The Goodbye Man

“Aiding and abetting,” Emma said. “I watch all the crime shows.”

Colter Shaw tended not to smile but when meeting offerors, he occasionally did, to put them at ease. “I don’t apprehend. I deal in information, not citizen’s arrests. But if I can find him, I won’t let the police know where he is until there’s no chance he or anybody else’ll be hurt. You’ll need a lawyer. Do you know one?”

The regarded each other once more. “Fellow did our closing,” Larry said.

“No. A criminal lawyer. I’ll get you some names.”

“We don’t have … I mean, we could work out a home equity thing, I guess.”

“You’ll have to. He needs good representation.”

Shaw reviewed his notes so far. His handwriting was small and had once been described as balletic, it was so beautifully drawn. The notebook wasn’t ruled. Shaw didn’t need guidance. Each line was perfectly horizontal.

For another twenty minutes Shaw asked questions and the couple responded. Over the course of the interview, he noted that their adamant view that their son was innocent seemed objective; they simply could not accept that the son they knew had committed this crime. The idea bewildered them. The sole perp had to be Adam Harper.

When he felt he had enough information for the moment, he put away the pen and notebook, rose and walked to the door. The parents agreed to send any new information they heard from the police or friends or relatives Erick had contacted for money or other help.

“Thank you,” Emma said at the doorway, debating hugging him, it seemed. She did not.

It was the husband who was choking up. He fumbled whatever he was going to say and just gripped Shaw’s hand. Larry turned back to the house before the first tear appeared.

As he walked to the Winnebago, Shaw was reflecting on the one subject he had not mentioned to Emma and Larry: his policy not to accept a reward from family members if the search revealed that their missing loved one was dead. No reason to even bring up the possibility, even though it seemed more or less likely to Shaw that their second child had been murdered as soon as Adam found he had no more use for the boy.

3.

Why should I talk to you?” the man scoffed.

Dressed in a faded jacket of cracked brown leather, jeans and boots, Adam Harper’s father, Stan, continued to stack cartons of motor oil on a dock. He was a ship’s chandler, an outfitter, and apparently getting an order ready to load onto a delivery boat when it arrived back in the berth.

The air was richly scented, pine and sea waste and petroleum.

“I’m helping Erick Young’s family find their son. The last the police knew, he and Adam were together.”

“You’re after that reward, I’ll bet.”

“I am, yes. Now, is there anything you can tell me about Adam that could help? Where he might go? Friends, relatives he’d be staying with?”

“Put that away.” Nodding at the notebook and pen in Shaw’s hand.

Shaw slipped them into a pocket.

“Don’t have any idea.” Harper was solid as a tree, with sandy-gray hair and a rosy complexion, nose slightly ruddier than cheek.

Erick’s family had offered money for someone to find their fugitive son; Stan Harper had not. As far as Shaw knew, he might hope his son successfully escaped from the law. There was no reason for him to say a word. Still, he wasn’t stonewalling. Not exactly. Three stacked cartons later, Harper turned. “He was always a problem. Moods this, moods that. Said it was like bees buzzing around him all the time. Made it hard on us too, you can believe. He didn’t get that. It was all about him. Trouble at school, counsellors calling all the time. Had some fights, him and me.” A glance toward Shaw. “But that’s fathers and sons. Happens to everybody. Easier for us when he quit school and started working trades. Day labor, mostly. If he was on staff, he’d get fired in a split.”

Shaw would tread lightly with his next question. Bigotry, he’d found, was often handed down from parents to children like hair color and heart trouble. He had no problem calling out a racist, but at the moment his mission was to gather information. “The incident at the church? The cross, the graffiti. Did he ever talk about doing anything like that?”

“Never heard him. But I gotta say, me and him, we didn’t talk about much of anything. After Kelly passed—after my wife passed—he went even further away. Hit him hard. I was like, it’s coming, her passing, and I tried to get ready. Adam, he just didn’t think she’d ever … Denied it, you know?”

“Any friends in supremacist groups? Was he a member of any community like that?”

“What’re you, like a bounty hunter?”

“I make my living finding people.”

Whether this answer satisfied or raised questions, Shaw couldn’t tell. Harper hefted two big cartons at once with little effort. They must’ve totaled fifty pounds.

Shaw repeated the question about neo-Nazis.

“Not that I ever heard but he was … you know, was impressionable. He met some musicians once, and for a year that was all he was going to do. Be a heavy metal star. That was the whole world to him. Then he gave it up. Was going to build skateboards and sell them. That went no place. Fell in with a bad crew in high school, shoplifting and drugs. He did whatever they wanted.

“You know, when I heard from the cops about the church, I wasn’t surprised. Not like oh shit surprised. I figured he’d snapped. I could feel it coming. Since his mother died.”

Stan walked to the edge of the dock and spit, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“That Erick kid, you oughta check him out.”

Shaw replied, “He doesn’t seem to have any connection with supremacists. No history of hate crimes.”

Harper’s eyes narrowed. “You know, Adam took off for a while. He was away for three weeks, a month, I don’t know. After we lost Kelly. He just disappeared and when he came back he was different. He was better, his moods. I asked him where he’d gone. He said he couldn’t talk about it. Maybe he hooked up with some of those assholes then.”

“Where?”

“No idea.”

“Can you give me the names of friends I can talk to?”

A shrug. “Couldn’t tell you. He wasn’t a boy, you know. He had his own life. We didn’t chat on the phone, like he did with his mama.” Harper received a text and then replied. Looked over the still water of the harbor. Then back to the cartons.

“Was he straight?” Shaw asked.

“You mean … like, not being gay?”

Shaw nodded.

“Why you wanta ask something like that?”

“I need all the facts I can get.”

“Only ever saw him with women. None of ’em for very long.” A sigh. “We tried everything with him. Therapy. Yeah, that was a joke. Medication. Always the most expensive ones, naturally. And that was on top of Kelly’s bills too. Doctors and hospitals.” He nodded toward the shack that was the corporate headquarters for Harper Ship Services, Inc. “I look like I can afford Cadillac health insurance?”

“Nothing worked for Adam?”

“Not much. Just being away wherever he went, that three or four weeks.” The crowning carton was placed on the stack. “Maybe he got a kick out of learning to burn crosses and spray paint churches. Who the fuck knows? I got paperwork to do.”

Shaw gave him a card with his number on it. “If you hear from him.”

The man slipped it into his back pocket and gave a cynical smile, which meant: Helping you get your blood money.

“Mr. Harper, I want to get both of them back safe.”

Harper turned but paused halfway to the shed.

“It was so damn frustrating. Sometimes you just wanted to shake him and say, ‘Get over yourself. Everybody’s got the blues. Just live with it.’”

Back in the Winnebago, Shaw brewed a cup of strong Honduran coffee, poured in some milk and sat down at the table.

He spent the next half hour or so calling some of the Youngs’ relatives. They were sympathetic but had no helpful information. Then on to Erick’s friends. Those willing to talk could offer no insights into where he might have gone and generally expressed dismay that he’d been implicated in a hate crime. One classmate, however, said that since his brother died “he’s just like … he’s not really himself, you know what I mean?”

Shaw spoke to Tom Pepper, a former FBI special agent and a friend with whom he rock-climbed occasionally. Pepper may have been retired but he was just as connected in law enforcement now as he had always been and was current on a robust security clearance. He also enjoyed staying in the investigation game and Shaw sometimes called Pepper for an assist. He now asked for the name of somebody involved in the investigation, either in the Pierce County Public Safety Office or the local FBI field office.

A reward seeker’s relationship with the police is complicated. Law enforcers have no problems with tip lines, like Crimewatch, whose purpose is to gather information from those who have personal knowledge of an incident. Cops are, however, reluctant to give much assistance to an active investigator like Shaw. Reward seekers, as opposed to tipsters, have been known to muddy up cases, occasionally even resulting in a suspect’s escape when police were close to an arrest. Seekers also sometimes end up injured or dead, which complicate a cop’s life to no end.

Still, Pepper’s name carried some weight and so did his assurance that Shaw wouldn’t get underfoot and could even possibly prove helpful. The Pierce County detective running the case, Chad Johnson, spent ten minutes filling Shaw in on the details, which Shaw recorded in his notebook. Johnson provided particulars on Adam Harper, supplementing what the young man’s father had said.

When they disconnected, Shaw made another cup of coffee and flipped through the notebook.

June 7. Around 6:30 p.m. Erick Young went to the Forest Hills Cemetery on Martinsville Road in Gig Harbor. This is where his brother, Mark, who died sixteen months ago, is buried. He went to the gravesite frequently.

At some point shortly thereafter, Erick was seen in the company of Adam Harper in the cemetery, according to witnesses. Erick had no apparent prior connection with Adam.

At around 7:30 police responded to reports of a shooting at Brethren Baptist Church. Victims—a lay preacher and a janitor—reported that two suspects, later identified as Adam and Erick, had placed a cross in front of the church and set it on fire. The church was also defaced with Nazi swastikas and obscenities.

When the preacher and janitor ran outside to try to tackle the suspects and hold them for police, Adam drew a gun and shot at them, hitting both.

The suspects fled in Adam’s ten-year-old red Toyota pickup truck, registered in Washington State. Erick’s car was found parked near the cemetery.

None of Erick’s social media posts suggest racist leanings. Adam has no FB, Twitter or Instagram account.

Neither is gay; unlikely there was a sexual encounter.

None of Erick’s other family members or friends have heard from him. There is no particular location he might have run off to that his parents and friends know of.

The authorities were forensically able to link the defamatory graffiti on the Brethren Baptist Church to similar incidents in Pierce County over the past year and a half.

The suspects are believed to still be in the Tacoma area, since both Adam and Erick emptied savings accounts over the past several days, and there have been two sightings of the pickup via video surveillance. Probably gathering money for a long-distance escape from the area.

Erick Young has been working part-time in a rehabilitation center for troubled youths and getting a B.A. at a local community college. He excelled in math, history and biology. But after his brother’s death, he became moody and his grades dropped and attendance at work became a problem. His girlfriend broke up with him because of his moods. Parents described him as “confused and vulnerable.”

Adam Harper has a history of depression and other emotional problems. A drifter. He’s taken classes at community college but never graduated. He’s worked trades most of his life.

He has been arrested on shoplifting and minor drug possession charges. He has no obvious history of white supremacist or racist organizations, though father pointed to his disappearance for 3 to 4 weeks out of town. Hooked up with a group then?

Adam has few friends and the ones the police contacted, as well as a couple of family members, were unaware of anyone or anyplace he would be inclined to flee to.

His residence, a small apartment on the east side of Tacoma, was searched. There was no evidence of any extremist affiliation.

Firearm used in the shooting was a Smith & Wesson .38 Police Special, registered to Adam’s father.

Neither of the suspects’ phones are active.

Both men have passports. Erick’s is still in his parents’ home.

A video of a currency exchange showed two men, in sunglasses and wearing hoodies, changing $500 U.S. into Canadian. They matched the general builds of the suspects.

Shaw scanned these notes, sat back, closed his eyes, digesting what he’d read, drawing conclusions about the incident and the people involved.

His phone hummed. It was Chad Johnson.

“Detective?”

“We’ve got them, Mr. Shaw.”

Fastest reward job on record. No money. But the good news was that he could now return to his other mission: tracking down his father’s secret.

Echo Ridge …

“Anybody hurt? Did they resist?”

A pause. “Oh, we haven’t apprehended them yet. I mean, we’ve located them. They’re in Adam’s pickup. There was a sighting of it headed north on I-5. Then they turned off on surface roads and were still heading north. Making for Canada, of course. We’ve got a taskforce on the apprehension detail. Ten person.”

The last word stumbled out. Johnson had recently been trained not to use the male gender if possible, Shaw guessed.

“Should get them in the next hour.”

“Good.”

“Sorry about the reward, sir.”

He didn’t sound too sorry, Shaw thought. Maybe the Ecumenical Council and the high-tech wunderkind Ed Jasper were contributing the bulk but the rest of the cash would have to come out of his budget.

Shaw thanked him. He sipped a bit more coffee, then sent a text to Mack McKenzie, his D.C.-based private eye, requesting three items of information. Shortly after, she responded, answering all of them with the level of detail that she was known for.

Shaw read the reply closely and, after scanning a map, fired up the Winnebago’s engine. He pulled out of Harper’s parking lot, surveyed the vehicles nearby—those parked, as well as those in motion—then drove onto the uneven road. He steered east out of Gig Harbor, his GPS directing him to a trailer camp, where he’d park the Winnebago and Uber to a car rental agency to pick up a sedan or SUV. He edged the camper as far over the speed limit as he dared without getting pulled over.

He couldn’t afford any delays. Time was vital.

An hour later Shaw was steering his rental Kia along a mountainous route fifty miles east of Tacoma in the beautiful country approaching Mount Rainier National Park. Winding roads, panoramic views, verdant forest, formations of rock shiny and pitted as wet bone.

He eased out of a climbing switchback and onto a straightaway, a hillside face on his right, and began to accelerate.

Then a moving shadow caught his attention.

The boulder was cartwheeling toward the road directly in front of him.

Seconds to decide.

Swerve left? Swerve right?

4.

June 11, 2 p.m., present time

T his bullet hit its mark …

A golden eagle, troubled by the sharp crack of the pistol rolling through the valley, lifted off and descended away from the human disturbance in stately urgency.

Colter Shaw glanced down, noting the sizable gunshot hole in the Kia’s right front tire. The car knelt.

Now free from the vehicle, Shaw pushed through the forsythia and watched the shooter walk across the road, dusting away pollen and burrs from his sleeves and jeans.

Fully bearded, Dalton Crowe was two inches taller than Shaw’s six feet even. Broad shoulders, ample chest, both encased in a black and red plaid lumberjack shirt. Camo overalls. His belt was well tooled, and well worn, shiny and unevenly dark. The holster for the long-barreled revolver was cowboy style, brown and glossy and chrome studded.

Each of the men had bestowed scars upon the other, about the same number, the same length, the same depth. The bruises had long fleshed away. The confrontations were not intended to be lethal but simply to derail the other’s success in finding the suspects in reward jobs. In one instance, Crowe wanted to stop Shaw so he could get one hundred percent of the money for an escaped prisoner; Shaw wanted to stop Crowe from gunning down the trapped, unarmed man.

Crowe ambled across the road and looked at the tire. “Hmm.”

“You fired in my direction,” Shaw said. His tone was scolding only; he hadn’t felt himself in much danger. He’d known to a certainty that the rock-tipper and shooter was Crowe and not the suspects, Adam Harper or Erick Young.

For a big man who would look right at home in Hells Angels’ attire, Crowe had an eerily high voice. “Nup, Shaw. None of that. I was saving you from a snake.” He was from Birmingham, Alabama, and came equipped with the accent. “Timber rattler and a damn big one.”

Shaw glanced down. “Don’t see him.”

“Aw, I just fired to scare him off. Which I did, as you can see. I like all of God’s creatures, rattlers included. Sorry about your tire.”

Shaw looked at the boulder, completely blocking the highway.

Crowe didn’t bother to spin a tale about that.

“These boys’re mine, Shaw. Adam and Erick. I’m going to find ’em and I’m going to bring ’em in. I got to Gig Harbor ’fore you did. So, dig yourself out and head on home.”

“How’d you find me?” Shaw asked.

“I’m the best, that’s how.” Crowe slipped his gun away. Shaw wondered if he ever twirled it on his finger like gunslingers do in the movies. Shaw had once seen somebody shoot himself in the armpit doing that. Human stupidity has no bounds.

“You heard my piece. That’s all there is to it. I’ve got a yellow Volkswagen to catch up with.”

Shaw’s brows compressed. “How’d you know they were …” His voice faded, as if he’d slipped up, confirming a fact that Crowe hadn’t known for certain.

“Haw. Now get that tire of yours fixed, call Triple A or man the jack yourself.” Crowe looked around, at the boulder, then back to Shaw. “On these roads, in that breadbox of a car … you could come to real grief. Not from me, of course, saving your ass from rattlers. But somebody aiming at you. I’d hate to see that happen.”

The threat delivered, Crowe turned and plodded up the road, then disappeared into the bushes. A moment later his silver SUV drove onto the road, on the other side of the boulder, and turned away from Shaw and the rock. A hand appeared from the driver’s window of the Bronco. The gesture seemed to be a wave but it might have been ruder.

He called 911, reporting the fallen boulder to the state police. The obstacle was in the middle of a straightaway and could be seen fifty yards away from either direction. Still, Colter Shaw was hardwired to save people from disaster, even if it was their own failings that put them in peril. Someone cruising along while texting might deserve the air bag slap; his or her children did not, however.

Shaw spent a few minutes checking the tires and backing out of the razorish weeds. It took some rocking and some tire spinning but eventually the car rolled onto the road again.

Once on the asphalt, he changed the tire and searched the wheel wells. He found the GPS tracker Crowe had hidden. He clicked the off button and stowed the device in his backpack.

Then he turned around and sped back the way he’d come, the exact opposite of the direction that Dalton Crowe was headed. Shaw checked his map and estimated that he should intercept Erick Young and Adam Harper in less than a half hour.

5.

It had taken some effort, and time, but the problem of Dalton Crowe had to be eliminated.

The man’s assessment of his own skill—“I’m the best”—was just plain wrong. Crowe was a functional, not talented, tracker, and he was just plain lousy at surveillance. Shaw knew Crowe had been dogging him from the moment he’d arrived in Gig Harbor. He’d noted the silver SUV as soon as he’d arrived at the Youngs’, parked at the curb several doors away, in front of a house with a foreclosure sale sign in the lawn. Not necessarily suspicious. He merely tucked the observation away.

When he’d left, he’d pulled past the SUV and seen the driver bending toward the glove compartment, as if avoiding being seen. Then the Bronco had pulled away from the curb and followed the Winnebago all the way to Adam’s father’s chandler business on the waterfront.

It was obviously Dalton Crowe, who would have been staking out the Young residence since he’d arrived in the harbor town on the chance that the boy, known to be still in the area, would return.

At that point, Shaw’s mission had doubled: get rid of Crowe, then find Adam and Erick.

Shaw had come up with a plan to do both.

The Public Safety Office believed the young men were headed north from Tacoma, presumably en route to Canada, given the currency exchange intelligence.

Shaw was eighty percent certain, however, that Adam and Erick were not in the red pickup.

Anticipating the suspects’ most logical plan, Shaw had sent the email to Mack. The questions he’d posed were:

1. What neighborhood in Tacoma has the highest gang activity?

2. Where’s the main bus station in or near that neighborhood?

3. Where are cars likely to be taken for chopping in the Seattle-Tacoma area?

The reply had been: the neighborhood of Manitou, a Western Express bus terminal on Evans Street, and any number of places, though there was a concentration of junkyard/chop shops on the south side of Seattle.

Shaw believed that they’d donned costumes and exchanged U.S. dollars for Canadian to trick investigators into thinking their destination was north. That alone wasn’t enough, though. They had to keep the law’s focus on Adam’s truck. Since Erick worked with troubled youths, he was likely familiar with the underworld of Pierce County. He would have known where to leave the pickup—with the keys “hidden” under the front seat or in a wheel well—where it would quickly be perped by some bangers and driven to south Seattle for butchering into parts.

Meanwhile, Adam and Erick had walked a few blocks to the bus station on Evans Street, bought tickets and left town.

After leaving Harper’s seaside company, Shaw had driven the Winnebago to a campground east of Tacoma, and parked it there. He’d Ubered to a nearby car rental agency and gotten the Kia, which he’d then driven into the Manitou neighborhood, with Crowe clumsily tailing all the way.

Shaw had parked in front of the Hermanos Alverez bodega. He had gone inside the store, and for a twenty-dollar bribe and several bags of groceries he didn’t need, bought the right to slip out the back door.

From there, to the bus station, at which the ante increased significantly, and it cost him five hundred dollars to learn the destination of the tickets the two boys had bought—a little town called Hope’s Corner, eighty miles southeast of Tacoma, near Mount Rainier National Park.