Chapter 21
TWENTY-ONE
CASEY – THURSDAY EVENING
It had taken Casey longer to get to Gabriel’s than he’d expected.
First, the rain had started up again, and there were no windshield wipers that could keep up with the deluge.
He didn’t envy anyone venturing up Crystal Creek Road in this weather.
Hopefully, the asshole driver who sped up the road at forty miles an hour didn’t end up in a ditch or front bumper first in one of the canyonesque potholes.
Then, once he was back on the highway, Casey had had to make a stop at the Park Office to trade vehicles and fill Greta in on what he’d learned about Calvin, which was not much.
While he’d enjoyed having coffee with Paul and Etienne, he never did get more than a maybe in answer to his questions, followed up with a vague promise to get in touch if they did suspect Perkins was in the area.
It was the curse of living off the grid and wanting to be left alone, Casey grumbled to himself as he drove into Smitty’s and toward Gabe’s.
Although admittedly, living off the grid sounded like a curse for him but obviously not for the retired spies or other folks living up there.
Their mutual agreement to not pay attention to other people’s business was an issue when something did happen.
Something like Calvin Perkins disappearing.
Gabe’s place was inexplicably dark, but the Honda was parked in his spot out front, so he had to be home. Maybe he’d fallen asleep? After all, Gabe had been up since at least three or four a.m., searching for information about Holly Pritchard. Casey’d been up almost as many hours, and he was beat.
Still, something didn’t feel right, and he wasn’t sure what it was. For one thing, he couldn’t imagine Gabe sitting around with all the lights off.
“Huh.” Reaching down, he set the Wagoneer’s parking brake and leaned forward, peering at Gabe’s front door, which was illuminated by his headlights.
Casey narrowed his eyes, squinting at the house. Was the door slightly ajar?
It was. Gabe would never leave his door open, especially not this time of year. Just the other day, he’d scolded Casey for not making sure it latched because Keith was a bit of an escape artist and “no way was he chasing the damn cat around the RV park in this fucking cold.”
Behind him, Bowie stirred and sat up to see what was going on. Casey could almost hear him asking why they weren’t getting out of the car.
A gust of wind blew up. The door slammed with an audible bang and almost immediately swung outward again.
“Stay,” Casey ordered Bowie, then elbowed his door open and got out.
“Gabe?” he yelled.
There was no answer. The tiny glimmer of hope Casey had that the open door meant Gabriel was inside and was about to pull it closed flickered out.
A second gust of wind blew across the park grounds.
Another weather system was moving in fast, and the next few hours promised to be wet and windy.
Not an ideal time for Gabe to disappear.
Casey moved closer to the house, the unease in the pit of his stomach becoming a snake pit. An acid-producing snake pit. His foot landed on something that crunched against the gravel. Stepping back, he looked down and saw a glint in the darkening evening light.
“Shit.” Bending down, Casey hooked one finger around the sparkly Hello Kitty keychain Gabe had picked up from Norskland General Store. Another of Mercy’s failed purchases for her daughter when Brooklyn had been a tween, one that Gabe had found amusing to add to his collection of sparkly things.
The acid roiled. What was he going to find inside?
“Gabe, are you there?” he called out again, pocketing the keys and forcing himself to move toward the door.
Under normal circumstances, Casey did not allow his imagination to run wild. Imagination was just that—not wholly perceived reality. However, Casey’s brain was churning out unwanted images. Gabe injured. Gabe dead. Charming Fucker, gone forever.
Life with Gabriel Karne, he’d learned, was never going to be normal. But this was even less normal than Casey was accustomed to.
Gabriel Karne was Casey’s personal basket lightning.
The phenomenon was something he’d only seen once in his life.
Instead of striking the earth, one and done, a bolt of lightning bolt struck, then appeared to twist up and roll along the ground like a ball, sometimes for miles, wreaking havoc in its path.
Casey wasn’t sure he could revert to a havoc-less, Gabe-less life.
“Fuck.”
Tugging the sleeve of his coat over one hand, Casey pulled on the handle and held the door open with his shoulder, then reached inside and flipped on the interior light.
Casey didn’t know what he expected to see, but it wasn’t this.
“Holy shit.”
The front room was utter chaos, completely trashed. Ignoring the rubble, Casey hastily searched for signs of Gabriel. In the bedroom, he discovered Keith hiding under the bed but no Gabe.
“Good kitty for staying inside,” Casey said to the pair of glowing eyes.
Leaving the cat there for the time being, Casey peeked into the closet and bathroom. Nothing. No Gabriel. No Charming Fucker.
At least he wasn’t lying on the kitchen floor. Was the fact that Gabe wasn’t to be found a good thing? Had Gabe decided to walk somewhere in this weather? Or had whoever was responsible for this mess taken him?
Gabe’s standard level of mess was a stack of dishes in the sink and dirty laundry sitting in a pile on the bedroom carpet beside the bed. And, yes, the over-the-top selection of toys he’d purchased for Keith were often strewn about. What Casey was looking at now was far beyond that.
From the confines of the Wagoneer, Bowie started barking, demanding to be let out. “Sorry, doggo, no can do,” Casey said, even though he knew Bowie couldn’t hear him.
Before he tried to make some kind of sense of what might have happened to Gabriel, Casey made two calls. The first was to the Sheriff’s Office to report a break-in, and the second was to Elton.
“I’m heading over,” Elton said grimly. “I was just sitting around wondering when you two were planning on getting here.”
“Were we supposed to come over? Eagan’s sending someone by. Maybe we should let them do their job?” Casey suggested. Not that he wouldn’t welcome moral support in the form of Elton Cox.
“Are you waiting around for them to get their act together?”
“Elton,” Casey said with a sigh. No, he wasn’t.
“Five minutes. I’ll turn the stove off and get my boots on.”
While he waited for Elton and law enforcement to show up, Casey walked the perimeter of the property but found no sign of Gabe.
This was good, he told himself. He was tempted to investigate further, but it was dark, and he was more likely to destroy any evidence left behind than make a miraculous discovery.
Elton and one of the new-hire deputies arrived at virtually the same time. Casey was thankful the deputy had skipped the siren and lights. After all, there was no one in the house to scare away, and the neighbors would find out soon enough.
Rolling down his window, Elton leaned out and asked, “Have you tried calling him again?”
Keeping out of the deputy’s way, Casey walked over to Elton’s truck. “Only about twenty times. Wherever he is, he’s not answering. Or he doesn’t have control of his phone. I found his keys on the ground.” Casey held them out as proof.
Elton’s caterpillar-like eyebrows drew together. “I don’t like this.”
“You don’t like it?” Casey asked. “I hate it.”
“Mr. Lundin?”
Casey turned around as the young deputy approached him.
“Acting Chief Deputy Eagan is on her way. Um, do you think you can take a look and see if anything is missing before she arrives? Might help us get started on sorting out what happened here.”
Casey glanced at Elton. “Wait here. I’ve already been inside once.”
“Use that fancy phone of yours to take a video so I can see too.”
Gabe was right, they’d created a monster. But taking a video was also a great idea.
“Will do.”
Casey cringed again at the wreckage when he and the deputy re-entered the house. Pressing Record, he held his phone out to document the damage; when they found Gabe, he might find it useful. He refused to entertain the idea they might not find him.
The intruders had destroyed Gabe’s secondhand Ikea couch, the cushion stuffing spread across the room.
His small but growing collection of paperback mysteries and thrillers had been swept off the shelves and tossed to the carpet.
Some of them had been ripped apart and stomped on, their pages violated.
Had the intruders been looking for something or just trying to cause as much damage as they could?
“Gabe isn’t going to be happy about this.”
When they found him. When they found him alive. The alive part was very important.
The bedroom had endured the same sort of willful destruction. Drawers had been ripped out of the chest and the contents thrown across the floor. Casey couldn’t tell if anything had been taken or not; it was all a jumble of socks and underwear and pillow innards.
Stopping the recording, Casey returned to the living room with the deputy, whose name he really should have tried to learn, but he couldn’t be bothered at the moment. He let his gaze drift slowly around the room, taking in the minute details now that he wasn’t looking for intruders.
“Shit.”
He knew exactly what was missing.
The boxes they’d picked up on Tuesday were gone. Nowhere in sight. All six of them.
“Some moving-type boxes are missing,” Casey told the deputy. “They were right here.” He pointed at the empty spot next to Alfred.
“Gabe brought them here the other day. They were his mother’s,” Casey added, although he doubted the deputy cared much about who the boxes had originally belonged to. Gabe would probably be upset that the intruders hadn’t taken Alfred too.
Through the window that wasn’t obscured by a pizza box, Casey saw that another police cruiser had arrived, Deputy Eagan behind the wheel.
The chief deputy got out and approached the front of the house, a flashlight clutched in one hand.
Casey appreciated how she scanned the area, but he could have told her she wouldn’t find anything.
He stepped through the propped-open door and met her outside.
“Karne going missing is very not good.” She shot Casey a gimlet stare. “We have an ID on the victim from the beach.”
“Oh? What is her name?”
“Mia Witherspoon. Does that name mean anything to you?”
“Did I hear you say Witherspoon?” Elton asked. He’d manifested himself from sitting in his truck to standing directly next to Casey.
Casey glanced at Elton and lifted his brows in a silent question. Were they going to tell Eagan about Gabe’s side job?
Elton spoke up. “Gabe had a run-in with Randy Witherspoon on Monday. Is she a relation?”
Apparently, they were sharing Gabe’s side hustle.
“And again yesterday. Gabe ran into him in Westfort,” Casey added.
“But that doesn’t explain why Mia Witherspoon showed up at Gabe’s Monday morning,” Elton added.
“Maybe we should head to the office and compare notes, see if we can come up with a narrative that makes sense. But before we do that, Deputy Wycoff and I will knock on doors around here, try to flush out a few witnesses, but I’m not holding my breath. Please, wait here.”
The don’t do anything stupid was inferred.
After getting a nod from each of them, Eagan and Wycoff headed toward the nearest neighbor.
“Why are we waiting here?” Elton asked out the side of his mouth.
“Because we are not Gabriel Karne?” Casey replied, equally quiet.
The truth was, Casey didn’t want to wait either. Waiting felt wrong, but they needed a direction to search in.
“If it was one of us, Gabriel would not sit on his hands,” Elton pointed out.
“Where do we start?”
“First, we go to the Sheriff’s Office, like Deputy Eagan asked. We report Gabe missing. Then we think like Gabriel. He didn’t leave under his own power but knowing him, he left us a clue if he could.”
“What like, Hansel and Gretal?” Casey asked.
Elton’s eyebrows twitched up and down. “Exactly like Hansel and Gretal.”