Chill Factor

“I’m headed there now. It’s in the next block.”

Begley smiled. “Excellent. And last?”

“Torrie Lambert, the teenager.”

“Who was probably a random selection.”

“More than likely. But I’d hate to assume that and then have there be a previous connection we overlooked. Perkins is still trying to contact her mother.”

“In the meantime . . .”

“What, sir?”

“Do we stay on Tierney to the exclusion of all others?”

“Scott Hamer, for instance?”

“Is it like Burton says, Hoot? Should we take the Hamers and everything they said at face value and end that line of thought entirely? Reasonably, Scott could have a motive for doing Millicent harm. Love affair gone awry, et cetera. It’s even conceivable that he chanced upon Torrie Lambert in the woods that day. But what would a good-looking young man like him have to do with an obese nurse, a single mom with a sick kid, and a widow lady older than his mother?”

“Which brings us back to Tierney.”

“To whom the same question applies. Say Tierney has a lech for teenage girls. Even Carolyn Maddox would fit if we fudged a couple of years. But the other two? Goddammit! Why can’t we find a connecting thread?”

Begley appreciated Hoot for not trying to produce an answer just to fill the silence.

Eventually the senior agent sighed. “Until that commonality becomes obvious, give me an educated guess, Hoot. Is Tierney our man?”

Hoot stopped the car at the address he’d jotted down. The frame house was little more than a cottage, its small yard enclosed with a white picket fence, now half buried in snow. Smoke was curling out of the rock chimney covered in a dormant wisteria vine. A fat, yellow cat was sitting on a windowsill staring out at them through lace curtains.

The two men sat in silence as they looked at the house belonging to Betsy Calhoun’s daughter. Begley was thinking that the house looked so innocent, so Norman Rockwellian, one couldn’t imagine tragedy visiting the people who lived there. Yet Betsy Calhoun’s daughter went to bed every night without knowing her mother’s fate.

“That has to be pure hell.” Begley didn’t realize he’d spoken the thought aloud until he saw the vapor of his breath swirling in front of his face. “We gotta get the bastard, Hoot.”

Hoot seemed to have followed his train of thought. “Absolutely, sir. We do.”

“So, the Hamer family’s jitters and evasions notwithstanding, does Ben Tierney still look good to you?”

“Yes, sir,” he replied. “Tierney still looks good to me.”

“Well, hell. He looks good to me too.” Begley shoved open his car door, and as he stepped out, he glanced in the direction of the cloud-enshrouded peak and said another brief prayer for Lilly Martin.

CHAPTER

23

EACH TIME LILLY EXHALED, THE TENDRILS OF vaporizing breath became finer.

She was chilled to her bones but had neither the strength nor the initiative to get up and place another log on the coals. What would be the point?

She wasn’t one of those people who dwelled on death and dying, fretting over it until the worry hastened the worrier’s demise. However, after Amy died, she naturally had contemplated death, wondering what the passage was like from this life into the next, never questioning if there was a next. That sweet, vital nova of life and energy that her daughter had been couldn’t simply have ceased to exist. Amy had merely moved from a dimension governed by physics into a realm of the spirit.

Believing that had helped Lilly survive her bereavement. Yet she had anguished over the nature of the journey between the two worlds. Had Amy glided into it peacefully on a carpet of light? Or had her passage been dark and terrifying?

That was when Lilly had come to think about her own death and ponder whether it would be serene or traumatic. But only in her nightmares had she died of suffocation while alone.

At least she would depart knowing that Blue would be caught. Before she became too weak, she used a paring knife to etch TIERNEY = BLUE into one of the kitchen cabinets, believing that would be more effective than a note written on one of her blank checks, which could easily be overlooked in the hubbub sure to arise during the discovery and removal of her body from the cabin.

Tierney.