Pieces of her, p.1
Pieces of Her, page 1
Pieces of Her
Robert J Walker
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Epilogue
About the Author
1
“Keith! Come on over here, son. I want to show you these tracks. These here look like bobcat tracks!”
Andrew Young groaned and cursed under his breath as he stood up from a crouching position in the snow where he’d been examining the animal tracks. He wasn’t old—mid-forties—but an old injury from his youth had cursed him with the right knee of a geriatric.
His son, Keith, overflowing with the boundless curiosity of any eight-year-old with a love of nature and the outdoors, was standing twenty or thirty yards away, staring intently up into the boughs of one of the many thousand pine trees that surrounded them in this wintry forest.
“There’s a bird’s nest up there, Dad!” he said excitedly, seeming not to have heard his father’s talk about the bobcat tracks.
Andrew rolled his eyes, but not with any degree of annoyance. Instead, he chuckled. “I know, son, and that’s the twentieth bird’s nest you’ve pointed out! Come on over here and check out these bobcat tracks because I know you haven’t ever seen these before.”
“All right, Dad,” Keith said, reluctantly dragging himself away from the tree with the nest.
Andrew couldn’t help but smile at the sight of Keith coming running toward him through the snow, which was a few inches deep and blanketed the vast wooded landscape. Keith had his mother’s gray eyes, pale skin, and dark-brown hair, but his father’s sturdy build and natural athleticism. Andrew imagined his son would have a great football career in high school in a couple years.
They were only five miles from town, but it felt as if they could have been a thousand miles away. There was nothing but trees, snow, and mountains in the distance, and here in the wilderness was where Andrew had always felt most at peace. And judging by the kind of person his only son was growing into, Keith was taking after his father with his love for the great outdoors.
“Wow, are those really bobcat tracks, Dad?” Keith asked with a gasp of awe when he got to his father.
“They sure are,” Keith said. “See the paw shape? Remember I showed you those pictures of the mountain lion prints I found last time I went camping with my buddies? Well, these here, they look pretty similar, don’t they? Of course, the mountain lion’s pawprints are bigger, but you can see that they’re the same shape, right? Here, let me show you the picture again,” he said, getting out his phone and pulling up the picture. “See? Very similar shape, right?”
“Uh-huh. The shapes look almost the same,” Keith said.
“Almost, but there are a few important differences. If you look—”
Just as Andrew was saying this, his phone rang. He frowned with annoyance at the interruption, but since it was his boss calling and there was a very important project underway at work, he couldn’t ignore the call. “I’ll talk to you in a second about the bobcat tracks, buddy,” he said to Keith and then answered the call.
“Young, we’ve got problems here!” the boss snapped as soon as Andrew answered the call. “Big problems! The client’s threatening to pull funding, and…”
Andrew sighed as his boss jabbered on about the current project, and the soothing spell of the wilderness was broken as his boss’s nasally, grating voice, going off like a machine gun in his ear, pulled him right back into the stressful world of the office he spent most days in from morning to evening. He racked his brain for solutions to the many problems his boss was hurling at him and soon found himself pacing back and forth, closing his eyes as he tried to run a ton of different calculations through his head.
Finally, he managed to calm his boss down and cut off the call.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered under his breath. “Can’t even have some peace and quiet on a Saturday.”
He looked at the spot where Keith had been moments earlier, but his son wasn’t there. He turned around, expecting to find him behind his back, but he wasn’t there, either. “Keith? Where are you, son?”
There was no answer. Andrew wasn’t worried; Keith had probably just spotted another bird’s nest in a tree nearby. The boy was easily distracted, after all. And how far could he have wandered? The phone call had only been a few minutes.
“Keith!” Andrew yelled, raising his voice now. “Come over here; son, quit playing around!”
There was no reply from the woods but an eerie, almost accusatory silence. Now worry began to gnaw at Andrew’s innards. He checked his call log and saw that his call had, in fact, been close to twenty minutes, rather than the four or five minutes he had estimated. A surge of panic ripped through him.
“Keith!” he yelled again, as loud as he could this time. “Keith! Where are you?” His voice echoed through the forest, but again there was no reply.
Andrew’s heart was racing now, but he forced himself to calm down. There was, he quickly realized, a certain way to locate his son. He looked down at the snow, and alongside the bobcat tracks, there were a set of little boy’s footprints. The racing anxiety subsided, and Andrew released a sigh of calm. Keith had just gone off, following the bobcat’s trail.
“Keith, stop following the bobcat!” Andrew yelled as he set off at a jog, following the footprints. “I’m coming to get you! Just stay where you are. Don’t move!”
How far could his son have gone in twenty minutes? Surely only a few hundred yards at the most. Andrew was certain he would find his boy in the next five minutes. He would find him, give him a short, stern lecture about wandering off on his own, and then everything would be fine again, and they could continue on their hike. And this little incident, as stressful as it was, would be over and would be a valuable learning experience for both father and son.
“Keith! Boy, stop moving. I’m not playing around. I mean that!” Andrew yelled. “This isn’t a game! I’m serious! Stop moving and stay right where you are!”
He glanced down as he jogged. Keith’s footprints continued to follow the bobcats; that was a good sign. He would find the boy soon enough. He was sure of it. After all, he couldn’t have gone very far, and he had to be around here somewhere.
“Dammit, Keith, just give me a yell or something to let me know where you are!” Andrew shouted. He knew these woods well, and the ground here was mostly flat. There were no ditches, wells, or crevasses the boy could have fallen into. Where could he have gone? He couldn’t simply have vanished into thin air.
Again there was no reply. Andrew forced himself to stay calm by focusing on Keith’s footprints. He reminded himself that the footprints would eventually lead him to Keith; they had to. The boy couldn’t have sprouted wings and flown away.
The footprints led to a dense thicket where a number of shrubs were growing close together, and under them was a large hollow with no snow inside it—it was all piled up on top of the shrubs, forming an igloo-like structure. Andrew smiled; it was just the sort of place Keith would hide.
“I’ve found your hiding place, buddy,” he said. “Come on out now.”
There was no reply.
“Come on, son, I’m serious. I know you’re in there. I ain’t mad, just come on out.”
Nothing.
Cursing to himself as pain shot through his leg, Andrew got down on his hands and knees. “Keith, now you are starting to make me a little angry,” Andrew muttered. “When I told you to come out, I meant it!”
He crawled into the hollow, which was quite dark despite the bright midday sun outside. It was larger than it looked from the outside—at least half a dozen grown men could fit in the space. Andrew turned on his flashlight on his phone and quickly saw that the hollow was empty. However, there was a small opening on the other side, and he saw tracks—both his son’s and the bobcat’s—leading out of it.
“Dammit, Keith,” Andrew muttered, and he crawled out to continue following the trail of footprints.
Except, he suddenly realized there was a problem. A big problem. A few of his son’s footprints led out of the hollow, but then they abruptly stopped. The bobcat’s footprints continued into the woods, but Keith’s just stopped right there.
“What the hell?” Andrew murmured, staring in disbelief at the last footprint Keith had left. “This isn’t … this is impossible. This can’t be….”
He looked on top of the tangle of shrubs to see if Keith had somehow jumped up onto it and was hiding on top of it, but his son was clearly not there.
“Keith! Keith, where are you?” Andrew yelled. “Keith! Please, son, please, give me a yell to let me know you’re out there! Keith!”
Andrew yelled until he was blue in the face, but there was no reply. Now panic hit him with the force of a speeding truck, and there was nothing he could do or say to counter it this time.
Keith was gone. As inexplicable and terrifying as it was, the eight-year-old boy had somehow simply vanished into thin air.
2
It was another Monday morning, and Jim Irons sighed as he shifted through the papers on his desk in his cramped basement office. For a man who craved excitement—as much now in his mid-forties as he had twenty years ago—the week’s cases weren’t looking particularly interesting. Life as a private investigator always sounded a lot more thrilling to those who only knew PIs from movies and television.
There were no murder mysteries or high-level CIA conspiracies, though, in Jim’s life as a PI. Instead, he usually dealt with minor insurance fraud cases, inheritance disputes, and the occasional cheating wife or husband. It was dull work most of the time, but Jim was good at his job, and it paid the bills … if only just.
Things had been much better when he’d been a cop, and he missed the police force, the cases, and his former colleagues … the good ones, at least. As for the bad ones, well, they were the reason he was stuck in a dingy basement office in a crummy downtown building working as a private investigator instead of doing the police detective work that had suited him so well.
When Jim had discovered that some of the worst criminals in town—indeed, in the whole state—had been fellow cops, cops in his precinct, his very superiors, in fact, he’d had to make a choice. Keep his mouth shut and keep the job he loved or go up against his commanding officers to root out the corruption in a battle that would likely cost him his job and maybe even more.
For Jim, the choice had been a simple one. Regardless of whatever danger it would put him in, he could only ever do the right thing. He had tried to take the dirty cops down, but they had preempted his strike and had hit him before he could hit them.
So here he was, kicked off the force for trumped-up charges for a crime he didn’t commit—beating up a suspect in custody, they had said, with lying witnesses to back up the dirty cops—and now powerless to do anything about the dark corruption that was still festering, completely unchecked, in the police department.
Jim had vowed to take them down, each and every one of the dirty cops who had ruined his life and stolen his career from him, but right now, he was in no position to do so. The loss of his job and the destruction of his reputation had left him fighting to survive, struggling just to keep his head above water in this cold, uncaring town.
He glanced at the family portrait he kept on his desk, and as he gazed at it, a bittersweet smile came across his face. He hardly recognized the man he had once been. The face was the same one he saw in the mirror every morning—a strong-jawed face with rugged features, a broad nose that had been broken one too many times in amateur boxing matches, and deep-set green eyes, with a head of close-trimmed hair, chestnut brown but streaked liberally with gray. But the smile on this familiar face was one he hadn’t seen for a while. In fact, he couldn’t remember when last he had smiled like that.
The image, from five years ago, felt like it came from a different life altogether. There he was with Meghan, now his ex-wife, and his daughter, Felicity, who was only four in the picture, but who was now a cheerful and bubbly nine-year-old. She had her mother’s dainty looks and long, blond locks but her father’s piercing green eyes.
Felicity had taken the divorce hard, especially when Jim had moved out of the house. Things had been difficult that first year; he had lost his job, had his reputation tarnished by false accusations, and the resulting fallout had cost him his marriage and his house, and almost his daughter, too.
He and Meghan were on friendly terms now, but it had taken a while to get that way. And Felicity still loved her father fiercely, and her eyes got teary every time after she spent a weekend with him, he had to drop her off at Meghan’s house.
He would do another for Felicity. And he often wondered if that meant doing the wrong thing. If he had kept quiet about the dirty cops and looked the other way, maybe his current life would still look like that loving family portrait.
It was a bitter pill to swallow—but he knew he couldn’t have done it any other way. There was no way that Jim Irons could uncover serious wrongdoing and simply look the other way and let it happen. Never. He couldn’t live with himself, regardless of whatever consequences came of his honesty.
With a sigh, he forced himself to look away from the portrait and focus on the files on his desk. Today he was supposed to investigate a case in which a gold-digging trophy wife had supposedly altered her late husband’s will in the last week of his life. The family didn’t believe a word she said about the old man changing the will of his own volition, and they had hired Jim to prove she was lying. It didn’t have the excitement of the murder cases he had once worked on as a police detective, but it was something.
As he started getting his files together, though, there was a knock on his door.
“Come in,” he said.
The door opened, and Jim was surprised to see a face that he recognized immediately, even though it was a face he hadn’t seen for a few years now. “Andrew Young,” he said. “It’s been a while, buddy. How are you?”
Before Andrew even opened his mouth, though, Jim could tell that something was seriously wrong. He had always been very perceptive when it came to body language—such powers of observation were tremendously useful when it came to detective work—but Andrew’s slumped shoulders, haggard face, bloodshot eyes, and dragging feet were something that even the most dim-witted cop would have noticed right away, screaming out in silence that something was terribly wrong.
“Someone’s taken my boy, Jim,” Andrew said softly. Those words came out as a raspy croak.
“Come and sit down,” Jim said gently, quickly getting up to pull out a chair for his old friend. “Tell me what’s happened. You want a glass of bourbon? You look like you could use one.”
Andrew nodded and eased himself into the chair. He started talking while Jim poured him some bourbon. “I was hiking with Keith in the woods on Saturday afternoon,” he began. He told the whole story about the bobcat tracks and the phone call that had distracted him, and Keith’s footprints suddenly just vanishing into the woods.
“And he’s been missing since then?” Jim asked. “You’ve been to the cops, right?”
“Yep,” Andrew said. “They organized search parties on Saturday and yesterday, but there’s nothing, no sign of him. They’ve opened a missing person's report, but they think he just wandered off and got lost in the woods, and they keep saying he’ll probably turn up today or tomorrow or something. None of them can explain the damn tracks, though, but they don’t seem to care, Jim. They don’t seem to give a shit that my boy is gone!”
“Well, I care, Andrew,” Jim said softly but with intense conviction. “And I’ll do whatever it takes to help you find your son. You said when you came in that he was taken—what makes you think that? I’m not grilling you; I’m just interested in finding out why you’d think that.”
“How else can I explain it?” Andrew said, taking a deep sip of bourbon, which seemed to calm him down a little. “A child doesn’t just vanish into thin air. His tracks were there in the snow one minute … then just nothing. Nothing at all! How the hell does anyone explain that away like those asshole cops did? They said he wandered off … bullshit! He disappeared! It’s like a fucking eagle just swooped down out of the sky and plucked him up like a rabbit! Except it wasn’t no damn eagle. It was someone. It was a person who did this. I can’t tell you how they did it, Jim, but I know, I know it in my bones that someone took my boy. You’ve known me since high school. That’s how long we’ve been friends, and you know I’m not crazy. You know I wouldn’t make something like this up.”
