He could see that. The Talley Inn had a large open living room and parlor area, perfect for people to lounge in. Teenagers could easily pack in there and just escape the adult world for as long as they were allowed to.
“The question is, where did they go after Helen was murdered?” Jac asked. “Randi, you said they just up and moved one night?”
“Yes. It was in April, just before the school year ended. We were freshmen. Her brother was a junior. The sheriff’s brother Levi was in his class. Half the families around here homeschooled, even back then. A lot of the outlying ranches are too far from town. There isn’t a huge number of kids in each grade. We all knew each other. For about a week, the rumor was they were pulled to homeschool because their father had a problem with one of the teachers. That didn’t surprise anyone because of his personality. Except me. Monica would have contacted me in some way, and she didn’t.”
“Should we talk to that teacher?” Jac asked.
“Can’t. Mrs. Ramey passed away from a stroke less than three years later, if I recall correctly. She was already in her seventies by then. I was a senior in high school.”
“She hadn’t retired?” Knight asked.
“Good teachers are hide to find here in Masterson. My cousin Daisy works at the elementary school now. It’s a problem keeping teachers. Neighboring counties just flat out pay more. It’s been a problem in the county for as long as I can remember.”
Small towns had their good and their bad. Knight understood that. He personally thought they were mostly bad.
No doubt Dr. Talley would disagree.
“Who might know what the problem was?” Jac asked.
Miranda was quiet for a long moment. “I think it involved Monica’s brother Lesley. Levi would have known, most likely. Lesley was always hanging on Levi’s coattails. That’s the sheriff’s—and Dr. Masterson’s—youngest brother.”
“Well, where do we find him?” Knight asked, almost impatiently. His own team had never worked this slowly.
“We’ll have to go for a drive. The Mastersons own ranches all over the county.”
“Then let’s go.”
“Patience, Knight. It’s a virtue. You might want to try it.”
15
“Where did they go?” Jac asked.
“A family of eight people doesn’t just disappear into the night like that. Not without some sort of trail.” Miranda studied the bulletin board, making mental notes of everything listed less than an hour after they’d spoken with Nate Masterson at the hospital. Trying to reconcile it with the family she’d known so long ago.
Perhaps she was too close to this.
Monica Beise had been her best friend. If there had been secrets going on in that family, wouldn’t she have known about them? She would have liked to think so.
But she knew that wasn’t the truth. Some families had secrets buried so deeply they weren’t ever brought to the surface. Not until they erupted and bubbled and steamed.
Some secrets were so dark they were never called out. Never brought to the light.
Was that the situation here?
Monica had had bruises a few times. Unexplained ones. Ones that now, as a professional in the law-enforcement field, Miranda recognized for what they were.
Someone had inflicted those bruises. And Monica had never told her who. Miranda spun and looked at the people surrounding her.
Kelly was near the exit. Jac had her laptops spread out over the rear folding table, with a whiteboard shoved up against the wall behind them. Jac’s neat handwriting outlined everything they had already found.
“Social media. Monica had a page that she’d access at the inn when she could. Or at school.” Miranda looked at Jac. “So did her older brother, I think. Where did they go? They didn’t just stop posting. Especially Monica. She was practically addicted. She called it her only connection to the outside world.”
Jac was already shaking her head. “I checked that already. Nothing. From April fifteenth of that year. Her page and her brother’s literally just stopped.”
“Were they shut down?” Max asked from where he lounged against the wall, as far away from Jac as it was possible for him to get. Miranda bit back a sigh—the two of them were going to have to figure things out between them eventually. Maybe.
Jac was an expert at avoidance. It was almost pathological.
“No. That’s the odd part. The pages were still in existence until the website itself closed.” Jac had special programs available only to the PAVAD: FBI directorate. They had the ability to track previous websites in ways that Miranda didn’t fully understand. “They just hadn’t been updated or visited since mid-April of the year of disappearance.”
Everything lasted forever on the internet—that was what Jac had told her several times. Miranda was exceptionally careful of anything she ever posted online. It was just dangerous not to be. But Monica would have been a completely different story. A teenager as obsessed with the internet as Monica was back then…no, she wouldn’t have just stopped cold turkey. Not by a long shot. “It looks like the entire family that had social media just walked away.”
“Monica was big into the internet. She wouldn’t just quit.”
“We’ll keep looking. It’s possible she changed her name—that they all did,” Jac said. “It’s finding those names that might be a problem. It’s either that, or they were all killed and buried on the property. I can trace friends through social media, see if there’s overlap, but that’s going to take a while.”
Miranda shook her head. The DCI of Wyoming had considered that. Nothing had been found to indicate a mass homicide anywhere.
But then again, Luther Beise’s ranch wasn’t exactly small overall. Two hundred acres. It was one of the smaller ranches in the county, but it wasn’t a small piece of land.
Finding bodies wasn’t a guarantee.
“But it wasn’t that easy to change your entire identity, even fifteen
