Wild Storm by Richard Castle Read Free Book Online

route, knocking on doors, showing his picture, and asking if anyone had seen him. They all had. A thousand times. Just not that morning.
    “ Th e dogs” came the next day. Th e chief had his own K-9 unit, plus one that had come from nearby Richmond. Th ey let four German Shepherds sni ff some of Bill’s jogging clothes, then sent them running along his route, their hypersensitive noses leading the way. Th ey le ft , barking and full of energy, did the entire circle, and came back an hour and a half later with their tongues dragging. Because he had done the route so many times, they never lost his scent. But they also never found any deviation from his course. As far as the dogs were concerned, they had done a bang-up job tracking the man along fi ve miles of sidewalk and roadway. It was just their human partners who remained mysti fi ed.
    “The media” was the final step. The chief had held a press conference, holding a blown-up picture of a smiling Bill McRae for all the local stations to put on the air. It was a story that played well: a genial grandfather who simply vanished one day. The Hercules Express had run two articles about it. Millions of people in the Bay Area had been told to alert authorities if they saw him. None did.
    “I know we’ve done a lot already,” Alida said. “I just feel like…there must be something else we can do. I heard about a kidnapping case in Oregon where they issued an Amber Alert. Maybe we could—”
    “Mrs. McRae, Amber Alerts are for children. Your husband was a grown man.”
    Was. The last two or three visits, the chief had mistakenly slipped into past tense when talking about her husband.
    “You don’t understand, Bill is—”
    “I know, I know. He is just not one to just disappear,” the chief said, echoing the words Alida had apparently said too many times now.
    The chief fiddled with something on his desk, keeping his head down for a moment.
    “Mrs. McRae, this is difficult for me to say. But with everything happening on the East Coast today with those airplanes, we’re going to be on terrorism watch for the next couple of days at the very least, and I don’t have the resources to…”
    He let his voice trail off. He was shaking his head. He finally looked up. “Mrs. McRae, we checked everything on that jogging route ten times and we never found the slightest hint that anything was out of place. We interviewed more people than I can count. We haven’t heard a whiff of anything resembling a ransom demand. We haven’t found any bloodstains or anything suggesting foul play. We’ve got those notifications on all his credit cards and bank accounts. There’s been no activity. I think you’re going to have to seriously consider the possibility that your husband has simply wandered off, for whatever reason, and he won’t be found until he wants to be found.”
    Alida squeezed the handkerchief tightly. The chief had hinted around this several times. This was the most direct he had been about it.
    “I know, I know, you think that’s impossible,” he continued. “And this is hard for me to even suggest. But there was a man down in Van Nuys a few years ago, same thing. Damon Hack was his name. A gentle family man who liked to play fantasy football with his buddies. He lived quietly, no enemies, no debts, never a hint of dissatisfaction with his life—just like your husband. And it turned out he had been squirreling away cash for years, twenty, forty bucks at a time until he had enough to flee. They found him in Las Vegas a few months later, living on the street, having blown through all his cash but still with no plans to go back. And there was nothing anyone could do. He was a grown man who had made a decision to live a different life, which was his choice.”
    “No,” she said. “You don’t understand. Bill was the most reliable man who ever lived. He was like sunrise in the east. He was a scientist. Life was logical and orderly with him. He was not