Hard Ride to Dry Gulch

“All depends on the game I find myself in.”

“So what’s the rule?”

“You leave the investigating to me. No more trips to the Passion Pit or any other questionable location.”

“I’m smart enough to know how to avoid trouble.”

“I’m questioning your judgment, not your intelligence. I saw you in action, remember? Besides, I have a lot more experience and muscle than you, and I wouldn’t go near that dive if I wasn’t carrying a weapon.”

“If it’s that dangerous, why don’t the police shut the club down and put Georgio out of business?”

Georgio. Merely hearing his name from her lips made Travis sick. “What do you know about Georgio?”

“Just that he’s the owner of the Passion Pit.”

“And an offspring of the devil. Stay away from him, Faith. That’s an order.”

The waitress returned with refills. This time Travis ordered two eggs, over easy, with sausage, grits, biscuits and gravy, without bothering to look at the menu. Faith ordered a slice of wheat toast.

“If you’ll give me your home phone number now, I’ll make a call and get the ball rolling,” Travis said.

She took a pen from her purse and scribbled the number down on a paper napkin. “How long will it take to track the call?”

“Depends on where the call was made from. If luck’s on our side, we could have the phone number by the time we finish breakfast.”

“In minutes.” She sounded almost breathless. “Cornell could be home in time for dinner.”

Damn. He should never have gotten her hopes up like that. “Don’t count on instant gratification,” he cautioned. “Have to take things one step at a time, but if we discover where that call was made from, we’ll be one huge leap ahead of where you were when you went to bed last night.”

“I’ll take that,” she said. “But if we find out where he called from, we should be able to find him.”

They would have to play this smart. No rushing in without knowing for certain what they were up against. If Cornell was really being held against his will, making a foolish mistake could get him killed.

At this point, the best they could hope for was that Cornell Ashburn had just developed a sudden taste for independence, women and drugs, and taken a leave of absence from home to satisfy his cravings.

He definitely wouldn’t be the first eighteen-year-old to sow his wild oats. Travis knew that firsthand.

He put the search for the phone number in motion and then his focus returned to Faith Ashburn. She wasn’t beautiful, but she was attractive and natural. Her smile, her eyes, her intensity—it all got to him.

And it was meshing with an overwhelming need to protect her and get to know her better. Maybe it was the wedding thing. Seeing Leif so happy to settle down with one woman could be addling Travis’s brain.

If he was smart, he’d turn this back over to Mark Ethridge and run for the hills. But even if he wanted to, he couldn’t do that. Not with the possibility that her son’s disappearance could in any way be connected to the four others who had gone missing over the past nineteen months and turned up dead. The pressure was on to solve the case before another young man lost his life.

A young man like Cornell.

In spite of his concerns, when the waitress arrived with the food, Travis dived in like a starving man. If he let worry or even murder interfere with his eating, he’d have to go on life support.

He didn’t hear back about the origins of Faith’s early-morning call during breakfast or on the drive back to her house. Once there, he went straight to Cornell’s room and began searching with the same intensity he’d use for a fresh crime scene.

Travis pulled several boxes from the back of the closet. One held a half-dozen pairs of tennis shoes, two jackets that were too heavy for Dallas winters and a pair of hiking boots.

“Cornell loved outdoor activities,” Faith said by way of explanation. “Skiing, hiking, white-water rafting, horseback riding. His dad’s brother used to own a condo in the Colorado Rockies, and Cornell visited him with his dad several times. He loved it out there, even talked about moving there one day.”

“Have you checked with his uncle to see if he was with him?”

“His uncle died in a snowmobile accident three years ago, just a year before Cornell’s father was killed while working on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. My son has never fully gotten over those deaths.”

“That would be hard on anyone.” And it definitely gave Cornell a reason to be troubled. “How old was Cornell when you got divorced?”

“Ten. That’s when I met Joni. I needed some job skills, so I went back for an associate degree.”

Faith’s house phone rang. She gasped and grabbed her chest as she ran to answer it. Travis followed, listening in on the conversation until he was certain Cornell wasn’t the caller.

He went back to the boy’s room alone to continue the search. All he found was typical teenage stuff. A worn baseball glove. Video games. Old comic books. Some swimming trophies from when he was in grade school.

Nothing that provided even a hint or a clue of where Cornell might have gone or why. Travis had started to put them back in place when he noticed a smaller box pushed to the back of the shelf. He took it down, opened it and peered inside.

A porn magazine stared back at him. He lifted it to find eight more, all with pictures of naked women, nothing sadistic or particularly kinky.

All well hidden from his mother.

No surprise. Guys of eighteen seldom confided those kinds of thoughts and activities to their mothers. But if Travis and Faith were going to find Cornell, they would have to go into this with their eyes wide open.

He stuck his head out the bedroom door. “Faith, want to come in here a minute?”

She arrived a few seconds later, breathless from racing up the stairs. The look on her face was expectant, downright hopeful.

He hated that what he had to show her would replace it with a kick in the gut. He tried to think of something to make this easier on her, but he’d never been great at dancing around the truth.

He set the box on the table. “This might explain why Cornell was spotted at the Passion Pit.”

Faith pushed back the cover of the top magazine with one finger, as if was too disgusting to touch. Tough on a mother to find out her baby wasn’t one.

Travis’s cell phone vibrated. Caller ID indicated it was from the precinct. “I need to take this,” he said.

Faith nodded.

His focus quickly switched to the call and the information relayed to him by one of the younger officers recently appointed to serve under him in the homicide division.

The news was not good.

Chapter Four

Travis’s find made Faith sick to her stomach. She steadied herself against the bedpost while she tried to put the magazines into perspective.

So he wasn’t as innocent and naive as she’d believed. It was only natural he’d have the same physical urges as other boys his age. That still didn’t explain his disappearance.

Or the interrupted phone call. Or why he hadn’t called back.