Frozen (Detective Ellie MacIntosh) (24 page)

“Nope.”

“A virgin, then.”

She had to laugh, but then sobered when he went on in a cool, even voice. “If you’ve never handled someone like your guy, you haven’t a damn clue, Detective. I’ve profiled for five years now. Trust me on this one. He’s bad news. This one sends a chill up my spine that has nothing to do with your shitty weather up there. He’s
methodical
.”

That was exactly what she was afraid of hearing. Ellie squared her shoulders as she propped her elbows on the desk. With a heavy tone, she said, “I’m taking notes here. Give me all of it. What do you think he’ll do next?”

His next words chilled
her
and she’d have thought she was beyond it.

“He’s showing off, Detective.”

“I’ve already figured that out,” she said curtly. “He’s enjoying rubbing our noses in it.”

Montoya said quietly, “I don’t think it’s just for us. I need to know more about Grantham.”

*   *   *

It wasn’t until
he got halfway up the steps from the cabin to the hill that Bryce realized he had a flat tire. Passenger rear from the telltale tilt of the vehicle.

Can’t anything go right?

The thought of changing a tire in this mess held about as much appeal as a root canal without anesthetic. The snow had turned to icy rain an hour ago and already coated the trees and his car in a thick glistening blanket.

It was going to be one hell of a drive home, he thought as he tried to open the driver’s-side door and found the handle frozen in place. Finally he managed to wrench it free, but fifteen more minutes of this crap and he’d have been locked out. He slid in and started the engine, setting the defrost on high and cursing steadily under his breath.

At first he hadn’t been able to fall asleep, and the result was when it finally happened, he slept later than he intended. After a hasty cup of coffee he’d set out to close up the cabin properly: bed stripped, power unhooked, water lines drained, refrigerator propped open and emptied, shutters closed and locked in place, floor swept, woodstove cleaned out of all ashes. He’d methodically completed each chore and checked the dire predictions of the fickle weather forecast on his phone with a growing knot in his stomach.

Now this
.

Bryce got out of the car and tried to ignore the sting of icy rain on his face even with the hood of his parka up. He’d almost not brought a heavier coat and only tossed it in his duffel bag with his fishing gear at the last minute in case it did get really cold. Not that it was all that cold right now. That was part of the problem with temps just hovering around freezing. He’d even thought he’d heard a boom of thunder earlier. Ice storms didn’t happen all that often this far north. He hoped it would turn into snow for the drive back to Milwaukee. Snow he could handle, but this mix was treacherous.

He’d popped the trunk from inside but the back hatch was still frozen firmly in place and the keyhole coated over with ice. His gloved hands just skidded across the metal as he tried to heave it open.
Shit
.

A small gleam of something was next to the depressingly flat tire, glittering like the ice so at first he thought the glimpse of it was an illusion. Pelted with freezing rain, he bent over, and saw it was metal, encased in ice like a fly in amber.

A pair of earrings. Not small studs, but the dangling kind some women liked, silver, with small hoops, maybe two inches long.

With a chill that had nothing to do with the weather, he realized they were carefully laid out on
top
of the snow that had fallen the night before.

Crouched there, he stared at the bizarre find, resisting the urge to try to dig it out, and then his head whipped up and he stood, looking around, scanning the empty woods, the ping of ice on ice warring with the sudden roar in his ears. Nothing moved. Even the birds were silent, huddled against the storm.

Flat tire
. It happened, he reminded himself, and tried to work some saliva into his dry mouth. A slow leak from a nail he picked up somewhere might render the tire dead flat with showing any signs of going low first … it was possible.

The earrings, however, he couldn’t explain. A crime scene unit had spent hours going over the area around the cabin just yesterday. They
would
have found it.

*   *   *

This time he
didn’t wait. He took out his phone, realized he was standing in the inhospitable elements for no reason, and went around to wrangle the door open again. Nothing like having a police officer programmed into your phone, he thought ironically, turning down the full blast of the heater so he could hear. The defroster hadn’t made a dent in the ice and snow and it felt like a white cave.

Ellie’s voice mail was on, which just about followed the current pattern of luck he was having lately, but he left a message saying it was urgent and could she call him back. Before he even could slip his phone back into the pocket of jeans, it rang.

“Bryce? What is it?”

His breath went out in an emotional expulsion. “I think I had a visitor again.”

“Is that so?” Her voice went from businesslike to terse. “More bones?”

“No.” He explained about the tire and the earrings.

“Are they pearl earrings? Margaret Wilson was wearing pearl earrings when she disappeared. She wasn’t when we found her.”

“No. These are silver.”

Silence.

The wind hissed around his car and he felt vulnerable sitting there, unable to see out. He started to say, “Maybe it’s nothing, but—”

“It isn’t nothing until we determine it isn’t important. Look, don’t touch it. Don’t move your car either.”

Moving his car was becoming less and less of an option by the moment. If he waited to change the tire, he was screwed. As it stood, he wasn’t sure he could open the back to get out the jack and the spare. “I’ve closed up the cabin. I’m heading back to Milwaukee. The power went out about two hours ago anyway. Forgive me if I don’t want to freeze my ass off in the dark in the middle of nowhere during a storm when a serial killer seems to be dropping by like an annoying neighbor.”

“I didn’t really think you should stay out there by yourself last night either, but I got outvoted. If we’d had an officer there, maybe he’d have seen something. We don’t have a ton of manpower.”

He was less concerned with his sleepless night and more worried about getting home. “Fine. No hard feelings on suspecting me of murder, no problem with ransacking my parents’ cabin; I’m not even as pissed about my laptop in light of this new development. I just want to get the hell out here. Can you blame me?”

“I’m on 17 right now. The roads are really getting bad. I can be there in about fifteen minutes, I think. Maybe twenty.”

Considering his vehicle at the moment was like claustrophobic ice-covered closet, that time frame sounded like an eternity. For all he knew, whoever had left him the two macabre presents stood right outside the driver’s side door wielding an ax. He wouldn’t be able to see him.

Now that was a cheery thought. “Fine,” he said grimly. “I suppose another fifteen minutes won’t hurt.”

Chapter 19

It was dark and cold and his footsteps scraped across the cement floor. Outside the wind was hushed, and in this place, he was safe.

And so was she.

Tucked into her bower, her sanctuary, safe from the elements that would eventually tear her apart, bit by bit until she was naked, ivory white, vulnerable to obscurity. The Hunter didn’t want that to happen to one of his girls. There was something mystic about being chosen and he refused to let that go easily, to trade the immortality of it.

Most people were born quietly and died the same way, but some were special.

He lifted the lid of the freezer and stared inside. She looked like she was sleeping except for the ice crystals around her nostrils and eyelids. Her dark hair was frosted with white.

“It’s cold outside too,” he whispered and gently closed the lid again.

*   *   *

The enormous tree
—she thought it was an elm—had not just fallen across the drive, but it had taken down two other trees in its dramatic descent, leaving a thick jumble of broken trunks, skeleton branches, and other assorted debris right across the small lane that led to the Grantham cabin. Considering thick woods hemmed the drive on either side, no one was getting in or out anytime soon, especially not in this malevolent weather.

Ellie stopped the car on the small road and even with pumping her brakes it slid about fifteen feet father than she intended. She called Bryce on his cell. He picked up immediately. “Yes?”

“You’ve got a tree down. I can’t get in.”

She was pretty sure he said
fuck
with a forgivable level of vehemence.

“Right. It also means you can’t get out.” She paused. “I’m not for leaving you there another night.” She might have added she’d debated asking if he wanted her to come out and sleep on his couch the night before. At least she was armed and by his own admission, he wasn’t. In the end, after flipping her phone open several times and then closing it without calling, she decided it wasn’t the best idea from a professional standpoint.

Instead she told him, “I’m waiting on the road outside the drive. Hurry. They’ve just declared this county under a weather emergency. No one is supposed to be on the roads.”

“I’m not for staying here another night either.”

He cut off the call, and though it seemed longer by the clock on the dash it was only a few minutes before she saw him climbing over—there wasn’t much choice—the uprooted tree, a vague figure in the precipitation that seemed to vary from rain to snow at intervals. He skidded on the icy pavement and saved himself with a hand on the hood of her car before opening the passenger door and climbing in, dropping a small duffel bag at his feet. “I’m soaking wet. Sorry.”

“How could you not be wet as hell? This sucks.” She eased the car into drive again, the windshield wipers on high and not helping much. It was three o’clock in the afternoon and it was dark as dusk. “I can deal with snow—we get lots of snow up here, but the ice … ugh. There are power outages everywhere.”

It was true, and the big elm was not the only casualty. The weight of the ice had broken branches strewn all over the roadsides. Bryce shoved back his hood and stripped off his gloves, showing reddened hands as he held them out to the heating vent on his side of the car. “Thanks for picking me up.”

“Thanks for calling in,” she said neutrally. “You could have just changed your tire and gone on your merry way.”

“Wrong. I could have changed the tire … or
maybe
I could have. The hatch was frozen shut, and I’m pretty sure what I thought was thunder earlier was that tree going down. I didn’t know it before you told me, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.”

The wind whipped a veil of moisture with force against the windshield, making her slow to a crawl on the treacherous road. “I think your new friend left you a token of his regard with those earrings.”

“A trophy?”

She dared a quick inquiring look. In profile his face was reminiscent of what she imagined in a Brontë hero, an almost melancholy sort of handsome. There was a dark curl plastered against his lean cheek. He smiled, but it had nothing to do with humor. He said, “I had some time to think about it, waiting for you. I’m not a psychologist, believe me, but I’m connected to two victims. At first I thought the bones were planted to incriminate me, but now I’m wondering. Maybe he’s … sharing, or something really insane like that. I mean, he must know you’d searched the property pretty thoroughly.”

“You’re assuming no one thinks you flattened the tire and planted the earrings to lead us off.”

That silenced him. He stared at the slick ribbon of dark road as if he didn’t even see it, which could be true because she was having a hard time seeing it herself.

After a harrowing moment in which they passed a snowplow hogging most of the road, he said quietly, “I can’t win, can I? If I didn’t call you; if I’d just changed the tire, put the earrings in my pocket, and drove off, what if I was stopped for whatever reason and they were found on me, and the evidence linked back to one of the missing women? What if I tried to dispose of them and someone saw me do it, or about any scenario in between?”

“It would look bad,” Ellie agreed.

“Even more important, what if telling you about it can help you catch him?”

“Noble of you, I suppose.”

He caught the slight sardonic inflection. “Not so noble. I’m tired of being Public Enemy Number One. When you catch him, at least I’m exonerated. And I’d just as soon not see any more of his…”

“Work.” she supplied when he trailed off. “An interesting way to put it, but I spent part of my morning talking to a profiler.” Ellie squinted at the road. With so many branches coming down she was being careful anyway, but she really didn’t want to encounter a live power line.

“Great.” His voice was heavy with irony. “With the way my luck is running, let me guess what he said. Your killer is from Milwaukee, designs computer software, and most likely has dark hair.”

She let out a muffled laugh. “He wasn’t quite that precise. He did mention serial killers often feel possessive of their victims and can usually pinpoint burial spots even years later. Some return to ‘visit’ the bodies, according to the agent I talked to.”

“What a lovely image.”

“None of this is lovely.”

“I agree.” He sounded tired. “Years later? Our man hasn’t been at it all that long, has he?”

“Eighteen months around here. That doesn’t mean he isn’t imported. VICAP…, sorry, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, is trying to analyze any similarities to other murders in different parts of the country.”

“Any luck?” He unzipped his sodden jacket a little.

“I can’t discuss specific evidence with you, I’m sorry.”

“That’s understandable, I suppose,” he said dryly. “I was kind of hoping you’d found something. Other than college, I’ve always lived in Wisconsin.”