The suspicion that Duke’s disappearance hadn’t made sense, surfaced again. “Is that unusual?”
“For Duke it is. He works out of his truck most of the time. He’s always got old food containers and clothes on the floorboard. And yesterday was no different. He drove me back to the bar after you took Josh to school, and I had to shove stuff onto the floor to sit down. If he spent most of the day at the bar with the rest of the town, when did he find the time to scrub the inside spotless?”
Logan searched the area and found Duke’s boat anchored on the shore. Without a word to Spear, he grabbed Skylar’s hand and pulled her toward the boat. “Would you know if anything was missing from his boat?”
Skylar caught on quickly and rushed toward the boat, scanning the inside. “Where are his poles, his tackle box? He’d have a cooler with food and drink as well.”
Logan turned and found Spear watching them both, speculation masking his features instead of annoyance. “Did you secure anything in the boat?”
Spear grabbed the radio attached to his coat and spoke to someone on the other end. When a sharp reply of, “Negative, Captain,” broke the air, Spear’s attention shot to Logan.
“Would a man as dedicated to fishing as Duke was, be out on the water without his gear? Without provisions?”
Spear studied the boat, looked back at Duke’s truck then his eyes shot to Logan. “So we’ve got a possible abduction set up to look like a fishing accident?”
Logan glanced over his shoulder at the black water and shook his head. “Not an abduction—” he looked at Skylar with concern “—they want us to believe he drowned.”
Skylar’s face fell, the hope she been hanging on to vanished and was replaced with grief. “They want us to think he’s dead because he is, isn’t he . . . ?”
Fifteen
Haunted Eyes
IT DIDN’T MATTER how hot I ran the bath water, I still couldn’t get warm. The arctic air may have frozen me to the bone, but it wasn’t the snow that had chilled my heart. Duke was dead. I knew that as sure as I knew the sun would rise in the morning and spill beauty across the state I loved. He was gone. Just like my father. And someone had killed him.
Leaning my head back against the tub, I closed my eyes and pulled up Duke’s face in my mind. I could see the tiny scar near his right eye. The one he’d gotten when he’d learned to fly fish as a boy. Time had transformed it, but it was still visible when he laughed.
I thought about all the times he came to our house when my father was alive to watch football on Sunday afternoons. All the times he came to check on me and my brothers in the weeks following my father’s death. How his eyes were filled with grief when he’d scan the living room as if he were searching for my father. His best friend.
Duke had woven himself into our lives like a favorite uncle. I tried but couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t in the shadows cheering us on. He was a constant and comfortable fixture. One whose absence would cut deep.
Grief swept in and consumed me with a powerful force, so I covered my face with my hands and cried silent tears for a man who was more father than friend, praying he knew how much we loved and respected him before he died.
Rage and grief were cousins, I realized. One came from a place of love while the other came from hate, but at their core, they were similar. They consumed a person fully until they burned out and left you empty. Fury for the person who ended the life of a man, who never hurt anyone, drowned out my grief. I would mourn Duke when his killer was behind bars. For now, I only cried tears of rage.
Spear had told his men to keep searching in case we had read the situation wrong, but I could tell by his demeanor he wasn’t holding out hope. Since there was nothing more Logan could do until morning, when the light of day might give him more clues, we’d headed back to West Yellowstone for the night and grabbed a room at the nearest hotel.
I listened to Logan’s low rumble in the outer room as he updated the mayor. After a minute of silence,