The Missing Place (16 page)

“I taught high school civics. When my daughter was born, she had a rare skeletal condition that's going to require a dozen surgeries as she grows up. We thought, at least we've got great health insurance. And then the school district started cutting costs and my wife and daughter didn't qualify for their insurance anymore. We were on the hook for almost fifty thousand dollars in bills by her first birthday.” He scowled. “We were divorced by her second birthday. By the time she turned three, I was up here trying to make a dent in what I owe. I come home covered with drilling mud, but somewhere under there I guess I'm still kind of a news junkie.”

Roland took a sip of his coffee. Colleen gripped her mug tightly but didn't drink. Shay thought through everything he'd said.

“Back at Walmart, you didn't want to talk about any of this.”

“Well, think about it. I got debt back home, and my girlfriend moved up here to teach. What happens if I lose my job? I'm fucked. And if anything happens to me, everyone I care about is fucked too.”

“What do you mean? What would happen to you?”

“I knew this guy, derrick hand on my first job. Friend of his died when the hand brake on a geronimo failed. So he started making a fuss about the routine safety checks not being performed. A few weeks later, he died in a snowmobile accident on the reservation.”

“Are you saying . . . was there something suspicious about his death?”

“I can only tell you what I heard, because they kept the whole thing hushed. But supposedly he was found at the bottom of a hill
with the snowmobile turned over a few feet away. But what killed him was getting hit on the
back
of the head. They say his brains were leaking out of it. And you don't get hit like that running into a tree. Also, what was he doing on the reservation? It's not like people go up there recreationally. Unless they were trying to send a message . . .”

“Didn't the police investigate?”

“The
Lawton
police?” Roland snorted. “Gimme a break. They blame everything on budget and staffing issues, but whenever anything happens on the worksite, they're nowhere to be found.”

“But what about their own police? Don't they have their own law enforcement?”

“Oh, now that's a whole other can of worms. Reservation law enforcement's a joke. They can't do much more than hand-slap their own. And if any outsiders are involved? It's out of their jurisdiction and you have to get the staties or the Feds in. So what happens is they hardly ever prosecute anything. I'm no fan of the tribe, but what you hear about them raping women up there, taking guys out of their cars and beating the shit out of them—it's mostly the opposite that's true, because if a white guy commits the offense, then the tribal officer's hands are tied.”

“So you're telling me no one's even looking into this whole angle?” Shay demanded.

“What if we contacted other agencies ourselves?” Colleen said, mostly to Shay. “Cut out the Lawton cops and see if we can find someone else to pick up the case, since it potentially involves the Indians. I mean, maybe we could even get FBI, right?”

“Shit, I don't know,” Shay said. “That's a stretch, isn't it? No matter what our boys were up to, why would they have any connection to the reservation?”

“I don't know. But maybe someone up there could tell us more about who's making trouble for guys who are too vocal about safety issues.”

“Just be careful,” Roland said. “You don't want Hunter-Cole thinking you're up to anything at all, because they're willing to throw money and manpower at every little problem that comes along. There's a rumor they're setting up a satellite office here in town so their guys don't have to keep flying in from their headquarters in Houston.”

“Earlier, you said the boys' crew was still working in the same place. Can you tell us how to get there?”

“Yeah, I can give you the coordinates. I'll text them to you. But they're not going to let you on site. And if they get wind you're even close, you'll just draw their attention and make them hypervigilant.”

Shay looked at Colleen. “Maybe we save that for now.”

“No—we can't hold anything back. It's been
nearly two weeks.
”

“All I mean is, we've got a couple more things to look into now, thanks to Roland. We have the reservation angle. And maybe we come at it from the side too—from your friend.”

“You got a friend in management?” Roland said, startled.

“No, no, she's exaggerating. I met a guy in the Walmart. Legal counsel at White Norris. I lied and said I was in town for business.”

“We're getting very good at lying,” Shay muttered.

Roland nodded. “Wait long enough, you'll meet everyone in the Walmart. The devil himself walked through those doors, wouldn't surprise me.”

Colleen and Shay thanked Roland, promising to keep everything he'd told them to themselves. Colleen wrote her own phone number down, as well as Brenda's address, and told him to contact her or Shay at any time.

“If you need to get in touch, go ahead and text me. But if I run into you somewhere, I'm going to pretend I don't know you, got it?”

Roland's girlfriend made another brief appearance as they were putting on their coats. “Roland able to help you out at all?” she asked sleepily, pushing her glasses up on her forehead and rubbing her eyes. “We'll both be praying for you.”

“Something I got to ask,” Shay said, pausing at the door. “You're a teacher, right? I'm guessing they didn't double teacher wages just because every fast-food joint in town's paying fifteen bucks an hour, right?”

Nora laughed drily. “Hell no. They've proposed raising our salaries, but that kind of change moves especially slow these days, now they can't figure out what to do with the budget surplus.”

“So why are you still doing it? When you could be making so much more money doing just about anything else?”

Nora glanced over her shoulder, down the hall. “Reason's sleeping in that back room. I stay with the school system, I'll be able to pick her up after preschool, get my summers off. I want to be there for her.”

Shay understood. Back in the day, she'd passed up more than one promotion—once when she was working as a bank teller and once at a gym—because the hours would have kept her away from the kids too much. Which was why her career path was more of a career checkerboard. And why she was down to a few hundred dollars in her checking account and a roll of the dice for a retirement plan.

Roland went to stand next to Nora, his arm around her. “You two drive safe and take care,” he said. “Let me know if you need anything.”

WHEN THEY GOT
back to the motor home, Colleen checked her phone. “Andy called,” she said, surprised. “It's after midnight there. I wonder—”

Paul. Someone had found something out. Or
Paul had called him.
“Oh, God,” she whispered, dialing. When Andy picked up, she didn't wait for him to say hello.

“Andy! Tell me—”

“Nothing happened,” he said quickly. “And I don't have anything new to report.”

Relief and dread tangled inside her. There wasn't bad news, and for that she was grateful. But what would she have done for good news? What would she have traded?

Had she dared to hope, for a moment, to pretend that Andy would say,
Guess who just showed up on our doorstep, in need of a shave?
That it was all a terrible misunderstanding, that Paul and Taylor had decided to go skiing or camping or, who knew, visiting someone he met last year in Syracuse, and was now back, sheepish and cranky and ready to get his life back on track.

“What,” she said hoarsely, the voice of a ghost, a used-up thing.

“I called in some favors today.” Andy was businesslike. “Two things. I've got a hotel booked for Wednesday on. It's yours as long as we want it. You can move into it, and if I come out I can join you, or
you and Shay, now that I think of it, or we can give it to Steve, if you feel you want him there.”

“Yes. Steve.”

She could sense, rather than hear, his frustration over the phone, in the lengthy pause that followed, in the careful way he spoke again. “I understand why you feel that way, you want as many resources devoted to the search as possible. But I still wonder if this is the right move. Having Steve there, the cops are going to see it as a challenge to their investigation.”

“There
is
no investigation. Don't you get it? They aren't doing anything.”

“Look, Col.” Andy sighed, and Colleen recognized the faint note of condescension that set her teeth on edge. “You have to have a little faith in these guys. Whatever abbreviated account the chief gave you was probably in the interest of saving time and, frankly, not causing a couple of hysterical moms any more worry than necessary. He wasn't—”

“Were you
there
?” Colleen demanded, clutching the phone tight in her anger.

“No, but I talked to him myself. Just about an hour ago.”

“
What?
”

“Don't get all worked up, Col, I just felt I should weigh in too, to, you know, bolster our side of things. And he reassured me—”

“I can't talk to you about this right now,” Colleen said, feeling like her breath had been forced from her lungs. Fury ignited a sharp pain behind her eyes, and she squeezed her free hand into a fist. “You have no right to—to—”

But what had he done, exactly? Another voice to nag the police, more weight behind their demands that attention be given to the case. Andy was an attorney; he was male; he was powerful. Those
were things that could be used, especially with someone like Chief Weyant. So why did it infuriate her so much?

“I have
every
right,” Andy snapped. “Don't you
dare
shut me out of this. Paul is my son too. I've been busting my ass here, me and Vicki. She's been down here practically since you left, setting up the Facebook page, helping me make calls. It was her idea I call Klipsinger in the first place—and he just got back in touch. You want to tell your best friend she doesn't have any right, either?”

Colleen's anger quickly turned to remorse. John Klipsinger was Vicki's ex-husband's law school roommate—and now a Massachusetts congressman.

“Vicki talked to Klipsinger?”

“To someone on his staff, anyway, and he's going to talk to someone in the North Dakota attorney general's office.” Andy sounded chastened too. It had to be the pressure, the incredible stress making them turn on each other when they needed more than ever to be united. “I mean, it's a favor, for sure, and without any serious threat behind it, any cooperation they give you is just a courtesy. But it's a start. Klipsinger's guy says this should at least get us more manpower on the investigation, and some coverage for you and Shay if you feel threatened. So you're not going around leaving yourself open to who knows what. And if we need to escalate, we can do that too.”

“Tell . . .” Colleen licked her parched lips. “Tell Vicki thank you.”

“You might want to tell her yourself,” Andy said shortly. “She's barely gone home to shower. She's really knocked herself out.”

“I will.” A faint alarm was ringing in Colleen's head, but now wasn't the time or place to pay attention. “I'll call her, as soon as things settle down for a minute. Right now I have to get some sleep. I'm exhausted.”

“All right.” There was an awkward pause. “Oh, I almost forgot. Vicki's putting together a flyer. Can you get a picture of Taylor? She says she can have it done overnight, and she found a place in Lawton that'll batch-print them priority. You can pick them up by ten.”

“Shay,” Colleen said. She looked up from her iPad. “Can you email Andy a picture of Taylor? My friend Vicki is putting together a flyer.”

“What's his email address?”

Her fingers flew while Colleen recited it. “Two minutes,” she said.

“Vicki even thinks she found someone to put them up around town, someone the shop owner referred her to,” Andy said. “She went ahead and ordered a thousand. I know that's probably too many, but better too many than too few. And tonight she's going to post it online—she found all these sites, I guess. Blogs and Facebook pages, sites the camps maintain. And listen, Col, WHDH is sending over a reporter tomorrow. I said I'd talk to him. I mean, anything to drum up attention, right?”

“I guess,” she said. “It just seems like there's hardly anything that anyone can do from there, really. All our leads—I don't know what else to call them—the reservation, the safety issues, that's all here in Lawton.”

“All right, I'll let you get back to it,” Andy said, sounding exhausted. “Let's check in tomorrow.”

They said terse love-yous and good-byes. As Colleen hung up, she tried not to think about Vicki stopping by with the printout of Paul's texts, dressed in those shimmering yoga pants, the tight jacket, her makeup perfect even though she said she was going to the gym. Of how often over the past few months she seemed to time her visits for when Andy was home, coming by on the weekends with an extra
jar of jam she picked up at the farmers' market, or asking to borrow the short stepladder to change the light in her foyer. “A divorcée's problem,” she'd laughed ruefully.

Andy had laughed along.

“I sent him three,” Shay said without looking up, dragging Colleen back to the present. “A head shot and two others. Now, for tomorrow, how does this sound? Let's drive out to the rig first thing. Roland sent me the coordinates, and all I had to do was put it in the map and it gave me driving directions. I don't care what he says, I want to see that rig. And it's on the way to the reservation, kind of. Shouldn't add more than a half hour to the trip, anyway.”