FOUR DECADES OF detective work had taught Decker a thing or two. One of the delights of Missing Persons cases was that they often had happy endings. But sometimes not. Because people disappear for a variety of reasons.
Some individuals vanished by accident: a wrong turn on a hiking trail or a rogue wave that hit while sailing on otherwise navigable seas. Sometimes lives evaporated by wicked intent—a pickup gone awry or a stranded motorist meeting the wrong type of help. Sometimes souls perished in seemingly innocuous encounters that went terribly wrong, leaving the horrified perpetrators attempting to hide the evildoing, keeping a corroding secret that they were unwilling or unable to confront.
But sometimes people disappeared because they wanted to.
So far, no one was quite sure which reason fit Bertram Lanz—a thirty-five-year-old man with cognitive disabilities who disappeared from a field trip arranged by the Loving Care facility: a residential home. On the trip, there were fifty mentally challenged men and women. Bertram was alive and well when chaperones herded the group back into the bus after a two-hour leisurely hike. But after a one-hour stop at a local diner, while boarding the bus to go home, the supervisors quickly realized that the head count was off by one. And no matter how many times the recount was taken, the Loving Care chaperones came up a body short. It took even more time to discover who was gone from the roster.
