Stone Cold Heart (Tracers #13)(27)

“Yes, we checked him out. No dice.” Nolan turned left onto a highway heading southbound out of town. The neighborhoods gave way to sporadic houses and then undeveloped land. They crossed a bridge, and Sara spotted a sign for Lakeview Park.

“How far is this park from White Falls?” she asked.

“Twenty miles exactly.”

He pulled into the turn lane and waited patiently as several carloads of people paid admission.

Nolan pulled up to the window. “Hey, Randy. How’s it going tonight?”

“It’s going.” The ranger dipped his head down to peer inside at Sara. He wore the same green uniform as the White Falls rangers.

“Any citations?” Nolan asked.

“Two so far. Coupla kids shooting off bottle rockets near the soccer fields. Maureen took care of them.”

“Good for her.”

“Hey, I heard about White Falls. Is it true they’re shut down tomorrow?”

“Rest of the week, looks like.”

Randy shook his head. “Hell of a thing.”

“Well, I’ll let you get back to it,” Nolan said, dodging more questions.

They proceeded down a two-lane road lined with oak trees. The topography was dramatically different from the park where Sara had spent her day.

“Is it all this flat?” she asked.

“Pretty much.”

“How many acres?”

“One-fifty.”

They reached a large clearing. Athletic fields stretched in every direction. She scanned the landscape, counting five soccer fields, all occupied. Several baseball diamonds were busy, too, and the parking lots adjacent to them were crowded with cars.

Nolan took a right onto a narrow drive and curved around to a field where a baseball game was wrapping up. Players filed through the chain-link fence, guzzling water and sports drinks as a fresh team took the field.

Nolan pulled into an empty space beside a snow-cone truck. Sara climbed out and immediately smelled hot dogs grilling. Her stomach growled, but she ignored it as she surveyed the area.

People milled around a grassy clearing between the parking lot and the baseball fields. Beyond the fields was a green-and-yellow playscape and a covered picnic area, both bustling with people. Sara followed a curl of smoke and spotted the source of the hot-dog smell, and her stomach grumbled again.

“Over here.” Nolan jerked his head toward a line of trees. A wooden sign marked a trailhead. Nearby was a trash can and a plastic-bag dispenser, along with a sign telling people to clean up after their dogs.

“A parent noticed the backpack here by the trailhead and turned it in to lost and found,” Nolan said. “It sat in the office for a day, until someone went through it and found Kaylin’s wallet inside.”

“The backpack was here?”

He nodded. “Right under the map, according to the mom who turned it in.”

“And how’d they track the mom down if she left it with lost and found?”

“She came to us when she heard the missing woman’s backpack had turned up at the park. We interviewed her. Got all the details she could remember.”

Sara studied the map behind protective plastic. It showed a 1.5-mile loop through the woods, ending back at the parking lot. Sara glanced around. “Busy place.”

“That’s right.”

“He wanted it spotted quickly.”

Nolan looked at her. “You’re thinking it’s a decoy meant to lead us to a different park?”

“Maybe. I assume this one was canvassed thoroughly?”

“Both parks were. But we spent extra time here dragging the lake.”

“Lake?”

He nodded in the direction of the soccer fields. “Just south of the athletic fields is a man-made lake. It’s a pond, really, but the park’s named after it. We dragged every inch of it the week Kaylin went missing, then again two months later. Nothing.”

Sara gazed out at the park where so many kids were playing, and she imagined how painful it must be for Kaylin’s parents to come here.

“My dad was in the Coast Guard,” Sara said.

Nolan looked at her. “Oh yeah?”

“Twenty-six years. He retired a while back.” She glanced at him, not sure why she’d decided to tell him something personal. “He did a lot of search-and-rescue missions, which sometimes turned into search-and-recovery. And sometimes they never recovered anything, not even a boat. It was agonizing for the loved ones. All that waiting and wondering. And when you can’t bring someone back home to their family . . .” She shook her head, remembering the defeated look on her dad’s face when he would come home from one of those missions. “I think not knowing is the hardest.”

Nolan didn’t say anything, but she sensed he understood. She also knew he felt personally responsible for getting answers, because she felt that, too. So had her father.

Sara did a slow three-sixty, trying to commit the setting to memory. She took in the sights, the smells, the sounds, even noting the direction of the shadows falling across the parking lot. She took out her cell phone and snapped a few pictures of the area.

“This mom who found the backpack, did she remember what time it was?” Sara asked.

“Four in the afternoon. She’d just finished coaching her daughter’s T-ball game.”