Chapter 2
him
The phone on the table started vibrating and Brice’s name rolled up on-screen. I sent it to voicemail, which I knew would drive him crazy, but I just couldn’t deal with him today. The buzzing phone woke up Eggy, and he moaned, then sighed while I held him in my arms.
“I know, bud. Sorry.”
I eyed the time on the phone. Eleven forty a.m. I was twenty minutes away from giving Eggy another pain med, and my insides twisted, thinking about how much discomfort he might be in. I knew he was suffering. I felt like a shit for doing this to him. Making him wait, and not just for the pain meds.
He’d been diagnosed three weeks ago. Hemangio-sarcoma—blood cancer. The vet said he had maybe six weeks to two months, but she’d recommended not waiting. “Isn’t it better to let him go out on a high note?” she’d asked.
I’d thought, Of course, it’s fucking better! Can’t you see it’d kill me to make him suffer?! But Eggy wasn’t my dog. He was Abby’s. Abigail Cooper—or just “Edgar” to me. The love of my life. Missing now for six full months.
My vision blurred with sudden wetness, and I swallowed hard. Then I swallowed hard again, blinking until I could clear my vision.
Crying wouldn’t help. If it would, she’d have been home five months and seven hours ago.
At the four-week mark in the search, local law enforcement was ready to call it. Probability of mortality: ninety percent.
That good-old-boy sheriff had even said that to my face.
“Agent Rivers, the probability of your wife being found alive is now only ten percent. I’m sorry, but we’re calling off the search. We won’t close the case until we identify her remains, but for now, we’re classifying this as an accidental mortality. We have to assume she got lost in the canyons,
and if there was an accident and she survived, without proper food, clothing, and shelter, she would’ve died of exposure, shock, or starvation by now.”
There was no trace of her anywhere. No footprints. No DNA. No trace of the SUV. No pings from her phone. No use of her credit cards…she’d simply vanished.
Six months ago, on a soggy Saturday morning, Abby had left our cabin hideaway to head out for a can of soup, milk, cheese, butter, and bread, intent on making us a tomato-soup-and-grilled-cheese combo.
It’d been raining and chilly outside, so we’d spent the morning cuddled under the covers.
I remember looking at her in the dim light of that log cabin and thinking I’d never been more in love with my wife.
She wasn’t just beautiful, smart, gifted, thoughtful, loving, sensual, and a supportive partner—she was my everything.
My whole world revolved around Mrs. Abigail Cooper-Rivers.
And now I was just this spinning planet, cast out to the far edge of the solar system, unable to feel the warmth of the sun, and so desperate for hope that I was putting this sweet little dachshund, who’d never hurt a soul,
through the worst kind of torture simply because letting him go before my wife came home felt like the end of hope for me too.
I was a coward. I just couldn’t do it. Not yet.
So, instead, I’d been pumping up Eggy with painkillers, steroids, and some Chinese herbs the veterinary oncologist had prescribed.
They’d all helped him feel better and he’d gotten his appetite back, but he was still very, very sick, and sometimes, in the hour between his previous pain med dose and the next one, he suffered, and it killed me.
All of it killed me. The empty feeling of the house.
The loss of my routine. The job that’d been my purpose in life.
The good I felt I was doing in the world.
Abby’s warmth, love, and presence. All of it was like the last echo of some sound you don’t realize is sustaining you until it’s gone, and all that’s left is the thunder of silence and the soul-crushing merry-go-round of memories, loss, and a hollow emptiness.
I glanced at the living room wall, which was covered with scraps of paper, photos, phone numbers, and leads that’d led nowhere.
“Montana,” I growled. “Middle of fucking nowhere.”
The vacation had been my idea. Abby loved the mountains as much as I did, and it occurred to me back then that we’d never taken a vacation together to the mountains. Abs had wanted to hike the trails and I’d wanted to teach her to fly-fish, so this past October, we’d headed west.
I’d found us a log cabin to rent on a twenty-thousand-acre bison ranch next to the Blackfoot River.
It’d been a bitch to get to the cabin: plane ride to Seattle, followed by a puddle-jumper to Missoula, then an hour and a half drive to Lincoln, Montana, where we’d stopped for lunch before another forty-minute drive to the cabin on a dirt road that was tough to navigate even in good weather.
Why I’d let Abby go alone to the store that Saturday, I couldn’t answer.
She’d been bubbly with energy and craving that grilled cheese and tomato soup.
I’d been feeling lazy and wanted to get a fire going to heat up the cabin.
The fire could’ve waited. The fire should’ve waited.
And I should’ve gone with my wife to the goddamn campground store.
It was only thirty-five minutes away—a quick trip by Montana standards.
I’d had this false sense of security because we’d been able to connect via satellite on our phones with each other. No internet or Wi-Fi, but we could still call each other.
When she wasn’t back after an hour and a half, I’d called.
Straight to voicemail. I’d tried to track her; her phone was either off or untraceable.
And I’d known. Right then, only an hour and a half after she’d kissed me goodbye, while the sweet, seductive scent of her still lingered on my skin, I’d just known she was gone.
Maybe living with a professional psychic for all these years had rubbed off on me, but that sinking, gutted feeling hit me like a brick.
She’d taken the SUV, so I had to rely on the kindness of the ranch owner to search for her until the local sheriff had graced me with his fucking presence three hours later.
The fact that I was a special agent with the FBI had carried no weight out there. They didn’t give a shit about us “federal city-folk LEOs.”
And it wasn’t until the entire Austin-based FBI Bureau showed up that the sheriff and his three deputies even took Abby’s disappearance seriously.
In my gut, I knew her going missing had nothing to do with our work at the FBI, but she’d been targeted before, and we couldn’t rule out that she’d been targeted again.
Abby and that amazing radar of hers had made her a little famous. She’d solved some high-profile crimes and put away a bunch of the evilest predators among us, and maybe some of their fans, friends, or family wanted to get their revenge while our guard was down.
But there were no leads. Nothing. Just dead ends.
There’d been a massive ground, water, and air search. I’d rented a helicopter, and Brice and I had gone up and spent hours and hours in the air, each with a set of binoculars, looking for any hint of the rental SUV.
The terrain had been thick with fallen leaves and dead grasses; a lot of the trees were bare, but there were enough evergreens to make the air search difficult, if not ultimately impossible, to think we’d covered it all.
And then there was the river.
It’d been raining. The Blackfoot River had been swollen and powerful. There was a bridge between the cabin and the campground store.
I’d hired professional kayakers, and they and the wildlife rangers had searched the river downstream for dozens of miles, and nothing.
No trace. No tire marks near the bridge to indicate a car had gone off the road and into the river.
No signs of a crash. No CCTV footage. No eyewitnesses to anything unusual. No trace.
She’d simply vanished.
Now, six months later, here I sat all but lost, cuddling a terminally ill pup while Abby’s other dog, Tuttle, cuddled next to me.
A soft knock at the door pulled me out of my hopeless thoughts. That’d be Oscar.
The man didn’t give up.
The only two things keeping me going were hope that Abby was still alive and somehow would find her way back to me, and Agent Oscar Hernandez.
He’d been one of Abby’s closest friends, and their separate intuitions went hand and hand.
Oscar wasn’t a professional intuitive like Abby, however. My wife made a living at it, but he was eerily good at predicting things and discerning the “ether,” as the two called it.
I owed him for his staunch, unwavering conviction that Abby was still alive, even all these months later. And because of that, he was the only one I’d answer the door for.
Getting up with Eggy still cradled in the crook of my arm, I headed to the door. Tuttle was already there, sniffing and wagging her tail. She loved Oscar. He took her for walks when I just wasn’t up for it.
I knew why he was here. He’d been dragging me to workouts the past nine weeks.
As the early months without Abby had dragged on, I’d stopped eating and taking care of myself.
It all seemed so pointless, but Oscar wouldn’t take no for an answer.
He’d literally pulled a gun on me just to get me out of the house.
Not that he’d ever pull the trigger, but I got the message when I stared down the muzzle of his Glock 19 without the protection of a Kevlar vest or a weapon of my own handy.
He’d used the maneuver to show me that I did still care about living, and if I was going to live, I might as well take care of myself.
It’d been a little better for me since then, so the guy had a point.
Opening the door, I was ready to tell him I wasn’t up for it today when I noticed the packed duffel at his feet and the way he was brimming with excitement.
“They found the Tahoe,” he said before I could even get a word out.
I knew exactly what he was referring to, and for a moment, I felt that spark of hope. But then I realized what else they might’ve found, and I searched his face for any sign of sadness or sympathy, but he seemed only enthusiastic.
I knew I had to ask, but I almost couldn’t form the words. “Her body?”