Chill Factor
Page 1
Praise for #1 Bestselling Author Sandra Brown and Her Electrifying Thrillers
“If you want romantic suspense that has teeth . . . Sandra Brown is your gal.”
—Stephen King
CHILL FACTOR
“Races along with the passion and verve that are the hallmarks of a Brown novel.”
—Orlando Sentinel
“Compelling characters, sexual tension and stunning plot twists . . . a page-turner that will keep readers guessing until the end.”
—The Sunday Oklahoman
“Gripping, surprising.”
—Booklist
“This creepy tale puts [Sandra Brown] in a remarkable class of her own, a class of fifty-four bestsellers.”
—Ottawa Citizen
“A great read anytime, but especially when the temperatures are soaring into triple digits.”
—Bookreporter.com
“Brown has done a skillful job in blending two genres—romantic suspense and serial killer—into a homogeneous whole that should please the devotees of both.”
—The San Diego Union-Tribune
WHITE HOT
“Family conflict, murder, and romance are ablaze in bestselling Brown’s latest romantic thriller. . . . Exciting.”
—Publishers Weekly
“An action thriller that will keep reader attention from first page to last . . . as white-hot as a bomb going off.”
—Midwest Book Review
“Brown’s writing lures readers with haunting, sultry seduction, redolent with secrets as deep as hot, breath-snagging Southern nights.”
—BookPage
HELLO DARKNESS
“[A] fast-reading thriller. The unmasking of the killer comes with a riveting finale that will leave fans begging for an encore.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Strong characters, crisp dialogue . . . the suspense builds in Ms. Brown’s capable hands.”
—Richmond Times-Dispatch
“Full of thrills and chills that will keep readers turning the pages. . . . With an abundance of likely suspects, this sexy, engrossing thriller will keep readers guessing until the very end.”
—Booklist
“Plenty of heart-stopping action.”
—The Port St. Lucie News (FL)
“Fascinating. . . . Will keep you up past your bedtime.”
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Acclaim for the Worldwide Bestselling Novels of
SANDRA BROWN
“Perfectly plotted. . . . Sin-tillating suspense.”
—People
“Brown stages one dramatic scene after another.”
—Publishers Weekly
“With over forty-six New York Times bestsellers, Brown has few to envy among living authors.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A master at weaving a story of suspense into a tight web that catches and holds the reader from first page to last.”
—Library Journal
“[Sandra Brown] carefully craft[s] tales that keep readers on the edge of their seats.”
—USA Today
Thank you for purchasing this Simon & Schuster eBook.
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CONTENTS
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
Epilogue
‘Ricochet’ Excerpt
CHAPTER
1
THE GRAVE WAS SUBSTANDARD.
The storm was forecast to be a record breaker.
Little more than a shallow bowl gouged out of unyielding earth, the grave had been dug for Millicent Gunn—age eighteen, short brown hair, delicate build, five feet four inches tall, reported missing a week ago. The grave was long enough to accommodate her height. Its depth, or lack thereof, could be remedied in the spring, when the ground began to thaw. If scavengers didn’t dispose of the body before then.
Ben Tierney shifted his gaze from the new grave to the others nearby. Four of them. Forest debris and vegetative decay provided natural camouflage, yet each lent subtle variations to the rugged topography if one knew what to look for. A dead tree had fallen across one, concealing it entirely except to someone with a discerning eye.
Like Tierney.
He took one last look into the empty, shallow grave, then picked up the shovel at his feet and backed away. As he did, he noticed the dark imprints left by his boots in the white carpet of sleet. They didn’t concern him overmuch. If the meteorologists were calling it right, the footprints would soon be covered by several inches of frozen precipitation. When the ground thawed, the prints would be absorbed into the mud.
In any case, he didn’t stop to worry about them. He had to get off the mountain. Now.
He’d left his car on the road a couple hundred yards from the summit and the makeshift graveyard. Although he was now moving downhill, there was no path to follow through the dense woods. Thick ground cover gave him limited traction, but the terrain was uneven and hazardous, made even more so by the blowing precipitation that hampered his vision. Though he was in a hurry, he was forced to pick his way carefully to avoid a misstep.
Weathermen had been predicting this storm for days. A confluence of several systems had the potential of creating one of the worst winter storms in recent memory. People in its projected path were being advised to take precautions, stock provisions, and rethink travel plans. Only a fool would have ventured onto the mountain today. Or someone with pressing business to take care of.
Like Tierney.
The cold drizzle that had been falling since early afternoon had turned into freezing rain mixed with sleet. Pellets of it stung his face like pinpricks as he thrashed through the forest. He hunched his shoulders, bringing his collar up to his ears, which were already numb from cold.
The wind velocity had increased noticeably. Trees were taking a beating, their naked branches clacking together like rhythm sticks in the fierce wind. It stripped needles off the evergreens and whipped them about. One struck his cheek like a blow dart.
Twenty-five miles an hour, out of the northwest, he thought with that part of his brain that automatically registered the current status of his surroundings. He knew these things—wind velocity, time, temperature, direction—instinctually, as though he had a built-in weather vane, clock, thermometer, and GPS constantly feeding pertinent information to his subconscious.
It was an innate talent that he had developed into a skill, which had been finely tuned by spending much of his adult life outdoors. He didn’t have to think consciously about this ever-changing environmental data but frequently relied on his ability to grasp it immediately when it was needed.
He was relying on it now, because it wouldn’t do to be caught on the summit
of Cleary Peak—the second highest in North Carolina, after Mount Mitchell—carrying a shovel and running away from four old graves and one freshly dug.
The local police weren’t exactly reputed for their dogged investigations and crime-solving success. In fact, the department was a local joke. The chief was a has-been, big-city detective who’d been ousted from the department on which he’d served.
Chief Dutch Burton now led a band of inept small-town officers—yokels outfitted in spiffy uniforms with shiny badges—who had been hard-pressed to catch the culprit spray-painting obscenities on the trash receptacles behind the Texaco station.
Now they were focused on the five unsolved missing persons cases. Despite their insufficiencies, Cleary’s finest had deduced that having five women vanish from one small community within two and a half years was, in all probability, more than a coincidence.
In a metropolis, that statistic would have been trumped by others even scarier. But here, in this mountainous, sparsely populated area, the disappearances of five women were staggering.
Further, it was a generally held opinion that the missing women had met with foul play, so finding human remains, not the women themselves, was the task facing the authorities. Suspicion would fall on a man carrying a shovel through the woods.
Like Tierney.
Up till now, he had flown under the radar of Police Chief Burton’s curiosity. It was crucial to keep it that way.
In pace with his footsteps, he clicked off the vital statistics of the women buried in the graves on the summit. Carolyn Maddox, a twenty-six-year-old who had a deep bosom, beautiful black hair, and large brown eyes. Reported missing last October. A single mom and sole supporter of a diabetic child, she had cleaned rooms at one of the guest lodges in town. Her life had been a cheerless, nonstop cycle of toil and exhaustion.
Carolyn Maddox was getting plenty of peace and rest now. As was Laureen Elliott. Single, blond, and overweight, she had worked as a nurse at a medical clinic.
Betsy Calhoun, a widowed homemaker, had been older than the others.
Torrie Lambert, the youngest of them, had also been the first, the prettiest, and the only one not a resident of Cleary.
Tierney picked up his speed, trying to outrun his haunting thoughts as well as the weather. Ice was beginning to coat tree limbs like sleeves. Boulders were becoming glazed with it. The steep, curving road down to Cleary would soon become unnavigable, and it was imperative that he get off this goddamn mountain.
Fortunately, his built-in compass didn’t fail him, and he emerged from the woods no more than twenty feet from where he’d entered it. He wasn’t surprised to see that his car was already coated with a thin layer of ice and sleet.
As he approached it, he was breathing hard, emitting bursts of vapor into the cold air. His descent from the summit had been arduous. Or perhaps his labored breathing and rapid heart rate were caused by anxiety. Or frustration. Or regret.
He placed the shovel in the trunk of his car. Peeling off the latex gloves he’d been wearing, he tossed them into the trunk as well, then shut the lid. He got into the car and quickly closed the door, welcoming shelter from the biting wind.
Shivering, he blew on his hands and vigorously rubbed them together in the hope of restoring circulation to his fingertips. The latex gloves had been necessary, but they hadn’t provided any protection against the cold. He took a pair of cashmere-lined leather gloves from a coat pocket and pulled them on.
He turned the ignition key.
Nothing happened.
He pumped the accelerator and tried again. The motor didn’t even growl. After several more unsuccessful tries, he leaned back against the seat and stared at the gauges on the dashboard as though expecting them to communicate what he was doing wrong.
He cranked the key one more time, but the engine remained as dead and silent as the women crudely buried nearby.
“Shit!” He thumped both gloved fists against the steering wheel and stared straight ahead, although there was nothing to look at. A sheet of ice had completely obscured the windshield. “Tierney,” he muttered, “you’re screwed.”
CHAPTER
2
THE WIND HAS PICKED UP, AND THERE’S ICY stuff falling out there,” Dutch Burton remarked as he let the drape fall back into place over the window. “We’d better start down soon.”
“I need to empty these few shelves, then I’ll be done.” Lilly took several hardcover editions from the built-in bookcase and placed them in a packing box.
“You always enjoyed reading when we came up here.”
“That’s when I had time to catch up on the latest best-sellers. Nothing to distract me here.”
“Except me, I guess,” he said. “I remember pestering you until you put your book aside and paid attention to me.”
She glanced up at Dutch from where she sat on the floor and smiled. But she didn’t pursue his fond recollection of how they’d spent their leisure time in the mountain retreat. Initially they had come here on weekends and holidays to escape their hectic schedules in Atlanta.
Later they’d come here simply to escape.
She was packing what remained of her personal belongings to take with her when she left today. She wouldn’t be coming back. Neither would Dutch. This would be the last page written—an epilogue, actually—of their life together. She had hoped to make their final farewell as unsentimental as possible. He seemed determined to stroll down memory lane.
Whether his recollections of times past were designed to make him feel better or to make her feel worse, she didn’t want to engage in them. Their good times together had been so eclipsed by their bad ones that any memory reopened wounds.
She steered the topic back to pragmatic matters. “I made copies of all the closing documents. They’re in that envelope, along with a check for your half of the sale.”
He looked down at the manila envelope but left it lying on the oak coffee table where she had placed it. “It’s not right. My getting half.”
“Dutch, we’ve been through this.” She folded down the four sections of the box top to seal it, wishing she could close the argument as easily.
“You paid for this cabin,” he said.
“We purchased it together.”
“But your salary made that possible. We couldn’t have afforded it on mine.”
She pushed the box along the floor to the door, then stood up and faced him. “We were married when we bought it, married when we shared it.”
“Married when we made love in it.”
“Dutch—”
“Married when you served me my morning coffee wearing nothing but a smile and that afghan,” he said, motioning in the general direction of the knitted throw on the back of the armchair.
“Please don’t do this.”
“That’s my line, Lilly.” He took a step closer to her. “Don’t do this.”
“It’s already done. It’s been done for six months.”
“You could undo it.”
“You could accept it.”
“I’ll never accept it.”
“That’s your choice.” She paused, took a breath, brought the volume down. “That’s always your choice, Dutch. You refuse to accept change. And because you can’t, you never get over anything.”
“I don’t want to get over you,” he argued.
“You’ll have to.”
She turned away from him, pulled an empty box nearer the bookcase, and began filling it with books, although taking less care with them than before. She was now in a hurry to leave, before she was forced to say more hurtful things in order to convince him that their marriage was, finally and forever, over.
Several minutes of tense silence were broken only by the soughing of the wind through the trees surrounding the cabin. Branches knocked against the eaves with increasing frequency and force.
She wished he would leave ahead of her, preferred he not be there when she left the cabin. Knowing that it would be for the last time, he
might have an emotional meltdown. She’d been through such scenes before and didn’t want to experience another. Their leave-taking didn’t have to be bitter and ugly, but Dutch was making it so by resurrecting old quarrels.
Although clearly it wasn’t his intention, his rehashing of these arguments only underscored how right she’d been to end the marriage.
“I think this Louis L’Amour is yours.” She held up a book. “Do you want it, or shall I leave it for the new owners?”
“They’re getting everything else,” he said morosely. “Just as well throw in a paperback book.”
“It was easier to sell the furnishings along with the cabin,” she said. “The furnishings were bought specifically for this place and wouldn’t look right in any other house. Besides, neither of us has extra space, so what would I have done with it? Move it all out only to sell it to someone else? And where would I have stored it in the meantime? It made more sense to include everything in the sell price.”
“That’s not the point, Lilly.”
She knew the point. He didn’t want to think of strangers living in the cabin, using their things. Leaving everything intact for someone else to enjoy seemed to him like a sacrilege, a violation of the privacy and intimacy they’d shared in these rooms.
I don’t care how sensible it is to sell the whole kit and caboodle, Lilly. Screw sensible! How can you bear to think of other people sleeping in our bed between our sheets?
That had been his reaction when she’d told him her plans for the furnishings. Obviously her decision still riled him, but it was too late for her to change her mind even if she were so inclined. Which she wasn’t.
When the shelves in the bookcase were empty, save for the lone Western novel, she looked around for anything she might have missed. “Those canned goods,” she said, pointing to the grocery items she’d placed on the bar that separated the kitchen from the living area. “Do you want to take them with you?”
He shook his head.
She added them to the last box of books, which was only half full. “I scheduled the utilities to be disconnected, since the new owners won’t be occupying the cabin until spring.” Doubtless he already knew all this. She was talking to fill the silence, which seemed to become conversely weightier the more of herself she removed from the cabin.