Gale thanked the man and promised he’d get back in touch. He hung up the phone and stared at his reflection on the computer screen. The lamp on the table next to him was on, and the plasma screen on the far wall displayed muted images of the fires in Wolf Creek. Petit must have been using his office while he was gone, Gale thought, before his gaze settled on the black-and-white framed photograph of a woman on his desk. He stared at the photograph and frowned, his attention flitting to the far wall.
He stood and walked to the wall, his gaze settling on another picture, framed amid the others—the picture that brought him the happiest of memories and consequently the saddest—a young man, his arm hung around his youngest daughter. Her posture relaxed, her green cammies taut around a small but muscular frame. Her head was tilted back, her brilliant white teeth flashing a million-dollar smile. She was so happy, Gale thought, his eyes going to his own figure next to them, holding the large German shepherd by the leash, his other arm draped around Emily who leaned into Trask. It was one of the happiest moments of his life. One of his favorite photographs—one of Cassie’s favorite photographs. He knew she kept a wallet-size version of the photo with her at all times.
She was so happy. We were all so happy.
He touched the picture with a dirty thumb as he said softly, “What have you done now, Cassie Gale?”
Chapter 8
GALE TRIED CASSIE’S cell phone first. It went straight to voice mail. He rummaged in his desk drawer and found the number listed for the satellite phone he bought her and like the cell, it was turned off. Then he fired up his computer and got the number for the Alaskan State Troopers out of Fairbanks.
A bored man’s voice answered and identified himself as a desk sergeant.
Gale introduced himself and asked if there had been any car crashes or anyone showing up in their system with the name of Cassandra Ann Gale. He gave the trooper the make and model of Cassie’s truck and license plate number. The man put him on hold, then came back on the line. There had been two auto accidents in southeast Alaska the week before. None involved a green Toyota Tundra. And none of the victims were identified as his daughter.
His next call was to the Canadian Mounted Police in the Yukon territory.
The Mounties ran Cassie’s information through their database and came up with nothing.
He then tried the border crossing at Sweetgrass in northern Montana and the border crossing into Alaska at Little Gold, via the Yukon territory. The station at Little Gold didn’t answer, and an agent in Sweetgrass said his supervisor would get back to him.
Gale hung up and stood over his desk.
Excited laughter echoed up from his Silicon Valley clients outside. He crossed the room and shut his office door. When he sat down, he stared out the window and up at the Bob Marshall Wilderness.
Cassie could very well just be running late to Fairbanks. Her phones could be off and she could have just gotten stuck in summer work delays.
Or, Gale speculated, maybe she just decided to spend an extra day or two camping. But why hadn’t she contacted anyone about her new plans? That wasn’t like his youngest daughter. The fact that she hadn’t shown up to her first day of work, let alone notified someone of her absence, didn’t sit right. Something was off.
He had a puckering thought—the same dark thought that had pestered him almost every day for the last six months. But he wouldn’t allow himself to go there, not now. Gale took that dark thought and put it in a box along with all the other boxes he had stashed away in the deep recesses of his mind. He picked up the snow globe again and stared at his reflection.
Compartmentalize, he thought. Look at this objectively, keep the emotion out.
He opened the door to his office and called down for Petit to come up.
The old cowboy leaned against the doorframe and pulled a tin of Copenhagen Long Cut out of his pocket, proffering it to Gale. When Gale shook his head, Petit shrugged and opened the tin, popping the chewing tobacco into his mouth and maneuvering it to his bottom lip.
“If this is about yellin’ at Pete, the only way that boy is gonna learn is if someone gets tough on him.”
“It’s not about Trask.” Gale told Petit about the call with Dennis Price. When Gale finished, the old cowboy sat down on the couch opposite Gale’s desk and remained silent for about thirty seconds, then said, “Nothing from the authorities?”
“Nothing,” Gale replied. “US Border Patrol said they’d give me a call back.”
Petit scrutinized the patterns in the rug. “Well, if you want to stay here until you get things sorted out, I can take this crew up to base camp tonight. Trask and Emily should be more than enough help for the week.”
“No, Emily can help me track her. Trask, too, they’re both good with that stuff. I’ll take the Davis brothers off my shit list for the week. But they’re not allowed to touch any beer. I don’t care if it’s gluten free, or not.”
“They can do that.”
“If we’re not at base camp by morning, head to the lake on schedule. Second we hear from Cassie, I’ll call you and we’ll meet up there.”
When Petit got up to leave, Gale asked him to send up Emily and Trask.
When they walked in, Trask held an ice pack over his injured forearm and Emily looked irritated. “If Petit is still bitching about the snake, let me remind you—”
Something about her father’s face made her stop short, and she eyed him, alarmed.
“What happened?”
Gale leaned against his desk and explained the situation.
When he finished, he said, “I’m going to need you to help me access her satellite phone’s data, it should give us a position from where she last made a call.”
Emily’s face dropped. She planted herself on the couch and shook her head in disbelief. “You don’t think she—”
“No,” Gale said, sternly. “We can’t be thinking like that. Just get me that satphone information.”
They both said they would and left the room to go downstairs to use the house computer.
Gale’s phone rang.
It was the Immigration and Naturalization Services supervisor at the Sweetgrass crossing. He told Gale he couldn’t release any information on Cassie’s passing without a state or federal warrant. He told Gale his best option would be to contact the Alaska State Police or the Canadian Mounted Police and get a missing person report filed and a petition to INS for a release of records.
Emily poked her head through the doorway. “Pete got access to Cassie’s call log.”
Gale thanked the supervisor, hung up, and followed his daughter downstairs. Out of the front windows, he could see Petit leading the pack train of dudes toward the Bob Marshall Wilderness.
His son-in-law’s large frame was huddled over the computer in the living room.
“Globalstar account was listed in your name, Jim. I’ve got her time logs.”
“Show me.”
Trask pulled up the page. “She made twelve calls from the time she left here on the eighteenth, looks like nine went through, three didn’t. She called the same number.”
“That’s Derrick’s number, Dad,” Emily said. “She never canceled his phone service.”
“Last call was four days ago, twenty-second of June, out of Alaska at 6:32 p.m.,” Trask said.
“Does the company log the GPS coordinates from where the calls were made?” Gale asked.
“They should.”
“Then find out exactly where it was made.”
Trask noted the coordinates from the latest call entry and copied and pasted them into Google Earth. The screen zeroed in on a tributary of the Yukon River some eight miles northwest of Eagle, Alaska.
The area was an ocean of mismatched hues: jagged mountains and green valleys, with the Yukon River slithering through the satellite image like a brown snake. Trask zoomed in as far as he could. The coordinates pinpointed Cassie’s last call from the remote bank on a narrow tributary of the Yukon. An old dirt ro
ad ran parallel to the river coming up from Eagle and ended abruptly a mile to the northwest of where she made the call.
“Hell of a place to camp,” Trask said.
“She was looking for desolate. You’re positive that was the last call she made?” Gale asked.
“Last one that’s recorded.”
“We can work with this. I’m going to call the troopers again, see if we can get anyone up there to check on her.” Gale ran up the stairs and redialed the Alaska State Trooper office in Fairbanks.
The same desk sergeant answered the phone and Gale got him up to speed with the situation. The sergeant was quiet on the line for a moment then told Gale he would transfer him to the Alaska Bureau of Investigation.
“I’ll patch you through to the sergeant that runs point on that region,” the man said.
The phone rang again and was picked up abruptly; a sharp woman’s voice answered, identifying herself as Sergeant Meredith Plant with the ABI.
Gale gave the blow by blow as fast as he could, asking once again if he could get a trooper up to the tributary to check on Cassie.
“Give me a minute,” Plant said. She came back on the line five minutes later. “The only trooper I’ve got in the area is stationed in the town of Tok, some four hundred miles from Eagle. He’s on assignment for the next couple days in Delta Junction. Let me see if I can get in contact with the village public safety officer in Eagle.”
Plant’s voice returned a couple minutes later.
“The village public safety officer isn’t answering his phone. You’ll want to deal with him on this. I left him a message to get back to me—”
“What’s his number?” Gale grabbed a pen and paper. The sergeant read it off for him. Then Gale asked, “And if he’s unreachable, could someone be flown over from Fairbanks?”
Sergeant Plant gave a sigh of resignation. “My detachment covers two thousand, three hundred square miles, and I’ve only got ten troopers on the job, and they’re overworked as it is. I can’t just tell my guys to drop everything and travel that distance because your daughter is a couple days late for work. Unless there are any circumstances that would lead you to believe she’s in danger, either to herself, or at the hands of someone else, I can’t really be of much help other than to say, contact the village public safety officer.”
Gale eyed the picture on the wall.
“Mr. Gale?”
“My daughter,” he tried to say as controlled as possible, “has been going through a rough time lately.”
He gave the sergeant a brief overview of what had happened to his daughter in the last six months. When he finished, Plant remained silent on the other line.
“I’m really sorry to hear that, Mr. Gale,” she said, finally. “I’m… truly sorry for her.”
Gale swallowed hard.
Plant continued, “Given the circumstances, I can expedite a missing person report into our clearinghouse.”
Gale spent the next fifteen minutes giving Sergeant Plant all the information he had on his daughter as well as faxing over a picture of her. Trask and Emily came into the office and stood with their backs against the wall.
When Gale hung up, Emily asked, “Someone’s checking on her?”
“Hold on,” Gale said, dialing the phone number to the VPSO office in Eagle. It went to voice mail. Gale left a detailed message and asked the officer to get back to him ASAP. When he hung up, he looked at Emily.
“I filed a missing person report. The troopers can now request information from the INS, but it’ll still be two days before a trooper can get up there, and the village public safety officer in Eagle isn’t answering.”
“Then we do it,” Emily said.
“How long is the drive to Eagle?” Gale asked.
“Google Maps said forty-one hours, more to get to the tributary,” Trask said.
“I’ll check flights, see if I can get into Fairbanks tonight.”
“We’re coming with you,” Emily said.
Gale wiggled the mouse on his computer. “You can’t, I need you here.”
“Call Bill Cronin, he can cover for us, they owe us a ton of favors.”
“Em—” Gale said, shaking his head, his attention glued to the computer screen.
“If you seriously think I’m just going to sit here while my little sister might be in danger, you’re out of your mind. What if she’s hurt? Are you going to single-handedly pull her out of that wilderness with that bum hip of yours?”
“My hip is fine and the troopers will be able to help me—”
“They won’t be up there for another two days!”
Gale remained silent, pondered what his daughter said, then shook his head.
“What if she broke her back, what if she’s sick—you would need our help!” Emily yelled.
Emily could handle herself in most situations but Gale wasn’t so sure of her abilities in the wilderness. As a young girl, she had shied away from hunting trips into the mountains and the second she turned eighteen, she had moved to Salt Lake in search of a life in the city.
Compared to Cassie, she was also more emotional. He worried how his eldest daughter might act if they got up there and the situation was more dire than they had anticipated. What if Cassie had planned all along to use the trip as cover to get away from therapy—to get away from everything forever?
Gale considered that idea. One dark box in his mind started to crack open. He felt the terror of the memories in that box spill out like acid. It made his ears ring. The ringing got louder, the box opened wider.
“Dad, answer me!”
“What if it’s worse!” Gale said, his voice harsher than intended. “Your sister has obviously been lying to us all, and lying to her therapists. She’s been calling Derrick’s phone nonstop from the moment she left here.” He pointed at Emily. “Are you prepared to find your little sister hanging from some goddamn tree?!”
Emily’s face looked like Gale just slapped her.
Gale kneaded his brow and walked to the window, the open box in his consciousness unleashing a tidal wave of fear. His hands shook. He rested them on the air conditioner and looked down again at the rank mule in the feed corral.
“How dare you,” Emily said coldly. “I’ve put everything on hold for this family, my education, my career—everything! I was the one sitting by Cassie’s bed all January. I was the one feeding her, making sure she wouldn’t harm herself. And where were you, huh?”
Emily took a predatory step closer. “Taking those walks by yourself in the mountains, crawling into that shell of yours. You couldn’t even show up for the funeral!”
“Em,” Trask said, reaching for his wife.
“No!” Emily slapped her husband’s hand away and glared at her father. “I might not be as physically tough as you and Cassie, I get that. But I’m the only one capable of holding this family together when shit hits the fan. I basically raised my sister until she was ten. I watched over her while you mourned for Mom for the better part of a decade. All the drinking—those solo trips in the mountains. What kind of mature adult would force that on his kids?”
“Stop!” Gale snapped.
“Stop what? Talking about Mom?” Emily pointed to the black-and-white picture on the desk. “You keep it there like some sort of shrine, but God forbid we speak about her!”
“You don’t know what you are talking about.”
“That’s right,” Emily shot back. “I don’t know, because you never talk about any of it. Your time in the service, the embassy work in Moscow, Paris—Mom’s car accident, and now Derrick.”
She let Derrick’s name linger in the air like a dark cloud. When she spoke again, her voice was serrated. “If my little sister is in trouble, or God forbid she is dead and hanging from a tree—I will not let you jump back into that shell of yours. I will not let you block out the rest of us. I’m going with you and that’s that.”
“We are going with you,” Trask said.
Gale clenched his jaw so h
ard he thought his teeth might splinter. He stood staring at his eldest daughter and her husband. “Fine,” he finally said. “Get the rifles out of the safe and into locked, hard-side cases. We’re going to Alaska. Tonight.”
He waited until they left the room and shut and locked the door to his office. Emily’s words still rattled in his ears. He felt his heart rate spike. Felt the boxes overflow in his chest—those dark thoughts boiling up, and his worst fear—the fear of losing his daughters.
He almost lost them once, all those years ago. He’d been a different person then.
Gale trembled as the memories of his past life washed over him. The dark cobblestone Moscow streets, the Paris high-rise—
His attention dropped to the carpet he stood on, his mind’s eye visualizing what lay hidden beneath the floorboards. After a long moment, Gale yanked the carpet from the floor, wedged his fingers between the semiloose board and lifted, exposing a pitch-black space below.
More memories flooded through him.
The gray concrete edifices swarming the Kremlin. The biting wind and deep snowdrifts of the Khimki Forest.
Gale reached down into the space and pulled up a green metal box.
Inside was a reminder of his past—
A promise he’d made himself.
He’d almost lost his little girls once.
That would never happen again. They would outlive him, raise families, have children, grandchildren.
Gale opened the box and snatched and pocketed the envelope within. He carried the envelope with him for nearly ten years after his wife died, after they’d been relocated to Montana. He carried it with him in January after—
But he’d never opened it. Not in over thirty years.
The thought of having the envelope on his person anchored him.
Made him never forget who he once was.
What he once did.
Cassie would be safe.
Gale would make sure of that.
Chapter 9
EAGLE, ALASKA
Sleeping Bear Page 5