Behr got home and carried his hunting gear inside. His clothes went straight into the washing machine, his boots back in the closet. The slug gun got a wipe-down with a chamois, but since it had gone unfired, it did not require a full cleaning before it was placed in the gun cabinet. It was late and he was nearly ready for sleep, but something kept him from his bed and steered him toward his computer.
Kendra Gibbons, Indianapolis
He typed the name from the billboard into a Google search. He didn’t know what caused him to do it. Four articles about her came up: three within days of each other dating back eighteen months, and then a more recent one, from the beginning of the month. Behr read them in chronological order. The first piece was a brief posting about a twenty-three-year-old woman who’d gone out for the night and hadn’t come home or called, which was highly unusual.
Her mother, Kerry Gibbons, age fifty, of the Millersville Boulevard area, had called police. “I know something bad happened to her, because I was watching my daughter’s baby girl, and she always comes for her first thing in the morning, or at least calls. She always calls. Always. Even from jail.”
Jail? Behr thought.
The second bit talked about police efforts to locate the woman and intimated that she was a prostitute who had gone out to work for the night. A shoe had been found, a lavender-colored pump. Kerry Gibbons was trying to positively ID it as one of her daughter’s but wasn’t sure. The third article linked the Gibbons disappearance to a few others that had occurred over the past three or four years. “Women get into cars with these men around here or out at the Dr. Gas truck stop on 70, or the one on 465, and a lot of them don’t come back and we don’t see ’em again,” a neighbor commented.
Behr felt the familiar cold weight of parental grief as he read the last, most recent piece. It was about the unveiling of the billboard he had seen and the reward fund that Kerry Gibbons had established.
“I appreciate all those who’ve sent in their money. I will find out what happened to my daughter so my granddaughter doesn’t have to wonder, if it takes my whole life and every cent I can spare.”
Doing something for the money usually ends up costing plenty.
Behr had risen early, and this was the thought in his head as he tied his running shoes and slipped on a heavy pack. He hit the street, his breath clouding in the cold morning darkness. The pack strap cut into his recovering collarbone and reminded him of what had happened six months ago. How the shotgun blast had come out of nowhere and leveled him in falling rain. He set out for Saddle Hill, hoping to outrun the memory.
If there was one positive by-product that came along with the paucity of work lately, Behr thought, it was his cardio. His empty plate and inability to lift heavy weights allowed him to run more regularly, and for longer than usual. While ten sprints up and down the long steep of the Hill used to constitute his morning run, he’d lately built to thirteen, then fourteen. He didn’t time himself, but he was pretty sure his pace had picked up. His strength at the finish surely had. He’d gone to swim with Susan a few times at the I.U. Purdue pool too. They took turns, each watching the baby on the side while the other swam laps. She put him to shame, though. She sliced through the water like a game fish, while he just wasn’t buoyant. He was made of lead apparently. She’d be done and toweling off while he churned up a lane, his thrashing dissuading other swimmers from sharing with him, mostly ignoring her pointers, until his heart was chugging like a steam engine and he’d finally call it a day. No, the asphalt was where he belonged. One foot in front of the other, just like his life. He hammered up the incline, road salt shifting and shaking in the pack like a seventy-pound maraca.
It’s a stupid idea, he thought about the Gibbons case, on the way down.
How could it hurt to just take a look? he wondered his next time up.
If the police have nothing, how can you do better? Up he went.
Because I have time. He huffed his way down.
Why bother?
A hundred grand. Trev and Susan.
The thought repeated itself on the way up. The same thought stayed in his head on the way back down.
By the time he was finished, he’d decided.