‘Hang on. Let me just check with Maria. She was on last night.’

There was a dull clatter as the phone was laid down, then Bradley could hear the clinking of glasses being stacked and the distant strains of “La Bamba.” After a few moments, the phone was picked back up.

‘Hello?’

‘Hey.’

‘Okay, I couldn’t find Maria - probably out back having a smoke - but I checked with Janine; she was on last night, too. She said Tony wasn’t in at all yesterday, or last night. You tried his house?’

‘Yeah,’ Bradley lied. ‘Thanks for your help.’

‘Okay, I’m sure he’ll turn up.’

‘Listen, honey, if he does show up, and if he’s been on the sauce – can you please dump him into a cab, and send him back down this way?’

‘Sure thing.’

Bradley hung up the phone and dragged a hand over his weathered face. In six years, Tony had never taken so much as a sick day. Something was wrong here, but in his mind, Bradley assumed Tony Morrelli had found a new job, or a woman with a hot body, or something good enough to keep him away.

He reached into a drawer in his cheap desk, and pulled out a sheet of A4 paper and a Sharpie pen. He yanked the cap off, the pen releasing a vinegar vapour. Then, he wrote out four words in block letters: HELP WANTED ENQUIRE WITHIN.

15

As he negotiated a worn cassette tape into the player, Leighton sighed. Vicki’s bloody-minded fixation on her friend’s unlikely demise bordered on obsessive. As the twang of “Delta Blues” filled the car, Leighton set his eyes on the road ahead, and tried to let the miles drift by. However, the emotional fallout from his departure was still bouncing around in his restless mind - drawing him back to his past like a bungee cord.

Leighton would have questioned why he had ever agreed to go along to Barstow in the first place, but he knew the answer to that. Nothing about the missing girl in any way interested him, but Vicki herself was quietly fascinating. Five decades earlier, when Leighton had been a child attending junior school, his teacher was a dark-haired, softly spoken woman, who smelled of lavender. On some occasions, she would come to sit by Leighton, and show him how to sketch, or read. In these moments, the small boy would feel a strange, tingling sensation, as if an aura of energy emanated from the woman. He would feel his skin fizz in response to her soft voice, as she drew shapes for him to follow, or guided his eyes along unfamiliar words. Now, all these years later, something about Vicki recreated that strange feeling - a simple sense of connection with another human being. It felt strangely right.

Despite this, she was still an absolute pain in the ass.

That fact did little to ease Leighton’s guilt at abandoning a girl in her twenties to make her own way home, especially up here along Route 1. An image of a stormy night filled his mind. The recollection was so real, he could feel the warm, thrumming rain battering down like bullets.

Leighton breathed out and gently pushed the thought away until later. That was what his grief counsellor had taught him to do. Trying to suddenly block out the thought didn’t work; he had to blow it away softly, otherwise it would bounce right back into his mind.

An impatient truck horn blasted him back into the moment. Leighton slowed down, and allowed the heavy, rumbling vehicle to pass him.

‘Okay,’ he said to the air, thinking he could come up with a way to help Vicki.

Leighton decided to approach it from a new angle. He would assume Vicki was somehow correct in her suspicions, and consider what he would do, if that was the case. It was, of course, a simply academic exercise. The girl was clearly blowing things out of proportion, but fully investigating her flawed beliefs would throw up a set of facts she would not be able to ignore. That way, at least he wouldn’t just be asking Vicki to ignore a situation. Instead, he’d provide her with evidence of an entirely different, and less dramatic, situation altogether, which would hopefully be more realistic.

Leighton needed to consider the starting point of the investigation. As he cruised along the highway, he decided he would speak to the ladies down at Oceanside dispatch. If this bus had shown up in the terminal, like Vicki had claimed, they should be able to track its journey. A pre-booked bus would also have a passenger record, which meant they would discover if Laurie was even on the bus - something that seemed increasingly unlikely.

That was fine. Leighton smiled, and began to drum along on the steering wheel in time to the music. He felt confident he was on the verge of giving Vicki her life back.

As the car curved along the smooth road, it moved out of the warm sunshine and into the relative shade of the National Park. The fragrance of desert lavender wafted through the air conditioner. Within a kilometre or so of entering the park, Leighton noticed a Highway Patrol motorcycle parked in a lay-by on the opposite side of the road.

He glanced for a moment at the bike parked at the side of the road, and slowed long enough to confirm there was no visible officer or other vehicle nearby. For a second, Leighton considered turning around to check out the situation, but then, he shook the thought away. The biker would be talking a leak, or having a smoke. In either case, he wouldn’t appreciate the intrusion of some paranoid ex-detective stalking him through the trees.

He smiled a crooked smile, and thought to himself seeing danger on every highway was simply a sign he had spent too much time with Vicki.

16

It was one of those fresh early mornings, where a bright haze gave the air a cool quality with the promise of certain heat to come. The moisture, which was still rising like a phantom from the sandy earth, would probably burn off by noon, leaving a clear blue sky over Nevada.

At 5:45 a.m., Jennifer Sanchez stood on a dry footpath in the Mojave National Park, and peered intently in all directions. The area surrounding her was full of silent cacti, and, moments earlier, her dog had vanished amongst them. She wasn’t sure of the exact moment he had vanished, because once off the lead, Rasputin would race off in crazy loops - darting ahead, then swooping into the boulders and shrubs, only to appear moments later behind her. She had thrown a couple of arid sticks for him, which he had obediently retrieved, but Jen could tell he was more interested in burning off some energy speeding around beneath the trees. So, she had let him go. It had been a bad move. The excited dog thundered into the tangle of bushes five minutes earlier, but then failed to reappear again.

Sighing in frustration, Jen felt a sudden dip in early morning temperature, and zipped up her red Nike top. Stamping her feet impatiently, she peered around, but found no sign of her dog.

‘Ra!’ she called loudly. The eruption of sound startled a cloud of birds from a nearby bush.

Still nothing.

The walk through the park was a journey Jen would make every morning. Usually, she would feely utterly safe as she wandered the dusty, desolate paths, which sliced through the rocky landscape National Park. This was because she was accompanied by Rasputin - a four-year-old, long-haired German shepherd.

Each morning, she would leave her Jeep in the westerly parking lot, which was really nothing more than a large clearing hemmed in by rough wooden fences. There were rarely any other vehicles there, other than the odd people-carrier with a bike rack, or the previous day, when a random old bus had appeared in one shadowy corner of the clearing.