Page 82 of A Future To Remember

And then I felt all the blood drain from my face because one second, I didn’t know who the murderer was, and the next second, I did. Just like that.

I knew it, but I didn’t know why. And to bring a murderer to justice and get Levi that reward money, I was going to have to figure out the motive and be able to prove it was the motivation behind all three murders, because if I was right—and I intuitively knew that I was—when I took a swing at this fucker, I couldn’t afford to miss.

CHAPTER 16

Him

Oscar and I met Candice at the puddle jumper she’d taken from Seattle. Stepping off the plane, she looked tired. And older than she had six months ago. The change was noticeable. In both of us, perhaps. Losing someone you love with your whole heart will do that to you, I supposed.

“Hey, fellas,” she said, pausing to give us both a one-arm hug. We’d been doing that a lot since October. Hugging. I wasn’t much of a hugger, unless it was my wife, but since she’d disappeared, I couldn’t get enough of them. Especially from Candice. She knew the pain I was in. She felt it too.

“We’re this way,” Oscar said, grabbing her luggage and motioning toward the gate beyond which we’d parked the pickup.

Candice walked between us, leaning over toward me to peer at Eggy. He was awake, and his tail thumped against my rib cage when she looked down on him.

“How’s he doing?”

“Hanging in there.” The dog was a trooper, I’d give him that.

“Aren’t we all,” I heard her mutter.

We got to the gate leading to the lot, and I held it open for Oscar and Candice. The F-150 we’d rented was an extended cab, so there was plenty of room in the back seat for Candice and her luggage.

After making it to the truck, we all piled in and buckled up.

“Where’re we headed first?” she asked.

“First, we start with the campground,” Oscar announced. Then he seemed to catch himself. “Sorry, sir, I should let you talk.”

“No harm, no foul, my man,” I assured him. Lifting up the folder between the seat and the cup holder, I said, “We got a composite sketch from a gas-station attendant outside Missoula who remembered seeing Abby with a Three Percenter, and we took the sketch to another witness who remembered seeing this scumbag with Abby at another gas station in Lincoln.”

I showed Candice the sketch and she took it from my hands, her upper lip curling into a snarl.

“He’s an ugly son of a bitch,” she said softly.

“Our witness from the gas station in Lincoln said it’s a match to the guy she saw with Abby. She also gave us a description of a unique tattoo that we have yet to pin down.”

“You can put me on that,” she said confidently, pulling out her laptop. “What’s the description?”

I rifled through the notes in the file and handed her a printout of the description.

She read it and, looking at her reflection in the rearview mirror, I could tell she was as disgusted and angry as I’d been when I’d first heard it described.

“Where have you already looked for this?” she asked.

I nodded at Oscar, and he replied, “The usual. I ran it through the federal database first, didn’t get any hits, then did an AI search, which brought back nothing, and then I tried social media and Google Images. I keep coming up with bupkis.”

“Have you tried Reddit?”

There was a pause before Oscar answered her. “No. No I did not.”

I glanced over my shoulder at Candice, who smirked while she tapped at her tablet. “Always check Reddit,” she said. “And the dark web.”

“We were gonna start calling around to tattoo parlors,” I said.

“I’m on it, Dutch,” she assured me before handing back the description of the sketch.

Oscar and I remained silent while Candice worked a search on the tattoo.