Frozen (Detective Ellie MacIntosh) (28 page)

“They aren’t dying because of me.” Bryce had his own sense of anger, his own violation to deal with, not least of which was invasion of his privacy by the police. “Someone flattened my tire yesterday and left evidence by my car on top of everything else. I expected to be home by now, away from all this.”

“That so? Remind me to tell the sheriff you were going to leave the county.”

“Remind me to tell my lawyer you want to detain me without probable cause.” Bryce leaned against the counter and folded his arms across his chest.

“Probable cause? I’ll give you probable cause. How about all those human remains showing up wherever you are?” Rick finished his coffee and slapped the cup down on the counter.

It was a hard point to argue. Luckily, he didn’t have to. Ellie emerged in record time, her hair caught carelessly back in a no-nonsense ponytail, no cosmetics but her face scrubbed clean, a bulky sweater and jeans punctuated by midcalf-high boots.

She looked fantastic even swathed head to foot in warmth-generating material. Unfortunately, she barely glanced at him, Bryce noted. “Do you know how to turn off the generator if the electricity comes back on?”

“Walk me through it quickly,” he said, her change in demeanor not surprising but still disconcerting.

“I’ll be in the car.” Jones stomped out, his face grim.

For whatever reason, Bryce wanted to apologize, but he wasn’t sure for what. Instead he followed her into the garage and out the side door, to where the generator sat in a small side structure with an outlet that sent a plume of exhaust into the frigid air. He listened to her instructions on how to flip the switch and shut off the machine, and nodded.

“I’ve got to go.” She didn’t look at him.

“I get that.”

“It’ll be hours.”

“Double homicide and the storm. I get that too.”

Finally, she glanced up. “Sorry.”

“For what?” He needed to know the answer. The garage was cold and his breath was visible. He shoved his hands into his pockets. “Last night?”

“No.” The look she gave him was unfathomable, detached, as if she’d checked out of being that woman who had slept against him in the dark.

“Ellie,” he said impulsively, because he didn’t want to be shut out, because the past week had been hell.

“Like I said, this will take awhile,” she said in a calm voice. “Make yourself at home.”

And then she walked away.

Chapter 22

She was still alive … he did that sometimes. It was like a double-dipped cone, twice the treat. The basement was cold, but it was cool even in the middle of summer, which was part of the charm. If cement walls, a single bulb hanging from the ceiling, and a freezer full of body parts could be charming.

She was bound, and not yet conscious, though he could see she’d moved a little on the blanket.

The entire county was rebounding from the storm. It would probably be hours before she was really considered missing.

November was always the best time to hunt …

*   *   *

Even with the
cold keeping it contained, the place smelled rank; a musty combination of cigarette smoke, old carpet, and unwashed bodies mingled with the unforgettable odor of death. Rick decided he could go the rest of his life without smelling that again. He pulled off his heavy gloves, slipped on latex examining substitutes, and knelt on the grimy floor near the closest body. “This is Reginald all right. Shotgun blast to the chest. Close range from the blood splatter. Took him right out. Lots of attractive Reggie debris everywhere.”

“Kind of hard to define that in this place.” Ellie professionally skittered the beam from her flashlight over plies of newspapers, a sagging couch, the cold rusted woodstove on bricks in the corner, and a coffee table laden with overflowing ashtrays and the crumpled remnants of fast-food bags. “I’m glad all possible insect life is dead. If it was summer, this place would be crawling. It’s filthy.”

“I do think their housekeeper could be on vacation.” Rick said. “I don’t make this guy.” The second body was a stranger, young, clean shaven, his cheeks bearing some nasty acne scars, his hair shaved almost to his scalp. He wore an army fatigue jacket, dirty jeans, and socks. His wound was different. If Rick had to guess—but crime scene forensics was not his area of expertise—a nine-millimeter bullet through the left temple. The dead man’s glassy eyes stared at the ceiling. “We’ve got two shooters or two weapons,” he commented tersely.

“I see that.” Ellie sounded curt, but subdued. “Quite the party. Left a mess.”

“I don’t think cleaning was high on Reginald’s list of priorities,” Rick agreed and rose. He looked at the state trooper standing by the door. The guy was shaken, but trying to look confident, as if he stumbled across two dead bodies every day of his life. “Where’s the electric company guy who found them?”

“Gone.” The patrolman looked sheepish, and his Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed hard. “I hope that’s okay. I got his cell number and the company number, but there are lines down everywhere and they need every man they can get. I took his statement and told him we might want to talk to him again later.”

“Let’s hear it.” Ellie was brusque but not unfriendly, as always.

Except Rick was fairly sure she’d been more than friendly with Grantham. It had been one hell of a shock to find her in her robe and their lead suspect—
only
suspect—having breakfast in her house after having spent the night. Maybe Grantham slept on the couch, but there had been a vibe between them since the beginning, and somehow, he doubted the evening had passed in a platonic way. He wasn’t a damn prude … hell, far from it, and if Ellie wanted to sleep with someone, he didn’t care, but Grantham was just plain and simple a stupid choice and she wasn’t at all a stupid woman.

“Lines down across the county road there.” The officer pointed east. Through a cracked window, a stand of timber held a ghostly pall of snow. “Maybe a hundred yards or so from this place. The technician stopped by the house to tell the occupants they couldn’t drive out that way until a team came to clear the mess … some of the lines might be hot even though the power is out to the house itself. The door was open when he came up on the porch. It clued him in something was wrong, since there are two vehicles in the driveway and it’s twenty degrees. He peeked in. He saw the bodies and called his dispatch, who called it in to us.”

“Not 911?”

“Lines are clogged with calls. This weather suc— Er…”—he shot a sidelong look at Ellie and straightened it out—“stinks.”

That was probably true about the call delays. Rick asked, “Any time estimate on the arrival of the coroner?”

“With the roads, sir, hard to say.” The young man fidgeted with his notebook.

“Nice.” He turned to Ellie. “We have to get word out about Keith. All points on that son of a bitch. It’s a cinch call he did this, if you ask me.”

She peered out the door, her cheeks pink from the cold. “That must have been his truck here last week. I don’t see it. Any idea at least who the friend is?”

“None,” Rick admitted grimly, gazing down at the sprawled body. “Like I said, I can’t make him. He’s a new attractive addition to Lincoln County. He’ll look good in the cemetery. Should we start processing the scene? This is going to take hours.”

“Maybe we could begin here.” Ellie picked up a pair of hemostats with gloved fingers from a rickety gray TV tray that served as an end table. “I’m guessing they haven’t been performing a lot of surgery in here.”

“Some fishermen use them.” Rick glanced into the kitchen and saw nothing but filthy linoleum, dishes in the sink, and an old-fashioned refrigerator with a broken handle. “You can remove fishhooks easier.”

“Where are their poles and tackle and why is there a roach in the ashtray next to it?”

“Good point.” He gingerly moved around the perimeter of the room. With a double like this, there was going to be a CS team. It was disturbing how he’d never handled a murder before all this started and now he wasn’t getting used to it exactly, but he didn’t have the frozen-in-the-headlights look of the young trooper either.

“Do you think this has a link back to the serial murders?” Ellie put the hemostats into a plastic bag. Her face was averted. “You brought up Keith Walters in the first place. Apparently a good call.”

“This isn’t linked and you know it.” Rick had thought so at one time, but not any longer. Neither did she, he could tell. With a fingertip he ruffled a stack of unopened mail sitting on what might have been a dining room table for the occupants before the Walters brothers.

He wasn’t all that diplomatic, he never had been, but he made an effort to smooth over the awkward moment. “While I think Keith Walters could be capable of the brutality necessary for the abductions, and certainly for killing these two lowlifes, I doubt he’d ever have the subtlety to put those bones in Grantham’s woodpile or save a pair of earrings, much less sneak in and drop them by the tire of the Land Rover.”

“I agree.” Her voice was quiet, concentrated, as she examined carefully the area around one of the bodies. “So all this means is we have another two unconnected murders to solve.”

“Maybe.” He’d make bank on it. This one could be drug related, but the missing women didn’t have that connection.

“It was too much to hope it would be this easy,” Ellie muttered, even her slim form bulky in her parka, a stray strand of blond hair falling forward as she peered under the sofa and grimaced. “They had mice. Didn’t they mind?”

“When you’re high, you overlook a lot of things,” Rick answered, finding a small dusting of something that looked like powdered sugar in the debris on the table. He was pretty sure neither Keith, Reginald, nor the other dead guy used it on their doughnuts. “Look at this. Coke, I’d guess.”

She turned, the young state kid’s eyes widened, and Rick said matter-of-factly, “If they had a stash, I’m guessing Keith took it with him when he ran for it. The question is, were they running drugs through the county? I never pictured Reginald as the outdoor type and it would explain that shiny new truck Keith drove here from Stevens Point. The last time we were here I wondered how the hell a scumbag like him could afford it. We should have run the VIN. That shitty Ford out there must belong to Reginald, and the car to his friend here. Maybe we can make him from the tags.”

“If we find more evidence than a trace of cocaine and something to suggest they might do more than some recreational weed, we can call the DEA. In the meantime, it’s going to take forever to get the team here,” she responded, as cool as ever, professional and collected. “Let’s start processing the scene.”

*   *   *

Bryce put down
the book he’d picked up, too edgy to read any longer, even if it was
For Whom the Bell Tolls
. Apparently Ellie was a Hemingway fan, for she had every volume the man had written.

Cabin fever, he wondered. Maybe this was what it felt like. In someone else’s house, no vehicle, no electricity except for the basics provided by the generator, his phone still useless, and no way of knowing exactly what was going on out there in the real world except for the local radio station that only wanted to cover the weather.

That
he knew about. The house had nice windows with a panoramic view of the woods. As the day wore on, the temperature rose, and the ice-covered trees had begun to drip as did the eaves, in a soft, soporific sound. The clouds had thinned too, so the sky was a hazy steel color and the forecaster kept promising there might even be a peek of sun later in the day, but it was already four o’clock so that seemed doubtful.

At least he’d thought to take a minute and stuff his shaving kit and a change of clothes into his duffel bag when Ellie had told him about the tree. He’d expected to be sequestered yet again in a sterile motel room. It had passed the time to shower, put on clean jeans and a pullover sweater, make the bed, clean up their half-eaten breakfast, put more wood on the fire … but not enough time. The night before had left him exhilarated—and restless.

No scenario could be a worse way to start a relationship. If that was even the way to define what had happened between him and Ellie MacIntosh. Maybe it was just one night of consensual sex, shared between two people who were attracted to each other …

The sudden ring of his cell phone made him start. He’d left it on the counter and he jumped up to answer it, as if he hadn’t spoken to a real person in days, instead of just hours.

He glanced at the number and a now familiar trepidation settled over him. “Alan.”

“Good, I’ve got you,” his friend said in his no-nonsense attorney voice. “I was beginning to worry you were in jail and because of the storm, you couldn’t call me. I’ve been trying most of the day.”

That didn’t sound promising. Bryce sat down on one of the stools abruptly. “Service has been out but, no, I’m not in jail, and what’s so urgent?”

“I wanted to let you know the story broke this morning here. Quite frankly, I’m surprised it hasn’t before this.”

Great
. Bryce rubbed his forehead, glad he’d taken the time to call his parents and warn them. “Maybe you’d better tell me exactly what’s going on.”

“Let me read you the headline from this morning’s paper.”

“Okay.”

“‘
Psychic or Psycho? Local Man Leads Police to the Bodies of Three Murdered Women in a Bizarre Twist to the Recent Lincoln County Disappearances
.’”

Maybe not worse than what he’d imagined, but the implication was pretty bad, just the same. “You might have said brace yourself,” Bryce muttered.

“Look, you’ve turned up two bodies and are implicated in another disappearance. What did you expect? Actually, something just like this is my guess, or you wouldn’t have called me. The gist of the article is a rundown of your background, your connection with the area, a few oblique references to the police taking a close look at you as a possible suspect that we can’t sue them over, and then a lot of bleeding heart references to the families of the victims.”