by Sandra Brown
“The problem was, well, sir, I didn’t serve in the military. I had no police training. To look at me, you wouldn’t immediately think that I would be a suitable candidate for the best criminal investigation agency in the world. I don’t fit the image most people have of a federal agent. I was afraid the bureau wouldn’t accept me unless and until I distinguished myself in some other way. I figured a law degree would help, and obviously it did.”
He glanced at Begley, who had been handpicked by the bureau because of his outstanding military service record, leadership qualities, and—most important—his set of brass balls. Their qualifications were so disparate it was laughable.
Begley was assessing him thoughtfully, although not harshly. Hoot thought that maybe, hopefully, he had passed muster in Begley’s estimation. That was no small thing. In fact, it was huge. It was the big bang of approval ratings.
“You asked me why Tierney takes women, sir. I was about to give you a correlation that may apply. From my first semester in law school, a classmate and I were in a dead heat to be top of our class. He looked like a young John Kennedy. Athletic. Charismatic. Dated a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model. In addition to all those attributes, he was brilliant. Positively brilliant.
“But he cheated. Rampantly. In just about every class, through every year of law school, he cribbed on every assignment and test. He wound up with a grade point a fraction higher than mine and graduated in the number one spot.”
“He was never caught?”
“No, sir.”
“That must have been difficult for you to stomach.”
“Not really, sir. He probably would have outscored me anyway. The point is, he didn’t need to cheat.”
“So why did he?”
“Law school didn’t present a challenge. Cheating and getting away with it did.”
Up ahead, Wes Hamer’s taillights blinked on once, twice, three times. Hoot took that as a signal that he would need to brake soon. He let up on the accelerator. Beyond Hamer the sanding truck’s brake lights came on, and with them, the right turn signal. Gently Hoot applied his brakes so he could slow down gradually.
Begley seemed oblivious to anything beyond the windshield. He was ruminating on Tierney’s motivation. “So here we have another overachiever who’s run out of challenges. He’s taking them to see if he can. But why these women? Why not—”
Suddenly he unbuckled his seat belt and turned toward the backseat, making Hoot awfully nervous. Reaching between the seats, Begley picked up the five file jackets containing the countless bureau forms and investigative information that Hoot had compiled for each missing persons case. Facing forward again, Begley stacked the files in his lap. Hoot breathed easier when he was buckled back into his seat.
“Last night, as I was wading through these files, I kept thinking I was reading the same story time and again,” Begley said. “I just now figured out why.”
“I’m not following, sir.” Hoot took the sedan into a careful turn. By following Hamer at a safe distance, he was able to roll to a stop, coming short of ramming into Hamer’s rear end when he braked. Ahead of Hamer, the sanding truck was laboring to get traction on the incline that rose sharply just beyond the turn.
Begley slapped his palm on the top file. The abrupt noise startled Hoot enough to make him jump. “These women had something in common, Hoot.”
“No one working the cases has found a common thread among the victims, sir. Not a place of employment, body type, background—”
“Neediness.”
Not sure he’d heard correctly, Hoot risked turning his head to look at Begley. “Sir?”
“They were all needy in one way or another. Millicent, we know, was anorexic, which is symptomatic of emotional and self-image problems, right?”
“That’s my understanding.”
Begley took them in descending order. “Before her was Carolyn Maddox. Single mother, working long hours to support her diabetic child. Laureen Elliott.” He opened her file and scanned the contents. “Ahh. Five feet three inches tall, two hundred forty pounds. She was overweight. I’ll bet if we investigate her, we’ll learn that her weight had been a lifetime problem, that she’d been on every fad diet ever invented.
“She was a nurse. Working in the medical profession, she was constantly reminded of the health risks associated with obesity. Maybe pressure had been placed on her to lose weight or lose her job.”
“I see where you’re going with this, sir.”
“Betsy Calhoun’s husband died of pancreatic cancer six months prior to her disappearance. They’d been married twenty-seven years. She was a homemaker. What does all that indicate to you, Hoot?”
“Uh . . .”
“Depression.”
“Of course.”
“Betsy Calhoun was married immediately after high school. She never worked outside the home. Her husband handled all their personal business. She probably never even signed a check until after he died. Suddenly she’s having to fend for herself, and besides that, she’s lost the love of her life, her reason for living.”
Begley was so wound up that Hoot didn’t have the heart to point out this was all conjecture. Conjecture based on sound logic, but still conjecture that wasn’t substantiated and would never hold up in a courtroom.
“This is key, Hoot,” Begley continued. “He hasn’t taken a woman who’s secure in her career, who’s in a solid romantic relationship, physically fit, or emotionally stable. Before they disappeared, all these women were dodging the slings and arrows, so to speak.
“One’s depressed, one’s obese, one’s working her fingers to the bone trying to make ends meet and keep her kid semihealthy, and one binges on junk food and makes herself puke. Then,” he said with a dramatic flair, “enter our perp. Gentle and understanding, compassionate and kind, and looking like fucking Prince Charming to boot.”
Warming to the theory, Hoot said, “He befriends them, wins their confidence and trust.”
“Gives them his broad shoulders to cry on and holds them in his strong, tanned arms.”
“His m.o. is to help needy women.”
“Not just help, Hoot, rescue. Deliver. Looking the way he does, being the rugged adventurer he is, he could get all the sex he wants, whenever he feels the urge. That may be a component, a fringe benefit, but what gets his pole up is being their savior.”
Then a thought occurred to Hoot that toppled the whole hypothesis. “We forgot Torrie Lambert. The first. She was a beautiful girl. Straight A student. Popular with her classmates. No major hang-ups or problems.
“Besides,” Hoot continued, “Blue didn’t seek her out. He stumbled across her when she left the group of hikers. He didn’t know she was going to be wandering alone in the woods that day. She was taken because she was available, not because she was needy.”
Frowning, Begley opened her file and began flipping through the contents. “What about the men in that group of hikers?”
“Present and accounted for the whole time she was missing. They were questioned at length. No one left the group except Torrie.”
“Why did she?”
“In interviews, Mrs. Lambert, Torrie’s mother, admitted that they’d had a row that morning. Nothing serious. Typical teenage angst and attitude. I would guess she resented being on vacation with her parents.”
“That’s precisely where Mrs. Begley and I are with our fifteen-year-old. We’re an embarrassment. She’s mortified if we acknowledge her in public.” He brooded on that a moment before continuing. “So Blue happens upon Torrie, who’s in a pissy, fifteen-year-old mood. He chats with her, sympathizes, takes her side against her mother, says he remembers what a pain in the ass parents can be . . .”
“And she’s his.”
“In a New York minute,” Begley said with finality. “Eventually she’ll start to feel uneasy with him and try to return to her parents. He asks her, why would you want to go back to them when I’m the friend you need? Creeped out by now, she tries to
get away. He loses his temper. She dies under his hands.
“Maybe it wasn’t his intention to kill her,” Begley continued. “Maybe things got out of hand and he didn’t realize until too late that she was no longer breathing. But all the same, whether he raped her or not, he got off on it.”
He closed his eyes as though following the actions and thought processes of the perpetrator. “Later, when he isn’t captured, and no one’s even looking at him as a suspect, he realizes how easy it was. Now he’s got a taste for it. Dominance is the ultimate ego trip. The quintessential rush is taking someone’s fate into your own hands, controlling her destiny.
“While he’s off ice climbing or some damn fool thing, he realizes it’s just not as thrilling as it used to be. The adrenaline isn’t pumping as it once did. He starts thinking about the high he derived from killing that girl, and suddenly he’s got a hard-on to do it again.
“He decides to return to Cleary and see what kind of aid he might render to some other needy female, see if he can recapture that particular exhilaration. He comes back here because the risk of capture is slim to none. He thinks the cops are hillbillies, not nearly as smart as he is. There are lots of places to hide, acres of wilderness in which to stash corpses. He likes it here. It’s the perfect place for his latest thrill-seeking pastime.”
By the time Begley concluded the imaginary scenario, he sounded angry. His eyes sprang open. “Why aren’t we moving?” Wiping the foggy windshield with his coat sleeve, he asked, “What the fuck’s taking so long?”
• • •
Inside the cab of the sanding truck, Dutch was rapidly losing patience. “You can do better than this, Cal.”
“I could if you’d stop yelling at me.” Hawkins sounded close to tears. “You’re making me nervous. How do you expect me to drive when you’re cussing me out with every breath? Forget what I said about your old lady, about if she wanted to be rescued. Didn’t mean to make you mad. I was just asking.”
“Lilly is my business.”
Hawkins mumbled something under his breath that sounded like “Not anymore, she ain’t,” but Dutch didn’t address it because, factually, Hawkins was right. Besides, they were approaching the road’s second hairpin curve, the one that they’d been unsuccessful navigating last night. He wanted Hawkins to give the switchback his undivided attention.
He downshifted, and as he did, Dutch noticed that the man’s hands were shaking. Maybe he should have allowed Hawkins one pull on a bottle of whiskey. From his own heavy drinking days, he knew that sometimes even a small hit could make all the difference between having the shakes and a steadier hand. But it was too late now. Hawkins went into the turn.
Or tried.
The front wheels followed the command of the steering wheel. They turned to the right. The truck didn’t. It continued going straight, heading unerringly for the drop-off, which Dutch knew was at least eighty feet.
“Turn it!”
“I’m trying!”
As the treetops loomed large in the windshield, Hawkins screamed and reflexively stamped the clutch and brake pedals, then let go of the steering wheel and crossed his forearms in front of his face.
Dutch was helpless to stop the momentum of the skid. The plow on the grille struck the guardrail, which crumpled and gave way to several tons of momentum. The front wheels went over the edge and seemed to hang there for several seconds before the rig tipped downward.
Dutch remembered the movie Duel, where during the climactic scene, an eighteen-wheeler went off a highway and plunged down a mountainside. The sequence had been filmed in slow motion. That was what this was like for him—watching and experiencing their inexorable descent in agonizingly slow motion.
Vision was a blur. Everything ran together. But the sounds had a stark clarity. The windshield shattering. Boulders knocking against the underside of the chassis. Breaking branches. Tearing metal. Hawkins’s terrified screams. His own animalistic roar of disbelief and defeat.
Actually, the trees probably saved their lives by slowing them down. Had the slope not been so heavily forested, their plunge would have been swifter and therefore deadly. After what seemed like an eternity, the rig came up against an immovable object with brain-rattling force. Inertia propelled them forward, although they went no further. The truck surrendered and came to a shuddering standstill.
Miraculously, Dutch’s brain hadn’t been instantly liquefied by the impact. He was sentient, and was surprised to realize that he was alive and basically unhurt. Apparently Hawkins had also survived. Dutch could hear him mewling pitiably.
Dutch unbuckled his seat belt and, putting his shoulder to the passenger-side door, shoved it open. He rolled out, landing several feet below, in snow that came almost to his waist after he struggled to his feet.
He tried to get his bearings but was blinded by the wind-driven snow that seemed to be aimed at his eyes. He couldn’t even see what had stopped the truck’s descent. All he could make out was a forest of black tree trunks against a field of white.
However, he didn’t have to see it.
He heard it.
He felt the vibration of it in the ground, in the trunk of the tree he had propped himself against for balance, in his balls.
He didn’t bother to shout a warning to Hawkins or try to pull him from the wreckage to safety. He didn’t attempt to run and save himself. Defeat had robbed him of initiative, immobilized him.
The futility of his life culminated in this single moment. He would just as soon die here and now because his hope of reaching Lilly had been crushed.
• • •
Wes watched in disbelief as the sanding rig disappeared over the ridge.
He leaped from his car and stood in the wedge of the open door, as though being outside would give him a clearer understanding of how this had happened.
He could hear the rig plowing its way down the slope. A tremendous crash was followed by what sounded like a metallic sigh, the truck’s death rattle. Following that was an eerie silence that was even more horrific. The hush was so absolute, Wes could hear snowflakes striking his clothing.
The quiet was broken by Begley and Wise, who approached as quickly as the slippery incline of the road would allow. Their vehicle had been far enough behind Wes’s that they hadn’t had his vantage point. Begley reached him first, huffing and emitting plumes of vapor from his mouth. “What happened?”
“They went over.”
“Holy shit.”
Begley didn’t even chide Hoot for his whispered expletive. Because at that moment the three of them heard another sound, one which they couldn’t identify but which they knew portended a continuation of the disaster.
They traded mystified looks.
Later they determined that what they’d heard was the splintering of wood. Trees that three grown men couldn’t reach around had been snapped as easily as toothpicks. At the time, they couldn’t see it happening because of the whiteout.
Speaking for all of them, Wes said, “What the hell is that?”
Then they saw it, dropping out of the low clouds, snow, and fog, destined for earth like a landing spacecraft with its red warning lights still flashing. The power line tower struck the ground with such force that even the deep snow didn’t cushion it. Later, Wes swore to those to whom he gave an account of the bizarre event that the repercussion caused his car to bounce off all four tires.
He and the two FBI agents stood in speechless awe for several moments, unable to absorb what they’d just witnessed, unable to believe that they’d survived. Had the tower fallen thirty yards closer, it would have crashed on top of them.
Dutch’s fate was unknown. Wes could only hope that he and Hawkins had survived. But the other casualty was Mountain Laurel Road. It was now blocked by tons of steel and forest debris that formed a barricade two stories high and almost that wide. No one could go up that road now.
It was equally impassable to anyone hoping to come down.
CHAPTER
LILLY ADDED A STICK OF FIREWOOD TO THOSE smoldering on the grate. She’d been stingy with them, adding one at a time, and only when necessary to keep the fire alive.
Despite her frugality, the wood supply she’d carried in earlier had dwindled to a few chunks, which she’d hacked off the larger logs. If the wood continued to burn at this rate, she might have enough for another two hours.
What she would do when it ran out, she didn’t know. Even inside the cabin, without a fire she would probably freeze during the coming night. She desperately needed the fire to survive. But—and here was the irony—the exertion of carrying in more firewood would likely kill her.
“Lilly?”
She rolled her lips inward and squeezed her eyes shut, wishing she could close off her ears as effectively. His voice was too persuasive, his arguments too reasonable. If she let them sway her, she could become victim number six.
Arguing with him was exhausting. They went round and round, getting nowhere. She wasn’t going to release him; he had an arsenal of arguments for why she should. And then there was her wheezing. Talking exacerbated it, so she had stopped answering him altogether.
“Lilly, say something. If you’re still conscious, I know you can hear me.”
His tone had developed an angry edge, sharpened by her refusal to respond. She left her place near the fireplace and went to the living room window, glancing into the open bedroom door as she walked past. “Why don’t you be quiet?”
She pushed aside the drapery and looked out, hoping to see that the snowfall had abated. Far from it. It was so thick she could see only a few yards beyond the porch overhang. The mountain peak had become an alien landscape, white and soundless and separate.
“Has it slowed down any?”
Shaking her head, she turned from the window and hugged her elbows for warmth. Moving away from the fireplace for even a brief time had allowed the cold to penetrate through her layers of clothing. She had put on every pair of socks she had with her, but her feet remained cold. She would have blown on her hands for warmth, but she couldn’t spare the breath.