Gone Missing: A gripping crime thriller that will have you hooked

by T. J. Brearton

  She loved it.

  Katie headed up the ridge then started down through a thick carpet of berry shrubs. She could no longer see the cabin now.

  Whose cabin was it?

  If it was a decommissioned ranger station, there would have been signs. Some documentation, something. In case a person just like her found themselves stranded and lucked upon it. The cabin had to be a privately owned place.

  She knew of a few people who owned vast tracts of wilderness, even whole mountains.

  Hefting the hatchet, she continued to descend, thinking about her hike up Dix. Thinking about her life before David.

  When she met him he’d been coming to the end of a career that’d never quite gotten off the ground. In a dimly lit bar, the profile of him curled over the piano, she’d seen it in the roll of his shoulders, heard it in the notes he played – he’d been at the end of something, and so had she; both of them ready for a change, and she’d chosen him. Picked him out – picked him up, as it were – and the rest was history.

  She wished she could talk to him.

  The thing she missed about him the most surprised her. She no longer expected his rescue. She didn’t need him to beat the shit out of Carson.

  She missed talking with him.

  It was one of the best parts of their relationship – they communicated. They helped each other out. There was a difference between that and trying to fix the other person’s problems. Support was not about taking over. She missed his support.

  Katie ignored the tears that fell as she curved back toward the drop, and Carson.

  This was going to work.

  Chapter Twenty

  Agent Paulson was holding the phone when it rang. He handed it to Calumet.

  “Hello?”

  Cross could hear the tinny voice on the other end but not make out the words. The voice fell silent and Calumet looked at his wife. After a moment he said, “Okay.”

  Calumet knelt beside the coffee table. He took the pen and paper and wrote down the account numbers as the kidnapper relayed them, repeating them back to the kidnapper in groups of three. Calumet didn’t need to do this, but it probably helped him cope.

  Finished, he stood up, glanced at Agent Sair, and said into the phone, “I need proof of life. The picture isn’t enough. I need to know that Katie is still okay.”

  The voice on the phone grew louder, like the kidnapper was upset. Calumet started pacing around the room.

  Cross looked at David, tried to read the man’s expression. There was a lot going on in David’s mind, Cross thought, and Katie’s husband felt helpless. But there was something else. Cross wanted to dig deeper on it when the time was right. Those subtle tensions between David and Katie’s parents.

  “Okay,” Calumet said. “But please, listen. This money is in my name, and my wife’s name. To authorize this amount we have to go to the bank, in person. We both have to sign a—”

  The voice emanating from Calumet’s phone crackled with anger.

  “I understand…” Calumet made gestures in the air. “I understand, but—”

  “What does he want?” Sybil asked.

  Calumet fell silent, clenching his jaw. He stared off into the distance, then his gaze wandered to Cross.

  “Please,” Calumet said. “Please don’t hurt her. Don’t hurt my baby girl…”

  He seemed to wait for a response, then hung up the phone.

  Paulson took the phone from Calumet and hustled it to the dining room, like it was a ticking bomb. The agent plugged it into his system.

  Sybil rose and went to her husband. “They want more, don’t they?”

  “Twenty million. Ten in each account.”

  The room was dead quiet.

  “I said I’d pay it.” Calumet kept looking at Cross. “How could I say no?”

  Sybil drew near him, but Cross thought she looked stiff. “We can’t. We don’t have it.”

  Calumet glared at her, his composure deteriorating. Cross had wondered when the cool, soft-spoken man was going to break down. This was it.

  “Of course we have it. This is Katie.”

  “Okay,” Sybil said, licking her lips. “We have it, but it’s not liquid. We have almost no equitable securities.”

  “Then we’ll liquidize all deposits, stocks, and shares. I don’t care about any hits on the open market.”

  Katie’s parents stood in the center of the room, staring into each other’s eyes. Then Sybil looked around at the people watching. “Will you excuse us, please?”

  Paulson called out from the other room. “We got it! It’s under Verizon.” He stepped into the doorway, visibly excited. “That means Tracfone.”

  “Let’s go to work.” Sair followed Paulson back into the dining room.

  The attention off them, the Calumets slipped away upstairs.

  Cross was bewildered. The whole thing was messier than he’d expected. He joined the feds and Kim Yom in the dining room along with Bouchard, Gates, and David. Everyone stood; no one sat down at the expensive table. They listened as Yom played back the recorded conversation.

  The kidnapper relayed the two account numbers. Calumet asked for the proof of life.

  “Oh big talk,” the voice said. “You got the feds there now, I bet. Huh? You want to get your daughter killed!? I deal with you. Only with you, Daddy. For the inconvenience, now it’s 20 million.”

  Calumet agreed then explained how it was going to take some time.

  “You got twenty-four hours,” the kidnapper said with mounting hostility. “Do you hear me? I don’t care if you have to move heaven and earth.”

  “I understand… I understand, but—”

  “This is very simple. I know you’ve got the money. You move those numbers. That’s all it is, numbers. You have them moved from A to B. They show up in B within twenty-four hours or my guy will fucking kill her.”

  Agent Sair leaned over Paulson, who was in front of a large screen showing voice analysis in a spiky graph. “It’s a bluff.”

  “Please,” Calumet said on the recording. “Please don’t hurt her. Don’t hurt my baby girl…”

  The call ended.

  “It’s a bluff,” Sair repeated, straightening. “He’s going to risk $20 million over some arbitrary time constraint? He’ll go longer. They always go longer. They just want to keep the pressure on.”

  “You’ve done this a lot?” Cross asked.

  Sair gave him a side glance. “A couple times.” He pointed to the voice graph, a jagged line with jaunty peaks. “Look at his stress. Look at when he says, ‘That’s all it is, numbers.’ He’s not confident. He knows it might take longer.” Sair touched Paulson – who had moved to a different but connected computer – on the shoulder. “Where are we on the bank numbers?”

  “Hold on, almost done.”

  Agent Paulson finished tapping the keys. Each account number was broken into four groups of digits and beneath each group was a blank field. The other cops watched a beach ball icon twirl on the screen.

  Then the first field began sorting through a series of possible alphanumeric characters, so fast that the characters seemed to blur together. The first field locked in a series of characters, then the second, third, and fourth. Same for the other account number; now each account number had an accompanying code.

  “What’s that?” Cross asked.

  “Nation codes. That just told us the bank is in Switzerland.”

  “That’s good,” Sair said.

  “How is that good?” Cross glanced at his supervisors, hoping he wasn’t out of line. But Bouchard and Gates seemed just as interested.

  “You hear about the Swiss Federal Banking Commission not divulging any accountholder information,” Sair said, “but there is international mutual assistance in criminal matters. Kidnapping is just as much a crime in Switzerland as it is in the US. They’ll cooperate. If you’ll excuse me, I need to make a call.”

  Sair didn’t move. After a moment it was clear he expected the rest
of them to leave.

  Cross led them out, including Yom. Only Paulson remained in the dining room with Sair, who put a phone to his ear and shut the door.

  “What’s that all about?” Dana Gates asked when they were back by the couches.

  “I don’t know,” Bouchard said.

  “He’s calling his supervisor to say it’s real,” Cross said. They all gave him a look. “I was reading about this last night before I went to bed.”

  Well, three Scotches and I passed out, but close enough.

  “There’s been a lot of virtual kidnapping. People call you up, armed with info they’ve got on your kid from social media, and demand you send them money. Get the police involved, they say they’ll kill them.”

  “She’s gone,” David said. “We have witnesses, you found the minivan…”

  “I know. They’re just being thorough. This is good for us. His supervisor might reinforce us with more help.”

  David didn’t seem so optimistic. “How long will it take to get the information on the Swiss accounts? So, what, they find out it’s this Vickers guy, they freeze the accounts, any assets, he doesn’t get the money? That doesn’t help Katie.”

  “They’ll let the money transfer happen. They’ll freeze the accounts afterwards.”

  “There are people you can hire,” David said. “People just waiting in Switzerland to work with a criminal who wants to set up an account. It won’t be in the abductors’ names. It’ll be some third party.”

  Katie’s husband sounded like he’d been doing some research of his own. Cross wished he could be more comforting.

  He also wanted to get back to Anderton Correctional. He needed to check in with Brit Silas, too, and find out what else was recovered from the minivan.

  “It’s all a timing thing,” Cross said weakly.

  “Yeah, well, while they try to get it right, Katie is out there.” David went out the back door, presumably to have a cigarette.

  Gates wanted to check in with Silas and the minivan. She stepped out the front, dialing her cellular.

  Bouchard put a hand on Cross’s shoulder. “So far so good.”

  “Is it? This is nuts. I’ve never worked with the feds before.”

  Bouchard glanced at the closed dining room door. “You’ll get used to it.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “Katie, thank God.”

  Carson coughed and spat up blood.

  One of his legs was twisted so bad there was a bulge in the leg of his pants where there shouldn’t have been, soaked red. Probably the bone had broken through the skin. The other leg was folded at a wrong angle, too. Carson looked a bit like a marionette dropped by the puppet master.

  He reached a clawed hand toward her. His dark eyes were shining with emotions she’d never expected to see. He was completely helpless, and he knew it.

  “Katie. Oh, Katie, I’m so fucked.”

  She moved toward him with the hatchet.

  The GPS was on the other side of Carson. The way the rocks and boulders were arranged, she needed to step beside Carson to get to the GPS.

  “Don’t move.”

  She crawled around him, holding the hatchet up, ready to hack at him.

  Her wounds ached as she stretched for the GPS, out of reach. She had to let go of the hatchet and use her good hand if she wanted to get it. At last she got a finger on the device, inched it closer, grabbed it. The moment of truth.

  The cracked screen displayed schizophrenic digital numbers like hieroglyphics.

  “Is it working?” Carson was trying to see. He shivered as he looked around, wide-eyed, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. He’d landed on his back, the legs beneath him in that terribly wrong way, one arm torn to shreds, the other flailing around, clutching for the device. “I sort of. Landed on it.” He was breathing irregularly, his speech clipped. “Let me see it. I can. Fix it.”

  “It’s broken.” Katie took a cleansing breath, let it out slow. “Where are we?”

  Carson laid his head back against a rock, looked up at the sky. “It was. A cheap one. I’m gonna. Die.”

  “Where are we?”

  She was stretched out behind his head, the two of them draped over the rocks like awkward sunbathers, she thought. Like perverse lovers.

  Carson just stared into the sky. It was a postcard of a day, little white puffy clouds, deep-blue firmament.

  “I’m twenty. Eight,” he said.

  “I don’t care how old you are, Carson. Tell me where we are.”

  “My name is Troy.”

  “I’m going to leave. Tell me where we are, or I’m just going to walk away. You’ll die right here, alone.”

  He tried to look down at himself. His head was shaking badly, as if he’d lost all physical control.

  He moaned, a wretched sound. “Oh no. No, no, no…”

  “Tell me where we are.”

  “We’re in the woods, bitch! I don’t know. I didn’t write. Anything down. I was relying on the. Fucking GPS.”

  “You were going to leave a different way than we came in. You brought climbing ropes. You were going to come down this way?” She looked beyond the immediate area. The land continued to pitch downward, terribly steep.

  “Yeah. Leno said. It would be shorter.”

  “Where is Leno?”

  “Making the calls.”

  “Where? From here, in the woods? Or, what – a town?”

  He didn’t respond.

  She raised her voice. “What’s nearest to here?”

  Carson didn’t reply.

  “Do you have a compass?”

  “No.”

  “You brought me out into the middle of the woods and didn’t take a compass? What if your cheap GPS broke, like it did? You didn’t think this through, Carson.”

  “Troy…”

  “How did you fall down here? Huh?”

  She laughed, feeling cruel, unable to stop it, not wanting to anyway. “You idiot, Carson.”

  She looked up at the sky and laughed some more. She couldn’t stop. She had to force herself to get a grip.

  When it passed, she looked at Carson, expecting him to be dead.

  He wasn’t. He was crying.

  She got up from the rocks, moved toward the trail. She clipped the broken GPS to her waist. No compass, but she was fairly sure the rocky drop where Carson had fallen faced south. She would go out the way they came – even if it was longer, it was obviously safer. And there had been a wristwatch among Carson’s things. Every break in the trees, when she had some sun, she would make a sundial in the dirt to provide a rough bearing. It was something, at least.

  “Wait…”

  She stopped.

  She turned.

  “Please don’t. Go.”

  “Goodbye, Carson.”

  He was sobbing. “Don’t let me die here.”

  He started to get up. It was painful just to watch, but he managed to get one leg working and flip himself over using his good arm. He gnashed his teeth and groaned.

  The other leg was useless, twisted in that way which was nauseating to look at. Blood all around him. Leaking from somewhere she couldn’t see. His flaccid penis half out of his pants, dangling like a broken finger.

  He forced himself up, balancing on one knee, and gave her a determined look.

  He was only hastening his death.

  “I have to go,” she said. “I’m burning daylight.”

  “Just help me. Up. To the cabin.”

  “No way. You’ll never make it.”

  “You’ll never make. It either.”

  She stopped again. Keeping her back turned, she said, “Yes I will.”

  But his words pierced to the core. She needed more time. It was already too late to leave. The sun would set – these days it was getting dark by seven thirty – and she’d still be in the woods. Despite all her internal pep talks, it was a major concern.

  Carson shouted and fell over.

  He was done, lying face do
wn on the rocks now, his body going through spasms. He coughed and gagged up more blood. He had multiple breaks and fractures, internal as well as external bleeding, probably a concussion.

  She moved closer to him.

  What are you doing?

  “Tell me where we are. Maybe you do that, Carson, and you won’t wind up in hell.”

  Carson’s lips scraped against the rock. He was trying to talk. She crawled back onto the rocks and leaned down to hear.

  “Jones. West. Canada.”

  She felt a shiver. “Canada? We didn’t cross any border.” West Canada made no sense. Did he mean British Columbia? That was on the other side of the continent. “What’s Jones? Who is it? Is that Leno’s real name?”

  “I go through. Black to get out.”

  “Black?”

  “Forest.”

  It was exasperating. He wasn’t making any sense. “This is a black forest? What does that mean?”

  “Black river…”

  “How do I get out? We came near a trail on the way in. There’s got to be more. Or a ranger station. I think DEC sets up posts in case of lost hikers.”

  A thought suddenly occurred to her and she couldn’t believe she hadn’t considered it before: She needed to build a signal fire. The smoke could potentially be seen for miles. Especially if they were looking for her, if they had a general idea of where she might be.

  For God’s sake, there was a wood stove in the cabin. Firewood piled right beside it. The wood had grayed and grown cobwebs but it would burn.

  She scrambled off the rocks again and jogged up the trail. If Carson was calling after her, he’d finally lost his voice and she couldn’t hear.

  She didn’t look back.

  * * *

  There were no matches. Not near the wood stove, not in the kitchen, nowhere in the cabin. Not a single ever-loving match.

  Carson had lit the oil lamp. They had to be here. Unless he had those, too. She looked through all of his things again, scattered over the plank floor.

  While she searched, she kept checking the wristwatch, second-guessing herself.

  This is pitiful. You should be on your way.