Now that they knew Bill was alive—at least that he had been when he’d sent the text an hour ago—Lucy felt energized, a myriad ideas to help with the search filling her head. But she also dreaded what they might find. That text… Bill was fifty-nine; maybe he simply didn’t express himself well in the shorthand that text messages demanded? He would know Judith would be involved in the search for him. Was he specifically trying to tell her something? Wanted to alert her somehow to something, get her to dig deeper?
Lucy had worked cases in plenty of less remote and more populated areas of the country where getting away with murder and other crimes was far easier than civilians imagined. Hell, right in her own backyard in rural Pennsylvania, she’d caught serial killers who’d been able to hunt for years without ever hitting law enforcement’s radar.
It wasn’t that the police didn’t want to solve crimes or were incompetent; they simply had insufficient resources, inadequate manpower, and often lacked the training to get the job done. Despite what people saw on shows like CSI, normal community cops whose budget relied on taxpayers’ whims faced enormous odds. It was to their credit that so few major felons escaped justice—the product of long hours, good instincts, and bulldog tenacity despite being overworked and underpaid.
Working at Beacon Falls, seeing the ever-growing queue of cold cases that families and law enforcement turned to Lucy’s team to help solve, she’d come to realize that even heinous criminals often operated in plain sight. Now, watching Judith skillfully steer the plane around several mountain peaks as she circled them onto the flight path for the narrow landing strip at Poet Springs, Lucy’s heart dropped at the sight of the miles and miles of unbroken wilderness stretching out in all directions, surrounding the tiny gathering of buildings that was the county seat. If someone didn’t want to be found, Magruder County was definitely the place to vanish.
The runway and its Quonset-style hangar and small outbuildings sat at the western end of a narrow valley. About a mile away, nestled against the foothills that formed the valley’s walls, sat another cluster of buildings: a large red barn-like structure with a peaked metal roof that was surrounded by small cabins; downhill from that along the main road were a whitewashed church, several buildings that sat shoulder to shoulder like Pittsburgh rowhouses but with western-style façades along their roofs, a gas station, and a brick building almost the same size as the church it sat opposite from. Lucy made a mental bet with herself that it was either a bank or a government building.
She’d been in small towns like Poet Springs all over the country, from West Texas to Tennessee to her own Pennsylvania. She’d grown up in a town almost as small and isolated; she understood how these people thought, how they would come together in a time of crisis, how little they’d appreciate outside interference.
Judith had radioed ahead about receiving the text from Bill, so by the time they landed and taxied to a stop near a large Quonset hangar, Lucy half-hoped to be greeted by a hang-faced Bill himself. This was one occasion where she’d love to have her paranoid suspicions of foul play disproved.
Instead, they climbed out of the Cessna to find a battered white Econoline van waiting. The driver, a middle-aged Hispanic man, hopped out and immediately began unloading the plane’s cargo, his only greeting a tip of his straw hat in Judith’s direction. The two geological engineers grabbed their gear and climbed into the van while Judith finished taking care of the plane and had a quick conversation with the driver. Lucy shamelessly eavesdropped as Nick grabbed their bags.
“No word?” Judith asked him.
The man shook his head.
“Couldn’t they use the text to locate the cell tower it came through?” Lucy asked. “They could try sending a silent SMS, ping his phone, see if it’s still on, maybe triangulate from several towers. Or get his coordinates from his GPS signal?”
Both the man and Judith turned to glare at her. She backed away, reminding herself that she was a guest here, not an FBI agent—not even a retired one. Judith finished her conversation and rejoined Nick and Lucy. “Harriet, our dispatcher at the sheriff’s office, forwarded the info about the text Bill sent me to the state police. They’d already contacted his cell carrier and they said it came through the same cell tower his other calls yesterday used. Makes sense, since it’s the only one around here. Best they could do was narrow the search area by a few miles. Said his phone is off now, so they can’t do much else.”
“But the GPS?” Lucy asked.
“Shows he moved a bit to the east since his last call yesterday—which was to you,” Judith said, arching an eyebrow in Lucy’s direction.
“I missed it,” Lucy admitted. “He left a message asking me to call back.”
Judith gave a hrumphing noise as if frustrated by Lucy’s inability to help. “Well, he must have either turned his phone off after he called you or he was in one of the GPS dark spots—there’s a bunch around here. Sometimes it can take fifteen-twenty minutes for a phone to pick up a satellite signal.”
Nick carried their suitcase and daypacks to the waiting van, where the two engineers were waiting impatiently.
“I’ll drop you two off at the hot springs,” Judith told Lucy, “then Miguel can take Mr. Davenport and his partner here out to the Holmstead ranch.”
“We want to join the search,” Lucy protested.
Nick loaded their bags into the van, hopped in, and extended a hand to Lucy. She felt Judith’s gaze on her so made a point of climbing in herself, hiding a wince of pain. Ten hours cramped into airline seats hadn’t done her ankle any good.
Judith got into the passenger seat while Miguel resumed his spot in the driver’s seat. She twisted in her seat to face the rear compartment. “Nick, you and Lucy can drop your bags and get geared up for the search, but I’m not sure where they’ll assign you. Sheriff’s office is coordinating and handling administration, but the forest service is in charge of the volunteers. It’ll be up to them.”
“Lucy,” Nick said, “one of us should check on Deena.” His tone implied that one should be her.
She shot him a glare. “Sounds like a job for a trauma counselor. You’d be much more comfort and help than I would be. I want to see where Bill’s last location was, and talk to any witnesses.”
“We’ve taken care of all that,” Judith interjected. “We might not be the FBI, but we actually do know what we’re doing.”
“But with the text he sent today, the timeline changes,” Lucy protested, until Nick squeezed her knee and she shut up.
Miguel steered the van down a rain-washed gravel road leading away from the airstrip and into town. The drive took all of five minutes but was noisy enough that it precluded any further conversation. Lucy won the bet with herself—the large brick building had the insignia of a defunct bank carved into its cornice, but now housed various government offices including the sheriff’s department. She also spotted a café, a general store, a diner, and a hunting-fishing outfitter. Despite it being tourist season, the only people she saw were a couple sitting at the café’s outdoor tables. Finally, at the end of the road, they parked in front of the large barn-like building nestled into the curve of the mountains.
“Welcome to the Keenan Hot Springs and Exotic Wild Animal Exhibit,” Judith said. “I’ve put you all in cabin three. Come inside and we’ll get your keys.”
Nick and Lucy grabbed their bags and followed her inside the massive building. It was three stories high at its peak, and as soon as they crossed the threshold, there was the distinctive scent of sulfur.
“The smell’s from the hot springs,” Judith said, as she meandered around a registration desk. Moose and elk heads featuring sprawling antlers adorned the walls along with other trophies: bears, wolves, mountain lions, bighorn sheep. “You can access them from inside, down that hallway through the shower and changing rooms, or from outside at the rear of the building.” She grabbed two old-fashioned metal keys on large key fobs from the pegboard. A raucous shriek echoed through the space followed by the flutter of wings and several bright green feathers floating out of the sky. Lucy glanced up to see three colorful parrots perched in the rafters above them. “Come on, I’ll show you to your cabin. The zoo’s on the other side of the building—right now we’ve got a tiger, a three-toed sloth, two ocelots, and a grizzly. Used to have a lion and a snake exhibit, but they’re gone.”
“Gone?” Nick asked. “You said the animals were orphans; did you find homes for them?”
Judith’s smile never faltered. “Gone as in dead. The lion from old age, the snakes after they killed my husband.”