and fast-food joints that had sprung up along the only road through the middle of town. They spoke of prosperity but of a particular and transient form. The casino had not been open long the last time he was here but its influence had clearly spread wide in the intervening years. The whole town had a soulless quality, of the kind only gambling money could buy. It also seemed deserted, every hotel and motel had vacancy signs outside and the huge parking lot surrounding the glass tower of the main Harrah Casino contained lots of virgin snow and hardly any cars. The homing instinct that was taking hold of the world was clearly not being kind to Cherokee. Clearly there were not many that called this place ‘home’.
Shepherd parked up outside the Tribal Grounds Coffee Shop, drawn by a sign in the window inviting him to ‘Come in and enjoy our world famous Elk latte and free wi-fi’. He kept the engine running and the heater on, opened up the laptop and hooked on to the internet. A new window opened, asking for his security clearance codes. He punched them in and the saved search reappeared on the desk top. The processor crunched. The windscreen wipers swiped back and forth and a ping rang out as the new search results loaded.
There were seven of them now.
He opened the first and scrolled straight to the PDF file attached to the bottom of the document. He clicked on it, holding his breath as he waited for it to open. A depressing parade of images appeared on the screen, similar to the ones he’d seen before, charting a blighted life then an early death. But it wasn’t her.
He closed the file and moved on, keeping the momentum going before his nerve failed him. The next result opened, a solid block of text cascading down the screen. He found the attached file at the bottom and clicked it open, bracing himself for the photographs.
They were different to the first photos but none the less tragic. A well-scrubbed, bright-eyed woman smiling from a picture that had been taken at a dressy function, the flashbulb capturing a moment of pure happiness and hope. The picture below showed the same face, the eyes now closed and bruised, her clear skin lacerated by the windshield she had passed through after her car had left the road and hit a streetlamp. A brief note beneath the photo read:
Melisa Erroll – Junior attorney at law
Fatal RTA. 02.34 Feb 16th.
BAC negligible. No suspects sought.
The time of her death, the minimal Blood Alcohol Concentration and lack of suspects told the whole story. She was probably just working late, fired by youthful ambition and a desire to one day make partner, and fell asleep at the wheel on her way home, never to wake again.
He closed the window and continued to work his way down the strange roll call of the dead, experiencing the see-sawing of emotion between tragedy and relief. He reached the last result and clicked it open. And there she was.
He felt like someone had punched him in the gut. He couldn’t breathe, his vision swam as eight years of hope evaporated in an instant and tears welled in his eyes. She looked exactly the same as he remembered, more beautiful even, her huge dark eyes staring out from a passport photograph. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and took a shuddering breath. ‘Oh Jesus.’
The blood drained from his face, and his breathing started to race. He forced himself to calm down, breathe more deeply, more slowly. His eyes darted over the file, trying to take in all the details at once. It was too much. Words and figures tumbled through his mind, disjointed fragments, missing pieces of someone he hadn’t seen in eight years. His brain re-engaged and his focus returned. The top document was a visa application. She had applied for an extension to her F-1 student visa around the time she had disappeared. It had been denied. Had this been the reason she had gone, something as mundane as this? It can’t have been, they were going to get married; she wouldn’t have needed a visa if she was married to a US citizen. It had to be something else.
His eyes shifted over the facsimile of her application form. There were details here he had never known. Her date of birth – she was two years older than he had guessed; her middle