“A second girl went missing? A month ago?” Oak gasped after I had gotten to the juicy part in my story.
“Yeah, but don’t get excited. Bract seemed to think it was an isolated incident related to some internal politics of the nomads or something.”
“But what if it wasn’t? I mean, how can he know?”
“He can’t, unless he’s still holding out more intel. And neither can we for that matter. Without finding the girl’s family and learning what might have been probable cause for someone to take Lysha, we’re dead on third base. Hell we don’t even have a picture of the girl, and according to Bract, we’re unlikely to get one.”
Oak groaned and beat her hands on the steering wheel. She had just picked me up and we were racing back to the office in Cresel, as we had no more leads in Wiggins for the moment. The final tests in the forensics report had turned up nothing useful, except to confirm once and for all via DNA from a hair on the discovered hairclip, that Luna had indeed been there in that forest clearing.
“How the hell did you stand working cases like this for so long?” she asked finally. “This feels so hopeless. I just can’t see how we can ever find Luna.”
I didn’t answer at once. To tell her how good it felt to find a missing person alive and be able to return them to their loved ones wasn’t going to help, especially as the feeling of never finding the victim and still waking years later wondering about them was almost enough to drive one mad.
“It’s just what we have to do sometimes.”
“I thought they’d bring in some like, high profile detectives or something by now,” Oak said.
That I laughed at. I knew for a fact that everyone in the country that had a knack for missing person’s cases was busy with their own cases, and there were more than enough to go around. “Don’t expect anyone to come charging to our rescue. This is it, we’re the team. Congratulations.”
That might have come out a bit harsher than I had meant it. After all, Oak was a rural detective used to fowl play and parking violations. I patted her shoulder to soften the blow. “Don’t worry, at least we have a team here. And everyone works well together. It could be worse.”
Oak huffed but gave me a sideways smile. We arrived back at the office. Ashley met us inside, looking bummed. The events of the past few days had certainly put a damper on her previously impervious spirits. But she was a trooper and tried to boost our morale even so.
“I ordered subs for us all. Time to refuel. Inspector Meryl will be back in ten minutes. He had to go see to the high school, there was a report of another burglary in one of the science labs.”
The subs arrived and we ate ravenously, not speaking much. Meryl arrived and the three of us crowded into his office, still shoving food in our mouths.
“What have you got?” Meryl asked in between bites.
We relayed both our stories. When we were finished, Meryl frowned, eyeing his last sandwich section. “Nomad girl kidnapped? But the only thing tying these events together is location. Could be completely unrelated.”
“I know,” I said quickly. “But if we get the chance, it might be worth pursuing.”
“Well, as we have absolutely nothing else to pursue, I have to agree,” Meryl grunted.
“What do we do now?” Oak asked, her tone betraying her frustration.
“We scrape,” I answered while Meryl dug into the last bite of food.
“Scrape?”
“We go back through everything and dig, ask more questions, try out different scenarios. We go at every possible angle. It’s all we can do.”
“That sounds kind of desperate, don’t you think?”
“You got a better idea?”
Meryl swallowed and stood. “Start with the school. Nurse, teachers, classmates, anyone who knew her. Ask them what Luna’s favorite color is if you have to. We need anything we can get. There’s got to be answers out there somewhere. And talk to the parents again.” He grimaced. “I know it’s not fun, but maybe there’s something we missed.”
We headed out, pinballing back to Wiggins. I had a sinking feeling the moment we were back in town. I knew which end of the stick I was going to get. “I’ll drop you at the school. Start with the interviews there. Focus on asking then if Luna had any unusual contact with strangers, if there were any weirdos spotted in the area, anyone suspicious that took an interest in her. Oh, and ask if she was friends with any nomad kids.”
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
“You’re going to tackle the parents?”
I nodded, not relishing the task. Oak hopped out at the school and I continued on to downtown. I would be finding the parents separately at their places of work today. I started with Mrs. Lampour at the diner. The moment she saw me, I saw the hope rise in her face. I shook my head quickly to dispel it, and her features grayed. The diner was just emptying a little after the lunch rush. We went out back to the alley behind, where it looked like the cooks took their smoke breaks judging from the overwhelmed ashtray on our left.
“Mrs. Lampour, I’m afraid we haven’t found Luna yet. We are working as hard as we can. I do have a few more questions for you as the case has developed.”
She nodded shakily, wringing her hands on the hem of her apron. “Did you ever see that Luna had talked to strangers, maybe someone passing through the neighborhood? Maybe even just the mailman or the garbageman?”
Mrs. Lampour shook her head. “She knew not to talk to strangers. She was polite and would have said hello to someone like the mailman or the garbageman, but I never saw anyone…weird talking to her.”
“What about at school, did she have any unusual people she talked to there?”
Mrs. Lampour shook her head. “Not that I know of.”
“And the diner? Sometimes she would go there after school until you were off work?”
She nodded. “A few times a week. I didn’t want her home alone if she wasn’t going over to Ronnie’s. So I told her to come to the diner.”
“And did she talk to any clients there? Or staff?”
“Well, usually Tom would make her a little snack, he liked to dote on her. But he’s almost 80. He just misses seeing his grandkids now his daughter and her husband moved to Canon. Other than that, she just sits at an empty table and does her homework.”
I nodded, jotting this down. “Is Tom here today?”
“Sure, he’s the cashier. You can’t think ole’ Tom has anything to do with this?”
“We can’t afford to rule anything out. But no, I highly doubt it. One more question, do you know if Luna was friends with any nomad kids?”
Her brow furrowed. “No, I don’t think so. They don’t go to her school far’s I know. Can’t see where she would have met one. Least she never said anything about one.”
“Thank you Mrs. Lampour. I’ll let you know as soon as we learn something.” I gripped her hand tightly for a moment and then headed in to speak with Tom. He was a hunchbacked man with wispy white curls of hair, a kindly smile and sad eyes when Luna’s situation was brought up. Two minutes of conversation with him and I was quite certain he wasn’t capable of such a kidnapping, at least without help, and there was also no motive for it.
I headed to Wiggins Auto next, a large barn full of power tools, cars being worked on and men in gray coveralls. I found Mr. Lampour and we headed to the back office to speak. He echoed Mrs. Lampour’s statement nearly exactly. Luna never talked to strangers and had no nomad friends. She rarely came to the shop, sometimes with Mrs. Lampour to walk Mr. Lampour home. On those occasions, she mostly spent time with a dog that belonged to one of the mechanics, a sweet old chocolate lab mix. I talked to a couple of guys in the shop who sometimes entertained Luna with jokes or stories, but couldn’t see what business any of them would have had in kidnapping her.
When I left the shop, I sat in the car for a long moment, feeling dejected. We were grasping at thin air here. Nothing was adding up.
Just then I caught sight of an ancient Ford pickup pulling out of a grocery store parking lot down the end of the street. Its bed was full to the bursting with people, men in colorful patched shirts wearing overalls and strange round caps, and women in white blouses and bright patterned long skirts, with shawls over their heads and shoulders. A few childen sat jammed in amongst them. I had been around town long enough now to know that they were nomads. I hesitated for a moment, and then, figuring I could only be wasting my time, which I was already basically doing scraping the bottom of the barrel, I pulled out behind them and followed them.
They were moving slowly under the load of people, so I inched along, staying well back so as not to alarm them. They drove along main street and then turned directly onto the highway that went north, the opposite direction to Cresel. I followed, just barely keeping them in sight, but enough so that I could tell if they stopped or made any turns. The woods deepened in this direction, beginning to leave behind the intermittent farm houses after about ten miles. The elevation started to climb. After perhaps another ten miles, I noted that the truck was slowing and when I caught up, I saw they had turned onto a dirt road. It was labeled national forest with the number 523 to designate it. I turned off and was able to follow the little spiral of dust left in the truck’s wake without being in sight of it. It wound through a series of connecting roads, which I did my best to take note of mentally. At long last a large clearing opened up and I came to an abrupt halt on the edge of it. Still hidden by the trees but able to see out, I could make out the edge of a massive camp stretching all the way along the clearing.
It was packed with all manners of motorized RV’s, trailers with pop ups or simply just tents atop them, beat up cars, wagons with hitches for horses, and strung up lean-tos made of tarps. Little cooking fires were smoking here and there and a few barbecue grills could be seen. All told, I thought there might be something like three hundred people in the camp, many sitting around their shanties or the camp fires, some men circled up and smoking pipes and one group clustered around what appeared to be a bull elk, butchering it and distributing sections of meat to waiting women. The truck I had followed had just pulled up to a group of trailers and the people inside began to disembark, hauling bags of groceries with them.
In contrast to Bract’s clean and tidy establishment, this camp was piled with trash, and the waft of human waste, fresh blood from the elk, and the aroma of cooking spices could be smelled even at this distance with the window cracked. I continued to gaze out at the scene for several long minutes before my phone ringtone brought me back into reality. It was Oak.
“Hey, have you finished with the parents?”
“Yeah, I did.”
“Good, can you pick me up from the school? I’ve got something. Seems your nomad friend isn’t as innocent as he appears.”