DESPITE A CLEAR blue sky and bright sun, the Gulf surf was heavy and pounded on the beach in thunderous waves when Tana went for her morning run.
She ran along the waterline taking long strides that put her at a near sprint. She had learned to run near the water, where the sand was hard packed by the waves coming off the Gulf, since moving to White Sands six months ago, and was now a regular among the locals—who made sure to step out of her way on the beach.
Most of the others on the beach were familiar to her now, but she still studied each face she saw. In a second, she took in their eyes, whether shifty or steady, and their hands (did they hold or clutch?). Even the way they walked.
The gazebo at the public beach loomed ahead at the top of a dune and she turned towards it. She sped past the shaded benches and the parking lot, then continued her run to Mobile Road and the last mile of her morning routine.
Once home, she checked her phone. Jett had texted while she was running, but she hadn’t read it. Whatever he wants can wait.
She grabbed a bottle of water and lifted to drink when her phone rang. Jett, again.
“Hello, Jett.” She kept her voice flat, wanting to sound strictly professional.
“Tana, I’m sorry to bother you, but I need your help.”
Sure, more help. Why not?
“What’s up?”
“Robert is missing.”
It took a minute for her to register what Jett said. She just saw Robert at the coffee shop two days ago.
“What does that mean?”
“Alicia, that’s his wife, called me about five o’clock this morning and said she hadn’t been able to get ahold of him in the last two days,” Jett said. “I gave him a one-day suspension because of his ankle Thursday. I didn’t hear from him yesterday.”
You should have followed up when he didn’t show yesterday, Tana thought. She tried to remember if Robert had said anything about going away when she saw him, but he didn’t say anything about leaving town or going out on the Gulf.
“I went to his house and his truck was there, but he isn’t,” Jett continued.
“Where are you now?”
“I’m on Mobile Road, on my way back to his house. We took a quick look this morning, but we’re going to give the area a more thorough look.”
Jett took a deep breath.
“Tana, look, I didn’t want to bother you. I know I pushed you too hard on the Beaumont case, and I know I kinda crowded you after… I’m sorry, it’s just…”
Silence lingered as he drifted off.
“Tana, I just…well, I…”
“I get it, Jett. Don’t get yourself tied up about it.”
More silence.
“Well, I’m sorry, Tana. But right now, I really do need you.” He paused and played his ace card. “Robert needs you. I don’t know what’s going on and I’m frankly scared.”
Jett gave her the address of Robert’s farm and she said she’d be there as soon as she could. Minutes later, she jumped into her Jeep and headed to Robert’s place.
At the farm, she pulled in behind a line of police vehicles parked in the driveway. She spotted Robert’s truck, parked in front of the cottage-style house encircled by a wide porch. The house was immaculately white, with black shutters on the windows, and for a moment, Tana feared she was looking at a Pinterest page again.
As she got out of her Jeep, she heard a woman shouting and turned to see a tall, blonde woman in her 20s yelling at Jett as he tried to hold her shoulders.
Alicia.
What do you tell a young woman when her husband vanishes? If it was someone other than Robert, you could say he’s probably out with some buddies, fishing on the Gulf or camped somewhere on Mobile Bay. Or maybe you could say that he might be out with some people, maybe even another woman. But you knew that he’d be back, he always came back.
But you couldn’t say that now because Robert wouldn’t fail to let Alicia know if he was going fishing or stopping by to buy a part for his truck or some project on his house. He just wasn’t the kind of guy to go hang out with drinking buddies or other women. If Robert wasn’t on the job, he was with Alicia and the baby. He had turned down every invitation to after-shift gatherings, every offer of meals. He hardly even ever stopped at a store on the way home, he was always so eager to be with his family. For Robert, the route home after every shift was a straight beeline.
Tana slowly walked towards Jett and Alicia, then spotted Shooter across the yard with a group of officers looking around at the ground. She turned to check with him instead, before having to deal with Jett. As she drew near, she saw they were studying the dirt driveway that encircled a palmetto in front of Robert and Alicia’s house before returning to the main driveway.
She gave the bare ground a wide berth as she approached.
Shooter looked up. “Hey, Tana, how y’all doing?” He spoke quietly, but she still sensed his fear and worry.
“I’m fine, Shooter. How’s it going? Gotten any ideas on what’s happened?”
Shooter took a deep breath and punched out one word, “No.”
She studied the other officers as they followed tire tracks in the dirt. Shooter followed her eyes, then took a step towards the others.
“We spotted some tracks here that don’t match tires on Robert’s truck. They pull off the driveway kinda going in the wrong direction.” He pointed to the spot where the dirt road rejoined the paved driveway. “Alicia’s been visiting her folks up north for the last week and since it rained here day before Robert’s last shift, we’re looking at this as probably related.”
Tana knew the weather in White Sands can help pin down events—the sandy soil didn’t hold tracks well in rain but made a nice mould when damp. Sand packs tightly into the treads of shoes or tires and hold its shape until squashed or rain falls, erasing it like a kid’s Etch-a-Sketch.
“So no one’s been with him or talked to him since yesterday?”
“Far as I know, Jett’s the last to talk to him,” Shooter said. “Sent him home ‘cause he sprained his ankle chasing a barge on the Waterway on patrol that morning.”
“I saw him after his shift. He told me about the barge.”
“What time did you see him?”
“I guess about 10:30…maybe a little earlier.” She tried to remember what time it was when she saw Robert, but she was at the shop for three hours and for most of that time she was completely unaware of what happened around her.
A door slammed behind her, causing her to jump. She turned to see Jett walking quickly in her direction. His face contorted in anger, frustration and concern.
When he got close enough, Shooter nodded his head in the direction of the house and said, “She giving it to you good.”
“Yeah, well, I can’t say I blame her,” Jett said. “I tried to calm her down. I just don’t have any ideas of what could be going on.”
He looked at her, studying her face and the way her eyes looked up at him.
“Tana, thanks for coming. And any help you can give us.”
“No problem.” She turned to continue studying the driveway, breaking away from Jett.
Jett then called out to the other officers, rounding up a crew made up from police and Sheriff’s Deputies from across the south end of the county. When they circled around him, he directed them to various parts of the yard and told them to go search in those areas.
“I don’t care if it’s an old candy wrapper, a cigarette butt from 1975, or a dead squirrel. You find anything out there, bring back here. Let Shooter or me know what you got.”
The officers fanned out across the long property surrounding the house. It was tidy and carefully organized. Three rows of pecan trees extended back from the house, shading the entire farm.
Tana envisioned Robert out tending to the thin grass in front, picking up branches that had fallen from the trees in back.
“Tana, Shooter—come with me. We can take a look inside.”
The three of them walked to the front porch, climbing the five steps that ended at the front door. Jett pulled open a storm door, knocked on the inside door and pushed it open.
Alicia sat in a sofa to the left of the doorway, her eyes red and hard. She was tense, sitting with one knee raised with a foot on the edge of the sofa, with her arms clenching around them. One hand held a cellphone which was taking a beating from her thumb frantically typing out text messages.
“’Licia, we’re just going to see if we can find anything helpful inside, like I told you,” Jett said in his most reassuring voice. Tana remembered that tone. “I promise we won’t be but a minute.”
Alicia glared at the three of them for several seconds, then went back to her phone without saying a word.
Tana studied Alicia’s determined face. She remembered someone—was it Robert?—telling her Alicia had also been in the service, but she’d forgotten which branch. Alicia was focusing her energy on following up with any of the local businesses Robert did business with, texting to Mose Richards, the mechanic Robert liked to have work on his truck, and Mason Johns, a onetime contractor who lost his business after the housing crash in 2007 and now made a living doing handyman jobs around the area.
She had already called hardware, paint, and farm stores Robert frequented; none recalled him stopping by in the last day or two, but two promised to check their records and to let her know what they found.
She turned her attention to the room. It was nicely decorated with furniture that looked at least a few years old but still in good shape—not Pinterest-ish, she noted, but still nice. Maybe she should take a photo to study later, she thought.
A line of pictures lining one wall showed Robert and Alicia on their wedding day, Robert in his Army fatigues, and Alicia in a Navy officer’s dress uniform sporting the double bars of a lieutenant. Another grouping of photos captured the couple with their newborn son and several pictures of him as a toddler.
There wasn’t anything that appeared moved or disturbed in any way as far as Tana could tell— apparently as far as Jett or Shooter could tell, either, as they had already stepped into the hallway that led to the bedrooms. She caught up to Jett and Shooter, who were studying a bathroom off the hallway.
When she looked inside, she saw what had caught their attention. The bathroom had been completely dismantled, the sink and vanity gone, the toilet removed and the walls from the front to the back around the tub bare to the two-by-four studs.
Jett and Shooter were discussing Robert’s plans to redo the bathroom and surprise Alicia when she returned from Tennessee. Tana stepped past them, and continued down the hall, peeking into the room Robert’s son slept in, and a spare room used as an office and guest bedroom.
At the end, the hallway went straight into the master bedroom. Tana stepped in and looked around. The luxurious touches in the room impressed her, touches that didn’t match the rest of the house—maybe Robert had already fixed up the room. If so, to her eyes, he did damn good work.
She turned around and went back down the hall, then turned right to the kitchen. Jett and Shooter were already in the kitchen, looking around again for any signs of disturbance. Tana did the same. Again, nothing out of place.
“All right, let’s go,” Jett said and led the way to the door. He held the door open for Shooter and Tana, then said he’d be right out. He turned back to talk to Alicia.
Outside, Tana and Shooter went down the steps and walked to Robert’s truck. She inspected the truck, stepping closer to the driver’s side door to look in.
As she leaned closer to the truck, she felt the door give a little. She stepped back and could see the door was open slightly.
“Shooter, did you look inside the truck?”
“Not yet.”
“The door isn’t closed all the way. Do you think that means anything?”
Shooter studied the door.
“Could be. Let me get some gloves.”
Jett walked out of the house and came over to the truck.
“You OK?” Tana asked him.
“No.” His face had a hang-dog look about it that she hadn’t seen before––even when he was struggling to solve murders, Jett maintained a steadfast grip on his emotions. This was new.
He turned to look at the officers searching around the yard, two of them nearly a hundred feet away at the back of the property. “I just can’t figure what might have happened to Robert.”
She felt a touch of sympathy for Jett. Or maybe it was a touch of joy after having watched another woman berate him so harshly.
Shooter snapped latex gloves over his hands, pulling her out of her thoughts. She watched as he carefully examined the door, then reached up to the top corner of the door frame. He pulled the door and it swung open—it wasn’t even latched.
Shooter stepped around to the outside of the door and began to sprinkle the fine powder used to capture any fingerprints or marks on the truck. Jett studied the inside of the vehicle.
Robert’s phone was on the floor and a bag from the GAP store rested on the center console. Jett lifted the bag and pulled out the shirt Robert purchased. The store receipt fell out of the bag and dropped to the floor of the truck.
He reached in and picked up the receipt, reading the timestamp of the transaction: 7:45 p.m. He handed it to Tana.
“That’s about an hour after he left my office,” Jett said.
“He goes from the station to the store; goes home, then…what?” she said. She looked around, hoping to see something helpful, something out of place…just something. “Leaves the door of his truck open and his phone and a new shirt in the truck…”
Shooter stepped around the door.
“I’ll see what we get, but I’m betting the only prints I’m lifting from this door are Robert’s,” he said.
“If those tracks over there don’t match any family vehicles, then I’m thinking someone met him here as he pulled up,” Jett said. “What I don’t get is who, and why.”
“I think it looks like someone grabbed him,” Tana said, surprising Jett and Shooter.
“Why’s that?” Jett asked.
“The door on the truck is open and his things are inside. If it was someone he knew, he damn sure would have picked up his phone and closed the door. If those tracks don’t match, they’re probably from the vehicle of whoever snatched him.”
They stood silently, lost in their own thoughts.
“Maybe there’s something to his barge story,” Tana said.
Jett snorted and looked around the farm before focusing his attention on her.
“We checked with Coast Guard—no barges on the Waterway that night, or any other for that matter,” he said, firmly. “Also, even if he heard somebody, where’d they go? Or if they were getting on the barge, as he seemed to think, where the hell’d they come from?”
She felt Jett’s eyes burning on her, challenging her to come up with the answers.
“You know Bobby so damn well, you tell me which of his buddies came and got him to go off without his phone, without closing the door on his truck, and without calling Alicia.” She struggled to keep calm as she said this, but managed to get it out without making it sound as challenging as she meant it.
They glared at each other through the truck window.
“Hey, not my job to figure it out,” Tana said, waving her hands in surrender. “That’s yours. I’d hate to see you close off any avenues that might lead to Robert. It’s your investigation.”
Jett took a step back from the truck and inhaled deeply. He had been standing straight, with arms crossed, but relaxed and dropped his arms.
“Yeah, well, I just hate this feeling not knowing what’s going on. Bobby’s a good cop and one of mine—I’m damn sure going to keep anything from happening to him.”
He rubbed his eyes.
“I just don’t think we’re dealing with a wayward accommodation barge,” he quietly said. “I don’t know what, but we’ve got too much to check into before we go off half-cocked after a boat no one else has seen.”
She watched Jett as he struggled to decide how to proceed. She knew he’d handled investigations into missing children, runaway teens, even spouses making a break for freedom during a weekend getaway.
But he was getting in own way. While she knew his connection with his officers was making finding Robert harder, clouding his mind with fear and confusion, she also knew something else blocked him. Something that seemed to always block his ability to take advice, or consider her suggestions.
She noted he was quick to discount Robert’s barge story after only a basic inquiry that seemed to her to miss the most obvious fact of what Robert had said: something was happening on the barge that most likely wasn’t legal—why would the barge have registered the trip?
She turned and walked away, joining a group from Bougainville searching around a large vegetable garden.
As soon as she could slip away from the group, she made her way to her Jeep and quietly backed out of the driveway.
Screw Jett.