“Mr. Kreiss?”
Talbot said.
“Special Agent Larry Talbot; this is Special Agent Janet Carter.”
“Yes, I remember,” Kreiss said.
“Come in.”
He opened the screen door. Talbot always reintroduced himself and his partner every time they met, and he was always politely formal—using sir a lot. If Talbot knew Kreiss had been with the Bureau, he gave no sign of it. Kreiss kept his own tone neutral; he would be polite, but not friendly, not if they were giving up.
“Thank you, sir,” Talbot said. Kreiss led them to chairs in the lodge room, an expansive area that encompassed the cabin’s living room, dining room, and kitchen. Talbot sat on the edge of his chair, his briefcase on his knees. Carter was somewhat more relaxed, both arms on the chair and her nice legs carefully crossed. Kreiss sat down in an oak rocker by the stone fireplace, crossed his arms over his chest, and tried not to scowl.
“Well,” Talbot began, glancing over at his partner as if making sure of her moral support.
“As I think you know, the investigation to date has come up empty. Frankly, I’ve never seen one quite like this: We usually have something, some piece of evidence, a witness, or at least a working theory. But this one …”
Kreiss looked from Carter to Talbot.
“What are the Bureau’s intentions?”
he asked.
Talbot took a deep breath.
“We’ve consulted with the other two families.
Our basic problem remains: There’s no indication of a criminal act.
And absent evidence of—” “They’ve been gone without a trace for three weeks,” Kreiss interrupted.
“I should think it would be hard to disappear without a trace in this day and age, Mr. Talbot. Really hard.”
He stared right at Talbot. Carter was looking at her shoes, her
expression blank.
“I’ll accept what you say about there being no evidence,” Kreiss continued.
“But there’s also no evidence that they just went off the grid voluntarily, either.”
“Yes, sir, we acknowledge that,” Talbot said.
“But they’re college kids, and the three of them were known to be, um, close.”
Close doesn’t quite describe it, Kreiss thought. Those three kids had been joined at the hip in some kind of weird triangular relationship since late freshman year. Tommy and Lynn, his daughter, had been the boy-girl pair, and Rip, the strange one, had been like some kind of eccentric electron, orbiting around the other two.
“We’ve interviewed everyone we could find on the campus who knew them,” Talbot continued.
“Professors, TA’s, other students. None of them could give us anything specific, except for two of their classmates, who were pretty sure they had gone camping somewhere. But nobody had any idea of where or for how long. Plus, it was spring break, which leaves almost an entire week where no one would have expected to see them. Sir, they could be literally anywhere.”
“And the campus cops—the Blacksburg cops?”
“We’ve had full cooperation from local law. University, city, and county. We’ve pulled all the usual strings: their telephone records, Email accounts, bank accounts, credit cards, school schedules, even their library cards. Nothing.” He took a deep breath.
“I guess what we’re here to say is that we have to forward this case into the Missing Persons Division now.”
“Missing Persons.”
“Yes, sir. Until we get some indication—anything at all, mind you-that they didn’t just take off for an extended, I don’t know, road trip of some kind.”
“And just leave college? Three successful engineering students in their senior year?”
“Sir, it has happened before. College kids get a wild hair and take off to save the whales or the rain forest or some damn thing.”
Kreiss frowned, shook his head, and got up. He walked to a front window, trying to control his temper. He stood with his back to them, not wanting them to see the anger in his face.
“That’s not my take on it, Mr. Talbot. My daughter and I had become pretty close, especially after her mother was killed.”
“Yes, sir, in the airplane accident. Our condolences, sir.”
Kreiss blinked. Talbot was letting him know they’d run his background, too. Standard procedure, of course: When kids disappeared, you
checked the parents, hard. So they had to know he was ex-FBI. He wondered how much they knew about the circumstances of his sudden retirement.
Talbot might; the woman was too young. Unless they’d gone back to Washington to ask around.
“Thank you,” Kreiss said.
“But my point is that Lynn would have told me if she was going to leave school. Hell, she’d have hit me up for money.”
“Would she, sir?” Talbot said.
“We understood she received quite a bit of money from the airline’s settlement.”
Kreiss, surprised, turned around to face them. He had forgotten about the settlement. He remembered his former wife’s lawyer contacting Lynn about it, but he had made her deal with it, whatever it was. So far, the money had covered all her college and living expenses, but he still gave her an allowance.
The woman had her notebook open and was writing something in it.
He felt he had to say something.
“My daughter was a responsible young adult, Mr. Talbot. So was Tommy Vining. Rip was … from Mars, somewhere.
But they would not just leave school. That’s something I know. I think they went camping, just like those two kids said, and something happened. Something bad.”
“Yes, sir, that’s one possibility. It’s just that there’s no—” “All right, all right. So what happens now? You just close it and file it?”
“Not at all, sir,” Talbot protested.
“You know that. It becomes a federal missing persons case, and they don’t get closed until the persons get found.” He hesitated.
“One way or another.” He paused again, as if regretting he had put it that way.
“As I think you’ll recall, sir, there are literally thousands of missing persons cases active at the Bureau. And that’s at the federal level. We don’t even hear about some of the local cases.”
“How comforting.”
“I know it’s not, Mr. Kreiss. But our MP Division has one big advantage:
They get to screen every Bureau case—every active case—for any possible links: names, credit-card numbers, evidence tags, telephone numbers. They’ve even developed special software for this, to screen the Bureau’s databases and alert for links to any missing person in the country.”
“What did the other parents say when you told them this?”
Talbot sighed.
“Um, they were dismayed, of course, but I think they understood. It’s just that there isn’t—”
“Yes, you keep saying that. Any of them going to take up a search on
? their own?”
“Is that what you’re considering, Mr. Kreiss?” Carter asked. It was the first time she had spoken at this meeting. Now that he thought of it, he had rarely heard her speak. Kreiss looked at her for a moment, and he was surprised when their eyes locked. There was a hint of challenge in her expression that surprised him.
“Absolutely not,” he answered calmly, continuing to hold her gaze. r “Civilians get into police business, they usually screw things up.”
“But you’re not exactly a civilian, are you, Mr. Kreiss?” she said.
Kreiss hesitated, wondering just what she meant by that.
“I am now, Agent Carter,” he said softly.
“I am now.”
Talbot cleared his throat.
“Um—” he began, but Carter cut him off.
“What I think Special Agent Talbot was about to say is that we ran a check on you, sir. We always check out the parents when kids go missing.
And of course we knew that you had been a senior FBI agent. But your service and personnel records have been sealed. The few people we did talk to would only say that you had been an unusually effective”—she looked at her notes—”hunter. That was the term that kept coming up, sir.”