Hunting Season (3 page)

“Well,” Talbot began, glancing over at his partner as if making sure of her moral support.

“As I think you know, the investigation to date has come up empty. Frankly, I’ve never seen one quite like this: We usually have something, some piece of evidence, a witness, or at least a working theory. But this one …”

Kreiss looked from Carter to Talbot.

“What are the Bureau’s intentions?”

he asked.

Talbot took a deep breath.

“We’ve consulted with the other two families.

Our basic problem remains: There’s no indication of a criminal act.

And absent evidence of—” “They’ve been gone without a trace for three weeks,” Kreiss interrupted.

“I should think it would be hard to disappear without a trace in this day and age, Mr. Talbot. Really hard.”

He stared right at Talbot. Carter was looking at her shoes, her

expression blank.

“I’ll accept what you say about there being no evidence,” Kreiss continued.

“But there’s also no evidence that they just went off the grid voluntarily, either.”

“Yes, sir, we acknowledge that,” Talbot said.

“But they’re college kids, and the three of them were known to be, um, close.”

Close doesn’t quite describe it, Kreiss thought. Those three kids had been joined at the hip in some kind of weird triangular relationship since late freshman year. Tommy and Lynn, his daughter, had been the boy-girl pair, and Rip, the strange one, had been like some kind of eccentric electron, orbiting around the other two.

“We’ve interviewed everyone we could find on the campus who knew them,” Talbot continued.

“Professors, TA’s, other students. None of them could give us anything specific, except for two of their classmates, who were pretty sure they had gone camping somewhere. But nobody had any idea of where or for how long. Plus, it was spring break, which leaves almost an entire week where no one would have expected to see them. Sir, they could be literally anywhere.”

“And the campus cops—the Blacksburg cops?”

“We’ve had full cooperation from local law. University, city, and county. We’ve pulled all the usual strings: their telephone records, Email accounts, bank accounts, credit cards, school schedules, even their library cards. Nothing.” He took a deep breath.

“I guess what we’re here to say is that we have to forward this case into the Missing Persons Division now.”

“Missing Persons.”

“Yes, sir. Until we get some indication—anything at all, mind you-that they didn’t just take off for an extended, I don’t know, road trip of some kind.”

“And just leave college? Three successful engineering students in their senior year?”

“Sir, it has happened before. College kids get a wild hair and take off to save the whales or the rain forest or some damn thing.”

Kreiss frowned, shook his head, and got up. He walked to a front window, trying to control his temper. He stood with his back to them, not wanting them to see the anger in his face.

“That’s not my take on it, Mr. Talbot. My daughter and I had become pretty close, especially after her mother was killed.”

“Yes, sir, in the airplane accident. Our condolences, sir.”

Kreiss blinked. Talbot was letting him know they’d run his background, too. Standard procedure, of course: When kids disappeared, you

checked the parents, hard. So they had to know he was ex-FBI. He wondered how much they knew about the circumstances of his sudden retirement.

Talbot might; the woman was too young. Unless they’d gone back to Washington to ask around.

“Thank you,” Kreiss said.

“But my point is that Lynn would have told me if she was going to leave school. Hell, she’d have hit me up for money.”

“Would she, sir?” Talbot said.

“We understood she received quite a bit of money from the airline’s settlement.”

Kreiss, surprised, turned around to face them. He had forgotten about the settlement. He remembered his former wife’s lawyer contacting Lynn about it, but he had made her deal with it, whatever it was. So far, the money had covered all her college and living expenses, but he still gave her an allowance.

The woman had her notebook open and was writing something in it.

He felt he had to say something.

“My daughter was a responsible young adult, Mr. Talbot. So was Tommy Vining. Rip was … from Mars, somewhere.

But they would not just leave school. That’s something I know. I think they went camping, just like those two kids said, and something happened. Something bad.”

“Yes, sir, that’s one possibility. It’s just that there’s no—” “All right, all right. So what happens now? You just close it and file it?”

“Not at all, sir,” Talbot protested.

“You know that. It becomes a federal missing persons case, and they don’t get closed until the persons get found.” He hesitated.

“One way or another.” He paused again, as if regretting he had put it that way.

“As I think you’ll recall, sir, there are literally thousands of missing persons cases active at the Bureau. And that’s at the federal level. We don’t even hear about some of the local cases.”

“How comforting.”

“I know it’s not, Mr. Kreiss. But our MP Division has one big advantage:

They get to screen every Bureau case—every active case—for any possible links: names, credit-card numbers, evidence tags, telephone numbers. They’ve even developed special software for this, to screen the Bureau’s databases and alert for links to any missing person in the country.”

“What did the other parents say when you told them this?”

Talbot sighed.

“Um, they were dismayed, of course, but I think they understood. It’s just that there isn’t—”

“Yes, you keep saying that. Any of them going to take up a search on

? their own?”

“Is that what you’re considering, Mr. Kreiss?” Carter asked. It was the first time she had spoken at this meeting. Now that he thought of it, he had rarely heard her speak. Kreiss looked at her for a moment, and he was surprised when their eyes locked. There was a hint of challenge in her expression that surprised him.

“Absolutely not,” he answered calmly, continuing to hold her gaze. r “Civilians get into police business, they usually screw things up.”

“But you’re not exactly a civilian, are you, Mr. Kreiss?” she said.

Kreiss hesitated, wondering just what she meant by that.

“I am now, Agent Carter,” he said softly.

“I am now.”

Talbot cleared his throat.

“Um—” he began, but Carter cut him off.

“What I think Special Agent Talbot was about to say is that we ran a check on you, sir. We always check out the parents when kids go missing.

And of course we knew that you had been a senior FBI agent. But your service and personnel records have been sealed. The few people we did talk to would only say that you had been an unusually effective”—she looked at her notes—”hunter. That was the term that kept coming up, sir.”

Time to cut this line of conversation right off, Kreiss thought. He let his face assume a cold mask that he had not used for years. He saw her blink and shift slightly in her chair. He walked over to stand in front of her, forcing her to look up at him.

“What else did these few people have to say, Agent Carter?” he asked, speaking through partially clenched teeth.

“Actually, nothing,” she said, her voice catching. Talbot, beginning to look alarmed, shifted in his chair.

Kreiss, arms still folded across his chest, bent forward to bring his face closer to hers.

“Do you have some questions for me that pertain to this case, Agent Carter?”

“Not at the moment, sir,” she replied, her chin up defiantly.

“But if we do, we’ll certainly ask them.”

She was trying for bluster, Kreiss decided, but even she knew it wasn’t working. He inflated his chest and stared down into her eyes while widening his own and then allowing them to go slightly out of focus. He felt her recoil in the chair. Talbot cleared his throat from across the room to break the tension. Kreiss straightened up, exhaled quietly, and went back to sit down in the rocking chair.

“My specialty at the Bureau was not in missing persons,” he said.

“I was a senior supervisor in the Counterintelligence Division, Far Eastern section.”

Carter had recovered herself by now and cleared her throat audibly.

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“So what you said earlier pertains absolutely: Do not go solo on this, please. You find something, think of something, hear something, please call us. We can bring a whole lot more assets to bear on a fragment than you can.”

“Even though you’re giving up on this case?”

“Sir, we’re not giving up,” Talbot protested.

“The case remains in the Roanoke office’s jurisdiction even when it goes up to national Missing Persons at headquarters. We can pull it back and reopen anytime we want.

But Janet’s right: It really complicates things if someone’s been messing around in the meantime.”

Kreiss continued to look across the room at Carter.

“Absolutely,” he said, rearranging his face into as benign an expression as he could muster.

For a moment there, he had wanted to swat her pretty little head right through the front window. He was pretty sure she had sensed that impulse; the color in her cheeks was still high.

“Well,” Talbot said, fingering his collar as he got up.

“Let me assure you again, sir, the Bureau is definitely not giving up, especially with the child of an exagent. The matter is simply moving into, um, another process, if you will. If something comes up, anything at all, pass it on to either one of us and we’ll get it into the right channels. I believe you have our cards?”

“I do,” Kreiss said, also getting up.

“I think you’re entirely wrong about this,” he told Talbot, ignoring Carter now.

Talbot gave him a sympathetic look before replying.

“Yes, sir. But until we get some indication that something bad has happened to your daughter and her friends, I’m afraid our hands are somewhat tied. It’s basically a resource problem. You were in the Bureau, Mr. Kreiss, you know how it is.”

“I know how it was, Mr. Talbot,” Kreiss said, clearly implying that his Bureau would not be giving up. He followed them to the front door. The agents said their good-byes and went down to their car.

Kreiss stood in the doorway, watching them go. He had fixed himself in emotional neutral ever since the kids went missing. He had cooperated with the university cops, then the local cops, and then the federal investigation, giving them whatever they wanted, patiently answering

questions, letting them search her room here in the cabin, agreeing to go over anything and everything they came up with. He had attended painfully emotional meetings with the other parents, and then more meetings with Lynn’s student friends and acquaintances. He had endured two brainstorming sessions with a Bureau psychologist that aimed at seeing if anyone could remember anything at all that might indicate where the kids had been going. All of which had produced nothing.

Some of Lynn’s schoolmates had been a bit snotty to the cops, but that was not unusual for college kids. Engineering students at Virginia Tech considered themselves to be several cuts above the average American college kid. Perhaps they are, he thought: Lynn certainly had been. He noticed again that his thinking about Lynn was shifting into the past tense when he wasn’t noticing. But there was no excuse for the students to be rude to the law-enforcement people, given the circumstances. And there had been one redheaded kid in particular who seemed to go out of his way to be rude. Kreiss had decided that either he had been grandstanding or he knew something.

Give all the cops their due, he thought wearily as the Feds drove off.

They hadn’t just sloughed it off. They had tried. But the colder the trail became, the more he’d become convinced that they would eventually shop it to Missing Persons and go chase real bad guys doing real crimes.

The Bureau had budgets, priorities, and more problems on its plate than time in a year to work them. Missing persons cases often dragged on for years, while an agent’s annual performance evaluations, especially in the statistics-driven Bureau, were based on that fiscal year’s results: case closings, arrests, convictions. Fair enough. And they had been considerate enough to drive all the way up here to tell him face-to-face, even if the young woman had been snippy. So, thank you very much, Special Agents Talbot and Carter. He let out a long breath to displace the iron ball in his stomach as he closed the door. In a way, he was almost relieved at their decision. Now he could do it his way.

Talbot navigated the car down the winding drive toward the wooden bridge at the bottom of Kreiss’s property. Janet checked her cell phone, but there was still no signal down here in the hollows.

“I hate doing that,” Talbot said as he turned the car back out onto the narrow county road.

“Telling them we’re giving up. Parents always feel Missing Persons is a brushoff.”

“We do what we have to,” Janet said.

“Personally, I still think the kids just ran off. Happens all the time, college kids these days. They have it too easy, that’s all.”

“I thought for a minute he was going to blow up back there. Did you see his face when you started talking about his background? Scary.”

Janet did not answer. She fiddled with her seat belt as Talbot took the car through a series of tight switchbacks. The road was climbing, but the woods came down close to the road, casting a greenish light on everything.

She’d seen it all right. It had taken everything she had to come back at him, and even then, her voice had broken. She’d never seen anyone’s face get that threatening, especially when the person was a big guy like Kreiss, with those lineman’s shoulders and that craggy face. Talbot had said Kreiss was probably in his mid-fifties, although his gray-white hair and lined face made him look older. He appeared to be keeping the lid on a lot of energy, she thought, and he was certainly able to project that power. She had actually been afraid of him for a moment, when he’d trained those flinty eyes at her with that slightly detached, off-center look a dog exhibits just before it bites you.