Chapter 16
Him
Oscar and I met Candice at the puddle jumper she’d taken from Seattle. Stepping off the plane, she looked tired. And older than she had six months ago. The change was noticeable. In both of us, perhaps. Losing someone you love with your whole heart will do that to you, I supposed.
“Hey, fellas,” she said, pausing to give us both a one-arm hug. We’d been doing that a lot since October. Hugging. I wasn’t much of a hugger, unless it was my wife, but since she’d disappeared, I couldn’t get enough of them. Especially from Candice. She knew the pain I was in. She felt it too.
“We’re this way,” Oscar said, grabbing her luggage and motioning toward the gate beyond which we’d parked the pickup.
Candice walked between us, leaning over toward me to peer at Eggy. He was awake, and his tail thumped against my rib cage when she looked down on him.
“How’s he doing?”
“Hanging in there.” The dog was a trooper, I’d give him that.
“Aren’t we all,” I heard her mutter.
We got to the gate leading to the lot, and I held it open for Oscar and Candice. The F-150 we’d rented was an extended cab, so there was plenty of room in the back seat for Candice and her luggage.
After making it to the truck, we all piled in and buckled up.
“Where’re we headed first?” she asked.
“First, we start with the campground,” Oscar announced. Then he seemed to catch himself. “Sorry, sir, I should let you talk.”
“No harm, no foul, my man,” I assured him.
Lifting up the folder between the seat and the cup holder, I said, “We got a composite sketch from a gas-station attendant outside Missoula who remembered seeing Abby with a Three Percenter,
and we took the sketch to another witness who remembered seeing this scumbag with Abby at another gas station in Lincoln.”
I showed Candice the sketch and she took it from my hands, her upper lip curling into a snarl.
“He’s an ugly son of a bitch,” she said softly.
“Our witness from the gas station in Lincoln said it’s a match to the guy she saw with Abby. She also gave us a description of a unique tattoo that we have yet to pin down.”
“You can put me on that,” she said confidently, pulling out her laptop. “What’s the description?”
I rifled through the notes in the file and handed her a printout of the description.
She read it and, looking at her reflection in the rearview mirror, I could tell she was as disgusted and angry as I’d been when I’d first heard it described.
“Where have you already looked for this?” she asked.
I nodded at Oscar, and he replied, “The usual. I ran it through the federal database first, didn’t get any hits, then did an AI search, which brought back nothing, and then I tried social media and Google Images. I keep coming up with bupkis.”
“Have you tried Reddit?”
There was a pause before Oscar answered her. “No. No I did not.”
I glanced over my shoulder at Candice, who smirked while she tapped at her tablet. “Always check Reddit,” she said. “And the dark web.”
“We were gonna start calling around to tattoo parlors,” I said.
“I’m on it, Dutch,” she assured me before handing back the description of the sketch.
Oscar and I remained silent while Candice worked a search on the tattoo.
“He could’ve gotten this anywhere,” she said after a bit.
“Anything coming up?” I asked. I wasn’t holding my breath that the tattoo would produce any info, but a lead was a lead, and we had to exhaust it.
“Not yet,” she said.
We were all quiet for the rest of the way to the campground, but as we pulled in, Candice tapped my shoulder.
I glanced over at her, and she swiveled her tablet around to show me a tattoo featuring a woman, lying naked and spread eagle under a tiger.
The tiger stared at her hungrily, while she arched her back, lifting her chest toward the cat provocatively.
“Not the same as the description,” I said, wondering if both witnesses had gotten it wrong.
“But it’s similar enough,” Candice said.
Oscar put the truck in park and twisted in his seat to get a load of the image. “Where’s that from?”
“A tattoo shop in Wallace, Idaho,” she told him.
“Where’s that?” I asked, glancing at Candice, who went back to tapping at her tablet screen.
“Near the Idaho–Montana border, about an hour and forty-five from Missoula or roughly three hours from here.”
I sighed. Damn, I was tired. Everything out here took forever to get to.
Oscar must’ve noticed my frustration. In a soft tone, he said, “Let’s check with the staff here, sir, and we’ll work our way south. Maybe we’ll get lucky and somebody’ll remember the guy and the tat, and we’ll score a name.”
I nodded and opened the door of the truck wordlessly. We all got out and headed to the main building for the campsite, which was sparsely populated, by the looks of it.
I reached the door first and held it open for Candice. As she passed me, she reached out and stroked the top of Eggy’s head. I felt his tail thump lightly against my chest, and his nose twitched from where he was peeking out at her from the sling.
“You want to hold him?” I asked her.
She nodded, and as we came into the office area, I slipped off the sling and handed it and Eggy to her. She held the pup close, rocking him gently.
I had to look away. It choked me up.
Candice wasn’t Abby, but Eggy had known her as long as he’d known me, and I knew that he loved her like a child might love an auntie.
Moving toward the front desk, I rang the bell at the counter because there wasn’t anyone in sight.
Out from the back stepped a woman I’d put in her mid-sixties. She had a kind face but sharp eyes. I suspected not a lot got past her.
“Hey there,” she said in greeting. “You here to camp?”
I withdrew my badge and flashed it at her while Oscar did the same. Candice stood behind us with Eggy. She’d let us take the lead.
At the appearance of a couple of bronze badges and federal IDs, the camp worker stiffened.
Couldn’t really say I blamed her.
“Ma’am,” I said with an acknowledging nod, then tapped my chest.
“I’m Special Agent Dutch Rivers.” I then pointed to Oscar and Candice in turn.
“That’s Agent Hernandez and our FBI consultant, Candice Fusco. We’re here about a woman who went missing last October. Abigail Cooper. One of our agents might’ve already spoken to you about her disappearance some months back.”
“The woman from the flyers,” she said, nodding. “I remember. I talked to a couple of your guys a while back. I told them the same thing I’ll tell you. A girl that pretty I would’ve remembered. She never came through the camp.”
I nodded again. I knew Abby hadn’t been here; what I wanted to know was if her abductor had.
“Can you remind us of your name?” I found that when you addressed witnesses by name, they tended to offer up more information.
“Sarah. Sarah Felter”
“Nice to meet you, Sarah. I’m hoping you can help us out. We’ve got a witness who thinks they saw Abigail with this guy…” From the folder, I took out the composite sketch and offered it to her. “You ever see him come through here? He would’ve left the area the same day Abigail went missing.”
Sarah’s eyes widened, then narrowed in on the sketch I was holding out to her. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “I remember him. We got ridda him. He and his brother were making some of the other campers real uncomfortable, so we told ’em they had to leave.”
I felt my brows arch while my heart rate ticked up, adrenaline once again flooding my system. Sarah remembered him. He’d camped here. “You catch his name, Sarah?”
“Wade. His brother’s name’s Wally. I almost had to call the sheriff on them two, but they ended up leaving without too much of a fuss.”
“Do Wade and Wally have a last name?” I pressed.
She frowned and walked over to a filing cabinet, where she rooted around inside one of the drawers for a bit, finally coming up with a thick bundle of rubber-banded receipts.
She brought them back to the counter and began to sort through them. At last, she pulled up a single receipt. “Wade Smith,” she said, handing it over to me.
I took it and stared down at the pink slip of paper, which had the dates that Wade had rented a camp slot for two weeks, beginning on October 19. At the bottom of the slip, it read: refunded one week.
I squinted at the slip. “Is that a phone number?”
Sarah leaned toward me, looking to where I was pointing. “Yep.”
I showed the receipt to Oscar. “Can you make that out?”
He nodded, tapping out the phone number on his own phone, but he didn’t call it.
Instead, he simply listed it as a contact, then switched over to another contact and made a call.
“Sir,” he said into the phone. “I got a name and a number we need a trace on right away.”
He walked several paces away to continue to talk to Brice.
I continued to question Sarah. “Did Wade or Wally ever talk to you about where they hailed from? Or where they were going after they left here?”
She shook her head. “They were only here a couple’a days, and they left in a huff. Didn’t say nothin’ to me except that Wally called me a fuckin’ bitch and flipped me the bird on his way out the door.”
Oscar came back and tapped me on the shoulder. “Phone number belongs to a Marilyn DeGroot. She’s 86. She’s had the same number for fifty years. Wade and Wally Smith also come back a bust.”
I nodded. What else could you expect from a Three Percenter except a complete distrust of anyone wanting their information. I wondered if they knew Marilyn, though. Did they make up the phone number on the spot? Or did they use her number because they knew it by heart?
Before I could tell Oscar to reach out to Marilyn DeGroot, he said, “Brice assigned Baldwin to look into Marilyn. Baldwin’s gonna call us as soon as he speaks to her.”
“Good work,” I told him, adding, “Smith might not be their last name, but I’d bet my next paycheck that their first names are right.”
For emphasis, I pointed to the form, which listed only Wade’s or Wally’s first initial. Looking back up at Sarah, I asked, “You knew their names because you overhead them talking to each other, right?”