by Sandra Brown
Begley dodged that by asking, “Did Millicent ever talk about him?”
“She’d mentioned him.”
“In what context?”
“Down at my brother’s store, where she works, they have this bulletin board. Somebody catches a big fish with a rod they bought there, or bags a deer with a rifle my brother sold, they bring him a picture of it, and he puts it on his bulletin board. Sorta like free advertising.
“So, naturally, Tierney’s articles are tacked up there, too. He’s by far their most famous customer. I think Millicent looks on him as a celebrity, him being in the magazines and all. She got excited every time he came into the store. Maybe she has a teenage crush on him.”
“Did she ever see him outside the store?” Wise asked.
“Not that we know of. But now we’re beginning to wonder. Pretty young girl like Millicent, with stars in her eyes over some older fellow . . .” Gunn cut a worried glance toward his wife, who was sniffing into a handkerchief. “You get my drift.” He coughed behind his hand. “Have y’all connected him to any of the other women who’re missing?”
“A colleague in the Charlotte office is working on that,” Wise said.
“I apologize in advance for the bluntness of the questions I’m about to put to you,” Begley said to the girl’s parents. “Diplomacy takes time, and none of us wants to waste it, do we?”
“No, sir. Ask away. Enough time’s been wasted already.”
Dutch ignored the critical glance Ernie Gunn shot him.
“What caused Millicent’s eating disorder?” Begley asked. “Was that ever determined?”
“Peer pressure, we think,” Mr. Gunn said, speaking for both of them. “You know how girls are about their weight.”
Begley smiled. “I’ve got a teenage daughter, a bit younger than Millicent, worries that she’s too fat, and she weighs maybe one ten.”
“Millicent got down to eighty-seven pounds,” Mrs. Gunn said feebly. “That was her lowest. That’s when we intervened.”
At Begley’s request, they gave him an account of her illness and alleged recovery.
“She’s doing good,” Mr. Gunn concluded. “Oh, sure, she might’ve dropped another couple pounds, but that’s due to her cheerleading workouts. We’re almost positive she isn’t forcing herself to vomit. She’s over that.”
Dutch wasn’t so sure, and he could tell that Wise and Begley weren’t either.
“What about boyfriends?” Begley asked.
“She has them. Off and on. You know. Typical kids. She falls in and out of love as regular as she changes her hairdo,” Mr. Gunn said.
“No steady boyfriend?”
“Not since Scott.”
Dutch reacted with a start, which the agents noticed. They looked at him curiously, then turned back to the Gunns.
“Scott who?” Wise asked.
“Hamer,” Mr. Gunn supplied. “Wes’s boy. He and Millicent went steady all last year, although that’s not what they call it these days. They were ‘together,’ ” he said with a snort of disdain for the term.
“Were?” Wise said.
“They broke up right before school was out last spring.”
“Do you know why?”
Mr. Gunn shrugged. “Got tired of each other, I reckon.”
“No, honey,” Mrs. Gunn chimed in. “Something happened that caused them to break up. I always thought so.”
Begley leaned forward. “Like what, Mrs. Gunn?”
“I don’t know. Millicent never told me. Hard as I tried to get her to talk about it, she wouldn’t and still won’t. Eventually I stopped asking because it made her upset, and she’d stop eating. I was more worried about her starving herself than I was about her boyfriend trouble.”
If she had shouted that the two problems were related, it couldn’t have been any more obvious to either Dutch or the FBI agents.
Wise was the first to break the ensuing silence. “I found nothing in her diary about Scott Hamer or their breakup.”
“She only started keeping her diary since she left the hospital. It’s part of her ongoing therapy,” Mr. Gunn explained. “The psychologist said she should start writing stuff down. Positive things.” His mouth became a hard, rigid line. “Guess she thinks Ben Tierney is a good thing.”
“At this point we have no reason to think otherwise, Mr. Gunn,” Begley cautioned, his tone more stern now than before.
“You think what you want, Mr. Begley.” Gunn stood up and extended his hand to his wife to help her from her chair. “I’m putting my money on him. I’ve known everybody in Cleary and the three neighboring counties all my life. I can’t think of anybody who could do such a thing as to cause five women to disappear. It’s gotta be an outsider, but somebody who knows his way around these parts, and has the initials B.T. Mr. Ben Tierney fits the bill on all counts.”
CHAPTER
21
THERE’S A KNACK TO IT,” WILLIAM SAID.
“Not everyone can do it.”
“I think I can handle it. I mean, how hard can it be?”
William resented Wes Hamer’s condescending tone. Just because he was the superstud football coach didn’t mean he had a talent for giving injections. “I’ll stop by your house on my way home and—”
“I can do it, Ritt.”
William also hated to be called Ritt. Wes had been calling him Ritt ever since they were in grade school. He’d been a bully then, and he was still a bully. They were the same age, yet he addressed William with no more respect than he would talk to one of his students, and that rankled.
William had a good mind to take back the package of syringes and the small sack containing several days’ supply of vials. But he didn’t. Being Wes’s supplier gave him definite leverage, which he enjoyed immensely.
“What’s that?”
Marilee’s sudden appearance in the stockroom startled them both. Wes was the first to recover. He pocketed the goods in his overcoat pocket and gave her one of his killer smiles. “Ready for me?”
William’s sister responded to Wes’s suggestive question with a simper. Just like every other woman who was exposed to his insinuating smile, she was instantly transformed into a twit.
“I came to remind you that I can’t toast the bread because the power is out,” she said to Wes. “Linda always makes pimiento cheese sandwiches on toasted bread.”
“Everyone will understand.”
“Sweet pickles or dill?”
“Half and half.”
“Fritos or potato chips?”
“Half and half.”
“Give me five more minutes.”
She left them. Wes turned back to William and patted his coat pocket. “How much do I owe you for this?”
“I’ll put it on your bill.”
“Don’t itemize it.”
“As if I’d be that careless. Now, you said Dutch needs something for his face?”
Wes explained the cuts, and William gave him a tube of antiseptic salve, a free sample from the drug company. “This should keep them from becoming infected. If it doesn’t work, I’ve got something stronger.”
Wes read the label. “One of these days, you’re gonna get busted for handing out prescription drugs without a doctor’s authorization.”
“Oh, I doubt that. Who’s going to tell?” William asked guilelessly.
Wes laughed. “I guess you’re right.”
William motioned him out of the stockroom. As they walked through the shadowed store, Wes gave him an update on the morning’s events. “It’s a wonder both of them weren’t squashed to death. We had to send a stretcher down by rope. Dutch strapped Hawkins to it. Never heard such screaming from a grown man as when we pulled him up. Poor bastard’s not doing very well.
“Physically, Dutch is okay but fit to be tied because Lilly’s still up there with Tierney. Then there are the FBI guys. Buttinskis in topcoats. In addition to his personal problems, Dutch is having to cope with them as well as Millicent’s parents.”
>
“What’s the latest on the investigation?”
“I can tell you that.” Marilee turned as they approached the counter of the soda fountain, where she was wrapping sandwiches. She nodded toward the battery-operated radio that was tuned to the local station. “It was just reported that the FBI has identified Blue to be Ben Tierney.”
• • •
Tierney was weaker than he ever remembered being.
He was light-headed, partially from hunger, partially from the concussion. His injuries continued a relentless assault of sharp, stabbing pains or dull, throbbing aches. He clenched his jaws so tightly against the cold that he felt the pressure in the roots of his teeth.
There was no help for any of these adversities. In order to survive, he would be relying on sheer determination.
Unfortunately, self-will had no effect on the snowfall. It obscured the demarcation between earth and sky. It absorbed landmarks. He was trapped in a sphere of infinite white. Without a horizon for reference, he could easily become disoriented and hopelessly lost.
Nevertheless, he plowed on, wading through snow that, in places, came past his knees. Before leaving the vicinity of the cabin, he had made a brief stop at the toolshed to get a snow shovel he’d seen there. It helped somewhat to clear a path, but mostly he used his body to bulldoze through the drifts. The shovel became a walking stick to help support him when vertigo threatened to hurl him to the ground.
Even in the most extreme circumstances, habits die hard. Stubbornly, perhaps foolishly, he took a shortcut to avoid a switchback, knowing that eventually he would reach the road and would have saved himself several hundred yards. But in the forest were potential hazards he couldn’t see. He was bushwhacked by boulders, fallen trees, and stumps, buried under two feet of snow. Roots became snares that caused him to stumble and fall.
Breaking an ankle or leg, falling into a crevasse he couldn’t climb out of, or getting lost in this snow globe environment would mean death. If he paused to consider the life-threatening risks, he would stop, turn around, go back, so he willed himself to concentrate only on taking one step at a time, on pulling his foot from the well in the snow it had just created and planting it ahead of him to form another.
He didn’t allow himself to dwell on the cold, either, although it was impossible to ignore. His clothing was a joke for its inadequacy. When he left the lodge yesterday morning, he’d been dressed for a cold day spent outdoors—coat, scarf, cap. But today the concept of cold had been taken to another dimension. The temperature, he guessed, was in the single digits. Factoring in the windchill, it was fifteen to twenty degrees below zero. He’d never been exposed to anything like it. Never. Not in all his travels.
His respiration and pulse rate soon reached dangerous levels. His heart felt like a balloon on the verge of bursting. Common sense dictated that he stop and rest. He didn’t dare. If he stopped, even for a moment, he knew he would probably never move again.
Eventually his frozen body would be found. And along with it, his backpack. They would find the ribbon. The handcuffs.
Lilly would be discovered dead in the cabin.
A search of the entire area would ensue. One shocking discovery would lead to another. His abandoned car would yield the incriminating shovel in the trunk. Ultimately they would find the graves.
Tierney pushed on.
His eyelashes became encrusted by snowflakes that froze in place, causing temporary blindness that was annoying as well as dangerous. The condensation of his breath froze on the woolen scarf, making it stiff with ice crystals.
Beneath his clothing, he was sweating from the exertion. He could feel trickles of perspiration rolling down his torso where the injured ribs on his left side ached from Lilly’s well-placed elbow jab.
Ordinarily his innate sense of direction was as reliable as a compass. But when he paused only long enough to check his wristwatch, he began to fear that his sixth sense had failed him. Even considering the terrain he’d had to walk over, surely he should have bypassed the first switchback and reached the road by now.
He looked around in the vain hope of getting his bearings, but in the maelstrom of snow, one tree looked exactly like another. Natural signposts like rock formations and rotten stumps were blanketed by the accumulation. The only thing marring the otherwise pristine snowscape was the track he’d made in it.
His conscious mind was telling him that his sense of direction was fallible, that he could have become confused and was moving in circles. But his gut instinct overrode it, insisting that he was still on course, that his only miscalculation was in how far he needed to go to bypass the switchback and reach the road.
He had relied on that instinct too many times to start mistrusting it now. Ducking his head against the wind, he plodded on, assuring himself that if he continued on his present path, just a little farther, he would soon find the road.
He did.
Not quite the way he expected.
He landed on it after a nine-foot plunge through thin air.
His right foot found it first. With the impetus of a pile driver, it tunneled through twenty inches of snow, striking the icy pavement below with enough force to cause him to scream.
• • •
After announcing to Begley, Hoot, and Burton that he considered Ben Tierney their culprit, Ernie Gunn had nothing more to say. Without another word, he resolutely escorted his wife to the door. Their departure created a vacuum in Chief Burton’s cramped office.
Begley broke the uneasy silence. “We need to talk to that Hamer kid.”
Hoot had predicted that would be Begley’s next step. “It’ll be interesting to feel his pulse about Millicent’s disappearance.”
“Hold on a minute,” Burton said. “‘Feel his pulse’? Scott and the girl were sweethearts a year ago, so what?”
“So, we want to talk to him. You object?” Begley’s nutcracker dared Burton to put up an argument.
“I’d like to notify Wes first.”
“Why?” Hoot asked.
“This is a criminal investigation,” Begley said. “Anybody is fair game, I don’t care who his daddy is.”
“Well, that’s where we’re different,” Burton said belligerently. “We can’t just show up on their doorstep and start asking questions about Scott’s relationship with a missing girl.”
Begley actually laughed. “Why the hell not?”
“Because,” Burton replied tightly, “that’s not the way we do things around here.”
“Well, the way you do things around here hasn’t found those women, has it?” Burton’s lacerated face turned even redder, but Begley held up his hand to stave off whatever it was the police chief was going to say. “All right, all right. Simmer down. Never let it be said that the FBI violates local etiquette. Isn’t Hamer bringing some sandwiches back for our lunch?”
“Yeah.”
“When he gets here, tell him that we want to talk to Scott. Don’t go into details, just say we’ve got some questions for him. We’ll head over to their place after we’ve eaten.”
Without so much as a nod, Burton stamped out.
“They’re good friends,” Hoot said after the chief of police was out of earshot.
“We’ll have to keep that in mind.”
Having said that, Begley requested some “quiet time.” As Hoot was pulling the door closed, he saw the SAC reaching for his Bible.
In the anteroom, Hoot ignored Burton’s jaundiced glance and asked the dispatcher for a working telephone line. He placed a call to Perkins in Charlotte but got his voice mail. In a succinct message, he told his associate about the power outage and the unreliable cellular service.
“If you can’t reach me by phone here at the police station, call my pager and punch in three, three, three. That’ll signal me to check my laptop for an e-mail.”
As he was hanging up, Wes Hamer came in carrying a box full of wrapped sandwiches. But lunch was superseded by his news of what was being broadcast over local
radio. Hoot said, “You can’t be serious.”
“As death and taxes,” Wes said somberly. “Want me to drive over and tell them to cool it?”
“The horse is out of the barn,” Dutch said, answering for Hoot. “Won’t do any good to close the door now.”
To Hoot’s mind, Burton didn’t appear to be too upset over the untimely broadcast of Tierney’s name. In fact, he seemed secretly pleased. SAC Begley, by contrast, was going to go ballistic, and it was Hoot’s misfortune to be the one who had to inform him of the fiasco.
He got as many details as he felt were necessary, then left the others with the sandwiches and went down the hall to the private office. He knocked lightly on the closed door. “Sir?”
“Come in, Hoot.” Begley finished reading a passage of scripture, then closed his large Bible and waved Hoot inside. “Is lunch here? I’m starving.”
Hoot closed the door. Wasting no words on a preamble, he gave Begley the news straight out.
The SAC banged his fist on the desk and surged to his feet. He spattered the walls with shouted obscenities. Hoot remained judiciously silent until the eruption had subsided to a slow boil. “Sir, the only good thing is that the station’s listening audience is small, and only those who have battery-operated radios are tuned in today.”
Hoot recounted the information he’d gotten from Dutch and Wes. “The two deejays—for lack of a better word—are local men. They retired from the forestry service a few years ago and, for something to do, began broadcasting a local news program, like a community bulletin board, each Saturday morning. It went over well and was expanded to seven days a week. They’re on the air from six A.M. till six P.M., and most of their programming is chatter.”
“They enjoy the sound of their own voices.”
“Evidently. They play music, mostly country, and give weather reports and news, but basically they’re glorified gossips. It’s a very unsophisticated operation. They broadcast from a room in the Elks’ lodge, but they have an emergency generator, so they’ve been able to stay on the air in spite of the power outage.”