Frozen (Detective Ellie MacIntosh) (18 page)

“Do you happen to remember the doctor’s name?” Rick plucked a notebook from his pocket and clicked his pen. Until now, there hadn’t been much worth writing down.

“No, not off the top of my head, but I might be able to find it for you. But I assure you the effort is hardly worth my time or yours to look into it.”

“Just the same, we’d appreciate that.”

“Even if the doctor won’t tell you anything?” Ms. Colgan-Grantham looked faintly amused. “Ever tried to get information from a mental health professional, Detective?”

From the moment the woman had opened the door—no, from the phone call she’d placed yesterday—Ellie had felt an irrational dislike toward her. Well, maybe it wasn’t irrational. Anyone who would take out a restraining order to make sure she could have sex with her boyfriend with impunity in the house she still owned with a man she hadn’t quite yet divorced, was not all that admirable. If she had cheated—and since her version fairly well matched Grantham’s it seemed likely—that really wasn’t great character endorsement either. So the superior remark struck the wrong chord all the way around. As if the highly paid attorney in the big city knew the police officer from rural northern Wisconsin wouldn’t understand the workings of various laws covering medical privacy.

Well, she did.

Keeping her voice very level—noticeably so—Ellie said, “We’d still like the name, if you could. We are just gathering whatever information we can at this point.”

“Give me your card and I’ll call you.” Suzanne rose, graceful and dismissive. Her smile was perfunctory. “I’m sorry I can’t help you more.”

*   *   *

Ellie sat in
the passenger side of the cruiser and looked out the window. Two hundred miles south of Lincoln County the trees still held some color and it was in the upper fifties, which felt positively balmy.

“What a bitch. Not an overt bitch, but it’s there just the same,” Rick said as he took the exit.

“Lots of people aren’t at their best when talking to the police,” she murmured.

“She a friggin’ lawyer, Ellie.”

“True. And I agree. She seems a little hard-edged.”

The traffic was not heavy on a Friday afternoon in November and they merged easily onto the interstate, going the speed limit. She was always amused at how everyone seemed to find religion about how fast they were going when they spotted a police car, even if it was a county sheriff’s cruiser quite a ways from home. She usually did just about what everyone else did and drove five miles over, maybe a little more now and then, but on the interstate she liked to watch everybody be honest.

“I don’t think that visit did us much good.” Ellie was more resigned than anything. She’d met women like Grantham’s ex-wife before. Bitchy was an apt description, but not quite enough.

Rick shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. She pretty much confirmed what Grantham told us about the restraining order, though she left out the part about how he walked in on her screwing her boyfriend. I almost asked about it, just to see what she’d say, but give me a medal, I held back. It was enough to see from her expression that she wondered if he’d told us that part.”

“I got that impression too,” Ellie said.

“But if she was trying to convince me he isn’t our guy, she didn’t. The opposite, I think. What did she say … he thinks in circles? Well, fuckin’ great, because whoever is making these girls disappear has us sitting around scratching our asses.”

“Speak for yourself,” she said, grateful to at least be able to laugh.

He grinned. “Figure of speech, of course.”

“The affair … not every man would want to mention that.” Ellie shook her head. “For a good reason. Even if they were separated, it still would be tough. You’d really have to be over your wife to just let it go when you walk in on her with someone in your own house. Then she files a restraining order against
him,
who is actually the injured party. Nice.”

It was warm in the car and Ellie unbuttoned her coat. When they’d set off that morning it had been below freezing up north so she’d chosen a long wool jacket to ward off the chilly temperature and blustery wind.

The cold would probably resurface again somewhere around Stevens Point if the weather forecasters demarked the correct line. She said tentatively, still thinking out loud, “This therapy thing … I don’t know if it has any significance. Since we have no idea what Grantham might be seeing the guy for, I doubt we should even pursue the angle. As much as I hate to say it, his ex-wife is right, it takes a subpoena to access medical records of any kind, and you have to have one hell of a good reason to get one.”

“Still, the first disappearance coincides pretty closely with the filing of that restraining order.” Rick flipped on his turn signal and changed lanes to pass a semi. “Can I mention how that whole deal would piss me off? If my ex-wife did something like that…” He trailed off.

“The trouble is, the coincidences are piling up,” Ellie said, because his wife had done exactly those sorts of things and now the two of them hated each other. “I usually don’t much believe in coincidence in police work. It happens, but in this case, the timing issues … I just don’t know.”

It was true. The date of Grantham’s separation was pretty close to the disappearance of Julia Becraft from the campground.

Rick gazed ahead at the ribbon of asphalt. “If you’re theorizing that the episode might have set him off for the first time, I totally agree.”

Was she?

“Set him off? I don’t know. I’m not a psychologist. I just know we’ve got four women missing, one of them dead for sure, and he had opportunity in all four of the cases as far as we can tell, and his life was turned upside down right about the time this all started.”

That was true. All of it.

Rick stubbornly stuck to it. “I wonder if Grantham started seeing the psychologist right after he walked in on his wife and her boyfriend? Surely we could get that information? No details, just the date of his first appointment. I bet his ex might even be able to find out for us from her insurance company. If so, with the disappearance of Julia Becraft just within a few weeks of the time frame, maybe we could get a judge to look at it.”

“It’s all circumstantial,” Ellie argued. “Even if we do find out the therapy coincided with that incident and the first disappearance took place at that time, so what? For all we know the therapy had something to do with being cut from the basketball team in high school. He’d just split from his wife. It follows he might want to talk to someone about how he was feeling. Work it through. It’s weak.”

“True enough.” Rick agreed with obvious reluctance. “We have no idea. Maybe he wets the bed or something. Or maybe he went to see someone because he’s having some pretty interesting aggressive feelings about his wife and the fact she’s diddling someone else. Maybe he doesn’t like to argue because he internalizes the feelings instead, and because he’s a smart guy, he knows he can’t touch the about-to-be ex, so instead he starts strangling innocent women.”

Ellie looked at him. He was right, but he was also wrong. Grantham was easy, and she wanted a quick arrest too. But even a vindictive ex-wife hadn’t quite hung the man out to dry. “I’m sorry but we need more than amateur psychoanalysis to even try to invade Bryce Grantham’s therapy records. One piece of physical evidence would help.”

Her partner’s face tightened. “Then let’s find it.”

Chapter 14

The anticipation was killing him.

Funny phrase, wasn’t it? And even more amusing when you thought of it in this context. The restless day had the Hunter unsettled, not sure if he needed to sit down or pace, and he distracted himself instead with simple tasks, but in the back of his mind was always—always—this evolving relationship.

It was one. A mutual attraction, he thought, because as he moved through the motions of normal life, he knew it to be true.

Grantham.

It was interesting to imagine what could happen next.

*   *   *

The rising sun
that had illuminated his unwelcome find had started to set in a spectacular array of spiky red streaks across a fading sky that had gone from brilliant blue to deep indigo. Bryce sat, feet up on the coffee table, and morosely stared out the wall of windows.

Fucked
.

It was a crude word to describe his situation but maybe appropriate.

He’d thought about it all day. At one point he’d made himself a bland sandwich of sliced deli turkey and a store-bought tomato on rye bread in an effort to keep the neurons firing. He’d forgotten the mayo, decided to not get up and bother to correct the oversight because it all tasted like dust anyway, and ate it while drinking a beer.

That was hours ago. The same litany was still running through his head.

Which made him more stupid? Calling the police, or trying to get rid of the evidence in his backyard?

Both choices made him want to break out in a clammy sweat. Especially, he’d discovered over the past hours of unwanted introspection, the latter.

To make matters worse, he had a feeling that somewhere out there a killer was smiling at his dilemma, the bastard.

He could try it. He could go out there, pick up all the bones he could find, place them in a garbage bag and put the lot of it in the back of the Land Rover, drive it out somewhere remote, and dump it. At that point, the skeletal remains of whoever resided currently in his parents’ woodpile would be moved off the property and he wouldn’t have to report discovering another body to the police.

Logic told him there were a few problems with that decision, however.

The first and foremost was his conviction that even if he got past the ethical part of his dilemma over not reporting this, he still couldn’t find every scrap of dead humanity sprinkled among those logs. The odds he could were very low. That body had been
hidden.
Three times during the day he’d walked back outside to make sure he wasn’t dreaming all of this, and he’d unfortunately determined he wasn’t. The bones were dispersed in a way that signaled a lack of symmetry and the guidance of something other than the elements.

The chance the person who had put those pieces there didn’t have more that he or she could plant at will—or didn’t have an agenda over reporting this anonymously to the authorities if he decided to take other action—seemed small. The skull wasn’t there as far as he could tell. The skull would identify the victim; could they find out who it was without it? Maybe he should have gotten a degree in forensic science in retrospect instead of his useless Ph.D., since he certainly wasn’t writing a damn thing on this trip. Knowing exactly how the evidence worked would be a nice boon at this moment anyway.

It became more macabre all the time. And he was a hostage in an almost literal sense of the word.

If he didn’t report this and the police became interested enough to explore the property, then he was in real trouble. As someone they were already looking at, how would it seem to have human remains about a hundred feet up the hill from the cabin if he’d told no one?

Not good,
a voice in his brain echoed monotonously. And the same sardonic voice reminded him he probably wasn’t good at hiding bodies, though he did seem to have a talent for finding them. Being caught with a garbage bag dumping bones in a remote spot spoke of a nightmare glare of guilt he didn’t even want to contemplate. He’d be crucified. If he wasn’t already in trouble, the police could at the least get him for tampering with evidence and obstructing justice.

The alternative, he realized with an inner exhaustion of tension, wasn’t a lot better. If he called this in, he was about to go from ankle deep in the mire of these murders to midthigh and sinking fast.

But a good day-long session of contemplating subverting the law told him he wasn’t cut out for it. Say he did hide the bones successfully, managed to quell his conscience over how some poor family was denied the knowledge of the whereabouts of their loved one, and went back to Milwaukee. What if then, later down the road, his father or one of his uncles, who also used the cabin, found more of the skeletal remains? Being law-abiding citizens, they would call the police, and Bryce would be right back where he was now. He couldn’t live with the suspense of not
knowing
. For that matter, what if the police really got serious about him as a suspect and decided to search his parents’ property? Things could get nasty if he was caught circumventing the investigation. For that matter, he didn’t
want
to interfere with the police catching the killer.

For a very good reason. If those bits of bone were planted there, someone was trying very hard to incriminate him, or else was playing a very sick joke.

He drank a second beer as he watched the blood-red orb of the sun sink below the tree line on the opposite end of the lake. A gaggle of Canada geese flew overhead, honking loudly, the arrowhead spear of their progress heading south.

It was five-thirty when he picked up his cell phone, fumbled with his wallet to find the detective’s card, and with a cynical attempt at some form of humor, programmed her number into his phone. Then he pushed the button.

*   *   *

It seemed strange
that Grantham didn’t want to meet at his cabin, but then again, the call itself had been strange, and since he specifically asked to see her alone, she supposed it was neutral ground.

The place was typical of the little bars that scattered the Wisconsin north woods. On a Saturday night it was fairly busy, with the click of connecting billiard balls and a wailing jukebox in the background. A television mounted in one corner played a rerun of the earlier Packers and Colts game.

Ellie saw that Bryce Grantham was already there, sitting at a table in a corner of the place. Two cups of what was presumably beer were on the scratched surface of the table, one in front of him, one in front of the opposite chair. He’d noted her entrance but didn’t quite meet her eyes as he waited for her approach. He rose to his feet as she got close.