Below Zero

LOL!

Joe looked to Marybeth, puzzled.

“Laugh out loud,” Marybeth said.

“Oh.”

Suddenly:

here they come G2G bye.

“Is she gone now?” Marybeth asked.

Sheridan sat back. “Yes.”

“Can you try again?”

Sheridan’s tapped out several versions of “Are you there?” “Are you coming back?” “April?”

No reply.

“She probably turned her phone off again,” Sheridan said.

“Why won’t she let you call her?” Joe asked. “This text message back-and-forth takes forever. If you could just talk with her . . .”

Sheridan said, “What she’s doing makes sense to me in her situation. If Stenko or Robert come out of the bar and look at her in the car they’d see the phone if she was talking on it. You can always tell when someone’s talking on a phone. But if she’s texting the phone’s in her lap and out of sight.”

Joe saw the logic of that.

“That’s what kids do at school,” Sheridan said. “They text each other under their desks all day long.”

“Really,” Marybeth said.

Sheridan shrugged. “Not me, of course.”

“Of course.”

JOE WAS IN HIS OFFICE with a Wyoming highway map spread open. He could find no Savage, and there was no bar near Savage Run Canyon. Of course, he thought, she could still be somewhere in Colorado. Or Utah. Or New Mexico, Nebraska, Arizona, Kansas . . . someplace up to twenty hours away from Aspen. That could be 700 road miles if they’d driven nonstop. He wished he knew when they’d left Aspen exactly so he could draw a radius. How many square miles would that be? Thousands.

But she’d mentioned black hills. The Black Hills were in western South Dakota and eastern Wyoming. She might know the Black Hills because she claimed to have been there in Keystone. Was there a Savage, South Dakota? He searched his bookshelves for a U.S. atlas and was following the tip of his finger through the cities, towns, and locations of the state to find a Savage. No luck: he’d need to do an Internet search.

His phone burred in his pocket and it startled him. He glanced at his watch: past one A.M. He retrieved his phone and looked at the display. It was the number of the FBI office in Cheyenne. He thought, “Ah . . .”

“So you got the warrant,” Joe said, opening the phone. “That was quick.”

Coon said, “We had to interrupt Judge Johnson’s dinner to get it. That didn’t make him very happy, as you might guess.”

“You said it would be tomorrow.”

“I thought about it, Joe. I thought we couldn’t risk missing your daughter getting a new call tonight and we were right, weren’t we?”

“Yes.”

“So, do you want to know where it came from?”

“What do you think?”

“First, give me the gist of the exchange.”

Joe nodded. Coon had him.

Joe said, “The caller said they were sitting in a car outside a bar somewhere while Stenko and Robert were inside. We couldn’t get a description of the vehicle. The only place names we could get were ‘black hills’ and ‘Savage.’ I’ve been looking over the map and I can’t find any Savage. Oh—and it had been a very bad day. Robert allegedly hurt someone in a store.”

Joe left out the part about the sister on purpose because he saw no way of not revealing April’s identity if he went down that road.

“A store?” Coon asked. “What kind of store? And where was this?”

“We don’t know. A drugstore. The text said a drugstore.”

Coon paused. Joe knew the conversation was being taped. What he didn’t know was how much Coon and the FBI knew. There was no doubt they were withholding information as well.

“Joe,” Coon said, “the cell phone tower that got the ping is located between Pine Tree Junction and Gillette, Wyoming. On State Highway Fifty.”

Joe brushed the atlas aside and stared at the Wyoming map. Savageton was seventeen miles north of Pine Tree Junction and thirty-five miles south of Gillette. The middle of nowhere. Was it even a town at all? Or was it like so many place names on the Wyoming map—a location?

But every location in Wyoming had a bar.