She wondered if Sheriff Kirkbride or any of the other deputies found that as unusual as she did.
* * *
CASSIE WAS GRATEFUL the sheriff’s department had been so overwhelmed the last month that no one had thought to change the passwords on the law enforcement databases they had access to.
Cassie accessed the FBI’s NIBRS (National Incident Based Reporting System), NCIC (National Crime Information Center), ViCAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program), and MOCIC (Mid-States Organized Crime Information Center) which regionalized crime reports to Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. Similar regional databases covered other sections of the country.
She was looking for possible crimes committed by boys of Kyle and Raheem’s description and perhaps the discovery of bodies matching them.
It took until breakfast and the searches resulted in nothing that helped her. Another man in Sanish reported missing by a neighbor a week after September 15; teenage runaways from two different Indian reservations late that month—but nothing really connected.
Cassie didn’t specifically search for any hits on Amanda Lee Hackl, but she kept her eye out and found no helpful information.
Maybe, she thought with a slight smile, she should key in Schwan’s man in the search criteria.
But she didn’t.
* * *
CASSIE STOOD OVER BEN’S BED after her shower, with a damp towel on her head. “What’s this Isabel says about you being sick and not wanting to go to school?”
“My stomach really hurts,” Ben said with a protracted groan. “I think I have a fever.”
She leaned over and placed the back of her hand on her son’s forehead. “You feel cool to me.”
He groaned again. It was as theatrical a groan as his statement had been at dinner the night before. He writhed around under the covers and flipped the top sheet up so it covered his face so she couldn’t see it.
“Ben, I know you’re upset but I don’t think you’re sick. At least get up and get dressed and get something to eat.”
Another groan but this one had less flair, she thought.
“Staying away from school won’t help anything.”
“Grandma Isabel could call them,” Ben offered.
“She’s already gone to her yoga class, and I’m not calling the school if you’re not really sick. Man up, Ben, or look me in the eye and convince me you really are too ill to go to school.”
After a beat, Ben pulled the sheet down but didn’t recant. She held his gaze for a moment before he broke it and looked away.
“Avoiding a situation doesn’t solve the problem,” she said, sitting down on the bed next to her son. “You know who told me that?”
He shook his head.
“Your dad,” she lied. Jim had not actually ever told her that.
“Your dad met problems head-on, which is something I try to do in my life and you should try to do in yours. You’ll hear some things at school you probably don’t want to hear about me, but they’re not true. You can get through this but not by staying in bed.”
He blinked and she thought he understood.
“Put some clothes on,” she said while stroking his cheek. “I’ll take you to school and you’ll march in there like a man with your chin up. And if someone gives you a hard time—and I mean beyond just a few words you can shrug off—you call me and I’ll get things straightened out.
“Just because I’m no longer a cop doesn’t mean I won’t protect you,” she said. She considered explaining to him how a she-bear would protect her cubs, but she didn’t.
He looked away, embarrassed. She’d said too much and gone too far, she realized. No boy his age wanted his mother to fight his battles for him.
It was times like this, she thought, she wished Jim was still there. Or Ian.
“Okay,” she said, patting him on the shoulder while she rose, “Thirty minutes. Showered, dressed and breakfast, Little Man.”
* * *
AS HE GOT out of the car, Ben said, “I’ll walk home tonight—okay? You don’t need to pick me up.”
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
She watched him shoulder his backpack and walk away from her car toward the front doors of the school. He didn’t look back and she was glad he didn’t or he could have seen the tears in her eyes and the concern on her face for him.
None of the other kids gave him undue attention that she could tell. That would come later.
CHAPTER
TWELVE
OVER HOMEMADE NORWEGIAN SNACKS of rolled-up lefse spread with butter, sugar, and cinnamon, and baked apples with gjetost cheese, Cassie listened to Lottie Westergaard talk about Kyle. Her spiral pad was open on the table in front of her and she dutifully took notes.
Lottie’s small house was located on the edge of the thick band of cottonwoods that choked the river. The other homes in the bottomland swale were scattered in the trees and could only be seen from her house in the winter when the leaves dropped. Builders had been prevented from constructing additional houses in the area because it was in a floodplain, but older homes like Lottie’s had been grandfathered in.
Cassie had been there dozens of times before to drop Kyle off after he’d spent time with Ben. The first time she’d seen the home, though, was when it was occupied by two MS-13 gangbangers from Southern California, their local drug distributor, and Kyle’s mother. Lottie herself had been taped up so she couldn’t move or call for help. It had been a bone-chilling night and when it was over, three men and Kyle’s mother had been killed.
* * *
“I JUST DON’T THINK he’s dead,” Lottie said. Then: “More coffee?”
Cassie declined. The coffee was hot and weak, just the way older North Dakotans seemed to like it. They drank it throughout the day and into the evening.
Lottie filled Cassie’s cup anyway and said, “Don’t think ill of me when I talk about my grandson being dead. I grew up on a farm and I’ve been around death all my life. It’s how things go.”
“I don’t think ill of you.”
Lottie said, “Good. Now if he was dead and Raheem was dead—like if they drowned on the river or something bad like that—I think their bodies would have been found. Bodies don’t sink, do they? Don’t they kind of bloat up and float to the top? I remember seeing a drowned heifer do that in the river when I was a little girl on the farm. It bobbed along like a beach ball or something.”
Cassie nodded. It was a tough subject to discuss but that didn’t seem to effect Lottie. She was a tough old bird who could serve slices of baked apple and lefse at the same time she was talking about the bloated body of her grandson.
“That’s true,” Cassie said. “When bodies decompose in the water they create gas that buoys them to the surface sooner or later.”
“Unless of course they’re weighted down with chains or something,” Lottie said. “But that just sounds a little too crazy, doesn’t it?”
“Well … we have no reason to believe that someone murdered them, do we?” Cassie asked.
“Nah, I guess not.” She shook her head. “Maybe I watch too many of those TV shows.”
Lottie pushed herself up from the table to get the pot of coffee. It didn’t seem to matter that Cassie had said she didn’t want more.
On the way to the kitchen counter, the old woman slid a loose rug aside that was in front of the stove to reveal a star-shaped burn in the linoleum.
“That’s where one of those tear gas things went off that night,” Lottie said. “It burnt my floor. The sheriff said he’d replace the flooring afterwards but I thought that was a wasteful use of taxpayer money. I just asked him to buy me a rug at Walmart to cover it up.”
“That was nice of you,” Cassie said. The thought of Sheriff Kirkbride browsing through kitchen rugs for the right one at Walmart made her smile to herself.
“Of course, it took months to get the smell of that gas ou
t of the house,” Lottie said. “It clung to the curtains and the sofa fabric. It was worse than old tobacco smoke, you know?”
“I can imagine,” Cassie said. Like most cops, she guessed, she hadn’t really given a lot of thought to the long-lasting effects of a police raid to the homeowner afterwards. The scars, the smells, the ghosts that lingered.
“When it was warm enough I tried to air it for days on end,” Lottie said as she came back and refilled Cassie’s cup. “Finally I think it’s gotten to the point where I can’t smell that smoke anymore. Can you?”
“No.”
“Well, good. When I smell that smoke it always takes me back to when it happened.”
* * *
CASSIE CONTINUED TO WRITE DOWN the pertinent details of the missing person’s case as Lottie laid them out, including a list of all the items Kyle had taken with him that had been collected over the years in his “River Box.” She did it to keep herself busy, primarily because she had no doubt the information was already in a file at the Law Enforcement Center. She did it to suggest to Lottie that something was being done.
“Is there anything else?” Cassie asked after an hour and too many bites of lefse and baked apple.
Lottie answered, “Yes. If you find Kyle, you don’t have to make him come back.”
“Excuse me?” Cassie had no idea that Lottie expected her to start an immediate investigation herself.
But Lottie misunderstood the question. “There’s no need to force him back to Grimstad to attend high school. He’s learning very little of value as far as I’m concerned. I’ve looked at his homework assignments. I can’t even figure out what they’re teaching him that can be of any real benefit to a boy like Kyle.”
Before Cassie could break in and steer the conversation back, Lottie continued.
“Kyle is a very poor student but as we know he’s very smart in his way. He’ll learn a lot more about the world by being out in it. That’s the way things used to be in this country. Not every person went to college and a lot of people I know never even finished high school. Instead, they went to work and moved from place to place. That’s how you get wisdom. It isn’t from school papers about diversity and gay rights and that sort of thing they teach these days.
“Kyle will learn and get smart in his own way,” she said. “If you find him I want you to tell him I said that. He’s always welcome back here and he should give me a call because I worry about him, but he doesn’t have to come back if he’s healthy and he’s doing okay. I just want to be assured he’s alive and on his journey, whatever that is. So will you let him be if he’s in a good place?”
Cassie didn’t know what to say to that.
“It’s more important to me to know he’s alive and well than it is to drag him back here to waste his time at that school and have to live with a little old lady,” Lottie said. “I just want to be sure. And I’m sure that nice Mr. Johnson wants to know that Raheem is okay.”
Cassie sat back. “Lottie, I think there’s been a misunderstanding here. I’m no longer law enforcement. I really can’t investigate this. I’m just here to get all the information and relay it to the sheriff now that he’s back.”
“There’s no misunderstanding,” Lottie said with a mischievous grin. “You were the only person who helped Kyle when he really needed it and you’re the only person I trust to find him or learn what happened to him.
“Here,” she said, digging into her purse on her lap and withdrawing a thick envelope. “This is eight thousand, three hundred and twenty-eight dollars. It should get you started.”
“Lottie, I’m not a private detective.”
“Whatever you are, this will help with expenses. Gas, motel, food, that kind of thing.”
“I can’t take it,” Cassie said.
“Of course you can,” Lottie said. “What am I going to do with it—die with it in my bank account? I’d rather spend it on finding Kyle.”
“I won’t take your life savings,” Cassie said.
“Oh,” Lottie said, waving away Cassie’s concern, “I got a lot more money than this stashed away. This is just one of my accounts from the First International Bank and Trust in town. I’ve got a lot of other accounts and a whole bunch of stock I’ve picked up over the years. I’m not worried about running out of money before I go meet Jesus. So if you need more, just say so.”
Cassie stuttered, “I’m not … I can’t do this kind of thing. This will take some time and travel and I have a son of my own.”
Lottie nodded eagerly as if Cassie had played right into her trap. “What would you do if Ben went missing and the police didn’t seem to care?”
Cassie closed her eyes and admitted it. “Everything I could.”
“Well, I’m not asking you to do that for Kyle,” Lottie said. “But this is all I can do.”
Then, after a long pause: “So, you’ll help me?”
* * *
WITH EVERY INTENTION to return later in the day and hand the thick envelope back to Lottie, Cassie drove out of the river bottom toward the state highway that ran from Grimstad to Watson City.
Maybe rather than facing her again—the old woman was deviously persuasive and she had the ability to melt away Cassie’s willpower—she could put the money in Lottie’s mailbox with a note saying she couldn’t accept it.
Instead, she could meet with Sheriff Kirkbride and brief him on the case. She could light a fire within the department to investigate the disappearance of Kyle and Raheem. That, she decided, was the best she could do.
The only thing she could do.
Cassie fished her cell phone out of her purse.
* * *
“SHERIFF KIRKBRIDE’S OFFICE.”
“Judy? This is Cassie. Is the sheriff in?”
“He’s in but he’s in a meeting with County Attorney Avery Tibbs and the entire county commission. They asked not to be disturbed.”
Cassie knew that given the participants it was likely a contentious meeting. She guessed Tibbs was negotiating Kirkbride’s exit with the commissioners there to rubber-stamp it.
The coup was underway.
“Can you have him call me when he gets out? It’s important.”
* * *
AS SHE DROVE THROUGH TOWN she said, “Damn you, Lottie.”
At the same time, though, she couldn’t deny that she was personally invested in what she’d been asked to do. Kyle was special to her, and for the past month she’d been without purpose, just waiting for the final BCI report so she could get back to work. Decelerating from the roller coaster, new-crisis-every-day world of law enforcement had been miserable.
Lottie had given her a reason and a purpose for moving on.
It enraged her that the investigation into the missing boys had been given such short shrift. She suspected that if one of the boys had been Avery Tibbs’ son—and not a developmentally disabled teenager and his African American friend—it would have been a different matter altogether. In fact, she was sure of it.
And there was something nagging at her from the computer database research. The complete lack of any information—sightings, crimes, credible leads—about Kyle and Raheem over the past month made her recall something her mentor Cody Hoyt had once told her about standard investigative procedure.
This was right after he told her the most important tenet in law enforcement was to never pass up an opportunity to eat or use a clean bathroom.
“A lot of times our biggest problem is we get focused too tight on a suspect or on our own stomping grounds. Douchebags”—the term he used for any and all criminals—“don’t give a shit about our jurisdiction. We forget there’s a great big world out there.”
And she thought: Which way does the river flow?
* * *
BACK AT THE COMPUTER in her home office, Cassie expanded the database search beyond North Dakota and MOCIC to include the states downriver: South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri. Because the Missouri was the longest river in North Ame
rica—2,341 miles—she guessed that even if the boys had traveled on it for a solid month they would yet to have reached the Mississippi.
They could be as far as Omaha, she thought.
* * *
FOR THE NEXT THREE HOURS she ran keyword searches. The results were disheartening. So many missing boys, so many missing girls. It reminded her of when she first started researching the number of missing truck-stop prostitutes on the original Lizard King case. She was astonished that the numbers climbed from the hundreds into the thousands.
What she couldn’t find, though, were any records that matched the descriptions of Kyle and Raheem. She searched for drowning victims and unidentified bodies found in or near the river and although there were scores of them, they didn’t match up. Ninety-five percent of the unidentified bodies were of men who were too old or boys who were too young. The other five percent were girls or women. Only two unidentified bodies were suspected victims of homicide and they were categorized as likely homeless men. Probably living under bridges when the water rose and washed them away.
The majority of victims had been found in the summer months when it was much more likely people would be wading, swimming, fishing, or boating in the river. There were no victims at all, in fact, for the past two weeks of October.
How could it be that they’d simply vanished, she asked herself. Was it possible Kyle and Raheem had negotiated dams, reservoirs, cities, and entire states without being reported? Did they travel at night and take on the risk of foundering in the dark?
Or maybe they’d decided to ditch their boat somewhere along the way and take off on their own.
That didn’t work either. Kyle wasn’t devious. In fact, in his way, he was the most straightforward and single-minded teenager Cassie had ever met. He wouldn’t have gathered items and gear for years for a river journey and then not followed through. She doubted Raheem had the influence to convince Kyle to use the boat as a ruse so they could slip away and go elsewhere. When Kyle’s mind was set no one could change it.
She was flummoxed.
* * *
BEFORE GIVING UP ENTIRELY to start dinner for Ben after he got home from school, she recalled how Cody Hoyt sometimes spouted off wild scenarios that seemed to have nothing at all to do with the case they were investigating. He did it, he said, because it was just as important to rule things out. By ruling out even implausible theories it helped them focus on what was plausible.