Frozen (Detective Ellie MacIntosh) (3 page)

Fuck, he loved this time of year. Especially on nights like this one when it was black and inhospitable …

*   *   *

Ellie pointed with
her fork. “The report is in and inconclusive. She sold real estate so she takes different people around all the time in the vehicle we found. Lots of forensic evidence to process, but who knows how much of it is worth anything. There was no blood in, on, or near her car.” She speared a piece of lettuce and ate it.

Across from her, Jody raised her brows. “Seriously, could you not do this?”

The lights flickered. It was only raining out but the wind was high, so Ellie glanced at the window before she responded. “Do what?”

Blond, petite, and annoyingly happy with three small children and a husband who worked at an insurance company, Jody sighed. “I love you, but didn’t we go out to dinner for a nice sister-to-sister chat? I realize you live and breathe the job, and I doubt it is easy to be around that much testosterone every single day and hold your own, but I don’t want to talk about Margaret Wilson’s disappearance. I’m just as spooked as every other woman in northern Wisconsin, but honey, I like my chicken salad without gloom and doom hovering over it.”

It took a moment, but Ellie shook her head with a small rueful laugh. “Oh, yeah. Sorry. It’s this case.”

Damn. Can’t help myself
. That was always part of it. She had an undeniable tendency to focus. How could she explain the juxtaposition of the horror and the hunt? She hated one and loved the other. And as far as she could tell, no one else in her sphere understood it.

Jody took another biscuit and broke it in half, but she set both pieces on her plate. “You work too hard.”

If so, why was it some days she thought she didn’t work hard enough? The hours didn’t count—well, they did—but results were all that mattered.

“True enough.” Ellie took a bite of walnuts and cranberries and changed the subject. “So tell me about the kids. Is Della still in dance?”

A half an hour later they were both standing in the foyer of the little restaurant, putting on their coats. Icy rain sluiced across the glass door, and Ellie braced herself to step outside into the cutting wind.

Winter was coming.

And that wasn’t the only cold cruel thing out there.

*   *   *

The cabin was
cold, the musty smell of disuse already heavy in the air, and his footsteps echoed loudly as Bryce fumbled for the flashlight kept on a shelf by the front door. He found it, flicked the switch, and muttered, “Shit.”

Nothing. The damn battery was dead. He never had understood why his parents were adamant about the flashlight always being put back in the same place when in his memory it didn’t have fresh batteries when they needed the thing. Disgusted, he shook out his wet hair, groped around so he could set down the leftover pizza—no box, Paul Bunyan back at the bar had wrapped it in some foil—and stumbled off blind to the fuse box in the back bedroom to switch the electricity on. It wasn’t the easiest thing to do in the pitch dark and he whacked his ankle on the corner of the bed frame hard enough to make his eyes water, but he finally found the metal box, fumbled it open, and flipped the main.

It helped to have light, he thought, as the glow of the little lamp on the side table banished the impenetrable darkness of a small room with the draperies drawn against a rainy late fall night. The bed was stripped, of course—his mother always did that when they closed up for the season—clean sheets were in a small cedar chest in the hallway, a patterned blanket neatly folded at the foot of the bed on top of the mattress pad. This was the room he’d had as a kid and still used as a grown man when he had the time to come up for a few days.

The blanket has little cowboys on it …

Suzanne could do derisive like no one he’d ever met. If a man had an urge to be emasculated with a few words, she was a pro.

He’d shrugged and told the truth. It was a perfectly good blanket and his mother was of pragmatic Scandinavian stock. Nothing wrong with it except it was bought years ago for an eight-year-old boy. She wasn’t going to throw it out and it was a
cabin,
for God’s sake.

He could still see the look on his wife’s face the first time he’d brought her up to Loon Lake for a vacation. The
only
time. She’d hated the whole week. She didn’t like to fish, to swim in the cold water, there was no television, no Internet, no upscale restaurants, no shopping—you name it, she’d complained about it.

He hadn’t understood her aversion then, and he still didn’t understand to this day. Trees, sparkling clear water, the smell of a woodstove with a crackling fire. What wasn’t to like?

No, it wasn’t elegant. That wasn’t in dispute. None of the furnishings matched. To this day his mother said the place was furnished
à la dump,
but it was comfortable and homey not in spite of it, Bryce thought as he moved to the kitchen, but maybe
because
of it. The tin cupboard for the dishes by the sink, the open shelves holding battered iron skillets, chipped casserole dishes, a vintage coffee pot that still made coffee so good it put Starbucks to shame. The floor was linoleum, worn through here and there but immaculately clean, and the counters held various styles and colors of jars to store pasta, flour, rice, sugar, all with good seals because mice could chew through anything but glass or metal.

Bryce went back out to his car for the beer, his suitcase and laptop. He put his suitcase in the bedroom, flicked on the baseboard heat in the living room, removed his wet jacket, and flopped down onto the couch facing the long windows overlooking the lake, toeing off his damp loafers. He couldn’t see anything outside because of the darkness and rain, but the comfortable sound of the rhythm on the roof was soothing. He drank his third beer of the evening in solitude and thought about Melissa.

Pretty girl. Interesting too. It had been awhile since he’d met someone like her.

His cell phone rang just as he was dozing off, the half-empty beer in his hand. He hadn’t even bothered to turn on the radio, just sat listening to the soporific sound of the rain slapping against the shingles. It took him a minute or so to blink awake and realize the phone was ringing, sitting on the table by the woodstove he hadn’t bother to light. Bryce surged to his feet and fumbled to retrieve it, finally managing to open it by the seventh ring. “Hello?”

“You made it okay?”

His mother. The sound of her voice was as familiar in the surroundings as if she stood there. “Yeah.” Bryce ran his fingers through his hair. “Everything is fine. Weather could be better, but I think you can say that ninety percent of the time up here. Stop worrying.”

“It’s on the lonely side on the lake this time of year.” There was concern and reproof in her voice. “I’m not sure what you’re going to do there all day.”

Neither of his parents had believed he wanted to spend his vacation in late October at a lake that didn’t have a single inhabitant except himself. All the other places were summer cottages and the road wouldn’t even get plowed if it wasn’t for the fact one lake over there was a couple of people who lived there all year.

“I’m going to work on my book.” Though she couldn’t see it, he gestured at his laptop, now sitting on the table by the windows. He felt foolish and laughed quietly at himself. “I brought my computer and a backup battery and I can check my e-mail on my phone, so I’m set. I’m fine.”

“When we saw you last month you looked tired.”

“Hence the peace and quiet. I always sleep like a rock here, Mom. Besides, you can reach me at any time. I can’t believe I get a good signal here, but I usually do.” Bryce squinted at his watch. “Is it really only eight-thirty? It must just feel later because of the rain.”

“Have you eaten?”

Once a mother, always a mother. Since the divorce became final every phone call between them had included that question. He hated to disillusion her, but Suzanne hadn’t been much of a cook. They’d usually eaten out or he grilled something. He could do that all on his own.

He had to, actually. Suzanne was gone.

“Some pizza.” He really just felt strange, as if he should go to bed and sleep off the seminar. Sleep off the past twelve months of trying to find himself again as he struggled to accept the failure of his marriage.

“Make sure you have something more healthy than pizza tomorrow.”

“I will.” Probably a lie, but it was a nonmalicious one, designed to ease her mind. “Thanks for calling.”

“Keep in touch with us.”

“Okay. Have a good night.”

It was funny he thought as he ended the call, but he didn’t miss his ex-wife. That wasn’t the problem.

What the hell
was
the problem?

*   *   *

She couldn’t sleep.

Again.

Fuck it.

Ellie sat up and shoved aside the covers. Barefoot, she padded out to the living room and picked up the remote. The rain was supposed to stop by midnight but it gave no sign of letting up yet if the steady drum against the skylight was any indication.

A lamp burned on the end table by the sofa, casting the comfortable room in a low haze of light. She never used to leave the lights on, but now … well, let’s say she always left a light burning. It would be helpful if she hadn’t inherited her father’s colorful imagination. There was a monster in the woods, and if this was one of the picture book stories he’d read to her as a child, someone magical would come along and find it so it wouldn’t ever scare anyone again …

She sat down on the couch and stared at the façade of the fireplace. It stared back, a blank canvas of river rock and the gaping hole of the hearth. Water dripped from the eaves outside.

Unfortunately, she was supposed to be that someone. But she wasn’t magical. Far from it. The monster so far had the advantage and she didn’t like it one bit.

The ever-present question lingered.
Let’s look at this logically again.

Like she hadn’t said
that
to herself before. Notes lay scattered all across the antique walnut table in her dining room. Some were dog-eared, some had coffee rings on them, but she knew each one by heart.

She drew her robe more tightly around her, pressed a button, and ironically saw a cop show flicker over the screen as the television popped on. One of those where they solved the mystery in an hour.

I could use you guys. Tell you what, I’ll give you two hours on this one. It isn’t all that easy, there’s no evidence, and we haven’t got a single body
 …

A year and a half for her and she was no closer to knowing what might be going on in this corner of Wisconsin than she had been when the first missing person report landed on her desk. It might be more accurate to say she was more in the dark than ever. Two leads had petered into nothing and it kept her awake at night.

Like now. The investigation had stalled.

Resigned to the fact she wasn’t going to go to sleep anytime soon, Ellie got up and went into the kitchen. It was neat and shining, but she absently wiped off the countertop anyway as she waited for the electric kettle to heat up. When the light flashed on, she brewed a cup of tea and went back into the dining room. She sat down, took a sip from her cup, and began to go over the cases in her mind, or case, as she thought of it, because she was sure they were all connected.

Or pretty sure. She was methodical about investigations and that was part of the problem with this case. Forcing the round peg into the square hole instead of going with her gut like she wanted to, which had told her from the beginning that they had a very, very serious problem and the enemy was … canny.

Margaret Wilson made the third missing woman in seventeen months. Tomorrow would mark day ten of her disappearance. Her car had been found, unlocked and abandoned by the gate of what used to be the county dump before it was shut down. The vehicle had been in plain sight but off the road. She’d been reported missing by her husband when she didn’t show up at home after work one evening and he couldn’t get ahold of her. The car had been spotted the next day by a sheriff’s deputy. A special crime scene unit had been called from the Division of Criminal Investigation, because while they had a county scene investigator, there was no way they were taking any chances on missing something and processing the scene themselves, not with another possible serial homicide. Without any bodies and with no evidence, no matter how many departments were cooperating, there had been no progress.

From the first disappearance it had been serious, but it was starting to get
really
serious.

There had been no blood in Margaret Wilson’s car, no tire tracks nearby that could be cast because the ground had been hard as a rock then. They lifted prints, but as she’d told Jody, Mrs. Wilson had been a Realtor and plenty of different people got in and out of her car, so it would only be helpful if they had a suspect later. None of them showed a match when ran through the federal database, so if whoever kidnapped her was careless enough to leave a print, he was a new bad guy, not an old one.

And Ellie had a feeling he was a very,
very
bad one. They hadn’t found a single trace of the bodies or even a struggle. The second missing woman had been just like this one: car driven off the road a discreet distance and left there, nothing stolen, and no sign of a struggle. The first had disappeared in a different way. Julia Becraft had been camping in a recreation area near Birch Spring Lake and opted to stay in the tent and sleep in when her two friends went off for an early morning canoe paddle. They came back to find no sign of her but hadn’t panicked until later in the day, thinking maybe she’d decided to go for a hike on one of the trails.

If so, that was one hell of a hike, because she’d been last seen seventeen long months ago.

Ellie sipped her tea and gazed morosely at the flow charts she’d painstakingly made. The victims didn’t have much in common except they were female and fairly young. The oldest was twenty-nine, the youngest nineteen. None of them knew each other.