Bitter Truth Read online

  “Private landowner,” Davenport answered. The smile he directed at Nick was probably meant to be charming but fell short of the mark. “But it’s really just a working vacation—an excuse for a fishing trip with a few hours of work thrown in on the side.”

  “Nice,” Nick said, wishing he and Lucy had the same luxury. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if they’d found Bill by the time they arrived, and they could turn it into a vacation? It had been a long time since he and Lucy had had one—since the last time they’d gone on a trip with Bill and Deena two years ago, following Sherman’s March from Atlanta to Savannah.

  “What are you looking for?” he asked Davenport. Bill had told him legends of gold still yet to be mined from the Bitterroots. “Gold?”

  Davenport shook his head. “Nothing so exotic. Anyway, no one would use GPR to find gold to mine. But I really can’t discuss a client’s private business. You understand.” He turned away to gaze out his window.

  Nick didn’t blame the engineer for being more interested in the view. As they moved east, the landscape changed dramatically; rolling hills gave way to a wide expanse of forest climbing up increasingly steep mountains until at the far edge of the horizon they crescendoed into jagged rocky peaks that shone white against the sky.

  Still, something about the two engineers bothered him. “I didn’t know anyone could own land past Poet Springs.”

  “Oh, yeah, there’s a few grandfathered in,” Judith answered from the cockpit. “It’s kind of a patchwork of homesteads—even in the Frank. Totally isolated in the winter, hard enough to get to in the summer, but those who live there, they love it. Nothing could make them leave.”

  “The Frank?” Lucy asked. She glanced over her shoulder at Nick, checking in. He gave her a smile.

  “Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness Area. The most remote region in the entire lower forty-eight.” She sounded proud of the distinction.

  Nick perked up at that. “River of No Return? Any good whitewater rafting?”

  With Lucy starting her new job at Beacon Falls and his work at the VA picking up, they hadn’t had a chance to even make it over to the Yough this summer for a rafting trip, much less anyplace exotic. Then he sobered, thinking of how Bill and Deena had postponed their visit because of work. It was far too easy to let opportunities slip away. After almost losing Lucy in January—hell, after almost losing her too many times to count, and those were only the situations she’d told him about—he’d vowed not to let that happen to them; yet here they were, their first trip together in years, and it was to search for a missing friend…or, most likely, recover his body.

  “Yes, sir,” Judith answered. “In fact, the ranch Mr. Davenport and Martin are headed to sits on the Salmon. It’s a base camp for fishing, rafting, hunting—about any expedition you might want. As long as you don’t mind llamas.”

  “I thought I saw you loading llama food.”

  “No motorized ground vehicles are allowed in the wilderness areas, so you need anything, you got to fly it, float it in by river, or pack it in. The Holmsteads, they been raising llamas for decades. Great pack animals and more friendly to the environment than horses or mules.”

  “So people hunt from llamas?” There went his romantic vision of a cowboy on a horse in the woods sighting his rifle on a grizzly bear.

  “No one hunts from on top of an animal—you need control. After all, you’re responsible for every bullet you send out there. But as pack animals, to get you into extreme areas where the hunting is more challenging and more rewarding, you can’t beat llamas.”

  “I’m surprised you don’t mind hunting,” Lucy put in. “Aren’t you the local veterinarian?”

  “Veterinarian, coroner, resort owner, and thanks to my husband, rest his soul, I’m even a zookeeper. And with Bill missing, turns out I’m now sheriff—hopefully not for long. Honestly the only job I don’t enjoy is the zoo. Animals locked in cages. But they’re all old, orphaned from circuses and carnivals that went under or bought by rich people who thought an exotic pet like a tiger cub was cute until it wasn’t. Max, my husband, he had a soft heart and took them in; thought he was saving their lives. Me, I’m not so sure they wouldn’t prefer to be put out of their misery.”

  Nick blinked. Judith did not sound at all like Dr. Rouff, their vet back home. But she was older, mid-fifties at least, so maybe she was speaking more from experience than sentiment.

  “What do you mean, you’re now sheriff?” Lucy asked.

  “In Idaho if the elected sheriff can no longer perform his duties and hasn’t appointed a replacement, the county coroner automatically assumes the office of sheriff. It was a surprise to me—never came up when Sheriff Langer had his heart attack because he already had Bill deputized as a reserve, and could ask him to step in. But now…”

  “You’re leading the search for the man whose job you now have?”

  “I never said I wanted the job in the first place. Didn’t even know it was a thing until Judge Carson showed up at the search coordination meeting this morning and told me.”

  Outside Nick’s window, he spotted a few buildings that appeared commercial, surrounded by some scattered houses and farms. “Is that Poet Springs?”

  “No, that’s Grangeville. Ten times the size of Poet Springs. And they have good cell service,” Judith added, as a ringtone sounded. She reached past Lucy to grab a small leather case. “Must have gotten a text. Would you mind checking for me? In case it’s about Bill?”

  Nick watched as Lucy opened the case and drew out a pilot’s logbook, a spiral bound set of navigation charts, and a cell phone. She tapped the cell phone and the screen lit up. It must not have been locked because suddenly her expression changed: surprise and delight.

  “It’s from Bill,” Lucy announced.

  “He’s alive!” Judith said, glee sending her voice up a notch. “Thank the Lord! What’s it say?”

  “It’s time-stamped twenty minutes ago. But it’s kind of weird.” She hesitated and glanced at Nick before reading the text. “I’m sorry. Don’t let D find me. Bill.” She raised the phone closer to her face as if interrogating it. “That’s it.”

  “Doesn’t sound like Bill. Why wouldn’t he want Deena to find him?” Judith asked. “I don’t get it. But at least he’s alive. And he must be somewhere within range of a cell tower, so we can see where he was when the text was sent.”

  Nick leaned back, ignoring the brilliant sky out his window and the shifting patterns the sunlight cast inside the cabin. He agreed with Judith—that text didn’t sound like the Bill he knew. “Judith, could Bill be trying to hide something from Deena? Like an affair?”

  “I doubt it—when he’s around her is about the only time lately he’s seemed happy. Something was getting him down, though, worrying him. Not sure if it was the job—if it was, it wasn’t any case I was involved with as coroner, so I wouldn’t know. He did mention needing a checkup before the election, so maybe he was sick and didn’t want Deena to find out?” She paused and adjusted a control. The plane shifted, rocked a tiny bit, then settled back level. “But why text me?”

  Lucy turned to look at Nick. Now her face was filled with worry. “Don’t let D find me. He’s not talking about running away with another woman, is he?”

  Nick had to force himself to meet her gaze. He suddenly felt heavy, almost surprised the tiny plane wasn’t straining against the weight that collapsed his shoulders. “I don’t think there’s another woman. I think he meant that text for the new sheriff of Magruder County.”

  Her eyes widened, but she nodded slowly. Because the only reason Judith would be sheriff was if the old one was gone.

  I’m sorry. Don’t let D find me.

  Sounded like the note of a desperate man.

  Then he shook himself. There was no point jumping to conclusions—and plenty of people wrote messages like that without harming themselves. Maybe Bill just needed time alone to think.

  No matter what, at least they knew that as of twen
ty minutes ago, he was alive.

  Until he saw proof otherwise, that was exactly how Nick was going to continue to think about things. It was a search and rescue, now with a new starting place. Which meant hope. And if Bill needed help—Nick’s particular kind of help—then it was a damn good thing he’d come along with Lucy. He was not about to lose a friend to that kind of darkness. He’d lost too many already.

  Nick couldn’t stop himself from glancing at Lucy. Because over these past few months, since her mother’s murder, that awful night when the dog attacked and she’d almost died, there had been times when he feared he might lose her as well. Not just her body, but her soul.

  No. They’d find Bill. Alive. And do whatever it took to help him.

  And then…then he’d talk to Lucy. Get everything out in the open. He’d let her keep hiding her feelings from him—from herself—for far too long.

  First Bill. Then Lucy.

  Chapter Eight

  Now that they knew Bill was alive—at least that he had been when he’d sent the text an hour ago—Lucy felt energized, a myriad ideas to help with the search filling her head. But she also dreaded what they might find. That text… Bill was fifty-nine; maybe he simply didn’t express himself well in the shorthand that text messages demanded? He would know Judith would be involved in the search for him. Was he specifically trying to tell her something? Wanted to alert her somehow to something, get her to dig deeper?

  Lucy had worked cases in plenty of less remote and more populated areas of the country where getting away with murder and other crimes was far easier than civilians imagined. Hell, right in her own backyard in rural Pennsylvania, she’d caught serial killers who’d been able to hunt for years without ever hitting law enforcement’s radar.

  It wasn’t that the police didn’t want to solve crimes or were incompetent; they simply had insufficient resources, inadequate manpower, and often lacked the training to get the job done. Despite what people saw on shows like CSI, normal community cops whose budget relied on taxpayers’ whims faced enormous odds. It was to their credit that so few major felons escaped justice—the product of long hours, good instincts, and bulldog tenacity despite being overworked and underpaid.

  Working at Beacon Falls, seeing the ever-growing queue of cold cases that families and law enforcement turned to Lucy’s team to help solve, she’d come to realize that even heinous criminals often operated in plain sight. Now, watching Judith skillfully steer the plane around several mountain peaks as she circled them onto the flight path for the narrow landing strip at Poet Springs, Lucy’s heart dropped at the sight of the miles and miles of unbroken wilderness stretching out in all directions, surrounding the tiny gathering of buildings that was the county seat. If someone didn’t want to be found, Magruder County was definitely the place to vanish.

  The runway and its Quonset-style hangar and small outbuildings sat at the western end of a narrow valley. About a mile away, nestled against the foothills that formed the valley’s walls, sat another cluster of buildings: a large red barn-like structure with a peaked metal roof that was surrounded by small cabins; downhill from that along the main road were a whitewashed church, several buildings that sat shoulder to shoulder like Pittsburgh rowhouses but with western-style façades along their roofs, a gas station, and a brick building almost the same size as the church it sat opposite from. Lucy made a mental bet with herself that it was either a bank or a government building.

  She’d been in small towns like Poet Springs all over the country, from West Texas to Tennessee to her own Pennsylvania. She’d grown up in a town almost as small and isolated; she understood how these people thought, how they would come together in a time of crisis, how little they’d appreciate outside interference.

  Judith had radioed ahead about receiving the text from Bill, so by the time they landed and taxied to a stop near a large Quonset hangar, Lucy half-hoped to be greeted by a hang-faced Bill himself. This was one occasion where she’d love to have her paranoid suspicions of foul play disproved.

  Instead, they climbed out of the Cessna to find a battered white Econoline van waiting. The driver, a middle-aged Hispanic man, hopped out and immediately began unloading the plane’s cargo, his only greeting a tip of his straw hat in Judith’s direction. The two geological engineers grabbed their gear and climbed into the van while Judith finished taking care of the plane and had a quick conversation with the driver. Lucy shamelessly eavesdropped as Nick grabbed their bags.

  “No word?” Judith asked him.

  The man shook his head.

  “Couldn’t they use the text to locate the cell tower it came through?” Lucy asked. “They could try sending a silent SMS, ping his phone, see if it’s still on, maybe triangulate from several towers. Or get his coordinates from his GPS signal?”

  Both the man and Judith turned to glare at her. She backed away, reminding herself that she was a guest here, not an FBI agent—not even a retired one. Judith finished her conversation and rejoined Nick and Lucy. “Harriet, our dispatcher at the sheriff’s office, forwarded the info about the text Bill sent me to the state police. They’d already contacted his cell carrier and they said it came through the same cell tower his other calls yesterday used. Makes sense, since it’s the only one around here. Best they could do was narrow the search area by a few miles. Said his phone is off now, so they can’t do much else.”

  “But the GPS?” Lucy asked.

  “Shows he moved a bit to the east since his last call yesterday—which was to you,” Judith said, arching an eyebrow in Lucy’s direction.

  “I missed it,” Lucy admitted. “He left a message asking me to call back.”

  Judith gave a hrumphing noise as if frustrated by Lucy’s inability to help. “Well, he must have either turned his phone off after he called you or he was in one of the GPS dark spots—there’s a bunch around here. Sometimes it can take fifteen-twenty minutes for a phone to pick up a satellite signal.”

  Nick carried their suitcase and daypacks to the waiting van, where the two engineers were waiting impatiently.

  “I’ll drop you two off at the hot springs,” Judith told Lucy, “then Miguel can take Mr. Davenport and his partner here out to the Holmstead ranch.”

  “We want to join the search,” Lucy protested.

  Nick loaded their bags into the van, hopped in, and extended a hand to Lucy. She felt Judith’s gaze on her so made a point of climbing in herself, hiding a wince of pain. Ten hours cramped into airline seats hadn’t done her ankle any good.

  Judith got into the passenger seat while Miguel resumed his spot in the driver’s seat. She twisted in her seat to face the rear compartment. “Nick, you and Lucy can drop your bags and get geared up for the search, but I’m not sure where they’ll assign you. Sheriff’s office is coordinating and handling administration, but the forest service is in charge of the volunteers. It’ll be up to them.”

  “Lucy,” Nick said, “one of us should check on Deena.” His tone implied that one should be her.

  She shot him a glare. “Sounds like a job for a trauma counselor. You’d be much more comfort and help than I would be. I want to see where Bill’s last location was, and talk to any witnesses.”

  “We’ve taken care of all that,” Judith interjected. “We might not be the FBI, but we actually do know what we’re doing.”

  “But with the text he sent today, the timeline changes,” Lucy protested, until Nick squeezed her knee and she shut up.

  Miguel steered the van down a rain-washed gravel road leading away from the airstrip and into town. The drive took all of five minutes but was noisy enough that it precluded any further conversation. Lucy won the bet with herself—the large brick building had the insignia of a defunct bank carved into its cornice, but now housed various government offices including the sheriff’s department. She also spotted a café, a general store, a diner, and a hunting-fishing outfitter. Despite it being tourist season, the only people she saw were a couple sitting at the café’s
outdoor tables. Finally, at the end of the road, they parked in front of the large barn-like building nestled into the curve of the mountains.

  “Welcome to the Keenan Hot Springs and Exotic Wild Animal Exhibit,” Judith said. “I’ve put you all in cabin three. Come inside and we’ll get your keys.”

  Nick and Lucy grabbed their bags and followed her inside the massive building. It was three stories high at its peak, and as soon as they crossed the threshold, there was the distinctive scent of sulfur.

  “The smell’s from the hot springs,” Judith said, as she meandered around a registration desk. Moose and elk heads featuring sprawling antlers adorned the walls along with other trophies: bears, wolves, mountain lions, bighorn sheep. “You can access them from inside, down that hallway through the shower and changing rooms, or from outside at the rear of the building.” She grabbed two old-fashioned metal keys on large key fobs from the pegboard. A raucous shriek echoed through the space followed by the flutter of wings and several bright green feathers floating out of the sky. Lucy glanced up to see three colorful parrots perched in the rafters above them. “Come on, I’ll show you to your cabin. The zoo’s on the other side of the building—right now we’ve got a tiger, a three-toed sloth, two ocelots, and a grizzly. Used to have a lion and a snake exhibit, but they’re gone.”

  “Gone?” Nick asked. “You said the animals were orphans; did you find homes for them?”

  Judith’s smile never faltered. “Gone as in dead. The lion from old age, the snakes after they killed my husband.”

  Chapter Nine

  They followed Judith through the massive grand hall, suitcases rattling across wide plank floors, the parrots tumbling from one rafter to the next, following them. At the rear of the hall was a dining area, but before that Judith turned down the corridor opposite the one leading to the hot springs.

  “If you need anything, my apartment is behind the registration desk,” she told them. Her voice echoed through the cavernous space. “We’re hosting a cookout tonight for the searchers—sunset is around eight-thirty, so they’ll all be in from the field after that. Might get noisy; we’re suddenly full up, with all the volunteers come over from Darby and Missoula. Good thing Deena warned me you were coming, so I saved you a cabin.”