PROLOGUE

P ROLOGUE

T he small Oregon town of Mountain Valley seemed like the perfect place to safely raise a family, away from the dangers of the big city. Vanessa’s parents thought so, until the day their fourteen-year-old daughter didn’t come home for dinner. They called her cell. Straight to voice mail. They called her friends. Nothing. No one had seen her since they’d left school. Posters and flyers were placed within a fifty-mile radius, and her photo appeared on local television every night. An attendant at the local gas station phoned the sheriff’s office, claiming he’d seen a girl fitting Vanessa’s description. He described her getting into a pickup truck with the S.E.I. logo, the one that represented Spangler Enterprises Inc. Everyone knew the Spanglers—the richest, most influential family for miles around.

Patriarch Milton Spangler offered a $50,000 reward, determined to quash any notion that his family might be involved. But more importantly, Milton Spangler didn’t like the idea that a young girl could go missing in such an idyllic community, one that he’d helped to build. But as search parties failed to yield any clues, and days went by without a phone call or ransom note, the rumors grew. And then another woman disappeared. Were these simply runaways? Or did the Spangler family have something to hide?

Spangler Enterprises was the biggest employer in Oregon, valued at over 600 million dollars. Not bad for a man who began working part-time in the back office when he was in high school. But it was a fatal accident that gave him the office desk that started his financial climb.

The Spangler Family was powerful but rarely flexed their influential muscle until one of the family members got into trouble with the law. Rather than invoke the ire of the patriarch of the family, local law enforcement made a pact. Anything that implicated someone in the family would be ignored, and they would turn a blind eye. In a small town like Mountain Valley, it was known as Backwater Justice.