The Rivers Run Dry (5 page)

I guessed it was my age throwing her off. She expected an older agent, a veteran.

“What time did she make those trips to Vegas?”

“After we first moved in together, like, two years ago. But she broke up with that guy.”

“What time did she leave here on Sunday?”

“Ten. Maybe eleven. Actually, it could've been noon.”

I waited for an explanation. In the bright sun, her eyes looked like dark seeds.

“I'm not much of a morning person,” she explained. “My mind doesn't really function until the afternoon. Like, right now, my brain feels stuffed with socks.”

“Tough if you're a student,” I said.

“It was.” She pursed her lips. “I dropped out last year. It just costs too much, you know? Besides, I make plenty of money now. So it's no big deal.”

“What do you do?”

“I'm a waitress.” Her brown eyes came to life. “I work nights. Nobody ever tips big at breakfast, so no loss for me.”

“If Courtney went to the library, why was her car at Cougar Mountain?”

Without a word, she walked across the room and into the kitchen where a refrigerator stood like a stainless steel sentry and the black granite countertops were covered by a micron of dust. Above the desk tucked in one corner, a map from the United States Geologic Services showed green areas—state and federal lands—with swirls of fine lines for the altitudes. Someone had drawn in the roads with pencil. Pushpins punctured several summits.

“We have this bet,” Stacee said. “Who can hike the most trails in one year. Winner takes all. We both love to hike.”

“What's the prize?”

“No more laundry. The loser does all the laundry, like, for-ever.”

The colorful pushpins marked several mountain summits, but the pins were only three colors—yellow, green, and blue. When I asked if the colors meant anything, Stacee said yellow was for a trail Courtney hiked solo; blue meant Stacee hiked by herself.

“And green means we hiked together, because yellow and blue make green.” She turned to me. “I really think Court went to Cougar Mountain to hike Clay Pit Road. She wanted to beat me to it.”

“You didn't tell this to the parents?”

“If they think something happened to her because of our bet, they'll kill me. I drove out there Monday, looking for her. I walked over that mountain, screaming my head off. I stayed until it got dark.”

“And the parents don't know?”

“About the bet?”

I nodded.

“They hate her gambling, on anything.”

She led me to Courtney's bedroom. The room was about twenty feet square with walls covered by black-and-white photographs, each showing an image of stunning symmetry, and all the mahogany frames were hung so perfectly level they seemed like an abstract sculpture. The double bed's sheets were bunched at the bottom, like layers of ruptured gray silt.

“Does she have a new boyfriend?” I asked.

“She doesn't need a boyfriend. Guys hit on her like you would not believe. Even when they don't know she's rich. She's that beautiful. And when she didn't come home Sunday night, I thought maybe she met somebody at the library and you know . . .”

I peeked into the closet. Courtney VanAlstyne had organized her clothing by color and type. Every red blouse together in one section—all the white T-shirts, the black skirts, a section of pressed blue jeans. Her shoes stood floor to ceiling on cherrywood shelves, organized into groups of tennis shoes, flats, heels, sandals, and boots.

“Neat freak,” Stacee said. “It has to do with the math-genius brain. She gets crabby when things aren't in perfect order.”

On the bottom shelf, two pairs of hiking boots were separated by a wide space, presumably where another pair of boots belonged.

“Did she have another pair of boots?” I stepped toward the shelf.

“Yes.”

I pulled two evidence bags from my back pocket, gently scraping soil from the soles, working dirt loose from the treads with the cap of my pen, letting the soil fall into the bag. It wasn't much to recover—the neat freak had dutifully cleaned the boots before shelving them—but at this point, procedure was as important as anything else.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

The tone of her voice sent a shiver down my spine, and I didn't turn around. She sounded like a small frightened child who had woken to find a parent doing something dangerous.

“This is just procedure. Do you know where she hiked before Sunday?”

She didn't reply, and when I turned the whites of her eyes were visible above the brown irises. My first impression of Stacee Warner was that she was a scrappy personality, even drowsiness couldn't disguise it. But now a fissure cracked open, revealing a vulnerability that made me want to insist Courtney VanAlstyne was fine; she probably flew to Vegas again. No ransom note, no body; no traces from the dogs. But I didn't. Once upon a time, I received my own bad news, and among the worst things people said were platitudes.
Your father is probably fine, there must be some mistake, I'm sure it's going to be okay.
Words of supposed comfort stung more than outright disregard, because in tragedy if you doubt the depths of darkness you run the risk of robbing the grieving of their love.

“You—you think she's dead.”

“No, I don't.”

After taking the samples, I replaced the boots on the wood shelf and marked the bags with a Sharpie. I thanked Stacee for her time, gave her my card.

It was 11:00 a.m.

And Stacee Warner was wide-awake.

The University of Washington's campus stretched from one body of water to another, Lake Washington to Lake Union, forming one of the largest colleges in the Northwest. Known simply as “The U,” it boasted top-ranked medical and law schools, and alumnae wore straight faces when they said God was a Husky.

The UW's math library was located in Padelford Hall and on Wednesday afternoon the only person inside was a young Asian man at the reference desk. He hadn't been working on Sunday, he told me, but agreed to find the librarian who was and have him or her call the number on my card.

I took the stairs one floor up. The halls were quiet, the students apparently outside for lunch in the sun. Professor Mark Wolper, Courtney's advisor, had his office door cracked six inches, and I could hear his voice rising and falling. When I glanced into the opening, he was hunched over a desk bisected by stacks of paper. His worn cotton T-shirt stretched across a rounded spine, his knobby vertebrae looking like a string of pillow lava. I stood in the hallway, waiting for the phone conversation to end, but after ten minutes, I knocked on the jamb to indicate my presence.

He stopped mid-sentence, head swiveling. “Yeah, what?”

I stepped inside. The phone rested in its base.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I'd like to ask you some questions.”

“Are you in the 102 class? Because we have tutors for you girls.”

“No, sir. I'm with the FBI.”

“The what?”

I opened my credentials case. “Special Agent Raleigh Harmon.”

“FBI.” He snorted. “You want to ask about my Arab students, that it? Well, I'm not talking.”

His gray eyes were flat until I mentioned Courtney's name. Then the eyes flashed to life.

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“Friday afternoon.” He picked up a paper clip, unwinding the metal. “What's this about anyway?”

“What did you two discuss on Friday?”

“Her project.”

I waited. The paper clip turned into a jagged silver line. “What's her project?”

“She's writing a thesis. You wouldn't understand it.”

“A thesis?”

“Yes.”

“Isn't that unusual, a junior writing a thesis?”

“
She's
unusual.”

“In what way?”

“For one thing, she's a female with a working brain.” He tossed the damaged paper clip into the steel trash can, pinging the side. “That alone sets her above 99 percent of her sex.”

“I see.”

“Do you?” He snorted again. “Okay, FBI. You want to know whether she was plotting to blow up the campus?”

“Actually, I'm curious about this idea that women are dumb. Is it a theory, or a lemma on the way to empirical proof?”

“Are you mocking me?” he said.

“No, but the last time I checked both clinical science and deductive reasoning had yet to prove double X chromosomes hinder cerebral development. But if you've made a breakthrough on your own, I'd like to hear it.”

He paused. “Your background is . . . ?”

“Geology.”

“With the Feds? You're kidding me.”

“Miss VanAlstyne?”

He glanced out the window. A column of sunlight sliced diagonally through the room, revealing dust mites dancing in entropy. Her thesis, he explained, focused on ideas of probability and the statistical quantities that characteristically defied mathematical definitions.

“Courtney wants to prove that quantitative boundaries exist for luck.” His face broke into a ragged grin. “Her math . . . it's like poetry.”

“Nobody's heard from the poet since Sunday morning.” I watched his reaction.

His long fingers reached for another paper clip, unwinding again. “She wasn't in class Monday. Or today. I was going to call.”

“Any idea where she might be?”

He shook his head.

“None. You're sure?”

“She takes research trips. Sometimes.”

“Does this research take her out of the area?”

He tossed the second paper clip, missing the trash can. “Let me ask you, Miss Geology. If you were studying luck, where would you go?”

“Where it doesn't show up.”

“Why?”

“Because some of the best definitions come from studying the opposite quality.”

“Interesting. She goes to Las Vegas to study gambling. It's fantastic material. Winners, losers, both in abundance, and everybody inside a casino wants to talk about luck. Here's Courtney, quantifying anecdotes with mathematical equations. I'm telling you, it's poetry.”

“I thought the house always wins.”

“That's just it!” he exclaimed. “The house wins
most
of the time, in order to recoup its money, to stay in business. But what about the rest of time? That's the area Courtney's working on. She's quantifying what we colloquially refer to as ‘luck.'”

“If you believe luck exists.”

“Let me guess. You don't believe in luck.”

“No, sir, I don't.”

“Well then.” He snorted. “You won't have to bother your pretty little head reading her thesis, will you?”

On the drive back to the office, down Montlake Boulevard, I called the Bureau's special agent at Sea-Tac Airport, a guy named Marvin Larsen. According to Jack, Marvin was “a troglodyte.” But even a dinosaur could help.

“We got no Courtney VanAlstyne on any outbound flights,” Marvin Larsen told me. “Unless she got hold of some fake ID, or cooked up a fraudulent passport, she didn't board any planes out of here. I even checked Saturday. No goes.”

At 2:45 p.m., still sweating from the climb, I explained all this to Allen McLeod as we sat in his glassed-in office and he scribbled notes on a white legal pad, doubling back over my details and circling key phrases.

“Sounds like we have a rich girl disobeying her parents,” he said. “And they can't admit their princess would do anything wrong. Maybe she's sleeping around. Maybe she's getting away from them. But let's not screw ourselves in the foot. Write up 302s for all the interviews and I'll take them up to the ASAC for a paper trail.”

“Yes, sir.” I caught myself. “And what about the parents?”

“The senator wants to call them personally. He made that clear to the ASAC. Let 'em know they're getting full bang for the buck. Big donors, big favors.”