Missings, The (31 page)

Mex remained a mystery. Chase felt certain that over time, the two of them would find a way to get to know each other better. The man was haunted, but he was stand-up and solid.

The DNA results for the two bodies hadn’t come back yet, but Chase’s money was on Mex.

He pulled the current copy of the
Aspen Falls Register
open to the article he’d just read and read it again:

MISSING—Former Aspen Falls resident and prominent international businessman, Presley Adams, has been reported missing in Los Cabos, Mexico, where one of his companies recently opened a new private clinic. Adams has been named as a person of interest in the recent murders and abductions of several people in the Aspen Falls area. Four other people are pending trial.

The Preston Clinic in Aspen Falls is under new ownership.

In an unrelated story out of the same region of Mexico, the continuing battle with various drug cartels has Mexican officials reeling. A larger army, more money, and Santeria are blamed for the failure of the Mexican government to bring an end to the cartels.

Chase folded the newspaper and tossed it on the counter. He didn’t believe for a minute the stories were unrelated.

The Missings
is the result of a complete rewrite of a manuscript I wrote a couple of years ago. That one was the result of a complete rewrite of an even earlier story. The original, although it bears next to no similarity to this book, was arrived at with the support of The Writing Girls—author Kelly Irvin, author Susan Lohrer and Angela Mills. They are gifted writers in their own right, and I’m proud to count them as friends.

I received assistance for medical issues from author Jordyn Redwood, and crime scene information from author Tom Adair. If there are any errors related to either of these aspects, I assume full responsibility. Both of these people are experts in their fields, gave me their considered opinions, and then I tried to make them work for the story.

The police chief in Aspen, Colorado, Richard Pryor (yes, that’s his real name!) helped me with some tricky problems with the plot—including my need to have a civilian involved in the investigation. Elizabeth would not have been as much fun to write if she had to be pathetic and mourn on the sidelines.

Carol Myers is my cousin, and I asked her to read the scene with Birdie to make sure I nailed the Eastern European language challenge. I remember my Great-Grandmother, but Carol spent much more time with her and came back to me with a thumbs-up.

My first readers were wonderful. Bestselling author L.J. Sellers, author Lala Corriere, Kel Darnell, Kathleen Hickey, Joni Williams and Gail Swift helped me get it ready for an editor. Each one of these women lead busy lives and I appreciate them tackling an unedited manuscript just because I asked them to, and each one of these women contributed to the final result. My gift to them is a brand new ending to the story they read all those weeks and months ago.

This was my first time working with Jodie Renner. She is a terrific editor and made me feel like I had a collaborator extraordinaire. She found things that needed fixing and areas that needed expansion, and then she sat back patiently while I applied her advice or convinced her to let me have my way. She made the editing process thoroughly enjoyable. With Jodie, it was very much a collaborative effort that spoiled me, taught me and stretched me. And she did it all without changing my voice. She was also one of my biggest encouragers. Because of Jodie,
The Missings
is a better story.

Patty G. Henderson worked her magic once again for my cover design. Patty tweaked and emailed and tweaked and emailed and tweaked some more. Maybe it’s because she’s in Florida and I’m in Colorado, but I didn’t get the sense she rolled her eyes or sighed even one time. She just wanted me to be happy. That’s what I call a partner!

And finally, in order to attempt to provide readers with an error free reading experience, Krysta Corinn Copeland applied her keen eye to my manuscript looking for strange little problems. If any exist in this version, it is not due to her oversight but my negligence. Special thanks also to early readers Marilynne Smith, and Allen MacDiarmid, who caught errors everyone else missed.

For more information regarding organ donation, begin with United Network for Organ Sharing, or UNOS. You can find them at
http://www.unos.org
. If you are not currently an organ donor, please carefully consider the final gift you might have to help greatly improve, or even save, the life of another person.

Finally, I want to acknowledge those of you who read
Red Tide
and told me how much you enjoyed it. You gave me the heart to do everything again. Thank you. Without you I would simply be spewing words into a vacuum, and how much fun could that be?

**Turn the page to read the beginning of RED TIDE, and find out why it got all of those great reviews.**

A Colorado Native, Peg Brantley is a member of Sisters in Crime and Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers. She and her husband make their home southeast of Denver, and have shared it over the years with a pair of mallard ducks named Ray and Deborah, a deer named Cedric and a beloved bichon named McKenzie.

Peg loves hearing from readers. If you’d like to learn more about Peg, or get in touch with her, you can go to her Facebook Author page at
https://www.facebook.com/PegBrantleyAuthorPage

by

RED TIDE
Copyright © 2012 by Peg Brantley

All rights reserved. Except for text references by reviewers, the reproduction of this work in any form is forbidden without permission from the author.

ISBN: 978-0-9853638-1-9 (Paperback)

978-0-9853638-0-2 (Electronic book text)

Published in the United States of America by Bark Publishing, LLC

This is a work of fiction. All characters, names, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual people, locations, or events is coincidental or fictionalized.

Cover Design by Patty G. Henderson at Boulevard Photografica, www.boulevardphotografica.yolasite.com

To my mom, who loved and believed in me even when she wasn’t here.

Happy birthday, Mom.

To my dad and my sister who showed me it could happen.

And to my husband, the Love of My Life, who has waited patiently

for the done-done version.

“And all the waters that were in the river were turned to blood. The fish that were in the river died, the river stank and the Egyptians could not drink of the water of the river…”

Exodus 7:20-21 New King James Version

Sometimes the dead shouldn’t stay buried.

Jamie Taylor ducked under an aspen branch. Sometimes the dead needed to be unearthed, exposed, examined, and prayed over.

And sometimes, mulchy, worm-filled graves were not meant to be their final resting places. Places where secrets remained hidden, held fast to rotted flesh and dry bones.

“Never,” Jamie said. “People are not meant to be buried in unmarked, unremembered tombs. Not as long as I have anything to say about it.” She and Gretchen had begun their search in earnest when the golden retriever alerted next to a mountain laurel. There, Jamie found a small, fragile piece of stained cloth. She marked it with a utility flag so the crime lab tech could photograph and bag the bit of evidence, and then she moved on with her dog, spirits high with the promise they’d find what they were looking for soon.

Hours later, physical exhaustion gave way to punchiness, and her certainty flagged to a dull depression. Jamie signaled to Gretchen with a light tug on the lead. “Time for a break.” The golden gave her a look that said, “Not yet,” but Jamie knew Gretchen would go until she could go no further.

“I need some water, my sweet. And you’re getting some even if you don’t consider it a priority.”

Jamie hiked a few feet up and behind the ground they’d already covered and settled onto a flat rock, her supply pack at her feet. She dug out water for the two of them and surveyed the field they’d been searching since early that morning.

Field... more like prairie.
She and one other handler were searching a hundred acres of high country meadow. Beautiful. Until you were forced to navigate the rough and rocky terrain hidden beneath the grasses.

They were looking for the body of a forty-two year old woman, missing for over a year. Her husband, finally drunk enough to tell his dirty little secret to a woman he’d met in a bar, said no one would ever find the body. The woman, after thinking about it for a while, became sufficiently terrorized to go to the authorities.

Analeise Reardon deserves a proper burial. She deserves to be prayed over by people who love her. Her parents, and her three children, deserve to have some closure.
“And her damned husband deserves to have his arms cut off at his elbows and stuffed up his ass for starters,” she mumbled.

Painful memories of Jamie’s mother’s murder flooded her thoughts and her breaths grew shallow and quick. Her ribs compressed until they felt like strong, bony fingers squeezing inside her chest. Her vision blurred, and instinct—born of deliberate practice—forced her to shake her head to shatter the tension. She pulled a breath deep into her lungs, then forced air out.
Inhale
.
Calm
.

This wasn’t the first time Jamie and her dogs had participated in a search for a body as a result of someone who had decided divorce cost too much time, money and trouble. It also wouldn’t be the last. People never failed to disappoint her.

Jamie’s gaze travelled the edge of the field and she found a visual she might never have seen as part of the original search plan. Even Gretchen, working the established scent cone pattern, might not have picked up something that far out of the search area.

“C’mon girl. We’ve got a grave to find.” She stowed the water and tucked her supply pack out of the way on her back. Her soil probe slipped easily from its holder, a sort of magic wand to use on her quest. Gretchen gave her a look that in a teenager would have involved rolled eyes and stood, ready to get back to work.

Jamie keyed a number into her cell. “It’s me. I’ve got an anomaly. Grasses.” She recorded her present coordinates on the handheld GPS she’d splurged on last summer and began the hike over to the area she’d spotted where the grass grew lush in comparison to nearby vegetation.

The path she took brought her back to the primary search area, then up again, almost fifty yards. Sure enough, a small area of prairie grass was growing thicker and darker and higher than anything else around it. Before she could sink her probe all the way into the earth to create the first breathing hole, Gretchen dropped to the ground. Full alert.

Nearby the song of a meadowlark filled the mountain air.

Sometimes, with a little help, the dead don’t stay buried.

Gray walls, gray ceiling and floor, poured concrete table and chairs—all blended together to eliminate any visual stimulation. Colorado’s Supermax prison facility didn’t waste any funds on interior design. The lack of color made the stink of sweat and urine seem touchable. Assistant Special Agent in Charge Nicholas Grant hated it here.

He dry-swallowed two oxycontin tablets, his sixth and seventh of the day, no longer certain his back condition bore any relevance to his need for what he euphemistically referred to as “pain management.” Now however, wasn’t the time to consider his motivation for popping the pills. It hadn’t been the time for close to two years but he didn’t want to think about that either. He tapped the amber plastic bottle in his pocket, assured by its presence and the control it represented.

The semi-public area was eerily quiet compared to other parts of the penitentiary. But rather than tranquility, the air spiked with anger, resentment and distrust. No one left here the same as when they came in. No one. Not even him.

Prior to his arrival, the prison authorities had checked out and cleared the wall-mounted camera and recording equipment. No extra feeds to an unauthorized receiver were in place and everything tested in working order. So far technology had chronicled his failures on this case. Maybe today it would record a success.

Before beginning the interview, Nick was glad to have somewhere to go to complete his mental preparation and give his subject time to stew. Inmates measure their freedom, such as it is, in inches.
When the guards brought Leopold Bonzer into the interview room and secured him to the cuff rings, his incarcerated ass would be about as mobile as a sick snail on a slow day.

Nick wandered back up to the security screening area in between two of the guard towers and settled on the corner of an unoccupied but cluttered desk that was already piled with stacks of forms, folders that looked like they had been pulled from a filing cabinet and dumped, unopened sleeves of Styrofoam cups, two canisters of powder for hot chocolate and a few old
People
magazines.

Nick worked to stay on good terms with all of the guards in this part of the prison. Over the years he’d popped in and out enough times to know about births and deaths, marriages and divorces. He knew which guards were die-hard Bronco fans, which ones followed the Rockies and even one who secretly pulled for the Redwings.

“Thanks for getting me the contact request list for Bonzer so fast.” Nick fist-bumped the guard. “You’d think after all this time even the tabloid reporters would know they can’t have access to inmates here.” Sensational stories sold papers. And a serial killer who admitted to murdering fourteen people was pretty sensational. A serial killer who wouldn’t give up the location of thirteen of those bodies and to whom no other members of the media had access was especially prime.