Chill Factor

“Hoot?”

“Sir?”

“Call the nearest RA. We need a crime scene unit up here ASAP. Remind them they’ll need a chopper.”

“Right, sir.”

Agent Wise got on his cell phone. Begley turned back to them. “How’s the shoulder, Mr. Tierney?”

“Busted.”

“I’m surprised you haven’t gone into shock.”

“Any minute now.”

“Want to sit down?”

He shook his head. “You’d never get me back up.”

“We set the chopper down in the road about fifty yards from here,” Begley said. “Followed your blood trail the rest of the way up. Our pilot already radioed for a CareFlight helicopter to pick you up. It should be here momentarily.”

“Thanks.”

“Feel like talking?”

“Talking may keep me from passing out.”

Begley grinned as though he understood that logic. Then his expression turned serious. “I owe you an apology, Mr. Tierney. We didn’t learn until minutes ago that you’re Torrie Lambert’s father.”

Lilly looked up at Tierney, speechless.

“Her mother and I divorced when Torrie was an infant,” he said, addressing his explanation to her rather than to the FBI agent. “Her stepfather adopted her, gave her his name. But she was my daughter.”

“Which explains a lot,” Begley said. “Obviously, you didn’t trust us or the local police to solve the case, so you’ve been doing your own sleuthing over the past two years.”

“That’s right.”

Begley harrumphed and looked at Tierney wryly. Lilly got the impression that, had it been his daughter who was missing, he would have done the same. “Whose handiwork is that in the kitchen?”

He was referring to the message she had scratched into the cabinet. It seemed he missed nothing. “Mine,” she said. “For a time, I thought . . .” With remorse, she motioned toward Tierney.

“Well, you weren’t alone in that assumption,” Begley said. “Mr. Tierney, were you on to William Ritt?”

“No. I thought it was Wes Hamer.”

“Wes Hamer?”

“I became acquainted with Millicent by shopping in her uncle’s store,” he said. “She developed a . . . a . . . an attachment to me.”

A crush, Lilly thought.

“This was during my trip here last fall. One night I returned to the lodge, and Millicent was there waiting on me. It made me uncomfortable. I didn’t invite her inside my cabin, but she started unloading a very sordid story about her, Wes, Wes’s son, a pregnancy and a miscarriage.”

Lilly had always thought Wes Hamer was a colossal jerk. According to Tierney’s story, he was considerably worse than that.

“When she returned from the clinic for eating disorders, she wanted to get back together with Scott, but he would have nothing to do with her. She asked for my advice.” He shook his head ruefully. “I had my own agenda and sure as hell didn’t want to get mixed up with anything like that. But then, when she was reported missing last week, well, I thought that maybe Wes had disposed of a problem, and that his crony Dutch was covering for him.”

Turning to Lilly, he said, “That’s why I didn’t tell you what I was doing. If I explained myself, I was afraid you’d feel honor bound to tell Dutch, and he would protect his pal Wes. Even if Wes had turned out not to be Blue, my cover would have been blown, and Dutch would have found a way to block my amateur efforts to find my daughter.”