“You should never have come here.”
Special Agent Janet Carter checked herself out in the ladies’ room mirror before going back to her office. She was still smarting over a remark she had overheard that morning down in the deli next to the Roanoke federal building. A new agent, fresh in from the Academy, had asked another agent about her while standing in the coffee line, unaware that Janet was sitting on the other side of the register, just out of sight. She was the only female agent in the Roanoke office, so when the new guy started talking about the cute little redhead in the Violent Crimes Squad, she had naturally paid attention. Then the other guy answering: “Don’t let that little girl face fool you; she’s thirty-something, going on forty, has eight years in the Bureau, and she doesn’t date other agents. You figure it out.”
Figure out what? she thought. Was he saying I’m a lesbian because I won’t date other agents? Is that what they think? Or that I’m too old for the newbie? She examined her “little-girl face.” Red hair, bright green eyes, okay, a couple of wrinkles here and there, but nothing substantial.
Firm chin, healthy skin. So she looked younger than her thirty-seven years—and what was wrong with that? She worked out three, four times a week and was in better shape generally than some other male coworkers, if the annual physical-fitness test proved anything. There was nothing wrong with the old bod, either. Which was why the newbie had been asking, right? So relax. They’re just guys flapping their jaws. In general, she liked the Roanoke crew, and they liked her.
She sighed and went back to her office. There were four cubicles in their office. One, belonging to Larry Talbot, the squad’s supervisor, was slightly larger than the others. The other three were Bureau-issue identical.
Each contained a computer workstation, a single chair, and some file
cabinets over and under the computer table. It was a four-person squad, with one semipermanent, budget- cut vacancy. The other worker bee in the squad was Billy Smith, who was generally conceded to be RIP, as in retired in place. The RIP designation was a little unfair to Billy, who had a serious blood-pressure problem, for which he would take a pill upon arrival in the office. It would promptly put him to sleep at his desk for an hour or so, and then he would wake up and do paperwork throughout the rest of the morning, until lunch, at which time he would take his next pill and slip back under again. He’d come down from some obscure Washington assignment three years ago and supposedly had two years to go until he was eligible for retirement. Larry Talbot had worked a deal: Billy would do the bulk of the squad’s routine paperwork, while Larry and Janet would do the legwork. Everyone figured the Bureau was simply looking the other way until Billy could take his retirement and go away.
His repertoire of dark two-liner jokes had become notorious in the office, especially when he could catch someone off guard, as he had Janet when he asked her what it meant that the post office flag was at half-mast: They were hiring. Between those little bombs and handling all the squad’s paperwork, Billy had found a home.
She sat down at her desk, checked E-mail, and grunted. Larry Talbot had left her a message: Today was the day they went out to tell Mr. Kreiss that they were sending the missing college kids’ case up to Washington.
She was supposed to meet Talbot in the parking garage at nine o’clock.
She looked at her watch. She barely had time to finish her coffee. She thought about that guy’s remark. Figure it out, huh? As she remembered, the guy talking to the newbie was a married man. She’d go figure him out all right. Maybe drop a dime, speculate to his wife about the guy’s sudden interest in redheads. Make his home life a little more interesting. But then she just laughed. Not her style.
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 friends, 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.
