Frozen (Detective Ellie MacIntosh) (16 page)

“Sounds great.”

Joe, going to fat around the middle, his bald head shining in the artificial light, fished out a frosted bottle of Leinenkugel from a big cooler behind the counter and popped the top off with an expert flick of his wrist. He put the beer on a small white napkin and wiped the cold from his hand on his green apron. “Jane working?”

“You got it.” Rick took the bottle and took a sip. “Thanks.”

“I hear you’re working too. One of those missing girls was found. I sure hope you can catch this maniac now.”

He thought of Margaret Wilson’s decomposing corpse in the weathered boathouse and took a deep swallow of beer. She wasn’t precisely a girl, but still … much too young to die. “We’re sure as hell trying. I’m not sure how crazy the guy is, by the way. We haven’t been able to touch him for nearly eighteen months.”

“Got any suspects?”

“We’re following some leads,” Rick said evasively. It was always difficult to explain how you couldn’t discuss the case. So far Grantham’s name hadn’t appeared in the media, but it was only a matter of time probably, especially if they got wind law enforcement was doing a little sniffing around his background. Ellie finally had agreed that maybe they should go talk to his ex-wife to get a better sense of Grantham’s past behavior. His explanation for the restraining order might or might not be true. Right now they were still trying to get a feel for how much they should pursue in his direction. If there was a history of intimidation or violence, it made him much more interesting.

One of the other patrons, sitting on a stool next to him, a young man with tousled sandy hair, wearing a jean jacket, glanced over, obviously listening. “You a cop?”

Rick nodded at the obvious question, fingering his beer bottle. “Sheriff’s deputy. Local.”

“I’m with the Division of Criminal Investigation crime scene unit.” He held out his hand. “Tom Jessup. I thought maybe you looked familiar. Out of uniform sometimes it’s hard to tell.”

Rick shook cordially with a brief nod. “We keep calling you guys up here.”

Jessup shrugged. “We go everywhere around the state. Lincoln County more than most this week, it’s true. Somebody isn’t playing nice around here, that’s for sure.”

Joe moved off down the length of the bar to serve someone else. Rick smoothed the damp label of the beer bottle. “You all didn’t find much.”

“Nope.” The other man agreed. He was drinking draft and finished his beer. His accent was more Chicago than Wisconsin. “There were a few stray fibers on this last victim. Hard to place, or at least not obvious in origin, but I wasn’t the one who analyzed them. She had an interesting scratch on her face though. It didn’t look postmortem to me. What did the medical examiner have to say about it?”

Joe was only a few feet away, listening avidly. Rick said, “You want to grab a table? I’ll buy you a burger and a beer.”

So much for getting away from the murders, even if only for a few hours. His whole body seemed to hum this case.

“Sounds good. Thanks.” Jessup got up and found them a booth. It was close enough to the front door that every time it opened they would both get an eddy of cold, the last of October Halloween chill, but was more private than sitting at the bar. Rick told Joe he wanted two of the house burgers—which meant bacon, barbecue sauce, and loads of brick cheese melted in a gooey cholesterol pile on a charred patty of meat—and asked for two more drinks. Joe nodded but looked disappointed they were going to carry on their discussion out of earshot.

When Rick went to slide into the booth, he said, “Sorry. This is a small town. I don’t see any reason I can’t talk to you, but I don’t want the few tidbits we have discussed at the next meeting of the ladies’ church circle.”

“I get it.” Jessup nodded and grinned. “Big cities don’t have networks in the same way.”

“Gets cold up here. There isn’t much to do but talk in the winter.”

“Or hunt. At least before it gets so cold you freeze your damn balls off. That’s why I’m still here. I’m off for a few days and decided to take advantage of the end of the whitetail bow season. I’m not hardy enough for muzzle loader. Deer hunting in northern Wisconsin in December is for the gung-ho types.”

“I do it,” Rick admitted. “The cold is part of the experience.”

“Not the best part.”

That icy morning, the dark, the hunt … the silence until you hear the telltale snap of a twig, or rustle of a leaf. The lift of the gun, the cold of the stock, the pull of the trigger … There was a surreal feel to the whole thing, even the killing of the animal. “I won’t argue, but it’s an integral part of it.”

“So you said.” Jessup glanced up and briefly thanked the waitress as she deposited his beer in front of him. She wore a kitten costume, or her version of it; cotton blouse, undone to a revealing degree so they could see a hint of lacy bra, and a short denim skirt, all punctuated by a pair of dark ears perched on her blond head, and black streaks mimicking feline whiskers on her face. She winked at Jessup, smiled, and sashayed away.

“Friendly girls up north here.” Jessup tilted his beer to his mouth.

“Don’t get too flattered. They get bored. It’s the cold again.” Rick sat back.

The music was loud enough to be distracting but it also meant no one could overhear them talking either. Not that he had much to say. “To answer your question, though our killer didn’t use a weapon, the ME said the scratch on the victim’s face came from something sharp. Metal maybe. She was decomposing by the time he got to examine her. Lucky for us, as you saw, she was in that structure so there wasn’t scavenger damage. At least it was sort of lucky. We still didn’t get much to go on. We now know she was strangled, but who is to say all the missing women were killed the same way.”

Jessup looked at him somberly. “You guys up here are floundering, aren’t you?”

Rick nodded and confirmed, “We sure as hell are.”

*   *   *

Ellie answered her
door wearing sweats, a T-shirt that had a Stevens Point beer logo on the front, and padded neon pink slippers. None of her outfit matched, but she’d been asleep when Rick called and he would just have to deal with it. She stepped back and he came in, his thick shoulders hunched under a down vest, his boots scuffing on the tiled floor of the entryway of her house.

“I’m glad you were still awake.” He had the gall to not even look tired. “Sorry to call so late.”

“I wasn’t awake,” she pointed out. “But that’s okay. Come on in. What’s up?”

He walked past; large, restive, edgy. A faint whiff of beer followed him in along with the night air. “I ran into one of the crime scene techs tonight at Gil’s. We had a couple of drinks.”

Ellie frowned, shutting the door. “Yeah, I can smell it. Are you sure you should be driving?”

“I didn’t have more than two. Well, might have been three. Okay, maybe driving wasn’t a brilliant idea. This damn case … I tell you, now that we have a body, I can’t think about anything else. Ask Jane. I talked about the autopsy report at dinner last night. She’s a nurse, and even she eventually asked me to shut the fuck up. Make me some coffee?”

Ellie knew she’d be up all night again if she drank coffee now, but she nodded, curious over what had him so wound up. It was after eleven and she’d gone to bed at ten, early for her, and wouldn’t you know, this was one night she’d drifted right off.

Rick went and dropped into the chair every male who came into her house instinctively chose, a recliner she only kept because it had belonged to her father. Her mother hadn’t been able to bear the sight of it after he died, but it held fond memories for Ellie. In her heart of hearts, she was sure he wouldn’t have wanted some stranger to buy it from a thrift shop. It was worn, and even new the beige color wasn’t something she would have chosen, nor did it match any of the rest of her furniture, but she liked having it there. It had only been a year now, and she still missed him with a throat-tightening ache when she allowed herself to remember he was gone.

She went into the kitchen, dumped the old filter, rinsed the pot and poured water into the machine, and spooned out fresh coffee. After she pressed the button, she went back into the living room and sat down, looking at her partner expectantly. “So? What’s this all about?”

“I think I might have an idea. I don’t know if it means anything, but it occurred to me while talking with Jessup, the crime scene guy, tonight. I sat there and the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if this might be the lead we need in this case.”

“Hey, I’m all ears.” Since she was already awake and he probably needed to stay awhile to make sure he was under the legal limit to drive home, she might as well hear it. Of course, he could have told her all about it during the four-hour drive to Milwaukee tomorrow. Though she’d been understandably curious, Suzanne Colgan-Grantham had agreed to see them. At first she’d said if they were investigating one of her clients they needed to come during office hours, and on Fridays she worked from home. Ellie hadn’t explained in particular what they wanted, but she had said the questions were related to her personal, not professional, life and she preferred a face-to-face interview, rather than a phone conversation. For an articulate lawyer, Grantham’s ex-wife seemed nonplussed but had agreed to meet with them anyway.

“We’ve been looking for a link,” Rick said. His blue eyes were just slightly bloodshot, either from the smoke in the bar or from the alcohol he’d consumed, and his boots had trailed mud across her floor but she didn’t comment. “Margaret Wilson was abducted from her car and strangled. The medical examiner also said the level of decomposition was inconsistent with the amount of time she’d been missing.”

“Actually he said it was slightly inconsistent in his opinion.” The one hour of sleep made her feel fuzzy around the edges. “That decomposition rates vary a lot due to external conditions such as temperature.” Ellie wasn’t sure whether to be exasperated or interested. “Rick, I know we both are living and breathing this case, but we’ll have eight hours in the car together tomorrow to talk about it. I, for one, wouldn’t mind some sleep.”

He leaned forward, putting his hands on his knees. “I think he keeps them somewhere. That’s why we don’t find the bodies. Because he keeps them until we’ve exhausted the search around where we can pinpoint their last location.

“The blood pooling in Margaret Wilson’s body didn’t match the position she was found in at all. That means she was killed somewhere else and dumped in the boathouse later.”

“Humor me and get to the point, please. Anyone reading the report would come to that conclusion.”

“I think maybe he keeps them alive for a few days.”

Ellie stared at him, not sure how to feel about that idea. It gave her an unwelcome chill, because while being attacked by a murderer was bad enough, being terrorized for days was worse.

She argued, “Melissa Simmons was bleeding.”

“Yeah, she was, or someone was, but though we found blood, we didn’t find a lot of blood.” His jaw was set. “The dogs tracked her a mile and a half through the woods to the road. It’s obvious at that point she was put into a vehicle.”

In the kitchen the coffee pot stopped making percolating noises. Ellie got up and went to one of the birch cupboards, got out two thick ceramic mugs, poured them each a cup, and diluted hers liberally with milk. Then she took the coffee back into the living room, thinking hard the whole way. Rick accepted his with a nod of thanks, and she sat back down, one leg curled under her. “I admit it could be possible.”

“This is a fairly unpopulated area. Lots of small deserted buildings, old summer cottages … plenty of hiding places.”

“Your theory doesn’t give me a warm fuzzy feeling, Rick,” Ellie muttered.

“What if it means Melissa Simmons is still alive?”

Chapter 13

He never parted with them lightly. It was a matter of progression. The Hunter mused, in the end, it was really like a couple falling out of love, the process insidious and yet inevitable. No more use for each other, the feelings gone like the ending of a season, the waning gradual but noticeable.

In short, the game was over.

He opened the door and descended the stairs, the air dank around him, his flashlight gleaming off the chill walls.

Usually he took them home.

This was the first time he’d given one of them to someone else.

*   *   *

The first day
of November dawned cold and clean, with enough frost on the fallen leaves they crackled with each step. Bryce trudged up the hill, ax in hand, his breath blowing puffs in the icy air. He caught a glimpse of something red through the stands of trees and realized it was a fox. The animal stopped, poised, snout in the air and one foot elevated, then seemed to dismiss him as a threat, trotted away, and disappeared down the hill toward the lake.

Nothing like being shrugged off with little more than a cursory glance, Bryce thought in amusement, though as an ax-toting human he thought he should get more deference.

The woodpile was located under a rough lean-to he remembered years ago building with his father, the structure just a few two-by-fours nailed together, open on each side, with a shingled roof above to keep moisture off if it was raining. Lighting wet wood in the stove inside was a challenge, but since the memory of constructing the makeshift cover was twenty-plus years old, the roof leaked and it really no longer was as functional as it had been when they put it up. It was half full of logs covered with lichen and small, interesting growths of fungus, cracked birch with peeling bark, pine, and rough odds and ends from the last summer project, which had been to repair the dock. Bryce picked up a log off the top, set it on a nearby stump, and took a swing with the ax. There was something satisfying about splitting wood. Chips flew, he vanquished the log as it cracked into two pieces, and then he went over for more. Something white caught his eye and the first flicker he felt was nothing but curiosity.

Then everything stopped dead. It was as if the world hung suspended, no longer spinning on its axis. A bird twittered and he registered the sound through the slight roaring in his ears.