by Tami Hoag
“She has reason to be scared, Chief. Her son is missing.”
“That has yet to be established. He's probably playing at a friend's house.”
“She says she checked with his friends.”
“Yes, but she's panicked. She's probably forgotten to look in an obvious place.”
“Or somebody grabbed the kid.”
Mitch scowled harder because it took an effort to dismiss her suggestion. “This is Deer Lake, O'Malley, not New York.”
Megan arched a brow. “You don't have crime in Deer Lake? You have a police force. You have a jail. Or is that all just window dressing?”
“Of course we have crime,” he snarled. “We have college students who shoplift and cheese factory workers who get drunk on Saturday night and try to beat each other up in the American Legion parking lot. We don't have child abductions, for Christ's sake.”
“Yeah, well, welcome to the nineties, Chief,” she said sarcastically. “It can happen anywhere.”
Mitch took a half step back and jammed his hands at his waist. The president of the Sons of Norway lodge went into the men's room, smiling and nodding to Mitch. A cloud of chokingly sweet air freshener escaped the room as the door swung shut. Mitch blocked it out just as he tried to block out what Megan was telling him.
“The people in St. Joseph didn't think it could happen there, either,” Megan said quietly. “And while they were all standing around consoling themselves with that lie, someone made off with Jacob Wetterling.”
The Wetterling case in St. Joseph had happened before Mitch had moved to Minnesota, but it was still in the hearts and minds of people. A child had been stolen from among them and never returned. That kind of crime was so rare in the area that it affected people as if someone from their own family had been taken. Deer Lake was nearly two hundred miles away from St. Joseph, but Mitch knew several men on his force and in the sheriff's department had worked on the case as volunteers. They spoke of it sparingly, in careful, hushed tones, as if they feared bringing it up might call back whatever demon had committed the crime.
Swearing under her breath, Megan grabbed the telephone receiver. “We're wasting time.”
“I'll do it.” Mitch reached over her shoulder and snatched the phone from her.
“A little rusty on our telephone etiquette, aren't we?” she said dryly.
“Our dispatcher doesn't know you” was all the apology he offered.
“Doug? Mitch Holt. Listen, I need a bulletin out on Paul Kirkwood's boy, Josh. Yeah. Hannah went to pick him up from hockey and he'd gone off somewhere. He's probably in somebody's basement playing Nintendo, but you know how it is. Hannah's worried. Yeah, that's what women do best.”
Megan narrowed her eyes and tipped her head. Mitch ignored her.
“Let the county boys know, too, just in case they spot him. He's eight, a little small for his age. Blue eyes, curly brown hair. Last seen wearing a bright blue ski jacket with green and yellow trim and a bright yellow stocking cap with a Vikings patch on it. And send a unit over to the hockey rink. Tell them I'll meet them there.”
He hung up the phone as the Sons of Norway leader emerged from the men's room and sidled past them, murmuring an absent greeting, his curious gaze sliding to Megan. Mitch grunted what he hoped would pass for an acknowledgment. He could feel Megan's steady gaze, heavy, expectant, disapproving. She was new to this job, ambitious, eager to prove herself. She would have called out the cavalry, but the cavalry wasn't warranted yet.
The first priority in a missing persons case was to make certain the person was actually missing. That was why the rule with adults was not to consider them missing until they had been gone twenty-four hours. That rule no longer applied to children, but even so, there were options to consider before jumping to the worst conclusion. Even levelheaded kids did stupid things once in a while. Josh might have gone home with a friend and lost track of time, or he might have been intentionally punishing his mother for forgetting him. There were any number of explanations more probable than kidnapping.
Then why did he have this knot in his gut?
He dug another quarter out of his pants pocket. He dialed the Strausses' number from memory and murmured a prayer of thanks when his daughter answered on the third ring with an exuberant “Hi! This is Jessie!”
“Hi, sweetheart, it's Daddy,” he said softly, ducking his head to elude Megan's curiosity.
“Are you coming to get me? I want you to read me some more of that book when it's bedtime.”
“I'm sorry, I can't, sweetie,” he murmured. “I've got to be a cop for a while longer tonight. You'll have to stay with Grandma and Grandpa.”
There was a heavy silence on the other end of the line. Mitch could clearly picture his little daughter making her mad face, an expression she had inherited from her mother and perfected by imitating her grandmother. An eloquent look, it could provoke feelings of guilt in the blink of a big brown eye. “I don't like it when you're a cop,” she said.
He wondered if she had any clue how badly it hurt him when she said that. The words were a knife slipped into an old wound that wouldn't heal. “I know you don't, Jess, but I have to go try to find somebody who's lost. Wouldn't you want me to come find you if you were lost?”
“Yeah,” she admitted grudgingly. “But you're my daddy.”
“I'll be home tomorrow night, honey, and we'll read extra pages. I promise.”
“You better, 'cause Grandma said she could read with me about Babar, too.”
Mitch clenched his jaw. “I promise. Give me a kiss good night, then let me talk to Grandpa.”
Jessie made a loud smacking sound over the phone, which Mitch repeated, turning his back to Megan so she couldn't see the color that warmed his cheeks. Then Jessie turned the phone over to her grandfather and Mitch went through the ritual explanation that wasn't an explanation—police business, hung up on a case, nothing major but it might drag on. If he told his in-laws he had to see about a possible kidnapping, Joy Strauss would burn up the phone lines whipping the town into a frenzy.
Jurgen didn't press for details. A born-and-bred Minnesotan, he considered it rude to ask for more information than the caller was willing to give. Aside from that, the routine wasn't unfamiliar to him. Mitch's job dictated a late night from time to time. The standing arrangement was for Jessie to remain with her grandparents, who looked after her every day after school. The routine was convenient and provided stability for Jessie. Mitch might not have been enamored of his mother-in-law, but he trusted her to take good care of her only grandchild.
He hated to miss seeing Jessie, to miss tucking her in and reading to her until her eyes drifted shut. His daughter was the absolute center of his universe. For a second he tried to imagine what it would feel like if he couldn't find her, then he thought of Josh and Hannah.
“He'll turn up in no time,” he murmured to himself as he hung up the receiver. The knot in his gut tightened.
Megan's temper dropped from a boil to a simmer. For a second there Mitch Holt had seemed vulnerable, not tough, not intimidating. For a second he was a single father who sent his little girl kisses over the phone. The word dangerous floated through her head again and took on new connotations.
Kicking the thought aside, she gave him a no-nonsense look. “I hope you're right, Chief,” she said. “For everyone's sake.”
CHAPTER 5
* * *
DAY 1
9:30 P.M. 19°
The last of the senior league hockey players were limping and shuffling their way out of the Gordie Knutson Memorial Arena when Mitch pulled his Explorer into the drive. Fifty or older, the senior leaguers still displayed an amazing amount of grace on the ice, as if they somehow shed the cumbersome stiffness of age in the locker room as they laced on the magic skates. They skated and passed and checked and laughed and swore. But when the game was over, the skates came off and the realities of age settled in with a vengeance. They inched their way down the steps, faces contorted
in grimaces of varying degrees.
Noogie watched them with a grin as he stood leaning against his patrol car parked in the fire lane in front of the building. He gave them a thumbs-up, then laughed when Al Jackson told him to go to hell.
“Why do you keep playing when it does this to you, Al?”
“What kind of stupid question is that?” Jackson shot back. “Oh, yeah, I forget—you used to play football; too many knocks in the head.”
“At least we had sense enough to wear helmets,” Noogie goaded.
“You mean there's no excuse for that face?”
Noga growled and waved them past.
“What's going on, Noogie?” Bill Lennox asked, hiking up the strap on his duffel bag. “Caught Olie speeding on the Zamboni machine?”
They all laughed, but their gazes slid past Noogie to Mitch and Megan as they came up the sidewalk.
“Evening, Mitch,” Jackson called, raising the end of his hockey stick in salute. “Crime wave at the ice rink?”
“Yeah. We've had another complaint that your slap shot is criminal.”
The group roared. Mitch kept an eye on them until they were well out of earshot, then turned to his officer.
“Officer Noga, this is Agent O'Malley—”
“We've met,” Megan said impatiently, tapping a foot against the snowpack on the sidewalk for the dual purpose of releasing energy and trying to keep the feeling in her toes.
Her gaze scanned the area. The ice rink was at the end of a street, set well back from the residences. Located at the southeast edge of Deer Lake, it was half a mile off the interstate highway. Beyond the island of artificial light that was the parking lot, the night was black, vaguely ominous, certainly unwelcoming. On the other side of a wall of overgrown leafless shrubbery, the Park County fairgrounds stretched out across a field, an array of old vacant buildings and a looming grandstand. It looked abandoned and somehow sinister, as if the shadows were inhabited by dark spirits that could be chased away only by carnival lights and crowds of people. Even looking in the other direction, toward the town, Megan felt a sense of isolation.
“Is this about the missing kid?” Noga asked.
Mitch nodded. “Hannah Garrison's boy. Josh. She was supposed to pick him up here. I figured we'd take a look around, talk to Olie—”
“We should have uniforms canvassing the residential area,” Megan interrupted, drawing a narrow look from Mitch and owl eyes from Noga. “Find out if the neighbors might have seen the boy or anything out of the ordinary. The fairgrounds will be the likely place to start the search once we've secured this area.”
Mitch had tried to stick her with baby-sitting detail, suggesting she stay with Hannah and offer moral support while they waited for word of Josh. She had informed him that moral support was not part of her job description, then suggested they call a friend to come stay with Hannah and help make another round of phone calls looking for Josh among his friends. In the end Mitch called Natalie, who lived in Hannah's neighborhood.
His gaze hard and steady on her, he took a deep breath and spoke to his officer in a tone too even to be believed. “Go on inside and round up Olie. I'll be there in a minute.”
“Gotcha.” Noga hustled off, clearly relieved to be out of the line of fire.
Megan braced herself for a skirmish. Mitch stared at her, his jaw set, his eyes dark and deep beneath his brows. She could feel the tension coming off him in waves.
“Agent O'Malley,” he said, his voice as cold as the air and deceptively, dangerously soft, “whose investigation is this?”
“Yours,” she answered without hesitation. “And you're screwing it up.”
“How diplomatically put.”
“I don't get paid for diplomacy,” she said, knowing damn well that she did. “I get paid to consult, advise, and investigate. I advise that you investigate, Chief, instead of dragging your butt around, pretending nothing's happened.”
“I didn't ask for your consultation or your advice, Ms. O'Malley.” Mitch didn't like this situation. He didn't like the possibilities and what they could mean to Deer Lake. And at the moment he was nursing a strong dislike for Megan O'Malley just because she was there and witnessing everything and poking at his authority and his ego. “You know, old Leo wasn't much to look at, but he knew his place. He wouldn't stick his nose into this until I asked him to.”
“Then he would have been dragging his butt, too,” Megan said, refusing to back down. If she backed away from him now, God knew she would probably end up sitting around the squad room monitoring the coffeepot. It wasn't just a question of turf, it was a matter of establishing herself in the pecking order. “If you don't call in uniforms to question the neighbors, I'll question them myself as soon as I've had a look around.”
The muscles in his jaw flexed. His nostrils flared, emitting twin jet streams of steam. Megan held her place, gloved hands jammed on her hips, the muscles in the back of her neck knotting from looking up at him. She had ceased to feel her smaller toes as the cold leeched up through the thin soles of her boots.
Mitch ground his teeth as that fist tightened a little more in his belly and a voice whispered in the back of his mind. What if she's right? What if you're wrong, Holt? What if you blow this? The self-doubt made him furious, and he readily transferred that fury to the woman before him.
“I'll call for two more units. Noga can start looking around out here,” he said tightly. “You can come with me, Agent O'Malley. I don't want you running unchecked in my town, spooking everyone into a panic.”
“I'm not yours to keep on a leash, Chief.”
His lips curled in a smile that was feral and nasty. “No, but it's a great fantasy.”
He stalked off down the sidewalk and up the steps, denying her the chance for rebuttal. She hurried after him, cursing the slippery footing with every breath she didn't use to curse Mitch Holt.
“Maybe we ought to set some ground rules here,” she said, coming up alongside him. “Decide when you'll be enlightened versus when you'll be an asshole. Is that a matter of convenience or a territorial thing, or what? I'd like to know now, because if this is going to degrade into a fence-pissing contest, I'm going to have to learn how to lift my leg.”
He shot her a glare. “They didn't teach you that at the FBI academy?”
“No. They taught me how to subdue aggressive males by ramming their balls up to their tonsils.”
“You must be a fun date.”
“You'll never know.”
He pulled open one of the doors that led into the ice arena and held it. Megan deliberately stepped to the side and opened another for herself.
“I don't expect special treatment,” she said, stepping into the foyer. “I expect equal treatment.”
“Fine.” Mitch pulled his gloves off and stuffed them into his coat pockets. “You try to go over my head and I will be as equally pissed off with you as I would be with anyone else. Make me mad enough and I'll punch you out.”
“That's assault.”
“Call a cop,” he tossed over his shoulder as he jerked open a door into the arena and strode through it.
Megan cast a glance toward heaven. “I asked for this, didn't I?”
Olie Swain had done most of the grunt work at the Gordie Knutson Memorial Arena for the better part of five years. He worked from three till eleven six days a week, keeping the locker rooms in order, sweeping trash from the seating areas, resurfacing the ice with the Zamboni machine, and doing whatever odd jobs needed doing. His real name was not Olie, but the nickname stuck with him and he made no effort to lose it. He figured the less anyone knew about the real him, the better—an attitude he had developed in childhood. Anonymity was a comfortable cloak, truth a neon light that directed unwanted attention on the unhappy story of his life.
Mind your own business, Leslie. Don't be proud, Leslie. Pride and arrogance are the sins of man.
The lines that had been hammered into him in childhood with iron fists and pointed tongues r
ang dully in the back of his head. The mystery had always been what he could possibly have to be proud of. He was small and ugly with a port wine birthmark spreading over a quarter of his face like a stain. His talents were small and of no interest to anyone. His experiences were the stuff of shame and secrets, and he kept them to himself. He always had, shrugging off what few concerns were expressed on his behalf, denying bruises and scars, excusing the glass eye as the result of a fall from a tree.
He had a clever mind, a head for books and studies. He had a natural aptitude for computers. This fact he kept mostly to himself as well, cherishing it as the one bright spot in an otherwise bleak existence.
Olie didn't like cops. He especially didn't like men. Their size, their strength, their aggressive sexuality, all triggered bad feelings in him, which was why he had no real friends his own age. The closest he came to having friends at all were the hockey boys. He envied their exuberance and coveted their innocence. They liked him because he could skate well and do acrobatics. Some were cruel about his looks, but mostly they accepted him, and that was the best Olie could ever hope for.
He stood in the corner of the cramped storage room he had converted into an office of sorts, his nerve endings wiggling like worms beneath his skin as Chief Holt's tall frame filled the doorway.
“Hey, Olie,” the chief said. His smile was fake and tired. “How's it going?”
“Fine.” Olie snapped the word off like a twig and tugged on the sleeve of the quilted flight jacket he'd bought at an army-navy store in the Cities. Inside his heavy wool sweater, perspiration trickled down his sides from his armpits, spicy and sour.
A woman peeked in around the chief's right arm. Bright green eyes in a pixie's face, dark hair slicked back.
“This is Agent O'Malley.” Holt moved no more than a fraction of an inch to his left. The woman glanced up at him, her jaw set as she wedged herself through the narrow opening and into the little room. “Agent O'Malley, Olie Swain. Olie's the night man here.”