He went back inside, pulled King’s orange tracking harness off the nail by the back door, and crouched on the kitchen floor. King came to him without being called and held still while Bear buckled the harness. Bear picked up Logan’s hoodie from the couch and held it out.
A long shot. King was mediocre at tracking on a good day.
It was what he had.
“This is Logan,” he said. “Find Logan.”
They went east.
Past the school, where King didn’t stop at the front doors, the parking lot, or the football field, where a few kids were still running track. Past the park at Birch and Third, where the playground equipment threw long shadows across the grass. Past the corner of Main, where the pharmacist flipped his sign to closed and didn’t look up at the six-foot-seven man in a barn jacket walking east with a Leonberger the size of a small horse on a tracking harness.
Bear kept his eyes on King and let him work, silently praying that this would be the one time King remembered his training and didn’t get stubborn about it.
The dog moved with purpose, nose to the pavement, tail low.
The Conoco came into view at the edge of town, where the highway straightened out, and the mountains pulled back from the road. It had two pump islands, a glass-front store, and a hand-painted banner in the window advertising a Friday special on fountain drinks. King pulled hard toward the nearest island and started working it in tight circles, nose dragging the asphalt between the pumps.
Bear stood back and watched him work.
The circles tightened.
Then King sat.
He looked up with his big amber-brown eyes, and Bear knew.
The scent was there, and then it wasn’t, buried under diesel exhaust and tire rubber and every car that had cycled through since Logan stood here. Sometime in the last several hours, his son had been on this pump island, and King could not tell him anything else.
Bear crouched beside him and put one hand flat on the dog’s back. He looked east.
The highway opened toward Missoula, sixty miles of two-lane that widened to four past the county line, and from Missoula you took I-90 east toward Billings, and from Billings the interstate ran straight and flat all the way to Denver.
Forty-three dollars.
No bag.
A Nirvana shirt in forty-five-degree weather.
He’d been trying to get through to Logan for weeks. He’d watched and waited and stayed close without crowding, trying to let the kid come to him at his own pace.
But he hadn’t seen this coming.
His mind went sideways and landed somewhere he hadn’t meant to go— Greta at her kitchen table with a photo of a girl who’d been sixteen when she walked into the dark and didn’t come back. Fifteen years of flyers. Fifteen years of unanswered leads. A case the sheriff’s department had filed under runaway and never reopened.
He straightened and stared up the highway.
Christ. What if his son had hitched a ride with someone? And what if that someone turned out to be dangerous?
No. No, he didn’t think Logan would do that. For all of the kid’s anger, he wasn’t stupid.
So he was still somewhere in town. He could be tracked by the better-trained dog.
There was only one person he knew who had a well-trained dog and knew how to find someone in the dark, and she lived across the street…
He turned and ran back to Maple. King loped at his side, paws thumping the pavement.
Greta opened the door before he finished knocking. She must have watched him come steamrolling up Maple. “What’s wrong?”
He gave it to her straight. “Logan is missing. King lost his scent at the Conoco.”
