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* * * * *
It turned out visiting the Bozwin Daily Chronicle had been a good call. Only the year 1926 had been digitized and was available online. The earliest years of the paper had been put on microfilm, but budget or interest had waned after 1935. Jason spent several hours poring over bound volumes of newspapers, starting his search with June 1944.
He hit pay dirt a few weeks’ worth of papers later, when Captain Roy Thompson wrote to his parents and siblings, describing the Normandy landing.
You can’t imagine the amazing sight of these tracers going up into the sky. The underbelly of clouds turned red like charred embers, a mass of red death to any plane within the circle of our anti-aircraft fire. It was a beautiful sight from our point of view, but a kind of beauty only a soldier can understand.
It was fascinating—and a little disconcerting—to read Thompson’s own words. Jason had not expected his thief to be so literate or lyrical. That was not common of the crooks he typically dealt with.
In January of 1945, Thompson wrote:
There’s a lot of snow on the Western Front these days, and the country looks like a Christmas card. The trees are like old queens stooping from under the weight of their ermine robes. The wires loop from pole to pole like tinsel on a Christmas tree, except where the weight of the ice and snow has pulled them down and the signal repairmen are patching them. Snow lies smooth on the hillsides—it’s beautiful. But I also have seen plenty of action and have just about had my fill. It’s pretty tough to take seeing some of your buddies getting knocked off; especially the ones who sweated it out together away, back in our training days.
He did not want to like this guy, did not want to feel sympathy for him. What Thompson had done was unconscionable, and then he’d made it worse by dragging Jason’s grandfather into it. But there was no question Thompson had gone through hell—or that he made an engaging narrator.
At noon, Jason took a break. He was not hungry, but his eyes were ready to fall out of his head. He needed to stretch his legs and smell something besides disintegrating pulp and ink.
He walked over to a small café and purchased an iced-coffee smoothie, which he drank on the patio while checking his phone messages.
Still nothing from de Haan.
Jason clicked on Contacts, clicked on de Haan’s name, waited for the phone to ring—and got nothing. Not even a message saying de Haan was not available.
Dead silence.
He hung up, tried again, and listened to that absolute void of sound with a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. Why the hell was de Haan’s phone dead?
Even if de Haan had decided to leave the country—and no way would he give up that easily—he wouldn’t have gone radio silent. He and Jason had been speaking regularly for over a month. De Haan would not fly off in a huff, and even if he did, he would not stop communicating with Jason while so much of the case was still up in the air.
Something was not right.
He should have recognized it sooner, but he’d had so much on his mind that it had been only too easy to set aside de Haan’s uncharacteristic quiet as something to be dealt with later. But that was his mistake, because considered in connection with that strange hang-up call the night before—the call he had dismissed as a misdial—something was seriously off.
He phoned J.J.
“Have you heard from de Haan?”
J.J., sounding back to his normal self, said disinterestedly, “He’s your pen pal, not mine.”
“I haven’t heard from him since I spoke to him yesterday afternoon.”
“Count your blessings.”
“I’m heading over to Big Sky Motor Lodge to check on him.”
“If you want my advice, West, leave sleeping Dutchmen lie.”
“Yeah. I’ll be in touch.” Jason disconnected and went to find his car.
* * * * *
De Haan’s blue compact sat in the back of the parking lot of Big Sky Motor Lodge.
Jason’s heart sank when he spotted the familiar vehicle. It seemed to confirm his worst suspicions. And yet his worst suspicions made no sense.
He parked, got out of his car, and went to the frostily air-conditioned front office.
A gangling twentysomething scrolling through a—given the panicked way he clicked out and rolled his chair back from the computer screen—porn site, greeted him.
