by Sandra Brown
He was beginning to think that everybody in the whole damn world had it in for him today.
When he entered headquarters and saw Mr. and Mrs. Ernie Gunn sitting in the waiting area, that cinched it. He must have a bull’s-eye painted on his back. Lilly, Millicent Gunn’s folks, the people of Cleary, even the weather had conspired to make this the worst day of his life.
Okay. One of the worst.
Mrs. Gunn, a rawboned sparrow of a woman on her best day, looked like she hadn’t slept or had a meal since her daughter’s disappearance a week ago. Her small head poked from the collar of her quilted coat like that of a turtle from its shell. As Dutch walked in, she looked at him with naked despair.
He wasn’t a stranger to that feeling. He empathized, all right. He just didn’t want to cope with Mrs. Gunn’s desperation tonight, when he was having a hell of a time battling his own.
Mr. Gunn was a rotund man who looked even larger in his red-and-black checked wool coat, the kind Dutch associated with lumberjacks. Gunn did, in fact, work with wood. His carpenter’s hands, roughened by decades of manual labor and chapped by the cold, looked like sugar-cured hams.
He was threading his hat between his scarred fingers, staring vacantly at the stained brown felt. At an elbow nudge from his wife, he looked up and followed her hollow-eyed gaze toward Dutch.
He stood. “Dutch.”
“Ernie. Mrs. Gunn.” Dutch nodded at them in turn. “It’s getting bad out there. You ought to be at home.”
“We just came by to ask was there anything new.”
Dutch knew the reason for this ambush. He’d received several telephone messages from them today but hadn’t responded. He wished one of his men had warned him that they were in the office so he could have delayed his return until they gave up and went home. But he was here, and so were they. He might just as well get the meeting over with.
“Come on back. We’ll talk in my office. Did somebody offer you coffee? It’s thick as road tar, but it’s usually hot.”
“No thanks,” Ernie Gunn said, speaking for both of them.
Once they were seated across the desk from him in his private office, Dutch frowned with regret. “Unfortunately I don’t have anything new to report. I had to call off the search today for obvious reasons,” he said, motioning toward the window.
“Before this storm hit, we towed Millicent’s car to the county pound. We’ll be gathering all the trace evidence we can from it, but there are no obvious signs of a struggle.”
“Like what?”
Dutch squirmed in his seat and shot a glance at Mrs. Gunn before answering her husband. “Broken fingernails, clumps of hair, blood.”
Mrs. Gunn’s head wobbled on her skinny neck.
“That’s actually good news,” Dutch said. “My men and I are still trying to reconstruct Millicent’s movements her last evening at work. Talking to everybody who saw her in and out of the store. But we had to suspend the canvassing this afternoon, again on account of the storm.
“I haven’t heard anything more from Special Agent Wise, either,” he said, heading off what he figured would be their next question. “He was called back to Charlotte a few days ago, you know. He had another case there that needed his attention. Before he left, though, he told me he was still actively working on Millicent’s disappearance and wanted to use the computers there in the bureau office to check out some things.”
“Did he say what?”
Dutch hated admitting to them that Wise—in fact all those FBI sons of bitches—was stingy with information. They were especially tight-lipped around cops they considered to be inferior, incompetent burnouts. Like yours truly, for instance.
“I believe you gave Wise access to Millicent’s journal,” he said.
“That’s right.” Mr. Gunn turned to his wife and clasped her hand for encouragement. “Maybe Mr. Wise will come across something in it that’ll lead them to her.”
Dutch pounced on that point. “That’s a very real possibility. Millicent might have left of her own accord.” He held up his hand to stave off their protests. “I know that’s the first thing I asked you when you reported her missing. You dismissed it out of hand. But hear me out.”
He divided his best serious-cop look between them. “It’s entirely possible that Millicent needed some time away. Maybe she’s not connected to the other missing women at all.” He knew the chances of that were highly remote, but it was something to say that would give them hope.
“But her car,” Mrs. Gunn said in a voice so reedy Dutch could barely hear her. “It was still in the parking lot behind the store. How could she have left without her car?”
“Maybe a friend took her somewhere,” Dutch said. “Because of the widespread panic her disappearance has caused, that friend is afraid to come forward now and ’fess up, afraid that he or she will get into trouble along with Millicent for scaring us out of our wits.”
Mr. Gunn frowned doubtfully. “We’ve had our problems with Millicent, same as all parents with teenagers, but I don’t think she’d pull a stunt like this to spite us.”
Mrs. Gunn said, “She knows we love her, knows how worried we’d be if she just up and ran off.” Her voice faltered on the last few words, and she crammed a soggy Kleenex against her lips to contain a sob.
Her misery was painful to witness. Dutch focused on his desk blotter, giving her a moment to compose herself. “Mrs. Gunn, I’m sure that deep down she knows how much you love her,” he said kindly. “But I understand Millicent wasn’t too keen on that hospital you sent her to last year. You checked her in against her will, isn’t that right?”
“She wouldn’t go voluntarily,” Mr. Gunn said. “We had to do it, or she was gonna die.”
“I understand,” Dutch said. “And probably, on some level, Millicent understands that, too. But could she be holding a grudge over it?”
The girl had been diagnosed with anorexia, and she was bulimic. To her parents’ credit, when her condition became life-threatening, they had borrowed against nearly everything they owned in order to send her to a hospital in Raleigh for treatment and psychiatric counseling.
She was there for three months before being pronounced cured and sent home. The scuttlebutt around town was that she had reverted to her bingeing and purging habits as soon as she was released, afraid any weight gain would keep her off the high school cheerleading squad. Having been a cheerleader since sixth grade, she didn’t want to miss out her senior year.
“She was doing good,” her father said. “Getting better, healthier every day.” He gave Dutch a hard look. “Besides, you know as well as I do that she didn’t run away. She was took. A blue ribbon was tied to her steering wheel.”
“You’re not supposed to talk about that,” Dutch reminded him. A blue ribbon had been left at the scene of each woman’s supposed abduction, but that fact had been withheld from the media. Because of the ribbon, the unknown kidnapper had been nicknamed Blue.
The cell phone on Dutch’s belt vibrated, but he let it go without answering. He was addressing a serious issue here. If word had leaked out about the blue ribbon, you could bet the feebs would think the leak had sprung from Dutch’s department. Maybe it had. Of course it had. Nevertheless, he would do all he could to contain it and try to avoid blame.
“Damn near everybody already knows about it, Dutch,” Mr. Gunn argued. “You cain’t keep something like that a secret, especially since the sumbitch has left that ribbon five times now.”
“If everybody knows about it, then more than likely Millicent does. She could have put the ribbon there as a decoy to make us all think—”
“The hell you say,” Ernie Gunn retorted angrily. “She wouldn’t be so cruel as to scare us like that. No sir, Blue’s got Millicent. You know he does. You gotta get out there and find her before he . . .” His voice cracked. Tears formed in his eyes.
Mrs. Gunn stifled another sob. But it was she who spoke next. Her expression had turned bitter. “You coming from the police
department in Atlanta and all, we thought you’d catch this man before he had a chance to get our Millicent or some other girl.”
“I worked homicide, not missing persons,” Dutch said tightly.
He’d been nothing but sympathetic to these people, doing everything he could to find their daughter, but he was still underappreciated. They were expecting a miracle from him because he’d been a cop in a metropolitan area.
The way he was feeling at that moment, he wondered why in hell he’d taken this job. When the city council—led by Chairman Wes Hamer—offered it to him, he should have told them that he would become their chief of police only after they’d caught their serial kidnapper.
But he had needed the employment. More important, he’d needed to get out of Atlanta, where he’d been humiliated personally by Lilly and professionally by the department. His divorce had become final the same month he’d been fired. Admittedly, there had been a correlation.
When he was at his lowest point, Wes had come to Atlanta to extend him the offer. He’d boosted Dutch’s flagging ego by saying that his hometown was in dire need of a badass cop with his experience.
It was the brand of bullshit at which Wes excelled. It was a halftime, locker room pep talk, the kind he delivered to fire up his team. Even recognizing it as such, Dutch had liked hearing it, and before he quite knew how it had come about, they were sealing their deal with a handshake.
He was known and respected here. He knew the people, knew the town and the area like the back of his hand. Moving back to Cleary was like slipping into a comfortable pair of old shoes. But there was a definite drawback. He had walked into a mess left by his predecessor, who’d known nothing about crime solving beyond writing a citation for an expired parking meter.
His first day on the job, the four unsolved missing persons cases had been dumped into Dutch’s lap. Now, he had a fifth woman missing. He had a limited budget, a staff that was minimally trained and experienced, and the condescending interference of the FBI, which had become involved because it appeared this was a kidnap situation, and that was a federal offense.
Now, two and a half years after the first girl had vanished off a popular hiking trail, there was still no suspect. It wasn’t Dutch’s fault, but it had become his baby, and it was turning ugly.
He was in no mood for criticism, even coming from people who were going through a living hell. “I’ve still got a list of Millicent’s acquaintances to talk to,” he said. “Soon as the weather clears, I swear to you that I and every man on the force will be out there searching for her.” He stood up, signaling an end to the discussion. “Would you like me to get somebody to drive you home in a patrol car? The streets are becoming treacherous.”
“No thank you.” With admirable dignity, Mr. Gunn assisted his wife from her chair and ushered her toward the front of the building.
“Hard as it is, try to keep a positive outlook,” Dutch said as he followed them down the short hallway.
Mr. Gunn merely nodded, put on his hat, and escorted his wife through the door into the wailing wind.
“Chief, we got a—”
“In a minute,” Dutch said, holding up his hand to interrupt the officer manning the incoming phone lines, all of which were blinking red. He pulled his cell phone from his belt and checked to see who had called.
Lilly. And she’d left a message. Hastily he punched in the keys to access his voice mail.
“Dutch, I don’t know if . . . get . . . or not. I . . . accident coming down the mountain . . . Ben Tierney . . . hurt. We’re . . . the cabin. He needs med . . . attention. If . . . possibly can . . . help. As soon . . . possible.”
CHAPTER
6
LILLY HAD KEPT THE VOICE MAIL MESSAGE brief and to the point, in case her cell phone lost its tenuous signal. By the time she stopped talking, the phone was dead again.
“I don’t know how much of that went through,” she said to Tierney. “Maybe Dutch will get enough of it to figure out the rest.” She had pulled the stadium blanket off her head, but it was bunched around her shoulders. The wool was wet, unmelted sleet still clinging to it. She was cold, wet, and uncomfortable.
Of course she couldn’t complain of her discomfort. It was mild compared with Tierney’s. He was sitting upright but swaying as though at any moment he would topple over. Fresh blood had soaked the black watch cap. Frost clung to his eyebrows and eyelashes, making him look ghostly.
She motioned toward his eyes. “You’ve got—”
“Frost? You’ve got it, too. It’ll go away in a minute.”
She brushed the ice crystals from her eyes and nostrils. “I’ve never been exposed to the elements like this. Never. Nothing more extreme than getting caught in the rain without an umbrella.”
She got up and crossed the room to the wall thermostat. After setting the gauge, she heard the reassuring whir of moving air coming from the vent in the ceiling. “It’ll get warm in here soon.” As she moved back toward the sofa, she said, “I can’t feel my toes or fingers.”
He put his middle finger between his teeth and used them to pull off his glove, then motioned her toward the sofa on which he sat. “Sit down and take off your boots.”
She sat down next to him and removed her gloves, then worked her feet out of her wet boots. “You knew these weren’t going to keep my feet dry.”
“It was a safe guess.”
Her socks were wet, as were the legs of her slacks from the knees down. Her outfit had been chosen for fashion, not for protection against blizzard conditions.
He patted the top of his thigh. “Put your leg up here.”
Lilly hesitated but then settled her leg across his thighs. He removed her thin sock. She didn’t recognize her own foot. It was as white as bone, bloodless. He pressed it tightly between his hands and began to chafe it vigorously.
“This will hurt,” he warned.
“It does.”
“Got to get the circulation going again.”
“Have you ever written about surviving a blizzard?”
“Not from firsthand experience. I realize now just how smug and uninformed that article was. Better?”
“My toes are stinging.”
“That’s good. Blood is returning to them. See? Turning pink already. Give me the other foot.”
“What about yours?”
“They can wait. My boots are waterproof.”
Lilly switched legs. He peeled off her sock, closed his hands around her foot, then began to massage feeling back into it. But not quite so briskly as before. He lightly pinched each toe. The pad of his thumb followed the curve of her arch, forward toward the ball of her foot, back toward her heel.
Lilly watched his hands. He watched his hands. Neither spoke.
Finally, he sandwiched her foot warmly between his palms. He turned his head, bringing them face-to-face, so close she could see individual eyelashes left wet by melting frost. “Better?” he said.
“Much. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
He made no move to release her foot, leaving it to her to withdraw it from his hands. She lowered her leg off his thighs. Taking a dry pair of socks from her coat pocket allowed her to move away from him without it being awkward.
She watched him from the corner of her eye as he bent down and untied the laces of his hiking boots. But even when they’d been loosed, he remained bent forward. He propped his elbow on his knee and rested his head in his hand.
“Are you going to be sick again?” she asked.
“I don’t think so. Just a wave of dizziness. It’ll pass.”
“You probably have a concussion.”
“No probably about it.”
“I’m so sorry.”
Her apologetic tone brought his head up. “Why should you be sorry? If it hadn’t been for me, you wouldn’t have crashed your car.”
“I couldn’t see beyond my hood. Suddenly you were just there, right in front of me, and—”
“It wa
s as much my fault as yours. I saw your headlights coming around the curve. I didn’t want to miss my last hope of getting a ride into town, so I started running full out. Gained too much momentum coming down the incline. Next thing I know, I’m not at the road, I’m in the road.”
“It was stupid of me to brake so hard.”
“Reflex,” he said with a dismissive shrug. “Anyway, don’t blame yourself. Maybe I was put in your path for a reason.”
“You probably saved my life. If I’d been alone, I would have stayed in the car and been frozen by morning.”
“Then it’s lucky I came along.”
“What were you doing up here on the peak on foot?”
He bent down and began tugging off his right boot. “Sightseeing.”
“Today?”
“I was hiking along the summit.”
“With a storm bearing down?”
“The mountains have a different kind of allure during the winter months.” He took off his second boot and tossed it aside, then began to massage his toes. “When I got ready to head back into town, my car wouldn’t start. Dead battery, I guess. Anyway, rather than follow the road and all those switchbacks, I decided to take a shortcut through the woods.”
“In the dark?”
“In hindsight, it wasn’t the smartest of decisions. But I would have been okay if the storm hadn’t moved in so quickly.”
“I miscalculated, too. Stupidly I fell asleep and . . .” She stopped when she noticed that he was blinking rapidly as though to ward off vertigo. “Are you about to pass out?”
“Maybe. This damn dizziness.”
She stood up and placed her hands on his shoulders. “Lean back, lay your head down.”
“If I pass out, wake me up. I shouldn’t go to sleep with a concussion.”
“I promise to keep you awake. Lie back.”
Still he resisted. “I’ll get blood on your couch.”
“I hardly think that matters, Mr. Tierney. Besides, it’s not my couch anymore.”
He relented and let her press him back until his head was resting on the cushion.