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 America—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.
Which meant her search would have to expand beyond the Missouri River states to include the entire nation. That’s where NIBRS, NCIC, and ViCAP should come in. But she’d already looked at those the night before. Maybe she’d used the wrong criteria, she thought.
The most implausible theory she could come up with was that the boys got in their boat and went upriver.
She’d assumed from the start that they would be at the mercy of the river flow and could travel no faster downriver than that. But what if they somehow obtained an outboard motor with enough horsepower to push them against the flow? The river near Grimstad was wide and slow. Steamboats had at one time sailed upriver.
Even though it made no sense to her, she accessed RIMN—the Rocky Mountain Information Network that included Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. It was the database she’d used the most when she worked for Lewis and Clark County in Montana.
Upriver was Montana, her home state, where the headwaters of the Missouri River originated.