Page 56 of A Future To Remember

The server was back at our table. I wasn’t hungry. My stomach was too tied up in knots ever since Gwen had given the description of the piece of shit who’d kidnapped my wife. If I found that motherfucker alive, he wasn’t going to survive long enough to be brought into custody.

“I’ll have the Cobb salad with ranch,” Oscar said. I cocked an eyebrow at him, and he muttered, “The wedding’s in two weeks. I gotta fit into my tux.”

I smirked, then shook my head at the server. “I’m good, but bring me another Mich Light when you bring out his salad.”

Oscar held up his hand to her before she could turn away. “He’ll have a T-bone, cooked medium-rare, with the home fries and slaw.”

When I shot him a questioning look, he said, “We’re gonna find her, sir, and I think it’s important that she be able to recognize you when you’re reunited. You’ve lost so much weight, she might mistake you for Dave.”

I chuffed out a laugh. Dave was nearly as tall as me but lean and wiry, and starting to bend a little with age. Finally, I sighed and nodded to the waitress. I could feed Eggy some steak later tonight or tomorrow morning when he woke up.

Once the young lady waiting on our table left us, Oscar got back to his list, tapping the next bullet point. “Tattoo shops. That tat Gwen described seems pretty unique.”

I sucked on my teeth. “That’s one way of putting it.”

He nodded but studied me critically, probably seeing the fury in my eyes. “Try not to go there, sir. I know it’s hard, but we gotta focus on finding her first. We can deal with what happened to her in the meantime later. Nikki’s got a list of trained therapists her SVU department works with. She says they’re all really good.”

I took a long pull on my beer, but it was like spraying a rumbling volcano with a water pistol. Inwardly, I was seething. That motherfucker was gonna feel some pain and some fear before I put him down. But to Oscar, I simply nodded.

He tapped the bullet point again. “I think we can use AI to create and then hunt for the template or the portfolio pic of the tattoo.”

AI was a fairly new tool to the Bureau. As an investigative tool, it was difficult to employ it confidentially, but it usually turned up some good results where searches and probabilities were concerned.

“You think some tattoo artist put that image up on social media somewhere?” I asked skeptically.

Oscar shrugged. “Anybody willing to needle it onto some dude’s arm isn’t gonna be shy about showing it off.”

“Good point. If AI doesn’t turn up anything, and Brice’s vice connections through the Bureau up here don’t turn up a lead, we can start calling around to all the licensed tattoo shops in the area. Someone had to have inked it.”

“Yep,” he agreed. “We should also ask around at the campground again.”

I sighed. “We did that, remember?”

There was a large camping park next to the trading post where Abby had gone to get us the groceries she’d purchased. We’d asked every camper in the park if they’d seen her, and we hadn’t turned up a single lead.

“Yeah, but we were asking the wrong question. We asked if anyone had seen your wife, not who might’ve seen the guy with a memorable tattoo like the one Gwen described.”

Oscar had another solid point. Back when rage and heartbreak weren’t filling every corner of my mind, I would’ve been faster to come up with a game plan myself, but right now, all I could do was hold it together long enough to find this piece of shit before I made sure the last sunrise he’d seen was the last sunrise he ever saw.

We hashed out a few more of the bullet points before our food arrived, and Oscar and I ate mostly in silence. Surprisingly, once I started eating, I enjoyed the steak. It was Oscar who pretended his salad was a good alternative to his usual fare of meat and potatoes.

Tucking a piece of steak for Eggy into a to-go carton, I had another thought. “We should reach out to one of the Bureau’s profilers.”

The statement was a hard one to give voice to. Abby had been our profiler, and she was by far the best in the biz. Our cold-case closure rates were stellar, and it was all due to her. She could get a feel for the killer in a way a regular psychiatrist-trained profiler couldn’t. And sometimes she’d give us a physical description of the perp too.

But now we had a physical description. I suspected this guy was either a current or former gang member, but we’d need more. We’d need a specific personality workup that’d help to narrow down where this guy, and Abby, might be.

“Good idea,” Oscar said. “Weird to think gangs are rampant in this neck of the woods.”

I motioned to the server for our check. “Fentanyl shows up everywhere. Montana’s no exception.”

“True. But there’d have to be fewer players out this way. We might get lucky and be able to narrow down the list quick.”

I grunted, reaching for my wallet. I was holding back the thought that Abby was drugged to make her compliant, and might still be being drugged, but that thought was doing its damnedest to feed my worst fears.

Like they needed feeding in the first place.

Oscar grabbed the check as it was laid on the table. “I got this,” he said.