I turn to Sam. “Really?”
“Really,” he replies. “Gear down, Gwen. Picking a fight with the cops isn’t going to help.”
He’s right, of course, but I want to fight somebody. And there’s nobody to hit except people I love, so I push that instinct right down and take a deep breath. “Okay. Who do you think it was?”
“If I had to guess? One of the Belldenes.”
It’s what I expect him to say. The Belldenes are a tight-knit family of hill folk who are both paramilitary and criminal. Sam’s run afoul of them a couple of times. Always in defense of someone else.
I’ve never met any of them face-to-face, though their reputation is large and well documented in the Norton and Tennessee state police records. They specialize in dealing all kinds of opiates. Word is that they’ve got some doc-in-a-box a few counties over who provides them with prescriptions, but so far nothing’s been proven. A little meth cooking on the side.
I’m used to being harassed. I’ve endured years of being relentlessly stalked and threatened by internet vigilantes. Organized groups like the Lost Angels, who number relatives and friends of my ex-husband’s victims among them. Random weirdos who idolized Melvin and want to either get close to me or kill me. Stalkers who think my kids might be budding serial killers. I have plenty of enemies to choose from, but this is different. It’s someone who lives within easy driving distance. Who can show up to my kids’ schools, my partner’s work, our grocery store.
Or our house.
Normally I act pretty aggressively against threats, but Sam’s impressed on me that the Belldenes treat feuds like sporting events. Anything I do to one of them stirs up a nest of very angry hornets. They’re baiting us.
I can’t afford to bite.
Still, I hate to let it go. “So we do—”
“Nothing,” he finishes, and gives me a look I recognize all too well. “Right?”
“Maybe.”
“Gwen.”
“He could have killed you.”
“If he’d wanted me dead, I’d be dead,” he tells me. “If it gets worse, we’ll level up. But right now he just wants an excuse, so don’t give it to him. Okay?”
I reluctantly nod. Neither of us knows which him it is exactly. There are a confusing number of Belldenes, and likely all of them are decent shots with a rifle. One’s a military-grade sniper but that doesn’t mean he’s the one who was out poking us today.
I think they save him for when they’re serious.
I walk the kids down to the bus, hyperalert for any threats, but they board without incident. Sam gets the all clear from the police as they leave the scene. He breaks out his damaged window and promises me he’ll call a repair service from his jobsite. This time our goodbye kiss is longer, more fraught.
We’ve struggled to get back to a sweet, warm balance of trust. It’s never been easy. Sam’s the brother of one of Melvin’s victims. That shadow will always fall over us. So, too, will the difficult fact that he helped form the Lost Angels, one of the most vocal groups that hounds us.
They now see Sam as a traitor, and still believe I was a participant in my ex-husband’s crimes. But I know Sam. I trust him completely with the most precious of all things to me, my children. And with my scarred, scared, closely guarded heart.
That frightens me sometimes. Letting anyone that close, giving anyone that power over me . . . it’s both thrilling and terrifying. But at moments like these it’s precious indeed.
I submit my finished reports, photos, and financial findings in the Kingston investigation to my boss. J. B. Hall owns the private detective agency I work for, and she’s a hell of a smart, tough woman.
She acknowledges receipt, and she’ll be the one to review the work, document the findings, and present it in a client-friendly way to the final customer. The board of directors won’t find it very palatable, though they’ll almost certainly hear about his arrest well before the report arrives.
I’m just as glad to not be on that end of things. I have too much drama in my life.
J. B.’s already sent me more work, I realize. I open her message. This is an odd one, she says. Cold case of a missing young man, and you’d think it would be the parents hiring us, but it’s not. It’s a nonprofit foundation. Maybe on behalf of the parents? It’s unclear, so go carefully. It’s so thin that really all we need to do is check the boxes. And it’s in your neck of the woods. Take a look?
I download the file attachment. It’s a not-very-thick police report about a missing person: a young man who vanished from a bar on a night out with his friends. He is—was?—a senior at University of Tennessee in Knoxville. The facts are slight and sketchy. Remy Landry, twenty-one years old, white, originally from Louisiana.
Remy had gone out with six friends on a Friday night and hit two different bars with the group. When they finally regrouped at the second bar, Remy was nowhere to be found. They’d all assumed he’d hooked up with someone and left, but texts and calls to his cell hadn’t been answered. He had his own car. It was found parked and locked back at the campus. That made sense; he’d ridden to the bars with his friends.
Surveillance footage attached to the digital file shows Remy at the first bar; the compiled footage shows him ordering drinks, dancing with his friends, chatting up girls. Seeing him makes me feel cold inside: he’s a handsome kid with an easy smile, strong and lean and agile. He looks like he’s on top of the world. The only odd thing is that he’s carrying a backpack. I wonder if that’s why the police assumed he was a runaway.
The second bar doesn’t have as much footage, but it catches Remy and his friends arriving at the club, and the friends leaving. There’s a note on the file that says the back exit had no surveillance camera, but that they’d viewed every minute of footage from the front. Remy had come in. He’d never left, not by that door. And he’d taken that backpack.
The police had done a thorough search of the club and turned up nothing. They hadn’t acted immediately, of course. The search had been done days later. Nobody takes missing college students—particularly missing young men—that seriously, especially if they don’t come home from a bar. Not when there’s no obvious evidence of a crime.
He’d been gone a long time before anyone believed it was a problem. And he’d vanished into thin air. No clues. No witnesses that the police had been able to locate.
And that was when I realized the date of the disappearance.
Three years ago.
I text J. B. This thing is way cold. Are there any new leads?
My business cell rings a minute after I send the text, and I pick it up to hear J. B.’s warm, confident voice. “You’re asking about new leads in the Remy Landry case, and we don’t have any. I’ll be honest, the police did a pretty decent investigation once they got on it. Not sure who this nonprofit is that’s paying for our work, but it seems like it’s church-related. I’m digging into it.”
“You sound like you have a bad feeling about this one,” I say. I know J. B. pretty well by now, and her instincts are razor sharp.
“I do. And yet . . . something happened to this young man. Regardless of the people who are putting up money, finding out what happened has to be a good thing for his parents.” She sighs. “You’re a mother too. You know.”