“Who?”
“My dad. When he first disappeared, I sent a string of folks out to look for him, but nothin’ came of it. It’s like he fell off the face of the earth. When this latest sighting came up, I beat the bushes for the best private eye I could find. Alton came highly recommended.”
“You said ‘latest sighting,’” Remi observed. “What does that mean?”
“Since my dad disappeared, there’ve been rumors of him popping up from time to time: a dozen or so times in the seventies, four times in the eighties—”
Sam interrupted. “Charlie, exactly how long has your father been missing?”
“Thirty-eight years. He disappeared in 1973.”
Lewis “Bully” King, Charles explained, was something of an Indiana Jones type, but long before the movies came out: an archaeologist who spent eleven months out of the year in the field; a globe-trotting academic who’d visited more countries than most people knew existed. What exactly his father was doing when he disappeared, Charles King didn’t know.
“Who was he affiliated with?” Remi asked.
“Not sure what you mean.”
“Did he work for a university or museum? Perhaps a foundation?”
“Nope. He was a square peg, my pop. Didn’t go for all that stuff.”
“How did he fund his expeditions?”
King offered them an aw-shucks smile. “He had a generous and gullible donor. To be fair, though, he never asked for much: five thousand here and there. Workin’ alone, he didn’t have much overhead, and he knew how to live cheap. Most of the places he traveled, you could live for a few bucks a day.”
“Did he have a home?”
“A little place in Monterey. I never sold it. Never did anything with it, in fact. It’s still mostly the way it was when he went missin’. And, yeah, I know what you’re gonna ask. Back in ’seventy-three I had some people go through his house lookin’ for clues, but they didn’t find nothin’. You’re welcome to look for yourselves, though. Zee’ll get you the info.”
“Did Frank go there?”
“No, he didn’t think it’d be worth it.”
“Tell us about the latest sighting,” Sam said.
“About six weeks ago a National Geographic crew was doing some spread on an old city out there—Lo Manta somethin’ or another—”
“Lo Monthang,” Remi offered.
“Yeah, that’s the place. Used to be the capital of Mustang.”
Like most people, King pronounced the name as he would the horse.
“It’s pronounced Moos-tong,” Remi replied. “It was also known as the Kingdom of Lo, before it was absorbed by Nepal in the eighteenth century.”
“Whatever you say. Never did like that sort of stuff. Fell kind of far from the tree, I guess. Anyway, in one of the photos they took there’s this guy in the background. A dead ringer for my dad—or at least how I think he’d look after nearly forty years.”
“That’s not much to go on,” Sam said.
“It’s all I’ve got. Still wanna take a crack at it?”
“Of course we do.”
Sam and Remi stood up to leave. They shook hands all around. “Zee’s got my contact info in there. You’ll be giving her updates. Let me know what you find. I’d appreciate regular reports. Good huntin’, Fargos.”
Charles King stood in the doorway of his Gulfstream and watched the Fargos return through the gate, mount their scooters, then disappear down the road. Zhilan Hsu came walking back through the gate, trotted up the plane’s stairs, and stopped in front of King.
“I do not like them,” she said.