Chill of Fear

by Kay Hooper

  The silent redhead moved suddenly, leaving her chair and coming to join Cullen on the sofa. Her face was pale, those green eyes anxious, and when he turned his head to meet her gaze, Cullen felt an instant, surprising certainty.

  So that’s it. That’s why she’s here. He felt his heartbeat quicken and had to fight once again to remain calm.

  “Are you sure about that?” she asked unsteadily. “Sure she had been abducted from her real parents?”

  “Sure enough.”

  The fed said, “Missy never said a word to even hint that Laura might not be her real mother.”

  Cullen managed a shrug. “She wasn’t but about two when Laura took her. By the time you came here that summer, I imagine she’d forgotten she belonged anywhere else.”

  The fed’s eyes narrowed. “You remember me?”

  “Of course I remember you. You could ride any horse we had, even the mean ones, and you didn’t mind grooming them afterward. Not such an arrogant little shit as most of ’em were. And I’m thinking you were the one the others followed that summer. The bunch of you spent more time down at the stables than anywhere else.” Cullen shrugged again. “And left Missy to play alone, more often than not.”

  He half expected to get a rise out of the fed with that one, but it was clear the younger man had been a cop too long to let something like that get to him. Then again, maybe he just knew Cullen had said it deliberately.

  “Yeah, she didn’t care for horses. Which makes me wonder how you spent any time with her.”

  “I’m wondering something else,” McDaniel said suddenly in the slightly-too-loud tone of a man who’d been forcing himself to be silent against his will. “I’m wondering why in hell you didn’t say a word after she was murdered about Missy having been abducted. Didn’t it occur to you that it might be important information?”

  Cullen looked at him and, coolly, said, “Fact is, I did say something about it. To the chief of police. And signed my statement, all right and proper. So they knew then. They knew Missy was a stolen child.”

  It was nearly midnight when Nate hung up the phone in the lounge and turned to face Quentin. “Well, the chief isn’t happy with me. I woke him up.”

  “How can he possibly sleep with all this going on?” Stephanie demanded. She had come into the room as Cullen was leaving, and had been filled in by the others.

  “Easily. He’s six months away from retirement.”

  Keeping to the point, Quentin asked, “What about Ruppe’s statement?”

  “The chief denied it ever happened.” Nate sighed heavily. “But either you’ve infected me with your conspiracy theories and I imagined it, or he was badly rattled by my question.”

  “Which do you believe? Gut instinct.”

  “He was rattled. If I were a betting man, I’d bet that Cullen Ruppe made exactly the statement he says he made—and for some reason that statement and any information supporting it were expunged from the record.”

  “Why on earth would they have done that?” Stephanie asked.

  “Secrets,” Diana said. She was still sitting on the sofa where she had earlier gone to join Cullen. “Someone wanted the secret of Missy’s abduction kept under wraps.”

  Frowning, Stephanie said, “I suppose someone connected with The Lodge might have wanted that. I mean, if Laura Turner was unbalanced enough to have stolen a child, her living here all those years didn’t exactly reflect well on whoever had hired her. But to suppress a statement . . . even if it had nothing to do with Missy’s murder, the information in that statement was important to the investigation. It must have taken a pretty big stick or a hell of a carrot to persuade the chief to bury it.”

  “My father could have done it.”

  They all looked at Diana, and it was Nate who said, “If we believe Missy was abducted from your family, Diana, then I’d think your father would be the last one we could suspect of suppressing that sort of evidence. They can’t have known who took their child, let alone where she was, or they would have gotten her back.”

  “That’s true enough. But suppose my father only found out after Missy was murdered.”

  “How?” Nate shook his head. “Cullen claims he never knew who Missy really belonged to, so even if his statement wasn’t initially suppressed, no one else would have been notified of her death. And as Quentin has pointed out more than once, there was precious little media coverage. Never a picture run in the press that your parents might have recognized, even if the story had made the news outside this area.”

  Diana was afraid she sounded paranoid about all this, but Quentin kept telling her to trust herself, her feelings and intuitions, and that’s what she was trying to do.

  She didn’t know who had murdered Missy, but she was utterly certain her father had had a hand in the subsequent investigation, and that he was responsible for the suppression of facts and information.

  No wonder Quentin had found the trail to Missy’s killer so cold for so long.

  Holding her voice steady, she said, “I don’t know how it happened. But there is something I do know.” She looked at Quentin. “When I talked to Dad on the phone, when I told him where I was, he reacted. He was surprised, unsettled, maybe even afraid. Because I was here, at The Lodge. That’s what shook him. And why would it have, if there wasn’t something here he didn’t want me to find out about?”

  “Secrets,” Quentin said. “At the very least, your father knew of The Lodge. Had he ever stayed here?”

  “We can check the records,” Stephanie said.

  But Diana was shaking her head. “Dad hates resort-type hotels, always has. He stays in one of two types of places when he travels: downtown penthouse hotel suites in the city, or houses or apartments he rents for the duration. Staying at a place like The Lodge, miles from anywhere, surrounded by mountains and scenery, would be his idea of hell.”

  Quentin accepted that with a nod. “The Lodge is very well known, though, so he could easily have heard of it. But, as you say, he reacted very strongly to the knowledge that you were here, and there has to be a reason for that.” He frowned. “Cullen said he’d overheard enough to know that Laura’s own child had died and she’d abducted Missy. My question is, who was she talking to when he overheard the conversation?”

  Nate grimaced. “Yeah, I sort of interrupted you, didn’t I? Sorry about that.”

  “It’s okay. The way he shut down after telling us about his statement, I have a hunch he’d told us everything he meant to, and no amount of questioning would have gotten anything else out of him. Not tonight, anyway.”

  Diana said, “I wonder if he overheard that conversation before or after Missy was killed. He didn’t say.”

  “Does it matter?” Stephanie asked.

  “It might,” Quentin said. “If Laura was unbalanced enough to have abducted someone else’s child to raise as her own, Missy’s murder may well have pushed her even farther over the edge. In that state, she could have told anybody the truth about Missy’s parentage.”

  Nate asked, “You don’t remember how Laura acted after the murder?”

  “Not really. In those days, there was a doctor on staff here, and I have the vague recollection that he kept her under sedation at least through the funeral. We left just a few weeks later. I remember seeing Laura at the funeral, but not after that.”

  Somewhat tentatively, Diana said, “She’d kept the secret of Missy’s abduction for a long time, years. It makes more sense to me that she might have talked about it only after Missy was murdered.”

  Nate was making a note in the small black notebook he carried. “I’ll ask Cullen. I definitely want to talk to that guy again.”

  Stephanie sat on the arm of a chair and said, “What creeps me out is the bit about him putting flowers on Missy’s grave. Isn’t that the sort of thing a killer might do?”

  “It’s possible,” Quentin said. “But not in this case, I think. Besides, what he said about his alibi was right. He couldn’t possibly have killed Mis
sy.”

  Nate looked at Quentin. “Been meaning to ask you, by the way, about that hunch of yours. It seemed to come out of nowhere. Far as I can remember, you’ve never asked anything about Missy’s grave before now.”

  “I know. A little voice told me now was the time. I’ve learned to listen to that little voice.” He shook his head. “It was when you told us the other maid had identified Cullen as the man she’d seen talking to Ellie Weeks. Up until then, I was interested in Cullen only because he’d been here that summer twenty-five years ago. And because we found that trap door in his tack room.”

  “And you still believe all this is connected?”

  Quentin nodded without hesitation.

  Grimly, Nate said, “Well, whether it is or isn’t, this is one murder that is damned well not going to go unsolved.” He checked his watch. “Shit. After midnight. Once Sally and Ryan finished processing the scene, I okayed the removal of the body; it’ll be in the hospital morgue by now. Doc said he’d do a preliminary check, but I want the post done by the state crime lab.”

  “And I bet they’re backed up,” Quentin said.

  “It won’t be fast,” Nate conceded. “But it’ll be thorough. And that’s what I want. In the meantime, we have whatever forensic evidence my CSI team found, and God knows we’ve got plenty of questions.”

  “Yeah,” Quentin said. “We’ve got plenty of those.”

  “Captain, you do realize I have to be up in a few hours?” The housekeeper’s voice was frosty.

  Nate wasn’t intimidated. “One of your maids was brutally murdered not twelve hours ago, Mrs. Kincaid; I would think you’d want to help in any way possible to find out who killed her.”

  As unaffected by his tone as he was by hers, she snapped, “In the morning would be soon enough for your questions; no one here is going to be running away.”

  “Still, I’m sure you won’t mind answering a few questions tonight.” Nate deliberately placed his notebook on the spotless butcher-block work island in the huge kitchen, turning the pages until he found the notes he’d made earlier.

  Mrs. Kincaid crossed her arms over her ample bosom and waited, standing on the other side of the island. She hadn’t suggested they adjourn to another room nor try to make themselves more comfortable in this one.

  “Well?”

  Nate didn’t allow himself to be rushed, and refused to admit even to himself that he found the big, empty kitchen very cold and more than a little spooky somehow, especially so late at night. He checked his notes, then said to her, “You informed Ms. Boyd that you believed Ellie Weeks was up to something, did you not?”

  “I did.”

  “What was it you suspected?”

  “I’m not a mind reader, Captain. But I’ve worked with young girls long enough to know when one of them is up to no good, and Ellie was.”

  “So you were watching her?”

  “I was keeping a close eye on her, of course.”

  “Was there anything in particular she did to alert you that something was going on with her?”

  “I saw her hanging around Ms. Boyd’s office. Her duties took her nowhere near that area.”

  “She could have just been passing through on her way to another part of the hotel.”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “You didn’t believe her?”

  “I know when I’m being lied to.”

  Nate wondered, but didn’t question her on that point. “What else?”

  “She kept slipping out to the smoking porch every chance she got, for one thing.”

  “That was suspicious?”

  “She didn’t smoke.”

  “So what do you think she was doing out there?”

  “Probably using her cell phone. The maids aren’t allowed to carry the things while on duty, but some of them sneak and do it anyway. To call their boyfriends.”

  “That seems innocent enough,” Nate observed, making a note to look for that cell phone.

  “Ellie didn’t have a boyfriend.” Mrs. Kincaid smiled thinly. “Here, anyway.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning she might have been stupid enough to get involved with one of our guests. That was, of course, forbidden. She would have been dismissed the instant I had proof.”

  “That’s what you were watching for? Proof?”

  “She would have betrayed herself sooner or later. They all do.”

  Nate frowned. “You’ve had that problem before? Maids getting involved with guests?”

  “Well, men will be men, won’t they, Captain?”

  Thinking about the old double standard, Nate said, “Then why blame the maids?”

  “Because they aren’t being paid to provide . . . entertainment . . . for guests. The Lodge is not that sort of place.” Mrs. Kincaid drew herself up even more stiffly. “I’ve told you when I last saw Ellie and what I said to her when I did. If you have further questions, Captain, I’m sure you can ask them in the morning. I’m going to bed.”

  Nate didn’t try to stop her. He gazed after her for a moment, then looked around the spotless, curiously sterile kitchen, and felt a shiver for no reason he could explain.

  Though he couldn’t help wondering if the ghost of a murdered maid was trying to get his attention.

  “Bullshit,” he murmured, but without much force. Without much force at all.

  “She wasn’t very big, was she?”

  Quentin turned a bit on the sofa to better look at Diana where she sat at the other end. She was leaning forward, elbows on her knees as she gazed into the cold fireplace nearby.

  The lounge was empty except for the two of them, and though it was nearly one in the morning, neither of them had suggested they call it a night.

  “Ellie, you mean?”

  Diana nodded, still without looking at him. “She wasn’t very big at all. And couldn’t have been more than . . . what? Twenty-two? Twenty-three?”

  “About that.”

  “We didn’t talk about her much. I mean, she was lying there, dead. Murdered. Just a few yards away. And we hardly talked about her.”

  “We were all thinking about her. You know that.”

  “I guess.”

  Quentin drew a breath and let it out slowly. “Without a certain amount of detachment, cops couldn’t do their jobs. Not for long, anyway.”

  “But what was my excuse?”

  “It isn’t an excuse, Diana, it’s just the way things are. Death is always around us. We all learn to deal with it the best way we can, sometimes just moment to moment. But you of all people know it’s not an ending. Or at least not an absolute ending.”

  She turned her head then and looked at him, frowning. “I hadn’t thought . . . but that should make me feel differently about death, shouldn’t it? That I know there’s some kind of existence beyond it. That I know we don’t just . . . stop.”

  “Maybe you will feel differently about it one day.”

  “But not today?”

  Quentin hesitated. “A lot’s happened in a very short time. You probably haven’t even begun to process it all.”

  “Have you?”

  He found the question surprising at first, but then not so much. “You’re wondering why I haven’t asked you any details about Missy.”

  “You’ve spent so many years thinking about her. Working to solve her murder. Going over the facts again and again. It’s been an obsession.”

  “Yes. It has.”

  “So, yeah, I guess I’m surprised you haven’t asked me more about her.”

  “What could I ask? If she looks the same? I know she does. If she’s happy? I know she isn’t. If she’ll help me solve her murder? I know she won’t.”

  “She said . . . it wouldn’t help me to know who killed her. That it wouldn’t help you. I don’t know what she meant by that. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right.”

  Diana shook her head. “It isn’t all right. Because now you’re here. And Missy’s here. Not so far away,
in one sense, not with me here too. Almost close enough to touch. I touched her. I touched her hand, and it was . . . surprisingly warm. And then I opened my eyes, and it was your hand I was touching.”

  Quentin didn’t say anything, just looked at her.

  “We’re connected, aren’t we, the three of us? I’m connected to Missy by blood, and you’re connected to us by what happened twenty-five years ago.”

  “It’s a little more complicated than that,” he said finally.

  “Is it? Why is it?”

  “Because we’re alive, and Missy’s dead.”

  Diana turned that over in her mind. “I don’t understand.”

  “I know you don’t. It’s another thing you haven’t really had the time—or the emotional energy—to process.”

  Her frown returned. “Is there something between us? You and me?”

  “What do you think? No—what do you feel?”

  A little laugh escaped her. “I feel . . . raw. Overloaded. Numb one minute and incredibly aware of everything around me the next. I feel afraid a lot. And anxious. Confused. But not in the gray time. Isn’t that strange? In the gray time, I feel calm and sure of myself. It’s like pulling on a comfortable pair of jeans I’ve worn so long they’re almost a part of me.”

  Quentin nodded. “That’s when you’re tapped in, connected to your abilities. When you’re centered, balanced. Whole.”

  “And when I’m here? In the everyday world of the living? Why can’t I be centered here? Why can’t I be balanced and whole?”

  “You can be. You will be. But it takes time, Diana. You might have learned to do it by now, but they cheated you out of that time with the drugs and the therapy. You . . . have a lot of catching up to do.”

  “Consciously.”

  Again, Quentin nodded. “Your subconscious has been learning for years, obviously. Maybe all your life. In dreams. During those blackouts.”

  “I thought of the dreams and the blackouts as me being . . . out of control,” she murmured, half to herself. “But I was most in control then, wasn’t I?”