl’s face, and he recognized her. “Brooke? What the hell are you doing out here?”
“Nate,” she gasped. “And Ryan. Did you see them?”
“They’re in the water, too?” he asked, searching the river in both directions and then the shoreline.
“Our canoe sank,” she said, her teeth chattering. “Nate and Ryan were swimming ahead of me.”
“I don’t see them. We’d better call for help.” He reached into his coat and realized he’d been in such a hurry, he hadn’t brought his cell phone. He started to swear, remembered she was only fifteen, and bit back the profanity. He grabbed an old wool picnic blanket in the stern and wrapped it around the shivering girl.
“Do you think they made it to shore?” she asked.
“We’ll have to find that out after I get you someplace where you can get warm,” Drew said, turning the boat toward the opposite shore, where there were homes with a phone.
“No!” she said grabbing his arm. “We have to go look for them. They’ll be scared. Nate might go back into the water looking for me. He’ll freeze and drown.”
Drew hesitated only a moment before he turned the boat back around and grounded it against the shoreline. He jumped out and tied it off. “You stay here,” he said. “I’ll take a quick look around. If I don’t see them, we’re outta here.”
“I’m coming,” Brooke said, clambering over the side of the boat onto the island.
“No, you’ll be—”
“I’ll be warmer moving around than sitting here in the cold,” she said.
She was right, and if he had an eye on her, he could make sure nothing bad happened to her. “Let’s go,” he said. “Stay with me.”
They were already deep in the underbrush before he realized he hadn’t brought a flashlight. “I thought we’d have more light,” he muttered.
“That’s why we brought flashlights,” Brooke said.
“You
r brothers have flashlights?”
“If Ryan didn’t lose them in the water.”
Drew peered ahead through the tangled undergrowth, hoping to see a beam of light. “We’ll never find them in this stuff.”
“I told them to head for the houses on the other side of the island,” Brooke said.
“I thought you said Nate would head back into the water.”
“If he didn’t come back looking for me,” Brooke said somberly, “it’s because he couldn’t.”
Drew remembered the man with the flashlight Clay had seen earlier that night on the island. He didn’t want to think about what might have happened to the two boys, assuming they’d actually made it to shore. “Can you walk any faster?”
“Walk as fast as you want,” Brooke said. “I’ll keep up.”
Drew abruptly put a hand out to stop her, and said, “Shh.” He pointed in the direction of a bobbing red light. “Someone’s coming.”
He heard Brooke draw breath to shout and clamped a hand over her mouth. In her ear he whispered, “Wait until we see who it is.”
She looked up at him with frightened eyes, the whites reflecting in the moonlight. She nodded, and he let her go.
Drew stood, holding his breath, and watched as a man with a red-beamed flashlight marched two persons, one tall, one short, ahead of him back toward the water.
“It’s—” Brooke began.
Drew clamped a hand across Brooke’s mouth again as he recognized her two brothers in the faint red glow. He strained to see who was holding the light, but to no avail. What he did see was the outline of a handgun.
“…right back into the water,” a male voice said.
Drew realized that whoever had caught the two boys was marching them right back to the river—to drown them. He tried to think of a way he could save them without putting Brooke at risk. The underbrush would make a lot of noise if he tried to intercept them. But what other choice did he have?
“Lie down,” he told Brooke. “I want you out of the line of fire if he starts shooting.”
“But—”
“Do it!”
As soon as she was down, he shouted, “Police! Drop your gun! We have you surrounded.”
As soon as he said it, he realized how much it sounded like a bad TV script, but to his amazement, it had the exact effect he’d hoped it would. The man with the flashlight turned toward the sound of his voice, and with the light off of them, he heard the two boys take off running.
Unfortunately, the light found him, and the instant the man realized Drew wasn’t the police, and that the kids had taken off running, he made a growling sound and shot at Drew.
Drew had anticipated the shot, and the bullet that would have hit him in the heart only tugged at his sleeve as he dove to the ground. Drew wondered if the noise of the shot had carried to the police still in the house, or whether the wind had carried it away or the noise of the river had drowned it out.
An instant later the flashlight went out and Drew heard the sound of someone running back toward the houses on shore.
Drew wanted very badly to go after him, but Brooke grabbed at his ankle and cried, “Don’t leave me!”
As he turned to help her up, he heard Nate calling, “Is that you, Brooke?”
“Yes, it’s me!” she called back. “Are you and Ryan okay?”
Drew watched as the siblings fell into each other’s arms, Ryan and Brooke crying, Nate trying very hard not to cry.
“We need to get the hell out of here,” Drew said. “Before that guy comes back with help.”
“We can’t leave,” Nate said. “They’ll move Dad if we do.”
“What?” Drew said.
“When Ryan and I came ashore, we saw a light in the brush ahead of us. We walked in that direction and that’s when we saw them. They were digging up a body.”
“ Theywere digging?” Drew said. “That guy is going for help. Let’s—”
“How do you know it’s Daddy they were digging up?” Brooke interrupted.
“I saw his shirt in the light. That blue-and-white-
and-green plaid one he was wearing the day he disappeared,” Nate said.
Brooke turned to Drew and said, “We can’t leave, Drew. If that is our dad, we have to—”
“I’m sorry if that was your dad they were digging up, Brooke, but those guys mean business. We need to get out of here now, while we still can. They’re not going to want witnesses.”
“We’re not going,” she said, her teeth chattering from fear as much as the cold, Drew believed. She turned to Nate and said, “Do you think you could find your way back to…there?”
“Sure. Let’s go.”
Drew watched as Sarah’s children took off in the same direction the man with the gun had taken. They were holding hands to stay together in the dark, single-minded in the pursuit of their father’s corpse.
“Sonofabitch,” Drew muttered as he hurried after them. He understood why Sarah’s children were determined to go on. He just hoped like hell he could protect them from whatever danger lay ahead.
Sarah didn’t know what woke her. Some premonition? Mother’s intuition? She sat up with a start, knowing something was wrong. She eased open the drawer in the chest beside her bed where she kept her Glock and slowly chambered a round. Then she rose soundlessly from the bed and headed on tiptoe down the hall.
She had kept night-lights in plugs around the house since Ryan was a baby, so she could see without turning on an overhead light. There was also a surprising amount of moonlight.
She reached the boys’ room first, eased the open door wide—and gasped when she saw the two empty beds.
She whirled and hurried down the hall to Brooke’s room. She shoved open her stepdaughter’s door to discover her bed not only empty, but unslept-in.
It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out where her children had gone. Both Nate and Brooke had overheard her discussion with Drew about the possibility of their father being buried on Bear Island. What she couldn’t understand was why they would have taken Ryan with them. He was just a baby!
Sarah’s heart leapt to her throat when she realized her children would probably attempt to reach the island from the river. Ryan had only learned to swim late last summer. Surely Nate and Brooke wouldn’t put him in a boat without a life jacket!
And where were they going to find a boat to get them to the island? Sarah tried to think of anyone her children knew who might have a canoe or a fishing boat or a raft, but couldn’t think of anyone who wasn’t a seasonal resident.
Maybe they hadn’t been daring enough to borrow—or steal—a boat. Then she thought of Nate’s recent theft of antlers from the town square. He was certainly bold enough to do something as stupid as this.
Sarah felt her cheeks grow hot, as the blood rushed to her face. She was furiously angry with her children. And terrified by the possibility of what might happen to them alone on the river at night.
She’d slept in her long johns, and she hurried back to her bedroom to pull on jeans, a wool sweater and hiking boots. She debated whether to call on one or more of her fellow officers to help her find her children and then realized Nate would certainly end up in trouble with the juvenile authorities if he had indeed “borrowed” someone’s boat without asking.
Nate had spent enough time with friends rafting down the Snake during the summer to be good on the water, and Brooke swam like a fish. But the water would be frigid. If they had an accident…
As Sarah gunned the engine on her Chevy Tahoe, she remembered that Drew had said he would be going to the island tonight. She pulled out her cell phone and called his home number. And got his answering machine.
“This is Sarah. If you’re there, Drew, please pick up. My kids are missing. I think they’ve gone to Bear Island. If you get this message, call me.”
She didn’t have Drew’s cell phone number and she wasn’t sure how she could get it. She hoped that the reason he hadn’t answered his phone was th
at he had, in fact, gone to the island, and that if her kids showed up there, he would take good care of them and make sure they got home all right.
Which presumed her kids would run into Drew, and not someone bent on doing bad things.
Sarah glanced down the street to where the pickup had been parked earlier that night. It was gone. She swore under her breath as she headed straight to the house where the murder had occurred.
Police had “frozen” the scene, preserving it until the arrival of special agents from the Wyoming DCI in Cheyenne. Sarah drove up to the house and parked but didn’t join the cluster of deputies outside. She took her heavy-duty lantern from the Tahoe, made sure her Glock was loaded and walked around the house toward the footbridge that led onto Bear Island.
The area of the island closest to the houses had been cleared as a picnic site, but Sarah walked past it and onto the part of the island that had been left as natural habitat. There were no paths here, and the footing was uneven and treacherous.
She cursed when she caught her foot on a root and fell onto her hands and knees. The lantern tumbled out of her hand and the light went out. She hadn’t realized how the trees overhead would block out the moonlight. She groped around with her gloved hands in the area where she thought the lantern had gone when it flew out of her grasp, but all she felt was frozen marsh.
“Damn, damn, damn!” she muttered. She stood up and kicked the underbrush with her boot, but no luck. Sarah was debating whether to go back to her Tahoe for a flashlight when she heard an echo of sound running downwind. A gunshot?
Sarah froze. She looked around, wondering if the police at the house had heard the shot, but realized the wind had carried most of the sound in the opposite direction.
She pulled her portable radio from the pocket of her coat and said to the dispatcher, “Shots fired. Officer needs assistance. Bear Island—the actual island. Bring lights. It’s dark as hell out here. And hurry!”
She wanted to run, but she didn’t have enough light to see where to put her feet. She retrieved her Glock, made sure a round was chambered and began moving through the tangled growth as quickly as she could. Her eyes were intent, the eyes of a predator.
The Rivals Page 19