by Sandra Brown
Tierney hadn’t complained of being cold. His strenuous efforts to escape the handcuffs were keeping him warm. Apparently he had decided that escape was worth having raw, bleeding wrists after all. He hadn’t even tried to cover the sounds. She’d heard the continual clank of metal against metal, the thumping of the headboard against the wall, and curses of sheer frustration when the cuffs refused to give.
“How’s the firewood situation?” he asked.
“Okay for now.”
“For now. What about later? An hour from now?”
She stepped into the open doorway. “I’ll worry about it when I need to.”
“When you need to, it will be too late for worry.”
He had vocalized her worst fear, so she didn’t waste breath on a contradiction. “Would you like . . . another blanket . . . over your legs?” She was forced to pause between phrases to gasp for breath.
“When did you take the last dose of your medication?”
“My pill?” she wheezed. “Yesterday morning.”
“You don’t sound so sure.”
God, could he read her mind?
Truth was, she couldn’t remember taking her pill yesterday morning. Thinking back over the day, she couldn’t isolate a memory of taking her medication.
She’d had several errands in town. She had gone to the local moving company to purchase some packing boxes. After that, she remembered stopping at an ATM to withdraw cash for her trip back to Atlanta.
Her final stop before returning to the cabin had been at the pharmacy. She had taken her last pill the night before. Luckily, when she started visiting Cleary on a regular basis, she’d had a local doctor write her a prescription for theophylline, the drug she took to help prevent asthma attacks. The extra prescription was a safeguard, so she would never be caught without.
Yesterday William Ritt had filled the prescription for her. From there her memory got hazy. She couldn’t remember if she had taken the tablet when she stopped at the soda fountain to buy a vanilla Coke from Linda Wexler, or if she had waited to take it once she reached the cabin.
Surely she hadn’t forgotten to take it. She never failed to take her medication. It was part of her daily routine. However, yesterday had been an unusual day, and not only in terms of her schedule. Dutch had placed her on an emotional seesaw.
He was waiting for her when she returned to the cabin. He was sitting on the edge of the sofa, staring into near space, shoulders hunched, looking forlorn. His greeting had been “How could you do this to me?”
In view of the events that had followed, taking her medication might have slipped her mind.
“Lilly, are you sure you took it yesterday?”
She refocused on Tierney. “Of course I’m sure,” she lied.
“But it’s been over twenty-four hours.”
Or thirty-six.
“It’s worn off,” he said. “You’re in distress.”
“Well, that happens . . . when you discover . . . you’re trapped with a . . . serial killer.”
“You know I’m not a killer. Unlock the handcuffs. I’ll go get your medication.”
She shook her head.
“You’re running out of time.”
“We could be rescued—”
“Nobody’s coming up that mountain road until at least tomorrow. Probably not even then. And if you’re counting on some Rambo-type helicopter rescue, think again. Not even the bravest pilot is going to take one up in this storm and risk being slapped down by these winds or crashing into a mountain he can’t see.”
“Somehow . . .”
“It is not going to happen,” he said with mounting asperity. “You may be willing to gamble with your life, but I’m not. Get the key.”
“They could come . . . on foot.”
“No one’s that crazy.”
“Except you.”
That silenced him, but only for several seconds. “Right. Except me. I’d take any risk to keep you alive. I don’t want you to die, Lilly.”
“I don’t . . . much like . . . the idea . . . myself.”
“Let me go.”
“Can’t.”
His lips flattened with anger. “Let me tell you what you can’t do. You can’t afford to keep me chained to this goddamn bed. Every second spent arguing about it uses time and breath that you don’t have. Now get the key and unlock these—”
“No!”
“—fucking handcuffs!”
The lights went out.
• • •
Dora Hamer approached the closed door to Scott’s bedroom. It seemed ominously silent in the house without his stereo system vibrating the walls. She knocked twice. “Scott, are you okay?”
He opened the door as though he’d been expecting her. “Fine, except for the electricity going out.”
“I think it went out all over town. I don’t see any lights in our neighbors’ windows. Are you warm enough in here?”
“I put on an extra sweater.”
“That may help for a while, but it’s not going to take long for the house to get cold. Until the power comes back on, we’ll have to rely on the fireplace for heat. Would you bring in some more wood from the garage, please?”
“Sure, Mom.”
“And get the lantern you and your dad take on camping trips. Do we have fuel for it?”
“I think so. I’ll check.”
He disappeared down the hall. Dora followed him part of the way before hastily retracing her footsteps back into his bedroom. The college application forms were scattered across his desk. She didn’t take the time to read them, but a glance showed her that he’d been working on them as Wes had mandated.
Quickly she moved to the nearest window and checked to see that the alarm system detector was intact. Two magnets, one on the window frame, the other on the jamb, formed a connection which, if broken, would trigger the alarm whenever it was set. The components were aligned as they should be. The same was true of the second window she checked.
Not wanting to be caught snooping, she paused to listen. She could hear Scott stacking logs in the open space in the rock wall of the living room fireplace. She heard him dusting off his hands as he headed back to the garage for another armload.
She went to the third window. Two magnets were making the required connection, all right. But the one on the window jamb was an ordinary magnet, a kid’s toy. It had been used to replace the missing connector and positioned so that no connection would be broken if the window was opened.
“Mom?”
When he called to her, Dora jumped as though she were the guilty party. She hurried from his bedroom, hoping she looked more composed than she felt when she joined him in the living room.
“Should I stack some wood up here on the hearth?” he asked.
“Good idea. It’ll save you the trouble of going for more later.”
“Okay. Want me to light the lantern?”
“Let’s reserve it for nighttime.”
“The kerosene can is practically full. I’ll leave it and the lantern in the kitchen.”
“Fine. I’ve got candles to use until dark. And there are plenty of batteries for flashlights.”
She followed him as far as the kitchen, where he disappeared through the door to the garage. She wanted to go after him, place her arms around him, and hug him close. Wes accused her of babying him. Well, so what? Scott was her baby. If she lived to see him become a very old man, he would still be her baby and she would want to protect him.
Something was going on with him, and whatever it was, it terrified her. “Worried sick” wasn’t merely a figure of speech. After the discovery she’d made in his bedroom, she was nauseated with worry.
He had rigged the alarm detector on his bedroom window not to go off when he sneaked out. What other explanation could there be for his tampering with it? How long had this been going on? Was she blind, deaf, and dumb not to have known that he was leaving the house?
It was by accident that she had com
e even to suspect it. She’d been delivering fresh laundry to his room this morning when she noticed his boots on the floor beside his bed.
They were waterproof, fleece lined, perfect footwear for a snowstorm. But Scott hadn’t been wearing them yesterday when he and Wes came home for dinner. Ostensibly, Scott hadn’t left the house since then.
But there were his boots, standing in small puddles of water formed on his bedroom floor as the snow melted off them. It had been on the tip of her tongue to ask him when he had gone out, but she’d stopped herself.
She’d decided she should be armed with some kind of backup evidence before accusing him of sneaking out. The power outage had provided her with an opportunity to investigate.
However, now that she could confront him with the disabled alarm system, she was reluctant—or too cowardly—to do so. He was certainly old enough to come and go as he pleased. Wes imposed a curfew on him, but if Scott wanted to leave the house, there was little Wes could do to stop him short of physically restraining him.
So why didn’t he defy Wes and simply walk out the door? Why was he sneaking out? It was symptomatic of other changes in him. Her sweet, considerate, and easygoing Scott had turned sullen, even prone to outbursts of temper. He was withdrawn, hostile, and unpredictable.
Because of the unrelenting pressure Wes placed on him, performance anxiety must be partially responsible. But knowing her son as she did, Dora feared that these personality changes were being caused by something even more consequential than Wes’s badgering. Scott was no longer himself, and she wanted to know why.
Mentally she traced back over the past year, trying to determine when she began noticing these changes.
Last spring.
About the time—
Everything inside Dora went terribly still.
Scott began to change about the time he and Millicent Gunn stopped seeing each other.
When the telephone rang, she nearly jumped out of her skin.
“I’ll get it,” Scott said. “It’s probably Gary.” He had just come in from the garage. Setting the Coleman lantern on the kitchen table, he reached for the phone. It was the old-fashioned kind of wall phone, without caller ID or anything else that required electricity to be operable.
“Oh, hi, Dad.” Scott listened for several seconds, then said, “How come? Okay, she’s right here.” He passed the phone to Dora. “He’s calling from the hospital.”
• • •
Begley wasn’t feeling too kindly toward Dutch Burton. In fact, he would have liked to plant his size eleven foot in Burton’s anus. He settled for speaking candidly. “Your face looks like raw hamburger.”
“They’re only superficial cuts.” The police chief was sitting on the end of the examination table, his posture that of a fifty-pound potato sack that was only three quarters full. “The doc picked out the glass slivers. I’m waiting for the nurse to come back with some antiseptic stuff to put on them. It may not be pretty, but I’ll be okay.”
“Better than Hawkins. He’s got a broken arm, which is a clean break. They popped his dislocated shoulder back in. But his anklebones are going to take some work. Both are splintered all to hell.”
“Wish it was his skull,” Burton muttered.
“Mr. Hawkins was intoxicated,” Hoot said from where he stood just inside the privacy curtain that divided the treatment areas in the community hospital’s ER. From the other side of the yellow fabric, they could hear Cal Hawkins moaning. “His blood-alcohol ratio was well over the legal limit.”
“Then he lied to me,” Burton said defensively. “I asked him if he’d been drinking, but he said—”
Begley cut him off. “I think you hear only what you want to hear.”
Burton glared at him.
“Reconstructing his ankles is going to require delicate surgery,” Hoot said. “They can’t do it here. Because of the weather, it could be several days before he can be transported to a hospital that has an orthopedic surgical team. In the meantime, he’s in misery.”
“Look,” Burton said angrily, “it’s not my fault the guy’s a drunk.”
“He couldn’t have driven up that road stone fucking sober,” Begley roared. “Thanks to you, the whole damn countryside is without electricity. You’re lucky this hospital’s got an emergency generator or you’d be sitting here in the cold and dark, looking like a freak show with hunks of glass sticking out of your face.”
Hawkins’s rig had collided with one of the tower’s four supports. In ordinary circumstances, it probably could have withstood the damage. But with the weight of the ice and snow making it top-heavy, it had toppled, taking dozens of ageless trees and a network of power lines with it. Worse, it had fallen across the mountain road, blocking access to the peak.
Dutch Burton had let his emotions outweigh his judgment. Unacceptable behavior for any man, but unforgivable for a public servant. His jealousy-inspired determination to get up the mountain road today had been irrational and dangerous, and had resulted in numerous casualties: Hawkins was probably crippled for life; the sanding truck was out of commission during one of the worst storms in decades; and the power outage extended into several surrounding counties.
All that was catastrophic.
But what really chapped Begley was that Burton’s idiocy had eliminated any possibility of going after Tierney. He couldn’t even attempt it again until the mess on that road was cleared, which could take weeks, or until the weather broke enough for a chopper to take him to the summit. Either way, valuable time had been squandered. Wasted time was not just one of Begley’s pet peeves; he considered it a sin.
His consolation was that he wasn’t the only one hamstrung by the situation. Ben Tierney couldn’t go anywhere, either.
“Excuse me? Chief?” Harris, the young cop they’d met earlier at the lodge, poked his head around the privacy curtain.
“What is it?”
“Dispatch called my radio. Mr. and Mrs. Gunn are at headquarters.”
“Shit,” Burton hissed. “They’re all I need. Tell whoever’s there to tell them that I’m in the hospital, to go home, and I’ll get over to see them as soon as I can.”
“He already tried that,” Harris said. “Didn’t budge them. Because it’s not you they want to talk to. It’s . . .” He nodded in Begley’s general direction. “They want to know is it true that Ben Tierney is Blue.”
Begley saw red. He managed to keep his volume at a reasonable level, but his voice vibrated with fury. “I hope you’re joking.”
“No, sir.”
Begley advanced on the young cop. “Who told them? Who told them we were interested in Tierney? If it was you, Officer Harris, I’ll pin your badge to your scrotum and weld it shut.”
“Wasn’t me, sir. I swear. It was Gus Elmer. The old man out at the lodge?”
“We told him not to mention our investigation to anyone,” Hoot said.
“I don’t think he meant to,” Harris said. “He didn’t talk to the Gunns directly. He called his cousin to check on her, see how she was faring the storm on account of her stove has a faulty flue? And he sort of let it slip.”
“Let it slip?”
Begley’s bellow roused Hawkins from his drug-induced stupor, and he groaned loudly. Harris took a cautious step back. “His cousin does Mrs. Gunn’s ironing,” he explained, sounding apologetic. “I guess she felt she owed it to them to, you know, to tell . . .” He stammered, then fell silent beneath Begley’s stare.
“Who else does Mr. Elmer’s cousin do ironing for?” His sarcasm escaped Harris. While the cop was pondering his answer, he turned to Dutch Burton. “I’d like to use your office for this interview with the Gunns.”
“Fine, but I’m coming, too.”
“What about your face?”
“I’ve got some cream I can put on it.”
They trooped out. Begley glanced at Cal Hawkins as he passed his bed. Hooked up to IVs, he’d lapsed into unconsciousness. Despite defending him to Burton, he didn�
�t have any sympathy for the man.
Once they were in their car and under way, Hoot said, “I thought you planned on talking to the Gunns anyway, sir.”
“I was going to call on them as soon as we left the hospital.”
“They why did you get so upset in there?”
“I hoped to scare them into believing how important it is that we keep a lid on this investigation. We need to have Tierney in custody before too many locals learn that we’re even looking at him.”
“You see how fast gossip travels.”
“That’s what worries me, Hoot. If we don’t pick Tierney up soon, I’m afraid a band of Bubbas, led by the chief of police himself, will assume he’s Blue and take matters into their own hands. Righteous indignation beats the law of the land every goddamn time in situations like this.
“These good ol’ boys, out to protect their womenfolk, may revert to the unwritten law of the hills. If they got to Tierney before we did, he’d be lucky if his rights were read to him as he lay drowning in his own blood. And wouldn’t that be a party and a half? The media would have a field day. They’d harken back to Ruby Ridge and Waco. The gun control fanatics would be all over it. We’d be left with one hell of a clusterfuck.”
“And many unanswered questions.”
“Precisely. Like where to find the five bodies.”
They drove in silence for a moment, then Hoot said, “You said you’re afraid they’ll go after Tierney, assuming he’s Blue. What if he isn’t?”
Begley frowned. “That’s another thing I’m afraid of.”
CHAPTER
20
TO RETAIN HEAT INSIDE THE CABIN, ALL THE draperies had been kept drawn. When the lights went out, the bedroom was plunged into darkness.
“That was inevitable,” Tierney said.
Lilly gave her eyes a few seconds to adjust, then went to the windows and pushed back one of the drapes. The premature gloaming outside provided Tierney with a fresh argument.
“It’ll be full darkness by midafternoon,” he said. “Which means there are only a couple hours of daylight left. It’ll take me at least that long to get to the car and back if I leave now.”