Last Halloween Eve, nearly six months ago, was a Friday. Scott Sheldon told his roommate that he was going camping with three friends—Tom Keller, Arthur Cowan, and Carlos Ibarra. They planned to be back Sunday morning.
According to the statements by Scott’s three friends, they’d been drinking and joking Friday night. At some point, Scott got angry—no one claimed to know exactly what set him off—and he grabbed his backpack and left. When he didn’t return, they assumed he was sleeping in the truck, which was parked an hour’s hike from the campsite.
The next morning, Scott still hadn’t returned. The weather turned from overcast to rain, and Keller, Cowan, and Ibarra returned to the truck. When they didn’t find Scott, they looked for him in the area, but the rain came down hard and heavy. They left—there was nothing in the notes saying that they went back to the campus on Saturday, but that was implied. It snowed late Saturday night and the boys said they trekked back to the campsite Sunday morning and looked for Scott. They didn’t call the rangers, they didn’t alert campus security, nothing, until Sunday afternoon.
That was the part of the story that set off Max’s instincts. Why had it taken them so long to tell anyone that Scott was missing? Why did campus security wait until Monday morning to notify the park service? By that point, the storm was so severe, they could search for only a few hours each day. By the end of the week, the roads to that area of the mountain were impassable.
There was no doubt in her mind that Scott Sheldon had died on that mountain, but the question was how and when. The fact that he was missing for nearly forty-eight hours before the three boys had alerted anyone told Max they were lying about something.
She reviewed her notes until eight, when she called Chuck Pence with the park service. He was based in Colorado Springs, near the police station, but Pence was on the search and rescue staff and had led the effort to find Scott. His specialty was working with tracking dogs.
He wasn’t there, and the staff said he was already in the field. Max left a message and reviewed her schedule. She’d wanted to talk to Pence first for more background on the search and what, if anything, they’d found that hadn’t made it in the official files, but that would have to wait. She considered talking to Detective Horn again, but after their phone conversation, Max suspected it would be a waste of time. If she learned anything new, she’d talk to the police. She’d go to the college first and talk to Scott’s roommate, then track down the others.
While she drove the thirty minutes to the Cheyenne College campus, she got two calls, which she sent to voice mail. The first from Ben. She wasn’t going to talk to him about the television show until after this case, and she was already thinking of more ways she could tell him no—since the blunt no she’d already given him didn’t work. The second call came from her editor. Max didn’t have anything good to tell her, and Emma was going to be disappointed.
Max had written four true crime novels, the first about Karen’s disappearance and the subsequent investigation. The latest book was coming out this summer, and Emma wanted another proposal. But Max didn’t have a case that excited her. She read the crime blotters, tracked the news—there were a lot of interesting cases, some even more interesting than Scott Sheldon’s disappearance. But nothing jumped out at her as thrilling enough to invest several months of her life into research and interviews, then another six to nine months verifying facts and writing the book. Writing the last book had nearly gutted Max. She’d investigated claims of elder abuse in a Miami facility and uncovered a ten-year reign of terror by the director she had dubbed the Wicked Nurse of Miami. Not very creative, and her editor had cut all but two references to the nickname from the book, but it was still the way Max thought of the bitch who seemed to take pleasure in making sick, old people suffer.
She didn’t want to go through that again, not yet. She briefly considered the Scott Sheldon case, and maybe there was something here that would warrant a full-length book, but Max didn’t see it yet. She first needed to talk to the people involved—maybe shining a new light on the matter would get them to talk—or slip up, if they were harboring a violent secret.