Chill Factor

Reaching up, she fingered the screws securing the support brackets to the underside of the counter. If she could loosen them enough to pull the brackets out of the wood, she could at least slip the cuffs free. Her hands would still be cuffed together, but she could run.

She tested the screws. There was no give in any of them, but she attacked them anyway. She broke her nails and abraded the pads of her fingers as she tried to twist the screws. After five minutes, she admitted that it was hopeless. She hadn’t loosened one of them. All she’d accomplished was to make her breathing more difficult and her fingers bleed.

Unless she could devise another means of escape—and nothing came to mind—she would have to rely on someone coming to her rescue. What kind of scenario would be played out?

Would Tierney kill her quickly and flee? Would he hold her hostage while negotiating the terms of his surrender? Whether he left her alive or dead, would he try to avoid arrest and get gunned down in the process?

Would she die while looking into his face, her eyes imploring him to spare her life, just as they had implored him last night to make her feel alive again after a four-year grieving slumber?

Or would she watch him lying motionless in a bank of snow that turned red as the life flowed out of him?

She wasn’t sure which of those two images caused her to start weeping.

But the tears ceased abruptly when her cell phone rang.

• • •

“Dammit!” Dutch cursed. “Got her voice mail. Why isn’t she answering the phone?”

The trip up the mountain was taking longer than anticipated, and Dutch’s patience was long since spent. He knew the basic route of the road, but the surface was covered with several feet of snow, icy in patches, making each yard of it hazardous. The short straightaways were no safer than the hairpin curves. Neither he nor Wes had a lot of experience with snowmobiles. In his opinion, they were unreliable and unwieldy vehicles.

His ski goggles had dug deep impressions into the puffy skin of his face. It was so swollen that his nose blended into his cheeks without any differentiation. Some of the cuts had developed pus. To relieve the throbbing pain, he’d taken off the goggles, but the sun’s glare on the snow had made his eyeballs ache so bad he’d put them back on.

Here on the mountain’s western face, the wind was much stronger. It whipped snow into icy dervishes they couldn’t always avoid. The temperature was impossibly cold, although the heated grips on the snowmobiles kept their hands from freezing. They had to ride single file, so they’d taken turns in the lead.

Wes, who was presently leading, had signaled him that he was about to stop. “I need to take a piss.”

Dutch had been annoyed by the delay but had used the opportunity to check his cell phone. When he saw that it was registering service, he hastily pulled off his glove and punched in Lilly’s number.

Wes had finished peeing and was plowing his way over when he heard Dutch ask rhetorically why she wasn’t answering her phone. “Try it again,” he said.

Dutch redialed, with the same unsatisfying result.

“Don’t jump to conclusions, Dutch. Just because she’s not answering her phone, doesn’t mean . . . well, you know. It could mean a lot of things.”

Dutch nodded agreement, but his heart wasn’t in it.

Ever the optimist, Wes said, “Maybe she’s tried to call you.”

Dutch shaded his phone with his hand so he could read the LED. There were no calls from Lilly’s number but three from police headquarters, coming in at one-minute intervals. His officers would be wondering where he was. Reluctantly he dialed the number. It was answered immediately, but background noise made the poor connection even worse.

“Chief?” his dispatcher said. “Can you hear me?”

Was he kidding? They could have heard him in China.

“. . . looking for you. The . . . BI helicopter has set down . . . school football field . . . quick or else . . . gonna . . . without you.”

Dutch clicked off. Later he could claim he’d lost the signal, hadn’t understood the message for all the breakups, hadn’t heard the part about the chopper’s arrival.

“Begley’s got his helicopter,” Wes said, having overheard the dispatcher’s excited voice.

Dutch nodded grimly as he tried Lilly’s number one more time and cursed when he heard the start of her voice mail message again.

“I don’t get it,” he said irritably. “Isn’t she anxious to be rescued?”

“She doesn’t know that Tierney is Blue,” Wes reminded him.

“I know, but she’s been—”