Missing Piece Read online

  MISSING PIECE

  A

  Hoskins & Fletcher

  crime novel

  Book Four

  T.L. DYER

  Copyright © 2022 by T.L. Dyer

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the author and publisher, except for the use of quotations in a book review.

  Published by Edge of the Roof Press, an imprint of T.L. Dyer

  For enquiries visit: www.TLDyer.com

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to incidents involving businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Author’s Note: The Hoskins & Fletcher books are set in a fictional geographical location, based on regions within and surrounding the American state of Oregon.

  Acknowledgements

  For volunteering their time and efforts to improve the Hoskins & Fletcher books for all readers, this fourth book in the series is dedicated to: Mary Arnold, Jenny Belliotti, Suzanne Gochenouer, Loretta Jubb, June, Janet Lerner, Elaine Posterick, Cheryl Walton, and Terri Rose Wilson. Your kind contribution and willingness to help a neurotic author out of a tight spot is appreciated more than I can say. Thank you to each of you.

  In addition, that same neurotic author sometimes needs a reassuring pat on the back, and a small shove, to put her books out there in the arena where all the big writers play. And for giving me that, I’d like to thank both my faithful team of pre-publication readers, and of course every individual who buys one of my books and enjoys it. Each one of you is the reason I return time and again to my desk to write.

  Last, but far from least, this book is dedicated to Barbara Woods Wright, without whom I may still be cowering under the desk or else throwing my keyboard in the bin in a child-like tantrum. Thank you, Barbara, for your selfless dedication to motivating and inspiring us writers, and for always being there with a kind word and an almighty confidence boost when the neurosis kicks in. I am truly inspired by the passion you show for books and their authors, and I’m sure many indie authors are still writing and publishing because of you. Including myself. Much love and gratitude. You are my ideal reader.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Epilogue

  Want More? Your Free Novella

  What To Read Next

  Also By T.L. Dyer

  About the Author

  part one

  no one saves us but ourselves

  no one can and no one may

  we ourselves must walk the path

  buddha

  Prologue

  September 1990

  A tune played in her head. Not the words that went with it. She couldn’t remember any of those. Just the tune, the one her mother liked when they sang it in church. Music had a way of looping continuously in her mind when her stupid thoughts wouldn’t settle. It drove her crazy if she was trying to get to sleep before a big test, or when she needed to memorize her lines for the school play. It drove her crazy now as she tried to concentrate on finding her way in the impossible blackness of the forest, each tree she passed looking the same as the last, the rough bracken underfoot piercing her skin with every step. There wasn’t even a moon tonight to break through the towering pines and offer a shred of guidance or reassurance she wasn’t just going in circles.

  Branches whipped at her forearms, her stomach, her thighs – snapped stinging sensations that distracted her from the goosebumps and the trembling. She didn’t think she was cold. Not when the air was so thick with heat she couldn’t catch a breath.

  It was the sounds – coming from behind her, in front of her, over the ground, up in the branches – that made the tune in her head play louder so that she hummed along with it. Not letting those unknown noises stop her, or force her to acknowledge her raging heartbeat or the fact she might never find the way out, ever, she strode on, and on, and hummed until her voice no longer sounded strange. Instead, its rumble in her throat and her chest became a source of energy, and she resolved to go on like that all night, or for days if she had to. When her eyes blurred, she rubbed at them until they cleared. When her skin split under the slice of another branch, she wiped away the blood with the heel of her hand. When her belly growled with emptiness, she just clasped her hands together, hummed louder, and silently prayed to the Lord Almighty that He hadn’t turned His back on her for all that she had done, all the sins she had committed.

  She didn’t notice at what point her voice had grown so raw from the humming that she’d stopped. But by doing so, it meant the moment another sound reached her ears, much different from all the rest in the otherwise eerie silence, she immediately came to a halt and snapped her weary eyes wide to be better able to place it.

  Now that her feet weren’t crunching and rustling through the forest’s undergrowth, she could hear the thump of her heart working doubly hard in her chest, her breath uneven with the shivers that rushed over her. Her limbs ached, soles of her feet throbbed, skin stung, but the sound was not only still there but getting louder. A sound she couldn’t have been more familiar with but hadn’t heard in… What was it? Weeks? Months? Years? She didn’t know anymore.

  Pinpointing where the sound of the vehicle’s engine was coming from, she started up again, ignoring her body’s reluctance, and instead picking up the pace from a walk to a half-jog, then from a jog to a run. Pain flared up her shins from her feet, her ankles. She stumbled, palm landing against the rough trunk of a pine. She propelled herself off it; the vehicle was drawing closer, which meant she too was closer, to the road, to help.

  Her panting breath tore through her lungs, and a yelp of desperation burst out of her with each exhale. She even tried calling, but what use was that? Better to save whatever she had left to get her to the road before whoever was coming passed right by, perhaps the only vehicle to come out this way in days. Weeks. She cried at the thought, balled her hands into fists, and pushed on.

  The engine was so loud now it was almost a roar. More noise than she’d heard in a long time. And there, up ahead, was the break in the trees. It was just yards away but her body was struck with the urge to stop. It saw help coming and wanted to drop right there, but she was
n’t at the road yet. Her legs weakened and she folded to the ground, her hands slapping against pine needles and the damp earth beneath them. An intrusion of light caught her eye and she looked up. The glorious strip of asphalt road lit up before her in a thin stream of illumination from the vehicle she couldn’t yet see, but that was running at a fair speed if the rumble of its engine was anything to go by. If she stayed here though, in the forest, flat out on the ground, they’d never see her. Eyes on the road ahead, they’d just drive on by and that would be that.

  With her palms torn and bloody, she used her knuckles instead to push herself upright and onto unsteady feet. And with nothing much left but blind will, she forced her weak limbs onward. Get to the edge of the road. That’s all she needed to do. It would be enough.

  She began the humming again, her mother’s favorite, and pressed forward until her toes scuffed against hard asphalt. She kept going, needed to be sure, one foot landing on the unforgiving surface, then the other. On and on, over and over, she dragged her weary limbs to the center of the road. And when the truck at last came into sight, her eyes could stay open no more. They fell closed, her body giving way under the blinding headlights and blaring horn bearing down on her like a monstrous, angry, and out of control Goliath.

  Chapter 1

  October 2020

  ‘This is one time, my friends, when it doesn’t pay to be the David slaying the Goliath. But that’s what we’re doing. Even if that’s not what we intended. We’ve thrown our weight around like we’ve got this, like we’re the superior species and just look at what we can do, aren’t we the clever ones? Well, here’s what we can do. We can bite ourselves in the ass, is what we can do.

  ‘How about we start with the animals on our factory farms, the ones who produce five hundred million tons of manure each year? That’s a lot of shit. Where does it go, I hear you ask. Well, its run-off finds its way into our rivers, our lakes, all those places you take your kids on the weekend and let them paddle around in barefoot. Unless, of course, you’re the wily farmer who avoids the pesky problem of exceeding the water pollution limit on your farm by instead spraying manure in liquid form straight into the air.

  ‘You all know air, right? That thing that doesn’t stay in one place? That thing that travels; over fields, over houses, into people’s homes, people’s lungs. Yeah, that’s right. That chest issue Uncle Bob’s been nursing for twenty years, or the inflammation Aunt Sue can’t seem to shift – don’t happen to live near a farm, do they?

  ‘But hey, setting that aside a second, if none of this agriculture conversation is really your thing, let’s talk instead for a moment about the sort of problems we’re leaving behind for the generations to come, your children’s children and grandchildren and great grandchildren. Yeah, sure, you and me, we’re all right, we’re golden. We’ll already be gone by then. But the shit we are leaving for our kin to inherit, my friends. That apocalypse you’ve all been dreading… not our problem. But it will be theirs. And it’ll be because of us. Because of what we choose to do – or not do – today. Not tomorrow. Today. Right this minute.’

  Beneath the fifty-foot banner running above the stage, marking the Sykes County GreenCraft Fall Festival, the speaker paused to take a sip of refreshment from his compostable, biodegradable, and one hundred percent recycled and recyclable paper cup. It was the same kind handed out to upwards of a couple of thousand visitors over the weekend and a good few hundred of those just today, Cass Fletcher estimated. She’d never been one for community events, preferring the solitude of her woodland cabin several miles down the road, to sitting in a damp field for hours surrounded by folk music, arts and crafts demos, passionate speakers, and far too many people making far too much noise. And it seemed she wasn’t the only one less than enamored with it. Her partner in private investigation had spent the last thirty minutes trying to find a position on the picnic blanket she’d brought that would allow some degree of comfort for his gangling legs, and was now clutching his coccyx, cracking his back, and rolling his eyes as the current speaker reeled off numbers pertaining to greenhouse gases that put everyone in the audience to shame.

  ‘Remind me again why you thought this was a good idea, Busta?’ Lawrence Hoskins said with a wince, screwing up his hazel eyes and returning to a slouch. He snatched up his paper cup to down what was left of the lukewarm flat beer he hadn’t stopped complaining about since they got here.

  Luckily, Joshua ‘Busta’ Rimes was the easygoing kind and had gotten used to this kind of persistent pessimism, demonstrating a level of patience with Hoss that Cass hadn’t managed in all the years she’d known and worked with him. Reclining on the blanket, with his ankles crossed and elbows propping him up, Josh lightly chuckled. ‘Give it time, you might learn something new, mate,’ he said, the British twang still unmistakable despite his seventeen years on American soil.

  Hoss belched and peered into the empty cup for any last remnant of the five dollars he’d spent on it. ‘If this is another one of your ploys to turn me vegan, let me save you the effort. It ain’t gonna happen. I’m a meat man through and through. And don’t bother with Fletcher, either,’ he said, throwing Cass a sideways glance. ‘Once a bunny killer, always a bunny killer.’

  A breeze brushed Josh’s fair hair over his forehead as he raised his eyebrows, a spark of uncertain humor curving his lips. For a man just shy of thirty, he had an energy about him that made him look boyish when he smiled. ‘You hunt rabbits, Cass?’

  ‘Jesus, Hoss.’ She slapped the back of her hand across his arm, stealing a glance at the largely creature-loving crowd, envisioning being doused with fake blood by an enraged horde of animal activists. ‘Not anymore. Don’t listen to him. That was a long time ago.’

  Hoss coughed a response into his fist. ‘Last year.’

  ‘Oh right. I see,’ Josh said, sitting upright and clutching his arms around his knees. ‘Wow. Well, that changes things. I never knew that about you.’

  The breeze picked up, fluttering the curls across Cass’s face and giving her the excuse she needed to avoid Josh’s teasing stare by slipping on the cable-knit sweater she’d brought with her. By the time she’d straightened it and hooked her hair behind her ears, he was back to watching the man on the stage. Except now she felt another pointed stare aimed at her, and this one less endearing. She countered it the way she knew best.

  ‘So, Hoss,’ she said, turning to face his unamused dressing down head on. ‘About this Meredith inquiry you’ve had…’

  ‘What about it? This our new office now?’ he replied, with a dry tone and a deadpan stare. ‘We call this a day off, Fletcher.’

  She returned his glare only long enough to bite her tongue. His discomfort on the blanket, the price of the beer, his restlessness, had all put him in one of his moods. There’d be no reasoning with him like this. She turned back to the stage. The male speaker had concluded his talk and was being replaced by members of a folk band setting up instruments and testing microphones.

  ‘Is this a fresh case you’re talking about?’ Josh asked, out of more than just curiosity, Cass guessed. He was throwing her a lifeline, stepping in to smooth the tension. Something she’d noticed he had done a lot over the past ten months since she’d been introduced to him as Hoss’s housemate. Despite working five miles offshore at the Sandowne Oil Rig for the better part of each month, the two new besties had struck up a genuine bond and, by extension, she too had found they shared a lot in common. Though whether mutual experience of childhood tragedy was a solid foundation from which to build a friendship remained to be seen. Increasingly all that did was make her uncomfortable.

  ‘It will be a new case,’ Hoss said, leaning back on his hands, his checked flannel shirt falling to either side of his t-shirt as he stretched his legs out in front of him and crossed one black ankle boot over the other. ‘As soon as Miss Moneypenny here gets her backside in gear.’

  ‘Well, shit, forgive me for helping my old friend and work partner recover from a brut
al attack that almost killed him.’

  ‘All right, Fletch, reel it in. Busta doesn’t need to hear you talk like that.’

  ‘No? Well, maybe Busta would be interested to know that you’re only agreeing to take this case because the client in question, a Ms Amelia Meredith, fluttered her eyelashes at you.’

  Hoss held up his middle finger. ‘Number one, the client in question is in her sixties, and thus twice my age…’

  ‘Never stopped you before.’

  He raised his index finger. ‘And number two, you realize I only spoke to her on the phone, don’t you?’

  ‘Someone teach you that, did they?’ she asked, with a nod toward his two fingers, a gesture she didn’t think was purely for numerical demonstration. Josh downed his beer, pretending he hadn’t heard. ‘You said you remembered her from the sheriff’s office because, and I quote, She was hard to forget.’

  ‘And how do you know I didn’t mean she was hard to forget because she had three legs and swore like a marine?’

  Cass blew out a laugh and looked past him to explain to Josh: ‘Ms Meredith’s eight-year-old son went missing in the summer.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Of 1985.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Exactly. Thirty-five years ago. And if law enforcement hasn’t found him by now, there’s little chance we will. Meaning there must be some other reason the Hossman is so keen on taking this case. He’s a sucker for a cougar.’

  Hoss’s hands slapped against the thighs of his jeans. ‘You know what? Think what you like, Fletch. This one’s mine to call, and I say we’re doing it.’ He brushed his hand across his nose and sniffed. ‘Besides, she’s loaded, from what I remember. And we’re running a business here, not some not-for-profit venture.’

  ‘Oh no you don’t. Don’t go there, Hoss, that’s a low blow. You know why we took Rosa’s case. My ex-field training officer’s dying wish, might I remind you—’