The who was a man named Russell Moss. He had been a friend of Danica’s father, years back, when they served in the Army together. Both men had left the service in the summer of 1989, a timeframe that was, at the very least, interesting. Danica’s father, Richard Ellis, had become an FBI agent after his time in the Army. Russell Moss had become a vagrant. The way Danica understood it, her father had spent years trying to help the guy straighten his life out, strong-arming him into rehab programs and calling in favors to get him employment. Eventually Moss had gotten clean, socked away a bit of money, bought an old trailer and moved to Shiprock Forest, where there was some kind of encampment of like-minded people—those who, for whatever reasons, wanted the world to leave them alone.

Danica had met Moss herself once, in her early twenties, when she’d taken a road trip with her father. They had stopped for a few hours at the camp in Shiprock, located way off the beaten track; it was at the end of a Forest Service road, in a place called Somber Valley.

He didn’t seem crazy or anything, Danica had told Dryden. No one else there seemed crazy, either. They just seemed like people who’d figured out what made them comfortable, and for them, it was living out there, away from the rat race.

Whether Moss would know anything useful about the summer of 1989 was the big question. Beyond the suspicious timing of his leaving the service, there wasn’t much to pin a hope on. This was just the only move they had, right now.

Dryden glanced at Danica, still asleep. The two of them had spoken of other things during the drive, besides their present circumstances. They had talked about their lives. Danica had been married for most of her thirties, and had gotten divorced just over a year ago. She was taking classes at a satellite campus of Oregon State now, going for a business degree.

With the marriage behind her, she was on her own in the world—a handful of friends, but no relatives. She’d lost her mother almost twenty years back, and her father not quite five years ago. In the last year before he would have retired from the Bureau, the man decided to get his pilot’s license. A few months into his new pastime—and a few months shy of his last day on the job—he rented a little Cessna 150 for a night flight out to Santa Catalina, twenty miles off the coast from Los Angeles. Halfway there, he dropped off of LAX’s radar and stopped responding to radio calls. The Coast Guard eventually found parts of the plane—the pieces that could float—but, as expected, they never recovered Richard Ellis’s remains.