Chapter 12
Him
“What do you need, Dutch?” Brice asked, his voice cutting out a bit from speaker of the phone pressed tightly against my ear.
“I need a connection to anyone working vice in the area. I want to see if the description—especially that tattoo—rings any bells.”
“Done. Have you asked Wheaton if he recognizes the description?”
“No. Not yet. And I’m not gonna be the one asking.”
“Why not?”
I let out a weighted sigh. “Because the man’s an idiot. He still likes me for the crime. He thinks I murdered her.”
Brice snorted what was probably his fourth cup of coffee for the day. “Dammit,” he muttered.
“Got coffee on your shirt again, huh?”
He chuckled. “Nothing gets by those keen detective senses, does it, bud?”
“Mad skills, brother. Mad skills.”
“Should I have a word with Wheaton? If he’s gonna be any kind of a hindrance to the investigation going forward—”
“Not necessary. Oscar and I can handle the sheriff. And Hernandez is gonna be the one to ask Wheaton about this piece of shit at the gas station. Maybe it’ll ring a bell with the sheriff, but I’m not holding my breath. You ask me,
this guy was just cruising through and stopped for gas and some groceries when he crossed paths with Abby.”
“Okay, but if Wheaton gets out of line, you call me.”
“Deal.”
“What else?”
I inhaled a deep breath, trying to fill up my lungs with fresh air. I was dog-tired but wired, a weird combo that had me feeling out of sorts. “I need Candice.”
“She’s already booked a flight.”
My throat tightened. Candice had been almost as wrecked by Abby’s disappearance as I had.
We’d been in silent misery together for six months, hiding our worst fears, deepest loss, and unending hopelessness on the inside while projecting the kind of anger that comes with biting the heads off anything and anyone who even looked at us funny.
Brice’s marriage with Candice had suffered for it, but he wasn’t about to complain.
“Good,” I told him, after hearing that Abby’s right hand was on the way. “I also need to keep Oscar here.”
“Done. I’ll clear it with Gaston and put in for some backpay so that he doesn’t keep using up his vacation time.”
“He’ll like that. It’ll give him a chance to get in a honeymoon when the time comes.”
Brice grunted. “The wedding’s in two weeks.”
“Yep.” I’d gotten the invitation a couple of months earlier. Scratch that, Abby and I had gotten the invite a few months earlier. You had to hand it to Oscar and Nikki to just assume she’d be home in time. It meant a lot that they’d never given up on her.
“Anything else?” he asked.
“Nah, Brice. I’m good.”
“Great, but before you go, I had a thought.”
“That’d explain the smoke.”
He plowed on as if I hadn’t just dogged him. “I want you to consider coming back to the Bureau—”
“Not a chance. Not till she’s home.”
“Hear me out for a sec, would ya?”
I could feel the tug of a scowl forming. “If you want to waste your breath, go for it.”
“Wearing a badge will advance your cause, Dutch. It’ll get you into places you maybe can’t get into if you’re not wearing one.”
“That’s why Oscar’s here.”
“You know as well as I do that splitting up is the most efficient way to investigate this going forward, and I can’t spare another agent to babysit you out there if you send Hernandez off on some lead while you tackle another.”
I shook my head but couldn’t help thinking he had a solid point.
“There’s also the issue of crossing jurisdictional lines here, my brother. You sent the Tahoe off to Salt Lake City—if they find anything, they aren’t gonna talk to you. They’ll go through Hernandez, and if you drive up there to check out a lead they’ve dug up,
Hernandez will be the only one they let into the crime lab.”
I mulled all that over. Dammit. He had another solid point.
He didn’t say anything into the silence I let hang. He knew I’d break it soon enough.
“Fine, Brice. I’ll take my badge back, but only for this case. Once I find Abby, I’m out.”
“We’ll talk about that when the time comes,” he said. It was like he was trying to get on my bad side. “I’m overnighting your badge and emailing you some paperwork to sign, reinstating you. And I’m sure I don’t have to remind you to follow the law while you’re wearing the shield.”
“I’ll give it my best shot,” was all I’d commit to. I wasn’t making any promises where Abby was concerned.
“Guess that’s the best I can expect from you right now, huh?”
“You’d be guessing right.”
“Godspeed, brother. Find her and bring her home.”
I ended the call with Brice and headed inside the noisy bar we’d stopped at for dinner.
I’d left Eggy in the truck, tucked around his blankets with some disposable, heat-activated hand warmers I’d picked up at a gas station to keep the pup warm while we ate.
Before I’d left the truck to call Brice, I made sure Eggy was peacefully sleeping, and he had enough pain meds in his system to keep him out like a light until morning.
“What’s the word?” Oscar asked when I joined him at the high-top inside the restaurant.
“For starters, I’m your boss again.”
“You never weren’t, sir. At least not in my mind.”
I grunted. Oscar’s loyalty meant a lot to me, but I couldn’t let down my walls right now to admit it. The walls were the only thing keeping me functional. “Now that we have something to investigate, Brice is gonna get you square with some backpay, and Candice is headed here too,” I continued.
He held up his phone. “She texted me five minutes ago. She’ll be here in the morning.”
I nodded. “We should come up with a game plan,” I told him, nodding to the server who’d just dropped off a Mich Light.
Oscar swiveled the cocktail napkin in front of him over to me, and I saw that he’d been scribbling on it.
Pointing to it, he read the bullet points. “We should start with the gas station, see if anybody working that day remembers the guy. If we get lucky, maybe there’s video and a credit card we can trace.”
I nodded, but I wasn’t hopeful about that. It’d been six months. For all we knew, anyone working at the gas station that day was no longer there. Gas stations have notoriously high turnovers.
And Oscar was reaching if he thought there’d be video; we weren’t anywhere near a population center, and commercial centers this remote didn’t have the budget for security cameras, not to mention storage for said footage.
Still, we couldn’t afford to leave any stone unturned.
He pointed to the next bullet point. “Campgrounds. Gwen said the Tahoe was pulling a camper. This guy must’ve car-jacked Abby, rendered her unconscious, and hitched his camper to your rental. That means he had to ditch his old vehicle.”
I nodded. “The Tahoe’s plates were gone when it came out of the water. He probably switched out the plates, or just removed them altogether because who could see a license plate attached to an SUV pulling a camper?’
Oscar nodded. “Exactly.”
Werewolf packs, rejected mates, and a second chance that was never part of the plan.
There are more stories like that on Lokepub.
“You two ready to order?”
The server was back at our table. I wasn’t hungry. My stomach was too tied up in knots ever since Gwen had given the description of the piece of shit who’d kidnapped my wife. If I found that motherfucker alive, he wasn’t going to survive long enough to be brought into custody.
“I’ll have the Cobb salad with ranch,” Oscar said. I cocked an eyebrow at him, and he muttered, “The wedding’s in two weeks. I gotta fit into my tux.”
I smirked, then shook my head at the server. “I’m good, but bring me another Mich Light when you bring out his salad.”
Oscar held up his hand to her before she could turn away. “He’ll have a T-bone, cooked medium-rare, with the home fries and slaw.”
When I shot him a questioning look, he said, “We’re gonna find her, sir, and I think it’s important that she be able to recognize you when you’re reunited. You’ve lost so much weight, she might mistake you for Dave.”
I chuffed out a laugh. Dave was nearly as tall as me but lean and wiry, and starting to bend a little with age. Finally, I sighed and nodded to the waitress. I could feed Eggy some steak later tonight or tomorrow morning when he woke up.
Once the young lady waiting on our table left us, Oscar got back to his list, tapping the next bullet point. “Tattoo shops. That tat Gwen described seems pretty unique.”
I sucked on my teeth. “That’s one way of putting it.”
He nodded but studied me critically, probably seeing the fury in my eyes.
“Try not to go there, sir. I know it’s hard, but we gotta focus on finding her first. We can deal with what happened to her in the meantime later. Nikki’s got a list of trained therapists her SVU department works with. She says they’re all really good.”
I took a long pull on my beer, but it was like spraying a rumbling volcano with a water pistol. Inwardly, I was seething. That motherfucker was gonna feel some pain and some fear before I put him down. But to Oscar, I simply nodded.
He tapped the bullet point again. “I think we can use AI to create and then hunt for the template or the portfolio pic of the tattoo.”
AI was a fairly new tool to the Bureau. As an investigative tool, it was difficult to employ it confidentially, but it usually turned up some good results where searches and probabilities were concerned.
“You think some tattoo artist put that image up on social media somewhere?” I asked skeptically.
Oscar shrugged. “Anybody willing to needle it onto some dude’s arm isn’t gonna be shy about showing it off.”
“Good point. If AI doesn’t turn up anything, and Brice’s vice connections through the Bureau up here don’t turn up a lead, we can start calling around to all the licensed tattoo shops in the area. Someone had to have inked it.”
“Yep,” he agreed. “We should also ask around at the campground again.”
I sighed. “We did that, remember?”
There was a large camping park next to the trading post where Abby had gone to get us the groceries she’d purchased. We’d asked every camper in the park if they’d seen her, and we hadn’t turned up a single lead.
“Yeah, but we were asking the wrong question. We asked if anyone had seen your wife, not who might’ve seen the guy with a memorable tattoo like the one Gwen described.”
Oscar had another solid point. Back when rage and heartbreak weren’t filling every corner of my mind, I would’ve been faster to come up with a game plan myself, but right now,
all I could do was hold it together long enough to find this piece of shit before I made sure the last sunrise he’d seen was the last sunrise he ever saw.
We hashed out a few more of the bullet points before our food arrived, and Oscar and I ate mostly in silence. Surprisingly, once I started eating, I enjoyed the steak. It was Oscar who pretended his salad was a good alternative to his usual fare of meat and potatoes.
Tucking a piece of steak for Eggy into a to-go carton, I had another thought. “We should reach out to one of the Bureau’s profilers.”
The statement was a hard one to give voice to.
Abby had been our profiler, and she was by far the best in the biz.
Our cold-case closure rates were stellar, and it was all due to her.
She could get a feel for the killer in a way a regular psychiatrist-trained profiler couldn’t.
And sometimes she’d give us a physical description of the perp too.
But now we had a physical description. I suspected this guy was either a current or former gang member, but we’d need more. We’d need a specific personality workup that’d help to narrow down where this guy, and Abby, might be.
“Good idea,” Oscar said. “Weird to think gangs are rampant in this neck of the woods.”
I motioned to the server for our check. “Fentanyl shows up everywhere. Montana’s no exception.”
“True. But there’d have to be fewer players out this way. We might get lucky and be able to narrow down the list quick.”
I grunted, reaching for my wallet. I was holding back the thought that Abby was drugged to make her compliant, and might still be being drugged, but that thought was doing its damnedest to feed my worst fears.
Like they needed feeding in the first place.
Oscar grabbed the check as it was laid on the table. “I got this,” he said.
I scowled and tried to grab it from him. “Come on, Hernandez. Stop playin’.”
Oscar held the check away from me, tucked his credit card into the small binder it was in, and handed it to the server. When she left to run the card, the junior agent looked at me squarely and said, “I’ve got backpay comin’, remember?”
I sighed. “Then I still owe you for all the vacation days you’ve taken.”
He cocked his head at me. “Why do you believe you owe me anything?”
I stared at him, confused by the question. “What’re you…kidding? You’re out here missing work, your fiancée, and your life, all to help me find my wife.”
He shook his head. “No, sir. I’m not.”
“You’re not?”
“Nope. I’m out here missing work, my fiancée, and my life because Cooper’s my friend. Hell, she’s one of my best friends. The fact that she married you is inconsequential. She’d look for me the same way I’m looking for her in a heartbeat, so, here I am,
and here I’m gonna stay until we find her and bring her home. Sir.”
That earned him a grateful half smile, which was all I had energy for.
We left the bar shortly after and I offered Eggy some steak, but he only sniffed at it before burying his nose back in the blankets. “Dammit,” I muttered as Oscar pulled out of the parking lot and onto the road.
“He’s not eating?”
“No. He ate a little this morning, but nothing since then.”
“He seemed perky when we were interviewing Gwen, though.”
I nodded, but my already troubled thoughts were clouded with guilt and worry for this twelve-pound noodle of a dog. “It’s getting bad, Oscar,” I said after a long silence.
“I know, sir.”
I sighed, leaning my head back against the headrest. “He’s got probably a week left in him.”
“Then we’ve got up to six days to find her. Sooner, if we’re lucky.”
I turned my head to eye him skeptically. “Ever the optimist, eh?”
He grinned. “How the fuck else are we going to get through this, Dutch?”
It wasn’t lost on me that he’d finally called me by my first name, and I knew he’d done it to drive home the point that we couldn’t allow ourselves the luxury of despair right now. We had way too much work to do and the clock was ticking.