The Disappeared

by C. J. Box

  He narrowed his eyes and felt a tremor of rage roll down his back.

  Nate drove his SUV up to the grille of the company truck so the bumpers were nose to nose and he leapt outside without turning off the motor. His right hand was on the grip of his .454 inside his coat.

  A man came out of the house with an armful of clothing, but didn’t see him standing there because the pile blocked his vision. He tossed the items into the bed of the truck.

  Only when he heard the snick-snick of Nate’s weapon being cocked did he look up quizzically.

  He was a young man, early twenties. He wore a stocking cap pulled down over his ears and he had a long bushy ZZ Top–style reddish beard sequined with ice. He looked to Nate like what he was: an employee of Buckbrush Power. The company name on the outside of his jacket and the logo on the door of the pickup confirmed it.

  “Who are you and what are you doing?” Nate hissed. The front sight of the gun fit neatly between the Buckbrush man’s widening eyes.

  “I’m Earl Wright. Don’t shoot me. Don’t—don’t shoot me.”

  He was stammering.

  “Where are Kurt and Laura?”

  “Who?” Wright asked, genuinely confused.

  “The people who used to live here.”

  “Oh, is that who they were?”

  Nate’s finger tightened on the trigger and Wright saw it.

  “I never met them,” Wright said quickly. “I’m just doing what I was told to do. I don’t know anything about no Kurt and Laura. From what I understand, they moved out a few weeks ago.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “My company bought the place,” Wright said. “I guess one of the executives wants to live on a ranch. I don’t know much more than that. I was told to come out here and clean the place out. I just do what I’m told. If you have an issue with it, I’m not the guy to talk to.”

  Nate believed him. He lowered the weapon to Wright’s belt buckle.

  “Hell,” Wright said, “I’m a coal miner. I live in Hanna and I didn’t have a job once they closed the mines up there. This is the only thing I could find. Buckbrush is the only outfit hiring right now. When I’m told to do something, I don’t ask too many questions about why.”

  The possible scenario made some sense. The Bucholz ranch was kept afloat by Dr. Bucholz’s medical practice, not by the income generated by the cattle operation. Nate knew that. It was a similar story on most small family-owned operations.

  The good doctor was getting old. The only day a small ranch was successful financially was the day it was sold.

  “So Buckbrush bought them out?”

  “I guess so,” Wright said. “I wasn’t privy to any of the details.”

  Nate said, “Are you telling me they left this house without taking all their stuff?”

  “They took some, all right,” Wright said. “I’m just getting the rest.”

  “Where are you taking it?”

  Wright hesitated for a moment. “The dump.”

  Nate felt his anger spike again. Despite the difficult financial circumstances they were in, Nate couldn’t see the doctor leaving his ranch in such a rush unless pressure had been applied.

  “If you want this stuff, you can have it,” Wright said, gesturing toward the items in the back of the truck. “Take anything you want.”

  Nate felt like shooting him, but he didn’t. Earl Wright wasn’t the problem.

  “Who are you, anyway?” Wright asked.

  “A friend of theirs. Do you have any idea where they moved?”

  “Not a clue. But I hope somewhere warm,” Wright said.

  “Is Buckbrush going to take over this entire valley?”

  Wright hesitated before saying, “Probably.” Then: “Believe me, mister, I don’t like it either. I’m from a coal family, third generation. Do you think I like working for a wind outfit that helped put the mines out of business and pays me half of what I used to make? If I didn’t have a wife and rugrats to feed...”

  “Enough,” Nate said.

  *

  FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, Nate rolled into the icy parking lot of the Encampment lumber mill. He parked in a slot between two pickups that apparently belonged to workers. When he opened his SUV door, the cold air was filled with the high whine of a vertical saw blade and it smelled of sweet cut pine.

  He had to mouth the words Jeb Pryor to a sawyer inside who was wearing a hard hat, safety glasses, and ear protection. The man pointed toward a door in the interior corner of the mill. Nate felt the eyes of mill employees on him as he traversed stacks of fresh-cut two-by-fours and waded through ankle-high piles of sawdust. Obviously, they didn’t get many visitors.

  Because the scream of the saw was so loud that it would be unlikely anyone inside the office could hear a knock on the door, he opened it a few inches and stuck his head inside.

  “Jeb Pryor?”

  An older, powerfully built man with a wide face and thick white hair looked up from a stack of orders on his desk. His face was wrinkled and weather-beaten and his meaty hands were scarred from years of hard outside labor. His arched eyebrows indicated that yes, he was Jeb Pryor.

  Nate stepped inside the small office and closed the door. It muted the sound of the saws and machinery, but didn’t completely block them out.

  “Joe Pickett asked me to come,” Nate said. “He said you called him.”

  “Who are you and why didn’t he come himself?”

  Pryor didn’t talk so much as boom. Nate attributed it to years of hearing loss and trying to make himself heard over chain saws and heavy equipment.

  “He had to go to Cheyenne today.”

  “And you are?”

  “Nate Romanowski.”

  “Romanowski,” Pryor said, while pointing Nate toward a chair in front of the desk. “I used to work with some tough old Polacks up in the timber. We called ’em the ‘ski’ bums because all their names ended in ‘ski’ like yours. Hard workers, though. One of ’em cut his own hand off at the wrist with a chain saw and he picked it up with his other good hand and pretended to wave it at his pals.

  “After that they all quit and went to work in the mines in Kemmerer. Are you related to any of them?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Because they were crazy, those Polacks.”

  “Sounds like it.”

  “You kind of have that crazy look in your eye, I’d say.”

  Nate said, “I’d call it ‘deliberate,’ not crazy.”

  Pryor grinned. “So you’re working with the new game warden.”

  Nate nodded.

  “What are you—his deputy?”

  “Of sorts.”

  “I did a little research on him after I met him the other day. He’s got a reputation, you know.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “Is he as trustworthy as he seems? I ask because I’ve run into a few game wardens who weren’t. And don’t even get me started on the feds.”

  Nate said, “He’s the most trustworthy man I know. He’s a straight arrow. Sometimes to a fault.”

  “That’s the impression I got when I met him,” Pryor said. “Did he really arrest the governor of Wyoming once for fishing without a license?”

  “That was him.”

  “Damn.”

  “You called him this morning,” Nate said, trying to get on track.

  Pryor nodded. He said, “I’ve got a knucklehead working here named Wylie Frye. He’s my night man in charge of the burner out there. You know, that tipi-looking thing?”

  “Yes?”

  “Wylie’s been letting somebody on my property at night. I just found out about it.”

  Nate raised his eyebrows, urging Pryor on.

  “I’ll get right to it,” the lumber mill owner said. “I think Wylie has allowed somebody to cremate bodies in my burner and I think they’re bringing another one here tonight. You think your Joe Pickett would be interested to find out about that?”

  *

>   NATE FOLLOWED PRYOR out of the mill and through the parking lot toward the conical burner on the far edge of the mill property. There was no wood smoke coming from the stack. A rusty metal shack was next to it.

  Nate asked, “Why haven’t you called the local cops about this?”

  “For one, I just got suspicious about it because I overheard Wylie talking on his cell phone last night. He wouldn’t fess up to who was on the other end or what he was talking about.

  “Second, our one local cop is a peckerwood named Spanks. He’s the type who would screw up a train wreck.”

  “What about the county sheriff?”

  “Neal?” Pryor said. “He’s a good egg. But he’s got some people in his department I’m not so sure about. This is a small isolated valley, Romanowski. Everyone knows everyone. There are some powerful people here. I have no doubt if I called the sheriff’s department, somebody would make a quick call to whoever is bringing the bodies here and tip ’em off.

  “We might never find ’em, or they could shut my mill down while they investigate. I can’t afford to have the mill shut down. My bankers are just waiting to move in and take it over as it is. I think they want to sell out to the Saratoga mill.”

  He paused near the base of the burner and turned to Nate.

  “If my saws shut down, my cash flow stops. I’m leveraged to the hilt and I’m competing with those big boys in Saratoga. If I can’t pay my loans, all those men you saw up there in the mill will be on the street. Not to mention the lumberjacks up in the mountains and the truckers who deliver our raw material.

  “I could have just fired Wylie Frye and kept my mouth shut,” Pryor said. “But I just couldn’t live with that. So I thought maybe Pickett could look into it with a fresh set of eyes. Didn’t Governor Rulon give Pickett assignments outside of his game warden duties?”

  “Yes.”

  Pryor said, “I loved Governor Rulon, even though he was a damned Democrat. If Rulon trusted Pickett, then I do, too.”

  Nate nodded. There was no reason to tell Pryor about Joe’s recent experiences with the new governor.

  “Follow me,” Pryor said, as he turned the metal handle of the burner hatch door and stepped inside.

  *

  EVEN THOUGH THE FIRE inside had been out for hours and the temperature outside was below zero, the interior of the burner was close and warm. Cold white light filtered down from the steel mesh cone directly above them and lit up tiny particles of ash hanging in the air. The ash on the floor of the burner was fine, white, and ankle-deep.

  Pryor said, “Every other week or so, I’ve gotten a couple of calls from Mrs. Schmidt—her house is about three hundred yards away—that the burner was overheating and putting out too much smoke in the middle of the night. I asked him about it, but Wylie Frye assured me that he was following the procedure and that there wasn’t anything to worry about. Mrs. Schmidt is a nice old lady and all, but she’s known for complaining about things.”

  “Schmidt?” Nate repeated.

  “Carol,” Pryor said. “The poor old lady is in the hospital in Rawlins. She went off the road and was trapped in her car all night. I don’t know how she lived through it.”

  “I heard about that,” Nate said, recalling what the waitress had told them.

  “Anyway,” Pryor said, “when this burner is really cranking with sawdust, it can get to nearly a thousand degrees in here. We try not to ever let it get that hot, because I worry about the structural integrity of the steel.”

  As he said that, he knocked on the interior wall with his knuckles.

  “Do you know how hot a crematorium gets in order to dispose of a human body?” Pryor asked. Then he answered his own question. “Between fourteen hundred and eighteen hundred degrees. Hot enough to make the bones break down into sand. It doesn’t take much imagination to figure that a guy could get this burner about that hot.”

  Nate wished Joe were there. Joe was better at connecting dots and he’d talked to more people in the valley. Nate committed what Pryor was telling him to memory.

  “Do you know what a burned corpse smells like?” Pryor asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Military?”

  “Special Forces.”

  “I thought so,” Pryor said. “You have that special operator thing going. I was an Airborne Ranger.”

  Nate nodded. Pryor had that thing as well.

  Pryor said, “Take a whiff.”

  Nate did. The odor of the burned pine sawdust was overpowering. But within it there was just a trace of something acrid and sweet, like burned hair or pork.

  “Mrs. Schmidt complained about that, too,” Pryor said. “She said she thought we were burning garbage.”

  As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Nate shuffled his boots through the ash on the floor. It was powdery and light, but there was grit on the bottom of it.

  He said, “I wonder if a forensic scientist could sift through this and find something besides wood ash?”

  “I wonder that, too,” Pryor said. “We use the Skid-Steer to clean it out when the ash gets above ten inches, then we spread it on the field out in back of the mill. The material is so fine it’s absorbed by the soil or it blows away in the wind. But it’s possible if experts went through it after our visitors come, they could find some kind of remains, I suppose.”

  Nate looked up. “The remains of Kate Shelford-Longden, for example?”

  Pryor groaned. He said, “I guess it’s possible. But I don’t think that lady is really missing. I think she’ll show up somewhere.”

  Pryor, Nate thought, was echoing what seemed to be the prevalent theory in the area. Nate wasn’t sure there was enough room inside the burner for more than one conspiracy theorist.

  “Where could the bodies come from?” he asked Pryor. “Are there a lot of missing people around here?”

  “A few, I suppose,” he said. “Or maybe someone’s bringing them here from a long distance. There’s all kinds of crap with gangs and such going on in Denver and Phoenix. Maybe they’re driving up and getting rid of bodies here.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I was also thinking Pickett could take a look at the funeral homes in the area,” Pryor said. “Maybe one of ’em cut a deal with Wylie to do cremations on the cheap. Most folks wouldn’t know the difference between ash from a body or from a wood burner, would be my guess.”

  Nate continued to shuffle his feet through the ash. Then he felt something larger than grit under the sole of his boot.

  He bent over and plunged his hand into the material. The warm ash was cloying and still warm. He felt something solid and grasped it.

  “What did you find?” Pryor asked, moving in.

  “I’m not sure,” Nate said as he blew on his hand and the object to clear both of the ash. He used the illuminated screen of his phone to look closer.

  The intense heat had discolored and elongated it, but there was no doubt he was holding what looked like a band or a ring. It was several times thicker in width than a wedding band and lighter in weight.

  Nate didn’t want to tell Pryor just yet that he thought he knew where it came from.

  Instead: “Is Wylie Frye still in town?”

  “As far as I know,” Pryor said. “I wasn’t going to fire him outright until I could train his replacement. He doesn’t seem like the type to have anywhere else to go.”

  “Let’s go find the son of a bitch,” Nate said.

  . . .

  NATE POCKETED THE RING and jabbed Joe’s cell phone number on his phone. The cartoon image of Dudley Do-Right appeared on the screen, but Joe didn’t pick up.

  As he followed Jeb Pryor across the yard toward their vehicles, Nate left a voice message.

  “Call me back.”

  27

  JOE TOOK A SEAT IN A CHAIR DIRECTLY ACROSS THE TABLE FROM Steve Pollock, who listed to his side as if slightly deflated. Pollock, who to Joe had always looked well-groomed and put together for a game warden, had a three- or four-day grow
th of whiskers on his cheeks and neck, and his hair was unkempt. His eyes were so bloodshot that Joe felt his own eyes tear up with some kind of odd empathy.

  Michael Williams was perched on the far-left end of the booth seat as if he might spring from it and run toward the door at any second. Either that, or he wanted to get as far away from Pollock as possible but still be in the booth. The ex–game warden smelled of musk and stale whiskey.

  The waitress arrived before a word was spoken between any of the three men. Joe and Williams ordered black coffee. Pollock said, “You know what I want,” and she smiled and strode back to the order station at the bar.

  “Do you two know each other?” Joe asked.

  “We met over in my district,” Pollock said as his draft beer and a shot of Wyoming Whiskey were put down in front of him. “Mike asked me if I knew anything about that disappearance of Kate what’s-her-name.”

  “Kate Shelford-Longden,” Williams interjected.

  Joe nodded.

  “Mike and I aren’t friends or anything,” Pollock said. “We hardly know each other besides that. Just a couple of state employees.”

  His voice was lazy and a bit slurry. Joe guessed that the order in front of Pollock wasn’t his first of the day.

  “What did you tell him about Kate?” Joe asked. “I don’t remember any interview notes in the file.”

  Williams sat up. He was more than a little defensive. “That’s because there was nothing to write up. Pollock said he’d never seen her or met her and he had no intel to share with me.”

  Pollock said, “That’s true. There were lots of fancy people coming and going at the Silver Creek Ranch. I’d rarely see any of ’em except if they decided to come to town at night, like at the Wolf or something. Occasionally I’d see a bunch of them riding nose-to-tail on ranch horses pretending to be cowboys, but I never really talked to them.

  “That place runs a really clean operation,” Pollock continued. “I never had any trouble with them over the years. Mark Gordon is tightly wrapped, but he doesn’t want his guests breaking any Game and Fish rules or regulations. I hardly ever got called out there, and if I was, it was to help shoo away elk from their haystacks. But that was the winter, when they didn’t have guests.