Chill Factor (6 page)

"Tell you what," he said, "come over to the house later. We'll
kill
a bottle of Jack while considering your options. I've got a dirty video
or two we can watch. That'll change your outlook, or you aren't human.
Wha'd'ya say?"

"I'm not supposed to be drinking, remember?"

"Rules don't apply during an ice and snow storm."

"Who said?"

"I did."

It was nearly impossible to resist Wes at his most affable,
but
Dutch gave it an earnest try. He pushed the Bronco's gearshift into
reverse. "I'll have both hands full tonight, and then some."

"Come over," Wes said, wagging a stern finger at Dutch as he
backed
away. "I'll be looking for you."

Dutch pulled back into traffic and pointed his Bronco toward
the
single-story brick building one block off Main Street that housed the
police department.

Before finally being booted out of the Atlanta PD, Dutch had
been
required to see the department's psychiatrist twice a week. He'd told
Dutch during one of their sessions that he was borderline paranoid. But
what was that old joke? Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean
everybody still isn't out to get you.

He was beginning to think that everybody in the whole damn
world had
it in for him today.

When he entered headquarters and saw Mr. and Mrs. Ernie Gunn
sitting
in the waiting area, that cinched it. He must have a bull's-eye painted
on his back. Lilly, Millicent Gunn's folks, the people of Cleary, even
the weather had conspired to make this the worst day of his life.

Okay.
One
of the worst.

Mrs. Gunn, a rawboned sparrow of a woman on her best day,
looked
like she hadn't slept or had a meal since her daughter's disappearance
a week ago. Her small head poked from the collar of her quilted coat
like that of a turtle from its shell. As Dutch walked in, she looked at
him with naked despair.

He wasn't a stranger to that feeling. He empathized, all
right. He
just didn't want to cope with Mrs. Gunn's desperation tonight, when he
was having a hell of a time battling his own.

Mr. Gunn was a rotund man who looked even larger in his
red-and-black checked wool coat, the kind Dutch associated with
lumberjacks. Gunn did, in fact, work with wood. His carpenter's hands,
roughened by decades of manual labor and chapped by the cold, looked
like sugar-cured hams.

He was threading his hat between his scarred fingers, staring
vacantly at the stained brown felt. At an elbow nudge from his wife, he
looked up and followed her hollow-eyed gaze toward Dutch.

He stood. "Dutch."

"Ernie. Mrs. Gunn." Dutch nodded at them in turn. "It's
getting bad
out there. You ought to be at home."

"We just came by to ask was there anything new."

Dutch knew the reason for this ambush. He'd received several
telephone messages from them today but hadn't responded. He wished one
of his men had warned him
that
they were in the
office so he
could have delayed his return until they gave up and went home. But he
was here, and so were they. He might just as well get the meeting over
with.

"Come on back. We'll talk in my office. Did somebody offer you
coffee? It's thick as road tar, but it's usually hot."

"No thanks," Ernie Gunn said, speaking for both of them.

Once they were seated across the desk from him in his private
office, Dutch frowned with regret. "Unfortunately I don't have anything
new to report. I had to call off the search today for obvious reasons,"
he said, motioning toward the window.

"Before this storm hit, we towed Millicent's car to the county
pound. We'll be gathering all the trace evidence we can from it, but
there are no obvious signs of a struggle."

"Like what?"

Dutch squirmed in his seat and shot a glance at Mrs. Gunn
before
answering her husband. "Broken fingernails, clumps of hair, blood."

Mrs. Gunn's head wobbled on her skinny neck.

"That's actually good news," Dutch said. "My men and I are
still
trying to reconstruct Millicent's movements her last evening at work.
Talking to everybody who saw her in and out of the store. But we had to
suspend the canvassing this afternoon, again on account of the storm.

"I haven't heard anything more from Special Agent Wise,
either," he
said, heading off what he figured would be their next question. "He was
called back to Charlotte a few days ago, you know. He had another case
there that needed his attention. Before he left, though, he told me he
was still actively working on Millicent's disappearance and wanted to
use the computers there in the bureau office to check out some things."

"Did he say what?"

Dutch hated admitting to them that Wise—in fact all
those FBI sons
of bitches—was stingy with information. They were especially
tight-lipped around cops they considered to be inferior, incompetent
burnouts. Like yours truly, for instance.

"I believe you gave Wise access to Millicent's journal," he
said.

"That's right." Mr. Gunn turned to his wife and clasped her
hand for
encouragement. "Maybe Mr. Wise will
come
across
something in it that'll lead them to her."

Dutch pounced on that point. "That's a very real possibility.
Millicent might have left of her own accord." He held up his hand to
stave off their protests. "I know that's the first thing I asked you
when you reported her missing. You dismissed it out of hand. But hear
me out."

He divided his best serious-cop look between them. "It's
entirely
possible that Millicent needed some time away. Maybe she's not
connected to the other missing women at all." He knew the chances of
that were highly remote, but it was something to say that would give
them hope.

"But her car," Mrs. Gunn said in a voice so reedy Dutch could
barely
hear her. "It was still in the parking lot behind the store. How could
she have left without her car?"

"Maybe a friend took her somewhere," Dutch said. "Because of
the
widespread panic her disappearance has caused, that friend is afraid to
come forward now and 'fess up, afraid that he or she will get into
trouble along with Millicent for scaring us out of our wits."

Mr. Gunn frowned doubtfully. "We've had
our problems with
Millicent, same as all parents with teenagers, but I don't think she'd
pull a stunt like this to spite us."

Mrs. Gunn said, "She knows we love her, knows how worried we'd
be if
she just up and ran off." Her voice faltered on the last few words, and
she crammed a soggy Kleenex against her lips to contain a sob.

Her misery was painful to witness. Dutch focused on his desk
blotter, giving her a moment to compose herself. "Mrs. Gunn, I'm sure
that deep down she knows how much you love her," he said kindly. "But I
understand Millicent wasn't too keen on that hospital you sent her to
last year. You checked her in against her will, isn't that right?"

"She wouldn't go voluntarily," Mr. Gunn said. "We had to do it
,
or she was gonna die."

"I understand," Dutch said. "And probably, on some level,
Millicent
understands that, too. But could she be holding a grudge over it?"

The girl had been diagnosed with anorexia, and she was
bulimic. To
her parents' credit, when her condition became life-threatening, they
had borrowed against nearly everything they owned in order to send her
to a hospital in Raleigh for treatment and psychiatric counseling.

She was there for three months before being pronounced cured
and
sent home. The scuttlebutt around town was that she had re
verted
to her bingeing and purging habits as soon as she was released, afraid
any weight gain would keep her off the high school cheerleading squad.
Having been a cheerleader since sixth grade, she didn't want to miss
out her senior year.

"She was doing good," her father said. "Getting better,
healthier
every day." He gave Dutch a hard look. "Besides, you know as well as I
do that she didn't run away. She was
took
. A blue
ribbon was
tied to her steering wheel."

"You're not supposed to talk about that," Dutch reminded him.
A blue
ribbon had been left at the scene of each woman's supposed abduction,
but that fact had been withheld from the media. Because of the ribbon,
the unknown kidnapper had been nicknamed Blue.

The cell phone on Dutch's belt vibrated, but he let it go
without
answering. He was addressing a serious issue here. If word had leaked
out about the blue ribbon, you could bet the feebs would think the leak
had sprung from Dutch's department. Maybe it had. Of course it had.
Nevertheless, he would do all he could to contain it and try to avoid
blame.

"Damn near everybody already knows about it, Dutch," Mr. Gunn
argued. "You cain't keep something like that a secret, especially since
the sumbitch has left that ribbon five times now."

"If everybody knows about it, then more than likely Millicent
does.
She could have put the ribbon there as a decoy to make us all
think—"

"The hell you say," Ernie Gunn retorted angrily. "She wouldn't
be so
cruel as to scare us like that. No sir, Blue's got Millicent. You know
he does. You gotta get out there and find her before he…"
His voice
cracked. Tears formed in his eyes.

Mrs. Gunn stifled another sob. But it was she who spoke next.
Her
expression had turned bitter. "You coming from the police department in
Atlanta and all, we thought you'd catch this man before he had a chance
to get our Millicent or some other girl."

"I worked homicide, not missing persons," Dutch said tightly.

He'd been nothing but sympathetic to these people, doing
everything
he could to find their daughter, but he was still underappreciated.
They were expecting a miracle from him because he'd been a cop in a
metropolitan area.

The way he was feeling at that moment, he wondered why in hell
he'd
taken this job. When the city council—led by Chairman Wes
Hamer—offered
it to him, he should have told them that he would become their chief of
police only after they'd caught their serial kidnapper.

But he had needed the employment. More important, he'd needed
to get
out of Atlanta, where he'd been humiliated personally by Lilly and
professionally by the department. His divorce had become final the same
month he'd been fired. Admittedly, there had been a correlation.

When he was at his lowest point, Wes had come to Atlanta to
extend
him the offer. He'd boosted Dutch's flagging ego by saying that his
hometown was in dire need of a badass cop with his experience.

It was the brand of bullshit at which Wes excelled. It was a
half-time, locker room pep talk, the kind he delivered to fire up his
team. Even recognizing it as such, Dutch had liked hearing it, and
before he quite knew how it had come about, they were sealing their
deal with a handshake.

He was known and respected here. He knew the people, knew the
town
and the area like the back of his hand. Moving back to Cleary was like
slipping into a comfortable pair of old shoes. But there was a definite
drawback. He had walked into a mess left by his predecessor, who'd
known nothing about crime solving beyond writing a citation for an
expired parking meter.

His first day on the job, the four unsolved missing persons
cases
had been dumped into Dutch's lap. Now, he had a fifth woman missing. He
had a limited budget, a staff that was minimally trained and
experienced, and the condescending interference of the FBI, which had
become involved because it appeared this was a kidnap situation, and
that was a federal offense.

Now, two and a half years after the first girl had vanished
off a
popular hiking trail, there was still no suspect. It wasn't Dutch's
fault, but it had become his baby, and it was turning ugly.

He was in no mood for criticism, even coming from people who
were
going through a living hell. "I've still got a list of Millicent's
acquaintances to talk to," he said. "Soon as the weather clears, I
swear to you that I and every man on the force will be out there
searching for her." He stood up, signaling an end to the discussion.
"Would you like me to get somebody to drive you home in a patrol car?
The streets are becoming treacherous."

"No thank you." With admirable dignity, Mr. Gunn assisted his
wife
from her chair and ushered her toward the front of the building.

"Hard as it is, try to keep a positive outlook," Dutch said as
he
followed them down the short hallway.

Mr. Gunn merely nodded, put on his hat, and escorted his wife
through the door into the wailing wind.

"Chief, we got a—"

"In a minute," Dutch said, holding up his hand to interrupt
the
officer manning the incoming phone lines, all of which were blinking
red. He pulled his cell phone from his belt and checked to see who had
called.

Lilly. And she'd left a message. Hastily he punched in the
keys to
access his voice mail.

"Dutch, I don't know if… get… or not.
I… accident coming down the
mountain… Ben Tierney… hurt. We're…
the cabin. He needs med… attention.
If… possibly can… help. As soon…
possible."

CHAPTER  6

LILLY HAD KEPT THE VOICE MAIL MESSAGE BRIEF AND TO the point,
in
case her cell phone lost its tenuous signal. By the time she stopped
talking, the phone was dead again. "I don't know how much of that went
through," she said to Tierney. "Maybe Dutch will get enough of it to
figure out the rest." She had pulled the stadium blanket off her head,
but it was bunched around her shoulders. The wool was wet, unmelted
sleet still clinging to it. She was cold, wet, and uncomfortable.

Of course she couldn't complain of her discomfort. It was mild
compared with Tierney's. He was sitting upright but swaying as though
at any moment he would topple over. Fresh blood had soaked the black
watch cap. Frost clung to his eyebrows and eyelashes, making him look
ghostly.