Frozen (Detective Ellie MacIntosh) (8 page)

Another full day of searching and there was no sign of Melissa Simmons. They had found another few traces of blood near the ravine where the second shoe had been left in the water. In Ellie’s mind she could picture a woman in desperate flight and a vicious killer right behind her …

She needed to quit doing that. It muddled her thinking and made her more victim than hunter. Personalizing the cases too much was a flaw as an investigator.

“I’m going to postulate,” she said carefully, “it never occurred to Bryce Grantham we might seriously investigate him. What does that mean? I’m not sure. Is it conceit or innocence? In my opinion, he was shocked.”

“Could be one hell of an actor.” Jones guided the patrol car onto the narrow road.

“Could be a lot of things,” Ellie agreed slowly, sitting back in her seat, the cold around her like a chill blanket. She’d forgotten her gloves. “But he doesn’t
feel
that way. Did you get the same vibe? He doesn’t really control his reactions well enough. There are things you can fake. Expressions, body language, etcetera, but he went pale when I listed off the names of the missing women. If he didn’t expect to be looked at, he either overestimated his ability to hide the crimes, underestimated our ability to solve them, or he honestly didn’t realize four women were missing and hearing their names was too much for him.”

It was for her. She knew their pictures. Their faces. After the investigations, their lives. She’d always been guilty of putting too much into a case, but she could swear that was what made her a good cop.

Her mother would say it was why she was still single, and she might even be right. It was fine to be driven, but probably never okay to be
too
driven.

Though at this moment she would swear those four missing women would not agree.

“Maybe he knew more than one of them?” Rick turned, his breath making a wisp of fog despite the heater beginning to kick in. “Maybe he knew
all
of them. I am still not sure how the last abductions took place. If they aren’t plastering it on the news down in Milwaukee, that doesn’t mean every woman from Mosinee to Hayward doesn’t know what’s going on. They aren’t going to let a stranger into their house or car.”

“Melissa Simmons did.”

“All we have is his word that was the first time they’d met. The owner of the bar said they were pretty cozy, and since they arrived together, he assumed they had a date. Grantham paid for her drinks and the food. Sounds like a date to me.”

“The owner of the tavern isn’t exactly a barometer of how to measure the generosity of the human spirit. He has a record.”

“True. Just misdemeanors, but I agree, he isn’t an angel.” Rick stared at the road. “She’d been in there before by his admission. He could have watched them, maybe even slipped out back to take out the trash and disabled her car.”

“It’s possible.”

“But we have nothing but conjecture and he swears they were at a table in the corner, talking like old friends.”

“Maybe,” Ellie muttered, watching the landscape flit past. That bothered her too. But then again, men she didn’t know had bought drinks for her before, and since Grantham said he stopped because he was hungry, it was logical he’d paid for the pizza. “I don’t want to harass the guy. It’s a fine line. What if he
is
involved? I don’t want to point out how little evidence we have. In some ways, he’s just what we’ve been looking for. Someone with access to the area … someone women seem to trust.”

Rick said nothing, just driving, his expression indecipherable. “I’ve been going over it too. He has no priors, but that doesn’t mean much. Most serial killers don’t look like monsters. They can be good-looking guys with money, intelligent, seem nice enough, but there’s a blip on the screen, you know? Something out of whack, a piston not firing like it should. That’s the kind of guy who kills a girl, and then when we can’t—don’t, whatever—make any progress in finding him, amps up the tension by leading us to her murder scene like a farmer with a pole taking his bull out to the field by the ring in his nose. Maybe our stupidity frustrated him. Like you said, he’s smart.”

“Jesus, Rick, spare me the bovine comparisons,” Ellie muttered. “And I argue the point we’re stupid, if you don’t mind. The state police detectives we’ve used for assistance are just as empty-handed as we are. We don’t have a fiber, a hair, a witness, or any other bit of tangible evidence. We don’t even have a single suspect unless you count Grantham.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t ask him about the restraining order his now ex-wife placed against him during their separation.”

Why
hadn’t
she asked? Ellie wasn’t sure.

“One restraining order means very little at this point. If he can’t provide proof he wasn’t in this area on the dates we gave him, then we’ll look into that. Restraining orders are too often a case of he said/she said. Divorce can get pretty ugly.”

“You’re telling me,” Rick agreed grimly. “My ex gave every stitch of clothes I owned to Goodwill the day we hashed out the fact we both wanted to split. I agreed to go stay in a motel so we could both cool off before we discussed the kids and settlements. When I came back a few days later, I pretty much had no personal possessions. She’d even burned my high school yearbook out of spite.”

Having never been married, Ellie couldn’t relate exactly, but she’d had a couple of relationships that had bordered on serious and breaking up hadn’t been fun, so she could only imagine. “That’s petty.”

“I think petty is pretty accurate way to describe Vivian.” He drove with competence, as he did most things. He was a good law enforcement officer, trustworthy and efficient, and his size didn’t hurt either. If she were one of the bad guys, she wouldn’t consider a tangle with Rick Jones. He added, “Let’s not pull punches. Vindictive fucking bitch works too.”

Ellie laughed.

He glanced at her and grinned “Feels good to say it now and again, you know?”

“Thank God, I don’t know,” she said truthfully.

“Ever come close?”

“To getting married?”

He nodded.

She was surprised. They had worked together on and off for seventeen months now, trying to pick up on anything that might lead them to a break in the disappearances. Ellie had handled other cases as usual, and Rick had his duties with the county, but they met weekly at least to discuss the investigations and rarely did they touch on anything personal. She hesitated and then admitted, “I thought about it once. Right after I graduated from UWM. He was a veterinary student there. Nice guy, but I realized after a while that his commitment was a lot more toward his career than it was to me. Funny thing is, when we talked about it, he said the same thing about me. I think we were both right, actually.”

They had been. She had known it the minute she was relieved it was over, as if the impending question was an anvil over her head, waiting to fall and crush her. Then Brian had come along, and it had been good for a while. He’d even moved in, but they had been playing at it, not serious, and when he’d left she hadn’t grieved.

She wasn’t sure what she wanted, but she was sure he hadn’t been it. They’d been treading water together, that’s all. Where that left her … who knew? She certainly didn’t.

“Good thing you were smart then. Viv and I were kids really when we decided to get married. Eighteen. She got pregnant, and you know, even in this day and age, it does seem like the right thing to do to marry the girl you knocked up.”

“If you’re a nice guy.” Ellie thought about that discarded shoe, brilliant fall leaves sifting over the ground next to it, and the congealing pool of blood. She added with somber conviction, “I’m afraid there are some out there who aren’t nice at all.”

Chapter 6

The article in the paper actually bored him. Front page, with a picture of the dark-haired young woman. The Hunter eyed it with calculated assessment, decided it didn’t do her justice, and went on reading.

They had the shoes. Some blood. No body, just like the others. They couldn’t release more details.

Because they didn’t have them, of course.

Tsk tsk tsk. Sounded like a difficult case to solve.

There was a cigarette smoldering in the ashtray and he picked it up and took a blissful inhale. Damn bad habit, but it was a guilty pleasure. Might kill him one day, but that was the way it went.

Unfortunately, life was full of dangerous habits …

His more than most.

*   *   *

Sheriff Pearson was
wiry, athletic, a long-distance runner in his fifties with salt-and-pepper hair and a Vandyke beard. He’d been to Indianapolis just two weeks before to try to qualify for the Boston Marathon and missed only by minutes, finishing in the top group of the male contestants. His sharp, dark eyes rarely stayed focused on one object for long and he had a slew of restless habits, one of which was flipping a pen around in his fingers. He was twirling one now in short bursts, his face furrowed in thought.

“We’ve been searching the woods for two full days. I’m going to call it off.”

Rick wasn’t surprised. He nodded in resigned agreement. Their killer didn’t leave the bodies behind. The question was, what did he do with them?

“I understand Dr. Grantham dropped by a little while ago and gave us a printout of his response to your request.”

“Yes, sir.” Rick took a copy of the spreadsheet and handed it over. “His complete agenda—on paper at least—of where he was when all four women disappeared.”

Pearson glanced at it. “What else do you know?”

“He went to MIT. Engineer in computer tech. Then to Marquette for the Ph.D. in literature. Clean credit, not even a traffic ticket since he was in high school, and other than what appears to have been a nasty divorce if the restraining order is an indication, not much else is out there without interviewing family and friends. We haven’t gone that far because it seems premature.”

The sheriff set the report on his desk. Even in late autumn a fan whirred by his desk, mounted on a small block of wood on one of the filing cabinets. His desk was cluttered, the blinds dusty, and a dying water cooler gurgled in the corner of the room. “Forensics says the blood found by the shoe is human. The Simmons family is frantic. So are all the other families for that matter.”

Rick could imagine. He had two kids, one little girl who was twelve and one who was six. They lived with their mother except for every other weekend, when they were his alone. In a purely selfish way, he was glad if this sort of crime had tainted Lincoln County—at least it wasn’t some wacko kidnapping little kids. He’d even go to Vivian’s to see them if that was the case rather than bring them here, and that was really saying something, because every time he set foot in her house, the visit ended in some sort of argument.

“We’re checking out what he gave us,” Rick explained.

The sheriff turned to gaze at several framed news clippings on the wall and the pen whirled with even greater speed. “This is getting bigger and bigger. I think you are very competent and Detective MacIntosh is bright and good at her job, but let’s face it, there just aren’t many murder investigations up here. I hope you’ll cooperate with state law enforcement in every way if it becomes necessary.”

“We will, but don’t discount MacIntosh. She’s done some homicide and she’s good at this, sir.”

“That’s what I keep telling the relatives of these missing women. Margaret Wilson’s husband is especially persistent. I can’t blame him.”

Point taken
. Rick got to his feet. “I’ll get back to it.”

Pearson leaned forward and for once his gaze was riveted. “Four is four too many. I don’t want any more victims, Jones.”

“No, sir. Neither do I.”

“Good. Catch this guy so we can go back to being a sleepy little county with only the occasional hunters shooting each other and a boating accident or two, okay?”

Rick nodded and left, striding out of the office with a purpose, only to crash into Colleen just outside the doorway. The sheriff’s secretary, holding a sheaf of papers, staggered. He caught her by the upper arms, and smiled an apology. “Sorry. In a hurry.”

“I guess so.” She had frizzy, unnaturally dark hair and large breasts, which she concealed under loose baggy tops. Today it was black with orange and white stripes, maybe in honor of Halloween, but it made her look like an overstuffed piece of candy corn. She peered up at him from under the fluffy fringe of her bangs. “You might want this.”

“‘This’ being?” He took the file.

“Updated information on any registered sex offenders in a hundred-mile radius.”

“Should be pleasant reading.” He took the file and grimaced. “It always is.”

She patted him on the shoulder. “You have fun now.”

Rick went to his desk and sat down, glanced at his skimmed-over cup of coffee in distaste, and opened the file. Not too much had changed. A few had moved away—they didn’t seem to stay in one place long—and a few new ones had moved to the area.

One of them caught his eye. A convicted pedophile had moved to just outside Antigo named Michael Sandoval. It wouldn’t mean anything more than any of the other names on the page, except he’d moved up from Stevens Point and that meant he’d had access to the area for a while. Stevens Point was maybe only an hour and a half away.

Rick made a small check next to his name. He’d call the guy’s parole officer, get a feel for Sandoval. The missing women weren’t children by any means, but they had been young—under thirty, and one had been nineteen.

One other name on the list made him sit back and take a deep breath. Keith Walters. The last name was familiar, but it wasn’t all that uncommon … He booted up his computer and sure enough, the address matched.
Fantastic,
he thought with an inner wince. Reginald Walters had a brother. A little brother from the birth date. This was like a fucking birthday present he didn’t want. Both of them were bad, bad news. And apparently both of them now lived in Lincoln County.