Turn the page for an excerpt from
P.T. Deutermann’s next exciting novel,
HUNTING SEASON
Now available from
St. Martin’s Paperbacks!
EDWIN KREISS waited in the doorway as the FBI car from the Roanoke office ground up the winding drive from the county road down below. He knew why the Bureau was coming: They were going to call off their search. It had been almost three weeks since the kids had vanished, and neither the Bureau nor the local cops had come up with one single clue as to what had happened. No bodies, no sign of foul play, no abandoned vehicles, no credit-card receipts, no phone tips, no witnesses, no sightings, and not the first idea of even where to look for them. His daughter, Lynn, and her two Mends, Rip and Tommy, had vanished.
Kreiss frankly did not care too much about the two boys, but Lynn was his only child. Had been his only child? He was determined to keep her memory in the present tense, even as he now lived with the sensation of a cold iron ball lodged permanently in his stomach. It had been there since that first call from the university’s campus security office. And here was the world’s greatest law-enforcement organization coming to tell him they were going to just give up. Special Agent Talbot, who had called that morning, hadn’t been willing to come right out and say that, not on the phone, anyway. But Kreiss, a retired FBI agent himself, knew the drill: They had reached that point in their investigation where some budget-conscious supervisor was asking pointed questions, especially since there were no indications of a crime.
Kreiss watched the dark four-door Ford sedan swing into the clearing in front of his cabin and stop. He recognized the two agents who had been working the case as they got out, a man and a woman. Special agents, Kreiss reminded himself. We were always special agents in the Bureau. Larry Talbot, the head of the Violent Crimes Squad, was dressed in a conservative business suit and was completely bald. He was heavyset, to the point of almost being fat, which in Kreiss’s day would have been very unusual at the Bureau. Special Agent Janet Carter was considerably younger than Talbot. She appeared to be in her early thirties, with a good figure and a pretty but somewhat girlish face, which Kreiss thought would make it difficult for people to take her seriously as a law-enforcement agent. Her red hair glinted in the sunlight. He stood motionless in the doorway, his face a patient mask, waiting for them. He and the other parents had met with these two several times over the past three weeks. Talbot had been patiently professional and considerate in his dealings with the parents, but Kreiss had the impression that the woman, Carter, had been frustrated by the case and was increasingly anxious to go do something else. He also sensed that she either did not like him or suspected him somehow in the disappearance of his daughter.
Kreiss’s prefab log cabin crouched below the eastern crest of Pearl’s Mountain, a 3,700-foot knob that was twenty-six miles west of Blacksburg, in southwest Appalachian Virginia. The mountain’s gnarled eastern face rose up out of an open meadow three hundred yards behind the cabin. The sheer rock cliff was dotted with scrub trees and a few glistening weeps that left mossy bright green trails down the crumbling rock. The meadow behind the cabin was the only open ground; otherwise, the hill’s flanks fell away into dense forest in all directions. Two hundred feet below the cabin, a vigorous creek, called Hangman’s Run, worked relentlessly, wearing down the ancient rock in a deep ravine. A narrow county road paralleled the creek. There was a stubby wooden bridge across the creek, leading into Kreiss’s drive.
The two agents walked across the leafy yard without speaking as they approached the wooden steps leading up onto the porch. “Mr. Kreiss?” Talbot said. “Special Agent Larry Talbot; this is Special Agent Janet Carter.”
“Yes, I remember,” Kreiss said. “Come in.”
He opened the screen door. Talbot always reintroduced himself and his partner every time they met, and he was always politely formal—using sir a lot. If Talbot knew Kreiss had been with the Bureau, he gave no sign of it. Kreiss kept his own tone neutral; he would be polite, but not friendly, not if they were giving up.
“Thank you, sir,” Talbot said. Kreiss led them to chairs in the lodge room, an expansive area that encompassed the cabin’s living room, dining room, and kitchen. Talbot sat on the edge of his chair, his briefcase on his knees. Carter was somewhat more relaxed, both arms on the chair and her nice legs carefully crossed. Kreiss sat down in an oak rocker by the stone fireplace, crossed his arms over his chest, and tried not to scowl.
“Well,” Talbot began, glancing over at his partner as if making sure of her moral support. “As I think you know, the investigation to date has come up empty. Frankly, I’ve never seen one quite like this: We usually have something, some piece of evidence, a witness, or at least a working theory. But this one …”
Kreiss looked from Carter to Talbot. “What are the Bureau’s intentions?” he asked.
Talbot took a deep breath. “We’ve consulted with the other two families. Our basic problem remains: There’s no indication of a criminal act. And absent evidence of—”
“They’ve been gone without a trace for three weeks,” Kreiss interrupted. “I should think it would be hard to disappear without a trace in this day and age, Mr. Talbot. Really hard.”
He stared right at Talbot. Carter was looking at her shoes, her expression blank. “I’ll accept what you say about there being no evidence,” Kreiss continued. “But there’s also no evidence that they just went off the grid voluntarily, either.”
“Yes, sir, we acknowledge that,” Talbot said. “But they’re college kids, and the three of them were known to be, um, close.”
Close doesn’t quite describe it, Kreiss thought. Those three kids had been joined at the hip in some kind of weird triangular relationship since late freshman year. Tommy and Lynn, his daughter, had been the boy-girl pair, and Rip, the strange one, had been like some kind of eccentric electron, orbiting around the other two.
“We’ve interviewed everyone we could find on the campus who knew them,” Talbot continued. “Professors, TAs, other students. None of them could give us anything specific, except for two of their classmates, who were pretty sure they had gone camping somewhere. But nobody had any idea of where or for how long. Plus, it was spring break, which leaves almost an entire week where no one would have expected to see them. Sir, they could be literally anywhere.”
“And the campus cops—the Blacksburg cops?”
“We’ve had full cooperation from local law. University, city, and county. We’ve pulled all the usual strings: their telephone records, E-mail accounts, bank accounts, credit cards, school schedules, even their library cards. Nothing.” He took a deep breath. “I guess what we’re here to say is that we have to forward this case into the Missing Persons Division now.”
“Missing Persons.”
“Yes, sir. Until we get some indication—anything at all, mind you—that they didn’t just take off for an extended, I don’t know, road trip of some kind.”
“And just leave college? Three successful engineering students in their senior year?”
“Sir, it has happened before. College kids get a wild hair and take off to save the whales or the rain forest or some damn thing.”
Kreiss frowned, shook his head, and got up. He walked to a front window, trying to control his temper. He stood with his back to them, not wanting them to see the anger in his face.
“That’s not my take on it, Mr. Talbot. My daughter and I had become pretty close, especially after her mother was killed.”
“Yes, sir, in the airplane accident. Our condolences, sir.”
Kreiss blinked. Talbot was letting him know they’d run his background, too. Standard procedure, of course: When kids disappeared, you checked the parents, hard. So they had to know he was ex-FBI. He wondered how much they knew about the circumstances of his sudden retirement Talbot might; the woman was too young. Unless they’d gone back to Washington to ask around.
“Thank you,” Kreiss said. “But my point is that Lynn would have told me if she was going to leave school. Hell, she’d have hit me up for money.”
“Would she, sir?” Talbot said. “We understood she received quite a bit of money from the airline’s settlement.”
Kreiss, surprised, turned around to face them. He had forgotten about the settlement. He remembered his former wife’s lawyer contacting Lynn about it, but he had made her deal with it, whatever it was. So far, the money had covered all her college and living expenses, but he still gave her an allowance.
The woman had her notebook open and was writing something in it. He felt he had to say something. “My daughter was a responsible young adult, Mr. Talbot. So was Tommy Vining. Rip was … from Mars, somewhere. But they would not just leave school. That’s something I know. I think they went camping, just like those two kids said, and something happened. Something bad.”
“Yes, sir, that’s one possibility. It’s just that there’s no—
“All right, all right. So what happens now? You just close it and file it?”
“Not at all, sir,” Talbot protested. “You know that. It becomes a federal missing persons case, and they don’t get closed until the persons get found.” He hesitated. “One way or another.” He paused again, as if regretting he had put it that way. “As I think you’ll recall, sir, there are literally thousands of missing persons cases active at the Bureau. And that’s at the federal level. We don’t even hear about some of the local cases.
“I know it’s not, Mr. Kreiss. But our MP Division has one big advantage: They get to screen every Bureau case—every active case—for any possible links: names, creditcard numbers, evidence tags, telephone numbers. They’ve even developed special software for this, to screen the Bureau’s databases and alert for links to any missing person in the country.”
“What did the other parents say when you told them this?”
Talbot sighed. “Um, they were dismayed, of course, but I think they understood. It’s just that there isn’t—”
“Yes, you keep saying that. Any of them going to take up a search on their own?”
“Is that what you’re considering, Mr. Kreiss?” Carter asked. It was the first time she had spoken at this meeting. Now that he thought of it, he had rarely heard her speak. Kreiss looked at her for a moment, and he was surprised when their eyes locked. There was a hint of challenge in her expression that surprised him.
“Absolutely not,” he answered calmly, continuing to hold her gaze. “Civilians get into police business, they usually screw things up.”
“But you’re not exactly a civilian, are you, Mr. Kreiss?” she said.
Kreiss hesitated, wondering just what she meant by that. “I am now, Agent Carter,” he said softly. “I am now.”
Talbot cleared his throat. “Um—” he began, but Carter cut him off.
“What I think Special Agent Talbot was about to say is that we ran a check on you, sir. We always check out the parents when kids go missing. And of course we knew that you had been a senior FBI agent. But your service and personnel records have been sealed. The few people we did talk to would only say that you had been an unusually effective”—she looked at her notes—”hunter. That was the term that kept coming up, sir.”
Time to cut this line of conversation right off, Kreiss thought. He let his face assume a cold mask that he had not used for years. He saw her blink and shift slightly in her chair. He walked over to stand in front of her, forcing her to look up at him. “What else did these few people have to say, Agent Carter?” he asked, speaking through partially clenched teeth.
“Actually, nothing,” she said, her voice catching. Talbot, beginning to look alarmed, shifted in his chair.
Kreiss, arms still folded across his chest, bent forward to bring his face closer to hers. “Do you have some questions for me that pertain to this case, Agent Carter?”
“Not at the moment, sir,” she replied, her chin up defiantly. “But if we do, we’ll certainly ask them.”
She was trying for bluster, Kreiss decided, but even she knew it wasn’t working. He inflated his chest and stared down into her eyes while widening his own and then allowing them to go slightly out of focus. He felt her recoil in the chair. Talbot cleared his throat from across the room to break the tension. Kreiss straightened up, exhaled quietly, and went back to sit down in the rocking chair. “My specialty at the Bureau was not in missing persons,” he said. “I was a senior supervisor in the Counterintelligence Division, Far Eastern section.”
Carter had recovered herself by now and cleared her throat audibly. “Yes, sir,” she said. “So what you said earlier pertains absolutely: Do not go solo on this, please. You find something, think of something, hear something, please call us. We can bring a whole lot more assets to bear on a fragment than you can.”
“Even though you’re giving up on this case?”
“Sir, we’re not giving up,” Talbot protested. “The case remains in the Roanoke office’s jurisdiction even when it goes up to national Missing Persons at headquarters. We can pull it back and reopen anytime we want. But Janet’s right: It really complicates things if someone’s been messing around in the meantime.”
Kreiss continued to look across the room at Carter. “Absolutely,” he said, rearranging his face into as benign an expression as he could muster. For a moment there, he had wanted to swat her pretty little head right through the front window. He was pretty sure she had sensed that impulse; the color in her cheeks was still high.
“Well,” Talbot said, fingering his collar as he got up. “Let me assure you again, sir, the Bureau is definitely not giving up, especially with the child of an ex-agent. The matter is simply moving into, um, another process, if you will. If something comes up, anything at all, pass it on to either one of us and we’ll get it into the right channels. I believe you have our cards?”
“I do,” Kreiss said, also getting up. “I think you’re entirely wrong about this,” he told Talbot, ignoring Carter now.
Talbot gave him a sympathetic look before replying. “Yes, sir. But until we get some indication that something bad has happened to your daughter and her friends, I’m afraid our hands are somewhat tied. It’s basically a resource problem. You were in the Bureau, Mr. Kreiss, you know how it is.”
“I know how it was, Mr. Talbot,” Kreiss said, clearly implying that his Bureau would not be giving up. He followed them to the front door. The agents said their goodbyes and went down to their car.
Kreiss stood in the doorway, watching them go. He had fixed himself in emotional neutral ever since the kids went missing. He had cooperated with the university cops, then the local cops, and then the federal investigation, giving them whatever they wanted, patiently answering questions, letting them search her room here in the cabin, agreeing to go over anything and everything they came up with. He had attended painfully emotional meetings with the other parents, and then more meetings with Lynn’s student friends and acquaintances. He had endured two brainstorming sessions with a Bureau psychologist that aimed at seeing if anyone could remember anything at all that might indicate where the kids had been going. All of which had produced nothing.
Some of Lynn’s schoolmates had been a bit snotty to the cops, but that was not unusual for college kids. Engineering students at Virginia Tech considered themselves to be several cuts above the average American college kid. Perhaps they are, he thought: Lynn certainly had been. He noticed again that his thinking about Lynn was shifting into the past tense when he wasn’t noticing. But there was no excuse for the students to be rude to the law-enforcement people, given the circumstances. And there had been one redheaded kid in particular who seemed to go out of his way to be rude. Kreiss had decided that either he had been grandstanding or he knew something.
Give all the cops their due, he thought wearily as the Feds drove off. They hadn’t just sloughed it off. They had tried. But the colder the trail became, the more he’d become convinced that they would eventually shop it to Missing Persons and go chase real bad guys doing real crimes. The Bureau had budgets, priorities, and more problems on its plate than time in a year to work them. Missing persons cases often dragged on for years, while an agent’s annual performance evaluations, especially in the statistics-driven Bureau, were based on that fiscal year’s results: case closings, arrests, convictions. Fair enough. And they had been considerate enough to drive all the way up here to tell him face-to-face, even if the young woman had been snippy. So, thank you very much, Special Agents Talbot and Carter. He let out a long breath to displace the iron ball in his stomach as he closed the door. In a way, he was almost relieved at their decision. Now he could do it his way.
Talbot navigated the car down the winding drive toward the wooden bridge at the bottom of Kreiss’s property. Janet checked her cell phone, but there was still no signal down here in the hollows.
“I hate doing that,” Talbot said as he turned the car back out onto the narrow county road. “Telling them we’re giving up. Parents always feel Missing Persons is a brush-off.”
“We do what we have to,” Janet said. “Personally, I still think the kids just ran off. Happens all the time, college kids these days. They have it too easy, that’s all.”
“I thought for a minute he was going to blow up back there. Did you see his face when you started talking about his background? Scary.”
Janet did not answer. She fiddled with her seat belt as Talbot took the car through a series of tight switchbacks. The road was climbing, but the woods came down close to the road, casting a greenish light on everything. She’d seen it all right. It had taken everything she had to come back at him, and even then, her voice had broken. She’d never seen anyone’s face get that threatening, especially when the person was a big guy like Kreiss, with those lineman’s shoulders and that craggy face. Talbot had said Kreiss was probably in his mid-fifties, although his gray-white hair and lined face made him look older. He appeared to be keeping the lid on a lot of energy, she thought, and he was certainly able to project that power. She had actually been afraid of him for a moment, when he’d trained those flinty eyes at her with that slightly detached, off-center look a dog exhibits just before it bites you.
“You know,” Talbot was saying, “like if I had some bad guys covered in a room, he’d be the guy I’d watch.”
“I suppose,” she said as nonchalantly as she could, trying to dismiss the fact that Kreiss had unsettled her. Get off it, Larry, she thought.
“I mean, I wouldn’t want him on my trail, either. Especially if what Farnsworth said was true.”
Their boss, Farnsworth, knew this guy? “What?” she said.
“Kreiss was apparently something special. One of those guys they could barely keep a handle on. Lone wolf type. I’ve heard that the Foreign Counterintelligence people get that way, sometimes. You know, all that cloak-and-dagger stuff, especially if they get involved with those weirdos across the river in Langley.”
“Special how?” Ted Farnsworth was the Resident Agent in Roanoke. Janet couldn’t see a homeboy like Farnsworth consorting with the FCI crowd.
“He didn’t elaborate, but he was shaking his head a lot. Supposedly, Kreiss spent a lot of time apart from the normal Bureau organization. Then something happened and he got forced out. I think they reorganized FCI after he left to make sure there was no more of that lone wolf shit.”
“I’ve never heard of Bureau assets being used that way. It would give away our biggest advantage—we come in hordes.”
Talbot concentrated on navigating the next set of hairpin turns. “Yeah, well,” he said. “Farnsworth said Kreiss got involved with the Agency’s sweepers, who supposedly are all lone wolves.”
“ ‘Sweepers’? What do they do?”
“They’re a group of man-hunting specialists in the Agency Counterespionage Division. They’re supposedly called in when one of their own clandestine operatives gets sideways with the Agency. Farnsworth said they were ‘retrieval’ specialists. Supersecret, very bad, et cetera, et cetera.”
Janet winced when Talbot went wide on a blind curve. “Never heard of them,” she said. “Sounds like another one of those Agency legends—you know, ghost-polishing for the benefit of the rest of us mere LE types.”
Talbot looked sideways at her before returning his attention to the winding road. “I’m not so sure of that. But anyhow, this was four, five years ago. Farnsworth said he was at the Washington field office when Kreiss was stashed over at headquarters, so this is all nineteenth-hand. But, basically, I was relieved when Kreiss said he’d stay out of this case.”
Janet snorted.
“What?” Talbot said.
She turned to look at him. “There is no way in hell that guy’s going to stay out of it. Didn’t you pick up on that back there?”
Talbot seemed surprised. “No. Actually, I didn’t detect that. I think he’s just pissed off. Besides, whatever he used to do at the Bureau, he’s retired now. He’s a parent, that’s all. I think he’s just a guy who screwed up at the end of his career, got kicked out, moved down here to be near his kid, and now she’s gone missing, and here’s the Bureau backing out. He’s old, for Chrissakes.”
“I think you’re wrong,” she said, shaking her head. “And he’s not that old.”
Talbot laughed. “Hey, you attracted to that guy or something?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Larry,” she said, looking away, afraid of what her face might reveal. It hadn’t exactly been attraction. She’d been scared and embarrassed. Eight years in the bureau and some veteran stares her down.
“Well, just remember, Janet, there’s still no evidence of a crime here. You know RA Farnsworth’s rules: no crime, no time. He’s right: We shop it to Missing Persons and move on. Hey, where do you want to stop for lunch?”
Janet shrugged and continued to stare out the side window. Gnarly-barked mossy pines, some of them enveloped in strangling vines, stared indifferently back at her. They were going down now, but another steep hill filled the windshield in front of them. It didn’t take a huge leap of her imagination to visualize Edwin Kreiss slipping out of that cabin and disappearing into the woods. Her heart had almost jumped out of her chest when he had loomed over her like a tiger examining its next meal. She had never had such a powerfully frightening reaction to a man in all her life. “Wherever,” she said. “I’m not that hungry.”