Josh Lanyon by In Plain Sight

Author:In Plain Sight
Format: epub
Published: 2013-09-13T16:00:00+00:00

Working in law enforcement, you came to believe in the randomness of life. You couldn’t help it. Bad things happened to good people. Good things happened to bad people. The sky fell on whoever happened to be standing there. Nash didn’t believe — hadn’t believed for many years — that there was a plan or a purpose or even a point.

It would have been nice to be able to tell himself some comfortable lie. That he had met Glen, cared for Glen, because he was going to be the one to find justice for Glen. But if the world really worked like that, then why wouldn’t the purpose have been simpler, benign? That he was going to find Glen.

No. You couldn’t let yourself start thinking that way. Next thing, you’d be getting mad at God. You’d be believing in God.

Things happened without rhyme or reason. Sometimes they happened to people you cared about. There wasn’t any moral to the story. Maybe it wasn’t even a story. Maybe it was just a sequence of unrelated events.

There were no photos on Glen’s desk. A clean, white coffee mug read MY SON CAN ARREST YOUR HONOR STUDENT. Today’s newspaper had featured an interview with Glen’s parents. Nice people. Good people. They were unswerving in their belief that Glen was alive. That he had no enemies. And, contrariwise, that he would never walk away from his responsibilities, the people who loved him, the people who counted on him. Nash wished he had the guts to talk to them, but that would have been for his own sake, not theirs. What could he tell them that they didn’t already know? That their son had been a fine man? A man worth loving? They already knew that.

There was a short stack of unopened mail and a couple of reports in Glen’s inbox. A large, opal geode served as a paperweight.

The desk was organized, files neat, but not obsessively so. The drawers smelled faintly of Old Spice. The ghostly scent made Nash’s chest ache.

It looked like Glen was caught up on his work — barring what had landed in his inbox over the last couple of days. The light was blinking on his phone. No one had thought to pick up the messages yet.

On the wall behind Glen’s desk hung a number of framed certificates and awards. All that training and preparing for a job that the fucking city council probably wouldn’t have given him anyway. And not because he was too young.

The small office was mostly dominated by a large, framed print photograph of a turquoise lake surrounded by blue mountains and pine trees.

“Where was that taken?” Nash asked Marilyn when she brought him coffee.

“That’s Bear Lake. Pretty, isn’t it? It’s limestone that gives the water that color.” Her expression was regretful. “Glen used to go fishing down there.”

Three days and Glen was already past tense.

“Did Glen take the photo?”

“Oh no!” Marilyn chuckled at the idea. “Glen wasn’t artistic. Glen was just a normal guy.”

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