Last Seen Alive (High Peaks Murder, Mystery and Crime Thrillers #9)

Chapter 1

Five years ago

The plow blade scraped against bare asphalt and Hank Sheridan winced.

He hated that sound. Metal on pavement meant he'd gone too low, shaving road instead of snow, and that was a thing that dulled a blade fast and earned him a conversation with the county maintenance supervisor he didn't want to have.

He eased up on the hydraulic controls and the blade lifted an inch.

Better. The snow was thinning out anyway.

It had been a long shift. Twelve hours behind the wheel of the county's oldest International, pushing snow since before dawn, and his lower back had settled into a deep, familiar ache that wouldn't let go until he was horizontal.

At fifty-six, the work was starting to talk back to him in ways it never had in his thirties.

He spent his winters behind the plow, and summers on landscaping crews.

His body kept a running tab of every season and lately it had started presenting the bill.

Trisha kept telling him to think about retirement.

He kept telling her they couldn't afford it yet. Both of them were right.

He came around the long curve near Cascade and that was when he saw it.

A vehicle sitting at an odd angle near the right-hand snowbank, its rear end swung out toward the center line as if the driver had overcompensated coming through the turn.

It was a common spot for it. The curve was deceptive, tighter than it looked, and in winter with snow packed along the edges it was hard to tell where the road ended and the shoulder began.

Hank had pulled three cars out of that bank himself over the years and the county had been talking about putting up reflective markers since he started the job. They never did.

He slowed the plow and pulled to a stop about thirty feet back, leaving his headlights on and the amber roof lights cycling.

The vehicle was a red Chevy Equinox, late model, with New York plates.

The driver's side window was cracked in a spiderweb pattern and he could see the deflated airbags hanging limp from the steering column.

No lights on. No engine running. The front end was nosed into the snowbank and the hood was buckled slightly, though it didn't look like a high-speed impact.

More like the car had slid into the bank and the airbags had done their job out of an abundance of caution.

Hank climbed down from the cab. The cold hit him immediately, that sharp Adirondack January cold that found every gap in your clothing and settled there. He zipped his coat higher and walked toward the Equinox, his boots crunching on the packed snow.

A young woman stood beside the car on the passenger side, partially sheltered from the wind by the vehicle itself.

Early twenties. Dark hair pulled back. She was hugging herself and shivering, her breath coming in quick clouds.

She wore a winter jacket but it wasn't zipped and she had no hat or gloves.

A cell phone was clutched in her right hand, its screen glowing faintly against her palm.

"Are you hurt?" Hank called out as he rounded the back of the Equinox.

She startled, then shook her head. "No. Just a little shaken."

Hank stopped a few feet away and took a better look at the car.

The impact had been driver's side front.

The wheel was turned hard to the right, which meant she'd tried to correct and overcorrected.

Classic winter move. He glanced at her again.

She was pale and her lips had a bluish tint that told him she'd been standing out here longer than she should have been.

"How long you been out here?" he asked.

"Not long. Maybe five minutes."

He looked up the road toward his house. He could almost see the porch light from here. Three hundred feet, give or take.

"I'll call the cops," he said.

She stepped forward. "No. Please don't." Her voice was quick, almost urgent. "I've already called a pickup. Someone's coming to get me."

Hank studied her. Something about the way she said it didn't sit right.

Not the words themselves but the way they came out, rehearsed almost, like she'd rehearsed what to say before he arrived.

And there was the phone. She was holding it but the screen wasn't showing a call or a text thread. It was just lit up on the home screen.

He knew this stretch of Route 73 better than most people knew their own living rooms. Cell coverage out here was a joke.

On a good day you might get a bar if you held your phone above your head and stood on the roof of your car, and on a January night with cloud cover sitting on the mountains like a lid, you'd be lucky to send a text at all.

The idea that she'd called anyone from this spot was hard to believe.

"Coverage is pretty spotty out here," he said carefully. "You sure your call went through?"

"It went through," she said. She didn't look at him when she said it.

Hank was a barrel-chested man, close to two hundred and fifty pounds, with a heavy beard that made him look rougher than he was.

He knew that about himself and he knew that out here on a dark road with a young woman who was alone and shaken, he probably wasn't the most reassuring sight.

He took a half step back to give her space.

"Look, my wife and I live just up the road," he said, gesturing past the curve. "Three hundred feet that way. Why don't you hop in the truck and I'll give you a ride up so you can wait somewhere warm. Trisha will make you a coffee. You can sit by the woodstove until your ride shows up."

The young woman glanced down the road in the opposite direction, the way she'd come from, as if she expected to see headlights approaching. There was nothing. Just the dark corridor of plowed snow and the faint orange glow of the plow's lights reflecting off the banks.

"Thank you but no," she said. "I'm good."

He wanted to push it. Everything in him said this girl shouldn't be out here alone in the dark and the cold, waiting for a ride that probably wasn't coming because the call probably never connected. But she was an adult and she was telling him no, and Hank wasn’t one to force the issue with a woman alone on a dark road.

"All right," he said. He reached into his coat and pulled out a scrap of receipt paper and a pen, wrote down his number.

"That's my cell. If your ride doesn't show, walk up the road to the house with the blue mailbox.

Door's always open." He held the paper out to her.

She took it and tucked it into her jacket pocket without looking at it.

He studied her one more time. There was no other passenger in the car. No bag on the seat that he could see.

"I'll have my wife call 911,” he said. "Just to let them know about the accident. They'll want to log it."

She opened her mouth to object but seemed to think better of it. She just nodded.

Hank walked back to the plow, climbed up into the cab, and pulled away.

In his side mirror he could see her standing there, small against the snowbank, her phone still glowing in her hand.

He rounded the gentle bend to his driveway, pulled in, and parked.

When he got out of the truck he looked back down the road.

He could just make out the shape of the Equinox and what he thought was the woman still beside it, though at this distance and in this light it was hard to be certain.

He went inside.

Trisha was in the kitchen, not on the couch, which meant she'd heard the plow pull in and was already heating something up for him. She turned when the door opened and he stamped the snow off his boots on the mat.

"There's a girl down the road," he said. "Car's in the snowbank near the curve. She won't come up to the house. Call the sheriff's office, would you? Tell them there's been an accident."

Trisha reached for the landline on the counter. "Is she hurt?"

"Says she isn't. But she shouldn't be out there."

He peeled off his coat and hung it on the hook by the door while Trisha made the call.

He could hear her giving the details, the location, the description of the car.

He opened the fridge and pulled out a beer and stood at the kitchen window, looking out toward the road.

He couldn't see much from this angle. Just the trees and the snow and the distant flicker of the plow's amber lights, which he'd left running.

It was less than ten minutes later when headlights swept across the kitchen window and tires crunched on the gravel drive.

Hank set down his beer and went to the front door.

A county sheriff's cruiser was pulling in behind the plow.

The door opened and Ray Sutherland stepped out, adjusting his hat against the cold.

Hank had known Ray for years. Everybody in this part of the county knew Ray.

"Ray. What are you doing here?"

"I was closest so I responded. We do that from time to time."

Hank nodded.

“Did you say, the driver was by the curve?" Ray asked, already looking past Hank toward the road.

"Red Equinox. She's right beside it. Young girl, early twenties."

Ray looked down the road. Then he looked back at Hank.

"She's not there," he said.

Hank stepped off the porch and looked for himself.

The plow's amber lights were still cycling, throwing a slow pulse of orange across the snow, and in that light he could see the Equinox still sitting at its awkward angle against the bank.

But the space beside it where the young woman had been standing was empty.

"That's not possible," Hank said. "I was in the house ten minutes. Maybe less."

Ray was already walking back to his cruiser. "Stay here."

Hank watched him drive down to the Equinox and get out.

Ray walked around the car, checked inside, looked up and down the road.

He crouched near the snowbank and studied something on the ground.

Then he got back in the cruiser and sat there for a long time with the dome light on, talking into his radio.

Hank stood on his porch in the cold, his beer going warm on the kitchen counter behind him, and waited for someone to tell him what had happened to the girl on the road.

No one ever did.