by John A. Daly
“I have a law enforcement connection,” he said. “He says they’re making good progress on the case and that they have a suspect in Andrew’s disappearance.”
She still appeared to be in partial disarray, now leaning on her car for support with her hands on her knees. She stared at the ground and forced herself to take a couple of deep breaths. “I’m sorry,” she muttered. “When you first brought up his name like that, I thought that…” She hesitated, glancing up at him.
“You thought what?” he asked, his face now displaying confusion.
“That you had something to do with his disappearance.”
“Excuse me?”
Jessica shook her head, letting her gaze fall to the ground again. “I’m sorry. It just sounded like you were going to demand a ransom or something.”
Squinting, he let the choice of words he had used bounce around his mind. “We don’t communicate well, do we?”
She let out an unexpected spasm of laughter, and then held her hands to her face where tears began to stream. She asked if the suspect was in custody and Sean answered no. He explained that the police were looking for him, and that they were confident they had the right guy.
“They have no idea where my uncle is, do they?” she asked.
“No,” he replied, taking from her tone that she had already accepted that she’d probably never see him alive again.
“Do you know the suspect’s name?” When he said nothing, she looked up at him through moist eyes and asked again.
“No,” he finally answered, knowing such information could spell bad things for Lumbergh and also jeopardize the investigation. “I don’t know anything else.”
She nodded. He could read the skepticism in her eyes.
“Well, thank you, Mr. Coleman,” she said. “Thanks for letting me know. My family will appreciate hearing that progress is being made.”
He nodded. “You’re welcome.”
She squatted down to pick up her purse and sunglasses, prompting Sean to try and help, too, though he was too slow. She brushed a strand of her long, bright hair behind her ear as she rose back up to her feet.
“Let me know if you hear anything else, okay?” she asked reservedly.
“Okay. Do you have a phone number?” He tried not to sound too eager.
“Just call GSL. I’m at extension 106. If you leave a message on my voicemail, I’ll get it.”
He opened his mouth to speak, but before he knew it, she had already turned her back on him and was heading toward the front door of the building. He thought she might turn around and glance back at him as she stepped inside, but she didn’t. She disappeared through the door.
Sean turned to the sun and stared up at the blue sky above, feeling the warmth press against his face while the rest of his body still felt cold. He closed his eyes. The sun’s hospitality almost seemed to be commending him for doing a good deed, though he found himself questioning if he had done much of anything at all.
He worried that bringing marginal comfort to someone he barely knew risked further straining his already labored relationship with Lumbergh. At least he hadn’t given out the name.
He strolled back to his car in no particular hurry, taking some guilty satisfaction in believing he had at least changed Jessica’s impression of him. He had left her better than he had found her, or so he worked to convince himself.
He propped open the driver’s side door of the Nova, which was heavy from the frosty weather, and slid inside. The car’s shocks made a faint buckling noise as he did. When he peered into his rearview mirror to check the traffic on the street behind him, he found his own eyes staring back at him. Their hazel depths expressed a nagging discontent that he tried to look away from but couldn’t. He hadn’t done enough. Not yet.
Instead of twisting his key in the ignition, he leaned to his side and began wading through all the food wrappers, receipts, and crumbs that lined the floorboard until he found the newspaper article that Toby had printed out for him. It had slid off the passenger seat earlier.
He traced his finger from paragraph to paragraph until he spotted the residential address where Andrew Carson had gone missing. He opened his glove compartment and dug through a collection of old street maps, many of which he had inherited from his uncle’s business, until he found one for Greeley, Colorado.
When he rose back up above his steering wheel and glanced out his windshield, he spotted Jessica. She was standing outside, a good distance off at the back corner of the plasma building. He only had a partial view of her. Snow-covered limbs from a nearby tree that sprung out from an island in the parking lot obstructed his view. If it weren’t for the color of her hair, he probably wouldn’t have even noticed her at all. He watched her gaze back and forth across the parking lot in a sweeping motion, and he wondered if she was looking for him. Did she have more to say?
He thought about stepping back out and waving to her, but when she pulled a cellphone from her purse and began punching numbers on it, he stopped himself.
Wrinkles formed on his forehead as he sat still, letting his curiosity captivate him as Jessica held the phone tightly to her ear. It made sense that she would want to quickly call her family and fill them in on the news Sean had told her, but her body language didn’t seem right for that. She wasn’t carefully relaying information to whomever she was talking to. She seemed upset. Panicked. She tossed her free hand up in the air as she spoke.
What Sean saw didn’t resemble calmness or relief. It looked like desperation.
Chapter 9
The afternoon traffic heading east along Interstate 70 wasn’t bad. It rarely was during that time of the week. Fridays were the day when scores of travelers made their way west up from Denver to the high country for a weekend of skiing or snowboarding. They’d pour into the resort towns, gallivanting around in their turtleneck sweaters, drinking hot chocolate throughout the day, and boozing it up at night. Few people were headed in the opposite direction, so Sean met little resistance on his way down to the suburbs.
From Denver, I-25 to Greeley wasn’t quite as forgiving. Sean had beat rush hour, but some unexpected construction and inexplicable pockets of congestion left him snarling and pounding his fist against the steering wheel a number of times. By the time he reached the Greeley city limits, it was bearing down on four in the afternoon. He began to doubt that his trip had been worth the trouble. The narrow winter day would begin to turn dark in just over an hour and he had feared that the search parties looking for Andrew Carson may have already given up for the day.
A camera man from a local news network, who was tethered to an attractive woman reporter in front of Carson’s house, directed Sean to an open field area about a half mile away. That’s where the volunteers would be doing one final sweep.
Minutes later, Sean was trouncing down a steep gully through a collection of about sixty bundled-up men and women of different ages. Some were carrying homemade walking sticks made from broom handles and tree branches, using them to poke through shrubs and lumps in the snow. A few were wearing orange vests.
“Okay, let’s get together and try one more stretch while we still have enough light!” a female voice sounded off in the distance.
“Bring it in! Bring it in!”
About halfway through her shouted instructions, Sean figured out who was speaking. She had long dark hair and was wearing a blue winter coat. When he drew closer to her alongside several others, he recognized her as Katelyn Carson, Andrew Carson’s daughter. She looked just like she did in the picture he had seen in the paper. Next to her was her boyfriend. He looked the same, too. His shoulders rode high, his arms were pressed to his sides, and his hands were jammed in his pockets, as he tried to keep warm. The sour expression underneath his fogged-up glasses suggested that he’d been ready to leave for some time.
Sean watched Katelyn divide up groups of people to set off in different directions along the open prairie. She came across as a natural leader, or perhaps she had just gone through the routine so many times that it now felt like second nature.
Upon receiving their marching orders, people began peeling away from the larger crowd. Sean suspected that Katelyn herself would likely join the last group, so he subtly moved himself to the edge of the congregation.
She must have noticed that Sean was a new face because once she had finished delegating, she looked at him and said, “Thank you for coming out today, sir. We appreciate it.”
Sean nodded.
“You need a stick?” she quickly asked him.
Before he could open his mouth, she grabbed a broom handle that her boyfriend had pinned under his arm while his hands were in his pockets. She handed it to Sean.
The boyfriend’s eyes bulged from the imposition and his head quickly swiveled toward her. He looked as if he had just been woken from a daydream.
“If you’re cold, go wait in the car,” she told him with an eye-roll, her statement laced with irritation.
He opened his mouth to say something, but she quickly turned her back on him, directing the rest of the group to follow her as she set out for a shallow ravine to the west. The boyfriend just stood there, unsure of what to do or say. Everyone else accompanied Katelyn, and the boyfriend eventually turned around and began making his way back to the nearby residential neighborhood where Sean had parked his car next to several others.
The area looked like it had already been thoroughly surveyed. There were footprints in the snow just about everywhere. Sean knew that one more sweep wouldn’t turn up anything, and he suspected Katelyn knew that as well. But just as he had become invested in the mystery of what had happened to Andrew Carson, he understood that the last thing a missing man’s daughter could do was sit helplessly by while the investigation was left solely in the hands of law enforcement. She had to do something—anything—to help.
Sean knew more than she did about her father’s disappearance. He knew the specific suspect the police were looking for. But that information didn’t make it any less likely that Carson’s body was lying outside in some ditch in the snow, waiting to be found. It just meant that the guy who could have dumped him there had a name.
He watched Katelyn and the others poke their sticks into the snow whenever they came upon a large lump or some other discrepancy in the terrain of the land. He followed suit.
Every couple of minutes, he found his gaze drifting up to meet Katelyn’s face. Though she and Jessica didn’t look much alike, he recognized the same shared sense of despair in her eyes. That alone displayed a certain resemblance between the two.
After a while, Katelyn noticed Sean’s attention turned to her, and she brought herself to answer his gaze with a polite smile. She walked up to him and formally introduced herself, extending her gloved hand and thanking him again for his help. Her face was red, likely burned that color from the frigid winds she had been working through in the past days.
“I’m Sean,” he told her. “Sean Coleman.” He wondered if his name would mean anything to her, thinking Jessica might have mentioned it over the phone after their conversation back at GSL. She must not have, because the introduction drew no recognition.
“Where are you from?” she asked him in a hoarse voice after wiping her nose with the back of her glove. She seemed to have a cold.
“Winston, Colorado. It’s a little town south of Lakeland.”
“Wow. You’ve came a long way,” she said, tilting her head and displaying a tone of gratitude. “Well, we appreciate it.”
“No problem,” he answered. “I kind of know your cousin. I wanted to help out.”
“Jess?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Well, great. My family is very grateful for all the help we’ve received.”
She leaned into Sean—something he wasn’t expecting—opened her arms, and wrapped them around him. She gripped him in a tight hug. He wasn’t sure at first how to take the show of affection, but he soon found his own arms wrapped gingerly around her as well.
“Thank you,” she muttered with sincerity in her voice, wiping a stray tear from her face after she pulled away.
He nodded.
The search went on for another twenty or thirty minutes, with nothing to show for it other than an old bicycle tire buried in the snow. Katelyn walked close to Sean and confided in him things that he wouldn’t have expected one to tell to a stranger. She talked about how she had gotten in a huge argument with her father the night he went missing, and that she feared her raised, angry voice would be his last memory of her. She spoke of how her father was disappointed in the decisions she had made in her adult life, and how painfully hard it was to sometimes concede that he was right. It was clear from some of the early stories she told of her and her father that the two were as tight as could be when she was a child.
He mostly nodded as she spoke, feeling unequipped to offer any emotional counsel. That appeared to be all right with Katelyn, who seemed satisfied just being able to voice her scattered emotions to a fresh set of ears.
The group headed back to the hill at the base of the residential area and rendezvoused with the others. That’s when Sean suddenly heard Katelyn shout out the name Jess. She was waving her arms back and forth in broad strokes, vying for attention.
Sean’s head jerked up upon hearing the name. He didn’t understand how Jessica could have been there when she was just beginning a shift at work right before he’d left for Greeley. There were bodies moving in every direction along the slope like busy ants marching over an anthill. He tried to follow Katelyn’s line of sight to spot Jessica, but wasn’t having any luck.
With butterflies bouncing off the inside of his stomach, wondering how she’d react to him being there, he guardedly walked over to Katelyn. Amidst battling conversations between members of the search party, he continued to scan the crowd as a tall teenage boy with wavy bleached-blond hair approached Katelyn. The two hugged before turning to Sean.
“Your friend showed up to help, Jess,” she said with a smile.
Sean’s head snapped toward the two of them like a weathervane in a sudden gust of wind.
Katelyn retained the smile on her face while the boy expressed a scowl of confusion that mirrored Sean’s.
“Jess?” Sean said.
Katelyn’s eyes narrowed and she turned her head to the boy beside her.
“Who the fuck is this?” Sean asked, his nostrils flared and teeth showing. The v
olume of his voice caused the two to jump.
“What?” Katelyn said, clearly taken aback.
“I don’t know this guy, Katie,” said the boy.
Sean shook his head. “I was talking about your cousin, Jessica. Not this guy.”
Katelyn and the boy looked at each other, expressionless.
“What?” Sean said in frustration, throwing his hands in the air.
“I don’t have a cousin named Jessica,” Katelyn said. “Jess . . . This guy right here. He’s my only cousin.”
Sean was speechless. His mouth hung open like the lowered drawbridge of a castle. He quickly dug his large hand into his coat pocket and dragged out the Denver Post article. He unfolded it and presented it to the two of them, his thick hands shaking with anxiety.
“Right there,” he said, pointing at the image of Jessica in the background of the photo. “Who’s this woman?”
The two both leaned forward, tilting their heads to grab a closer look.
“Beats me,” said the boy.
“I don’t know,” said Katelyn. “I think I remember her being here a few days ago, helping us search. I don’t think I talked to her. We had a lot more people that day, and there was so much going on. I didn’t get to talk to a lot of people who were here.”
“Neither of you know this woman . . .? At all?”
They shook their heads no before exchanging confused glances again.
Sean felt the earth below his feet stir. The fading horizon off in the distance suddenly seemed slanted. Off. His eyes refused to focus on either individual’s face for a few moments, his head lost in a cloud of questions.
“You probably just misunderstood her, man,” said the boy he now knew as Jess.