Frozen (Detective Ellie MacIntosh) (30 page)

None of the four women missing had that last name, he knew that much from the papers.

The sound of a car door was his first clue she might be home after—a glance at his watch told him—eleven hours. It was pitch dark now and had been for some time, but maybe that long of a day for her was normal. He had to admit he didn’t know the ins and outs of a detective’s schedule.

Unfortunately, he was starting to be more clued in all the time.

Ellie’s face was drawn into lines and angles; creases in the forehead, along the jaw, her mouth tight. She came in the door, but didn’t discard her scarf or gloves, just gave a cursory scrape of her boots on the mat, and then lifted her head. “I don’t know what to say to you.”

Whatever he expected, it wasn’t that curt statement. Bryce hesitated, silent, not sure what it was he saw in her eyes. A hollowness, a grim resignation that cut through him like a razor.

Another car had pulled in, the swinging arc of the lights visible against the kitchen curtains.

What the hell
now
?

“While we wait for a judge to grant us—and he will—a search warrant for your car and the cabin, we’d like you to come in for questioning.”

“You already searched the cabin.” He made a helpless gesture with his hand. “Jesus, Ellie.”

Too evenly, she said, “That was two days ago. We need to go over it again.”

“Why?” he asked flatly, arms at his sides.

“You can ride with me, or with the two deputies outside. Your choice.”

Bryce just stared at her. There were dark circles under her eyes and her shoulders drooped. He well remembered how her slender body had fitted to his, how they’d intimately moved together in perfect communion, how her lips parted and her eyes squeezed shut when she climaxed and breathed his name in his ear …

More important, how she’d slept trustingly against him, warm and vulnerable in the night.

“What’s happened?” His voice was hoarse.

“I’m sorry.” Her voice dropped. “This isn’t my call.”

“You won’t tell me?”

“No.”

“Because I’m a suspect?

“Yes.”

“How nice to be upgraded from … what was it, person of interest? I’d love to know what I was supposed to have done sitting here stranded in your house all day, most of it without electricity.”

“Trust me, you still had a better day than I did.” She briefly closed her eyes as if the memory of the past hours could be erased that way.

Bryce had a healthy aversion to the idea of a police station and that had steadily grown since the moment he’d decided a week or two of north woods solitude might clear his mind. The solidification of the nightmare was an unwelcome development, and call him a coward, but the idea of a jail cell made him turn clammy from head to toe. “Am I under arrest?”

“Not yet.” She turned away, remote, her voice tired. There was a glassy look to her eyes that might have been tears. “It’s pretty cold outside. Get your coat.”

He took it from the rack by the glass panel framing the front door, apprehension and anger bubbling through his nerve endings like fizz from soda water. There was no way he could resist saying, “I made you dinner. It’s covered and in the refrigerator.”

The look she gave him said that was a cheap shot, and it had been, but then again, she wasn’t the one being hauled off to the police station either. Her response was low, so quiet he almost couldn’t hear it. “I’ve already told you this isn’t how I’d play it, but I’m not in charge, the sheriff is, at least for now. This is getting worse, Bryce. It’s so … awful.”

The way her voice cracked and from the look on her face, he decided grimly, it was, but he’d also figured out she wasn’t going to tell him just how awful. He zipped up his coat. “I have no idea what on earth I can tell you I haven’t already, but let’s get this over with.”

Chapter 24

They’d have evidence for the first time.

From a nosebleed. Fuck.

Simple enough, but it had never happened before and it had been too late to back out, to decide the kill wasn’t worth the risk.

Sometimes things go wrong, he reminded himself. Like the time he was crossing Deer Creek and somehow his foot went through the ice, which should have been thick as his forearm. His boot had taken on icy water and he’d had to sit down in the snow and remove it, wring out his sock, which was already turning stiff in the below-zero temps, and then put it all back and head for his truck as fast as possible, his foot feeling prickles like needles stabbing in his flesh the whole way. If he had broken his ankle, or the water had been deeper, he could have been in real trouble.

A small mishap a resourceful man could deal with, if he could stay calm.

November … When he’d started to drag her from the car she’d hit him and blood was splashed in crimson splotches in the snow and on the driver seat …

Bitch.

They’d find the blood, and the car, and she’d be missing, and they’d look for her.

For him.

Not that it frightened him. They were always looking for him, searching but not finding as he quietly laughed and went about his life.

Still, he thought as he turned off the light and went up the stairs, he wished they didn’t have the blood.

*   *   *

The cold, filtered
light from a dismal sky didn’t do anyone favors and Ellie had the feeling she looked as washed out as a bleached bit of driftwood. She hadn’t slept now for twenty-two hours and her eyelids were gritty each time she blinked.

If Jane wasn’t the one missing, they might or might not have been up most of the night, but as it was, going home to sleep was out of the question.

“No matter if he’s telling the truth or not, it would have been a really tight time frame.” McConnell, the DCI lieutenant, drove like he did everything else, competently. He was in his forties probably, but looked older, with a lean face and heavy-lidded eyes.

Ellie nodded, her muscles jerking because of fatigue. She’d stopped by her house to shower and change, but she could swear despite the cold she felt sticky. “Grantham called me at two forty-seven. That means if Jane left her shift at one, it would still take her nearly half an hour to get to where her car was found, and with the weather we were having, maybe longer. That would give him an extremely short amount of time to pull it off.”

“Tight.” McConnell braked for a light.

“He would have had to walk back to the cabin. That’s four miles from where her car was found.” It was the most damning part. The car was so close and Jane didn’t usually take that route. It was out of her way, but then again, roads had been closing all over the place.

“In that shit we had coming down? That might take two hours alone right there.”

She agreed, but she had to be honest. “It’s still possible though. Maybe she wasn’t abducted where we found her car. If he waited for her right outside the hospital that changes everything.”

“I suppose our man might have driven it there deliberately into the ditch.”

Just close enough to walk. Smart move
.

Dammit
.

“Maybe. But it would have to be a matter of precision timing.” McConnell pulled into the hospital parking lot. “Suppose he
was
waiting, stopped her, abducted her, and drove her car to where we found it?”

It would mean taking a serious chance, but their killer had proved he wasn’t above doing just that. “How the hell did he get to the hospital? How did he know when she’d get off work early with the storm?”

“He could have gotten a ride there and waited. People tend to be helpful when the weather is going south.”

“That doesn’t answer my last question.”

“Detective, you are assuming he was targeting one specific victim. I’m going more with the assumption he was just waiting for the opportunity. Hospitals have lots of nurses and most are female.”

“What I don’t buy is that someone who has kept us guessing for long would leave so much to chance.”

“Just because we haven’t caught him yet, doesn’t mean he isn’t capable of mistakes.”

“Rick thinks this is a deliberate strike back at him. But I don’t agree. How would Grantham even know he had a girlfriend, or who she was, where she works?” She didn’t buy it, but was trying to stay as unbiased as possible. If word got out she and Bryce had a personal relationship of any kind, she’d get booted right off the case. And she was much too invested to allow that to happen. Professionally and on an emotional level too. She was good at her job … good enough to catch whoever was doing this. Maybe someday she might think about federal law enforcement again. It had occurred to her. She liked the chase, the challenge, and she especially liked it when she won.

However, at this moment, she wasn’t happy with any aspect of this case. They weren’t winning, they were losing. Big time.

McConnell took a moment. “No one has had our suspect under constant surveillance. It’s difficult to draw conclusions over what he might or might not know.”

Ellie took a moment and drew a measured breath. “The tree was down a good hour before Grantham called me. I saw it. Must have been. It was covered in ice an inch thick on the horizontal surface of the trunk and there had to be enough weight to bring it down in the first place. The crime scene techs also say they don’t think his car was moved after it started to snow the night before despite the melt they encountered when they finally got there. He didn’t drive back. If we are postulating with him as the suspect, he would have had to be on foot. Then what did he do with the body? Jane isn’t a small woman.” McConnell berthed the car in an empty spot a good distance from the front doors of the hospital. The plows had been at work and piles of snow defined the space, but it was supposed to get in the forties later and there was already opaque slush at the edges and watery puddles.

“I have no idea. We have the blood to go on anyway and let’s just hope it isn’t hers.” He opened his door and slid out. In the gray morning light, his leathery skin looked drawn. “Let’s find out what’s going on.”

The lobby was moderately busy, and the minute Ellie said who they were, the reception desk directed them upstairs, the older woman in charge nodding after a sharp-edged glance at their identification.

In small towns and a small county, news traveled fast. They took the elevator, not speaking, and followed the signs to the surgical floor. There were two nurses behind the high desk, both tapping away on computers, and they glanced up as Ellie and her companion fished out their badges again and explained why they were there.

One of them checked the log, and nodded. “I’ll get Lori and Stephanie. They were both working Jane’s shift.” Subdued, she got up, the other nurse no longer typing but bowing her head and brushing the back of her hand furtively across one cheek.

Ellie didn’t blame her. She felt a little like sitting down and crying herself. Pearson had driven Rick home, ignoring the protest Rick could be on the job; that he
needed
to be on the job, and this morning at first light, search parties had started to fan out from the location of Jane’s abandoned car.

There was more too. Forensics was working on those damned bloodstains on the cloth seat. They’d swabbed Bryce for his DNA, but that wasn’t a fast test, and Ellie didn’t want to think about his state of humiliation over having to allow it.

Stephanie came around the desk, her blond hair drawn into a ponytail, and if she wore makeup it had long ago worn off. After all the extra hours the smudges under her eyes were distinct, and she sat heavily in a chair and looked defeated and tired, her pink scrubs rumpled. “Jane said she wasn’t interested in the overtime. We had next shift nurses coming in who knew in a few hours they wouldn’t be able to get here, so she volunteered to leave early.”

Ellie sat in a chair across the low desk and nodded. “What else did she say?”

Stephanie fiddled with the file in front of her, bending the edges. “I don’t really remember. We were all running around.”

McConnell leaned a hip on the desk and imitated a sympathetic cop, but he only came off as a top brass DCI in his suit and tie and polished shoes. “She was going right home then?”

“As far as I know.”

Lori finally arrived, pushing a cart, her expression also strained and her shoulders slumped. She was older, also visibly tired, and had wispy hair pushed back by a white band. “She told me they were out of milk. It’s ridiculous. A little weather moves in and everyone raids the grocery stores, acting like we’re going to be snowed in for weeks. Jane mentioned to me she was going to stop for milk and a few other things.”

Ellie exchanged a look with McConnell. Margaret Wilson was also out running errands when she disappeared. If she wasn’t so sick at heart, she might be elated at that small connection. “Did she say where she was going?”

“No. She just said on the way home.”

McConnell asked a few more questions that yielded nothing and they left.

There was something positive in living in this remote part of the country. That limited the choices. “The grocery in Merrill, or else Hathaway’s,” Ellie said as they exited the building. “Those were on her way home. Unless she stopped at a gas station.”

“At least it won’t take forever to do the interviews.” McConnell unlocked the doors, his face set in grim lines. “We’ve only got a handful of possibilities. From what I understand everything shut down early as the ice came in. As far as investigation goes, this should be easy.”

“There were no groceries in her car.” Ellie got in and slammed the door. There was a two-foot pile of snow tinged with dirt in front of the car from the plows. “Just her purse. It was clean. No prints but hers and Rick’s.”

She pictured Jane laughing and spooning out Chinese food not even a week ago. “Except for the blood,” she said out loud in a bleak voice.

*   *   *

The house was
cold, quiet, desolate. Rick sat at the table, in his underwear, deliberately torturing himself. Normally he would wear sweats at least, and switch on the television, maybe eat something he shouldn’t. Jane would complain about it too. Point out that if a hot dog had 170 calories in it, 140 of them were from fat and it was an unhealthy ratio.