Blood Trade: A Sean Coleman Thriller (14 page)

Sean watched Katelyn divide up groups of people to set off in different directions
along the open prairie. She came across as a natural leader, or perhaps she had just
gone through the routine so many times that it now felt like second nature.

Upon receiving their marching orders, people began peeling away from the larger crowd.
Sean suspected that Katelyn herself would likely join the last group, so he subtly
moved himself to the edge of the congregation.

She must have noticed that Sean was a new face because once she had finished delegating,
she looked at him and said, “Thank you for coming out today, sir. We appreciate it.”

Sean nodded.

“You need a stick?” she quickly asked him.

Before he could open his mouth, she grabbed a broom handle that her boyfriend had
pinned under his arm while his hands were in his pockets. She handed it to Sean.

The boyfriend’s eyes bulged from the imposition and his head
quickly swiveled toward
her. He looked as if he had just been woken from a daydream.

“If you’re cold, go wait in the car,” she told him with an eye-roll, her statement
laced with irritation.

He opened his mouth to say something, but she quickly turned her back on him, directing
the rest of the group to follow her as she set out for a shallow ravine to the west.
The boyfriend just stood there, unsure of what to do or say. Everyone else accompanied
Katelyn, and the boyfriend eventually turned around and began making his way back
to the nearby residential neighborhood where Sean had parked his car next to several
others.

The area looked like it had already been thoroughly surveyed. There were footprints
in the snow just about everywhere. Sean knew that one more sweep wouldn’t turn up
anything, and he suspected Katelyn knew that as well. But just as he had become invested
in the mystery of what had happened to Andrew Carson, he understood that the last
thing a missing man’s daughter could do was sit helplessly by while the investigation
was left solely in the hands of law enforcement. She had to do something—anything—to
help.

Sean knew more than she did about her father’s disappearance. He knew the specific
suspect the police were looking for. But that information didn’t make it any less
likely that Carson’s body was lying outside in some ditch in the snow, waiting to
be found. It just meant that the guy who could have dumped him there had a name.

He watched Katelyn and the others poke their sticks into the snow whenever they came
upon a large lump or some other discrepancy in the terrain of the land. He followed
suit.

Every couple of minutes, he found his gaze drifting up to meet Katelyn’s face. Though
she and Jessica didn’t look much alike, he recognized the same shared sense of despair
in her eyes. That alone displayed a certain resemblance between the two.

After a while, Katelyn noticed Sean’s attention turned to her,
and she brought herself
to answer his gaze with a polite smile. She walked up to him and formally introduced
herself, extending her gloved hand and thanking him again for his help. Her face
was red, likely burned that color from the frigid winds she had been working through
in the past days.

“I’m Sean,” he told her. “Sean Coleman.” He wondered if his name would mean anything
to her, thinking Jessica might have mentioned it over the phone after their conversation
back at GSL. She must not have, because the introduction drew no recognition.

“Where are you from?” she asked him in a hoarse voice after wiping her nose with
the back of her glove. She seemed to have a cold.

“Winston, Colorado. It’s a little town south of Lakeland.”

“Wow. You’ve came a long way,” she said, tilting her head and displaying a tone of
gratitude. “Well, we appreciate it.”

“No problem,” he answered. “I kind of know your cousin. I wanted to help out.”

“Jess?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Well, great. My family is very grateful for all the help we’ve received.”

She leaned into Sean—something he wasn’t expecting—opened her arms, and wrapped them
around him. She gripped him in a tight hug. He wasn’t sure at first how to take the
show of affection, but he soon found his own arms wrapped gingerly around her as
well.

“Thank you,” she muttered with sincerity in her voice, wiping a stray tear from her
face after she pulled away.

He nodded.

The search went on for another twenty or thirty minutes, with nothing to show for
it other than an old bicycle tire buried in the snow. Katelyn walked close to Sean
and confided in him things that he wouldn’t have expected one to tell to a stranger.
She talked about
how she had gotten in a huge argument with her father the night
he went missing, and that she feared her raised, angry voice would be his last memory
of her. She spoke of how her father was disappointed in the decisions she had made
in her adult life, and how painfully hard it was to sometimes concede that he was
right. It was clear from some of the early stories she told of her and her father
that the two were as tight as could be when she was a child.

He mostly nodded as she spoke, feeling unequipped to offer any emotional counsel.
That appeared to be all right with Katelyn, who seemed satisfied just being able
to voice her scattered emotions to a fresh set of ears.

The group headed back to the hill at the base of the residential area and rendezvoused
with the others. That’s when Sean suddenly heard Katelyn shout out the name Jess.
She was waving her arms back and forth in broad strokes, vying for attention.

Sean’s head jerked up upon hearing the name. He didn’t understand how Jessica could
have been there when she was just beginning a shift at work right before he’d left
for Greeley. There were bodies moving in every direction along the slope like busy
ants marching over an anthill. He tried to follow Katelyn’s line of sight to spot
Jessica, but wasn’t having any luck.

With butterflies bouncing off the inside of his stomach, wondering how she’d react
to him being there, he guardedly walked over to Katelyn. Amidst battling conversations
between members of the search party, he continued to scan the crowd as a tall teenage
boy with wavy bleached-blond hair approached Katelyn. The two hugged before turning
to Sean.

“Your friend showed up to help, Jess,” she said with a smile.

Sean’s head snapped toward the two of them like a weathervane in a sudden gust of
wind.

Katelyn retained the smile on her face while the boy expressed a scowl of confusion
that mirrored Sean’s.

“Jess?” Sean said.

Katelyn’s eyes narrowed and she turned her head to the boy beside her.

“Who the fuck is this?” Sean asked, his nostrils flared and teeth showing. The volume
of his voice caused the two to jump.

“What?” Katelyn said, clearly taken aback.

“I don’t know this guy, Katie,” said the boy.

Sean shook his head. “I was talking about your
cousin
, Jessica. Not this guy.”

Katelyn and the boy looked at each other, expressionless.

“What?” Sean said in frustration, throwing his hands in the air.

“I don’t
have
a cousin named Jessica,” Katelyn said. “Jess . . . This guy right here.
He’s my only cousin.”

Sean was speechless. His mouth hung open like the lowered drawbridge of a castle.
He quickly dug his large hand into his coat pocket and dragged out the
Denver Post
article. He unfolded it and presented it to the two of them, his thick hands shaking
with anxiety.

“Right there,” he said, pointing at the image of Jessica in the background of the
photo. “Who’s this woman?”

The two both leaned forward, tilting their heads to grab a closer look.

“Beats me,” said the boy.

“I don’t know,” said Katelyn. “I think I remember her being here a few days ago,
helping us search. I don’t think I talked to her. We had a lot more people that day,
and there was so much going on. I didn’t get to talk to a lot of people who were
here.”

“Neither of you know this woman . . .? At all?”

They shook their heads
no
before exchanging confused glances again.

Sean felt the earth below his feet stir. The fading horizon off in the distance suddenly
seemed slanted. Off. His eyes refused to focus on either individual’s face for a
few moments, his head lost in a cloud of questions.

“You probably just misunderstood her, man,” said the boy he now knew as Jess.

Sean didn’t respond, still standing there in an almost hypnotic trance.

“Well, thanks either way,” said Katelyn. “I hope you get it sorted out.”

Sean wasn’t sure when it was that they had walked away, but the next time he glanced
up, both of them were halfway to the parked cars above. Most everyone else had also
left, leaving him by himself in the field. The wind began to pick up.

A sudden gust whipped against his face, leaving behind a stinging sensation that
felt as though he’d just been slapped with an open hand.

In Sean’s view, that was exactly what had just happened.

Chapter 10

F
rom his snug, grimy jeans pocket, the man pried out a well-worn, diamond-shaped
keychain. A single key dangled from it. At the center of the diamond’s face was a
piece of masking tape yellowed with age. The number three was written on it in black
Magic Marker.

It was nighttime. The temperature had dropped rapidly and he could see his own labored
breath.

He slid the key into the womb of the brass doorknob where he twisted it until he
heard a click and felt the door give. When it swung open, dry, rusted hinges cried
as if they were pleading for help. The light from a flickering neon-blue motel sign
just a dozen yards away lit up the foot of a queen-sized bed covered in a thin bedspread
that had probably once been white.

The small room inside was musty and warm, a climate brought on by the old baseboard
heater beneath the lone window facing the parking lot. The heater emitted a continuous
tapping noise, just as it had the night before when it kept him up late tossing and
turning.

The cryptic scent of an artificial air freshener lingered inside. Its placement beside
the heater was likely intended to conceal a fouler odor.

He tossed a heavy, graphite-colored, canvas backpack onto the bed. He stuck his head
through the doorway and cautiously skimmed the outside parking lot for notable activity.
He found none. He pulled his head inside the room and kicked the door closed behind
him.

The uncovered overhead light sprung to life with the flick of
a switch. It brought
little clarity, however, with only one working bulb. An amateurish painting of an
old abandoned sawmill in front of a mountain landscape decorated the wall above the
headboard. It hung crooked.

The man sat down along the foot of the bed, the mattress springs groaning from his
weight. He brushed some dust from his pants and then leaned forward, placing his
elbows on his thighs and running his fingers along his scalp as he faced the floor.

After a moment, his eyes rose to meet his own reflection in the mirror on the wall
in front of him. It hung above a sturdy dresser made of dark, polished wood.

Through dimness, he recognized the hate and vengeance that burned in his own eyes.
He greeted it with a fiendish grin that nearly eclipsed the entirety of his face.
The smile dissipated after he tugged at a rubber band that he wore around his opposite
wrist, stretching it to its fullest extent and then releasing it into a painful snap.

He rose to his feet and methodically removed all of his clothes, folding each garment
neatly before placing them in a tidy stack on top of the nightstand. He stepped inside
the small adjoining bathroom whose pale walls seemed to be critiquing him once the
lamp above exposed their dispassionate glare.

He lifted his eyes to the lamp and answered, “It has to be done.”

Steam rose from the shower, which doubled as a bathtub. His feet were planted on
the vinyl textured mat suctioned in place. The back of his head bumped against the
steel showerhead each time he brought it up straight after soaping himself down.
What sounded like the eerie whimpering of a hungry dog caught his ear. He didn’t
recognize that it was coming from his own mouth until it erupted into inconsolable
sobbing that nearly knocked him down to his knees.

When the water shut off with a squeak, he stepped out of the shower and headed back
to the main room, ignoring the rack of fresh folded towels on his way out. He plopped
his sopping wet body
down across the foot of the bed and leaned forward, twisting
the knob of the medium-sized television that sat on top of the dresser. Snow across
the screen lit up his face, casting his large, eerie shadow along the wall behind
him.

He dug his hand under the flap of his backpack and pulled from it a black, unlabeled
video cassette. He quickly fed it into the mouth of a VCR that rested on top of the
television. He watched the digital clock on its display flash “12:00 am” for a few
seconds before a picture came on and his wide eyes fell to the screen.

The picture—the top quarter of it tilted at a forty-five-degree angle—revealed some
chaotic camera work among a large group of reporters. They shouted questions about
the Alvar Montoya shootout over each other as their shoulders grinded together. Some
of them impatiently shoved their way in front of others.

“Chief Lumbergh! Chief Lumbergh!” a female voice sounded out above the rest. “Can
you tell us when you’ll be returning to duty?”

When the camera-shot stabilized, the blurry face of Gary Lumbergh quickly came into
focus. It nearly filled the entire screen before the camera zoomed back out and revealed
the chief ’s arm wrapped around his wife. He was wearing a navy-blue polo shirt with
a dark-green jacket draped over his opposite shoulder. The jacket only partially
covered the sling and the cast that kept his arm elevated.