Page 47 of The Keeper

“It’s possible.” Maybe even probable. There were still two members of the cult that had eluded their capture. Cain and Abel were described as loyal followers, and they were key weapons in Mick’s terrorizing. Keegan might be able to fill in some more gaps. He’d reacted viscerally to their names when Seth interviewed him nine months ago, and he hadn’t pressed since to avoid causing trauma. The time to revisit the pair with Keegan was near, but he wanted to find Odell first.

Seth tracked down the deputies and corrections officers Kerry provided. He reached most of them by phone and visited the others at home. No one had much to say about Odell. He kind of appeared out of nowhere six or seven months ago. He was friendly enough but kept to himself a lot. They didn’t think he had a girlfriend or dated much.

“Where the hell did this guy go?” Tony asked.

“It’s time to speak to his mother,” Seth said.

Janice Odell’s house was still bustling with people when they returned. It seemed Odell wasn’t the only one who loved his mama’s pot roast. The woman who answered the door was petite and frail. It looked like a good wind would blow her over, and Seth was grateful the storm had subsided for the moment. She took one look at Seth and covered her heart. “What’s happened to my Jasper?”

Seth tried to dance around the truth, but Mrs. Odell wasn’t having it. He kept his answers as vague as possible, but he had to give her something to get her talking. Mrs. Odell didn’t take a direct approach to giving up information about her son. She talked about his military service and the toll it had taken on him. Jasper hadn’t been able to hold down a job after his service ended, and then he’d gone on a spiritual journey for over a year. Afterward, he was more like the son she remembered and got so excited when he landed the job at the county jail. Seth’s Spidey sense went off again at the mention of a spiritual journey. He searched for an unoffensive way to approach a sensitive subject when Tony took the bull-in-a-china-shop approach.

“Do you mean he was a member of Salvation Anew?”

Mrs. Odell’s shoulders went rigid, and Seth knew Tony had fucked up. He wished he could kick the shit out of him. “Jasper said the media portrayal wasn’t fair. He promised me it wasn’t a cult.”

Son of a bitch. Jasper Odell was likely Cain or Abel, and he’d been right under their noses the entire time. The rest of the conversation became stilted when Mrs. Odell refused to accept vague answers to her questions. She eventually got fed up and told them to leave her property.

“What the fuck are we going to say to the feds?” Tony asked when they got back in the SUV.

“Right now, we suspect a lot, but we don’t know anything. They don’t even want us investigating what happened. Let’s head back to the jail and wait for the transport team and Agent Johansen to arrive.”

The marshals who’d brought the Carsons to Last Chance Creek were the same ones to pick Quinton up. They made snide remarks about the jail’s shitty hospitality before they secured Quinton and took him out to a van. The younger Carson gave an Academy Award–winning performance, crying and trembling with fear as he mourned his uncle and claimed someone wanted him dead too. Seth caught a hint of a smirk on the asshole’s face when the marshal secured him in the back of the transport vehicle.

“Do you guys want an escort?” Seth asked.

The marshal who opened the driver’s door scoffed. “I think you guys have done enough, Sheriff, but thanks. We’ll take it from here.”

Seth, Tony, and Daniels returned to the lieutenant’s office and discussed everything they knew up to that point, which wasn’t much. They reviewed every documented detail throughout Odell’s hiring process, and nothing looked out of order. He hadn’t admitted to being a part of Salvation Anew, and all his references had checked out.

“I wonder if any of these references are from the other missing cult member,” Seth said out loud. “If they’ve been planning this for a while, they could’ve gone to great lengths to make sure they got someone on the inside.”

“The press is going to slaughter us,” Tony said.

And the bigoted candidate for sheriff might not look so bad to the constituents. “We need to keep looking for any kind of clue that might tell us where to find Odell.”

“Could they be hiding at the abandoned compound?” Tony asked.

“Possibly, but it’s not likely. Odell’s been living in plain sight. The other guy probably is too. I’ve got security measures to keep nosy people from snooping around back there. Nothing has tripped the security cameras.”

“Where the hell do we look next?” Daniels asked.

They continued interviewing the jail staff and put a BOLO out on Jasper’s vehicle. Seth’s phone rang, and the noise seemed loud and ominous in the small room.

“It’s one of my deputies. Maybe he has some news about Odell.” Seth accepted the call and greeted him.

“Sheriff,” Deputy Smithson said breathlessly. “Dispatch just took a 9-1-1 call. Armed assailants ambushed the transport vehicle. The marshals exchanged fire with the gunmen. We’ve got one fatality reported, and Quinton Carson escaped.”

Rueben glanced at the clock hanging on the living room wall and was surprised to see it was ten o’clock already. He guessed that’s what happened when he put his nervous energy to good use. Rueben had cleaned every room in the small cabin from top to bottom, then reorganized every closet and storage space. Seth had left nearly five hours ago, and Rueben didn’t have a clue what was going on. His burner phone ran out of juice, and Rueben had left the charger at home. His ranch phone was in the truck, but he didn’t feel like dodging lightning bolts to get it. A large clap of thunder rattled the cabin as if Mother Nature was privy to his thoughts and seconded his opinion.

Seth would return as quickly as he could, and Rueben had needed to entertain himself the best he could until then. Music was his first love, but the batteries in the radio were dead. Rueben had looked in a junk drawer in the kitchen for replacements, but the only available size went to the flashlight. A power outage was highly probable, so knowing he had a light source was more important than music. The cabin didn’t have cable or satellite, and the powerful storm interfered too much with the antennae signal used for local channels, so he’d raided the DVDs kept in the same closet with the games. The storage space was small and poorly utilized, and that’s when the cleaning bug had bitten Rueben. He’d hooked up the DVD, started Raiders of the Lost Ark, and took a few moments to appreciate a young, sexy Harrison Ford. When the first movie ended, Rueben put the next one in the player. It was entertaining background noise to keep him from overthinking as he worked.

With nothing left to clean, he surveyed the cabin and said, “Now what?” The lights flickered, and another clap of thunder rumbled overhead. Rueben looked up and said, “I wasn’t talking to you.”

Knowing he’d go out of his mind if he just tried to watch a movie, he headed back into the kitchen. He’d cooked and shredded the chicken for his enchiladas, but that was as far as he’d gotten. It wasn’t likely they’d want to eat a heavy meal when Seth returned, but he could assemble the dish for the next day. Rueben pulled the masa from the cabinet and set to work. His abuela had insisted he shop someplace where they sold authentic Mexican ingredients, and Rueben had recognized the brand of masa she’d used his entire life. Abuela’s cousin had shipped boxes of the stuff to her from Los Angeles until the international food aisles improved in the local markets. Even the tiny store in Last Chance Creek had an impressive selection, but Rueben had driven to Colorado Springs to shop at a store dedicated to worldwide cuisine. He’d wanted to avoid Oliver and anyone else who might watch and speculate about what or who he was doing.

Rueben read the directions on the masa package and cycled through the tips and tricks his abuela had given him. He’d assisted her more times than he could count, so the process came back to him after a few missteps. Making homemade tortillas sounded easy, but it was an art form that few people mastered well. He didn’t allow himself to obsess over getting a perfect round shell because he was going to fill and roll them, then smother them with a delicious cheese sauce, though he’d wait to do the final step right before he slid them into the oven. Rueben chalked up the first two or three attempts to practice and tossed those disasters away. Once he had a dozen decently sized and shaped tortillas, he turned his attention to cooking them. His deep cleaning and organizing had uncovered a set of cast-iron skillets, pots, and baking dishes. His abuela had fried her tortillas in a skillet just like the one Rueben held in his hand. The trick, he recalled, was using the proper amount of oil and achieving the perfect temperature. If not, you ended up with a soggy, oily tortilla or one that was hard and burned.

He didn’t find a thermometer, so Rueben ran his fingers under the tap and sprinkled a few drops of water into the skillet. The oil bubbled and hissed the right amount to show it was ready. “Here goes nothing.” The wind howled, the rain pounded the roof harder, and the power flickered again as if the universe mocked his attempts at a family tradition. “You don’t scare me.” Standing in a dark room with sizzling oil sounded like a recipe for disaster, though.

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