Vanishing Girls (Detective Josie Quinn #1)(87)

She left Carrieann weeping and trembling with excitement by his side and ran into the waiting room to get her cell phone so she could call Noah. Her fingers tapped impatiently against the phone case as she waited for it to boot up. A glance at the television showed the six a.m. news. More Trinity Payne. The phone had been dead a long time. As the screen flashed on, the photo of her and Luke beneath the icons sent even more euphoria surging through her. He had squeezed her hand. He was in there. He was going to be okay.

Notifications from the last week started pouring in. Missed texts and missed calls. She saw the little number at the upper right-hand corner of the phone icon tick upward. Three, seven, twelve, seventeen, twenty-two. The missed calls stopped at fifty-seven.

Josie pressed the icon and pulled up the missed call log. It went from most recent to oldest. The most recent call had come in an hour ago. In fact, forty-nine of the calls were from the same person. A tiny photo of Chief Wayland Harris showed beside the number. Above the number was the name she had assigned in her phone’s contacts: Chief (Lodge).





Chapter Seventy-Five





“I don’t understand,” Noah said. “The chief is… well, he’s dead.”

Josie paced the ICU waiting room, clutching her cell phone to her ear. “Well, someone is calling me from his hunting lodge. Someone called my cell phone from his hunting lodge forty-nine times this week.”

“His wife?”

“I talked to his wife. She’s planning his funeral. I doubt she’s had time to drive to his hunting lodge every day for the last week and call my cell phone. Why would she? She could just call the station.”

“His daughters?”

“They’re both away at college. They’re flying into Philadelphia tomorrow.”

“Did you try calling back?”

“There was no answer. I tried three times. We need to go up there.”

On the other end of the line, Noah sighed. She knew he hadn’t slept in days. Neither of them had. “I’m gonna have to pull people from the Coleman search,” Noah said.

“No,” Josie said. “We can’t afford that. Especially if Coleman is still alive somewhere. I think we should call the FBI. Ask for their help.”

“I’ll call them, but they’re spread pretty thin from what I’ve gathered, with the raids and processing and all.”

“Try,” Josie said. “In the meantime, put Sergeant Tralies in charge. The chief’s lodge is an hour north of Geisinger. How fast can you get here?”



* * *



Wayland Harris’ hunting lodge was little more than a single-level two-bedroom modular home halfway up a mountain. The last two miles of road leading to its driveway was unpaved, as was the driveway. In the winter he needed an ATV to get from the road to the house, kept in a small shed at the bottom of his property for that very reason. As Josie and Noah drove, bouncing mercilessly in Noah’s truck, she noticed that the padlock on the outside of the shed was still intact.

It had been a long-running joke in the police department that the chief never actually went hunting but maintained a hunting lodge so he could get away from all the estrogen in his household. When most men in the area were showing off photos of the eight-point bucks or the seven-hundred-pound black bears they’d shot, Chief Harris would return from his lodge after every hunting season empty-handed, with no stories to tell. One year, Josie remembered, he had shot a turkey. The rest of the guys joked that was just so his wife would stop urging him to sell his beloved lodge. He had called it a lodge and not a camp. Most hunters belonged to a hunting camp, which was just a house or cabin in the woods where a group of them stayed together during hunting season. But this was a lodge. His lodge, and his alone.

Josie only knew where it was because the chief had loaned the department his ATV a few years in a row—mostly to rescue dumb kids who got lost in the woods. The chief had commissioned Josie twice to go with him to return the ATV. She’d never been inside the infamous lodge though.

So that anyone at the lodge wouldn’t hear their vehicle driving over the gravel, they parked at the bottom of the chief’s long driveway and walked the rest of the way. Soon Noah was panting beside her. She glanced over at him, alarmed by the shade of white he had turned. He was still nursing his gunshot wound, and she was working him like crazy. “You okay?” she asked. “Want to wait in the car?”

He scoffed at her and wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his wrist. “Are you crazy? Leave you alone? No way.”

“You don’t look so good.”

“I’m fine.”

At the top of the driveway the chief’s lodge sat silent and implacable. The chief had replaced the siding since the last time Josie had seen it. She pulled her service weapon out and held it pointed toward the ground. Together they circled to the back of the house.

After two circuits of the house, Josie walked up to the front door and knocked, while Noah stayed back in the tree line, his pistol drawn, ready to fire. She holstered her own gun but left the holster unfastened. She waited several minutes, knocking periodically until finally she heard movement from inside. It sounded like more than one person—and a dog barking. She heard footsteps and what sounded like a whispered argument before the door creaked slowly open, and Misty launched herself into Josie’s arms.