Deep Freeze (West Coast 1)

“Mmm. Her biggest fan seems to be Scott Dalinsky.”

“Rinda’s kid?”

BJ nodded. “He’s got every movie she ever made—ordered them all online and even bought some movie paraphernalia through e-Bay.”

“You checked his credit card records?”

Her grin was wicked. “I’ve got my sources.”

“Who else?”

“Just about everybody in town,” she admitted, stopping on the curb and waiting for a truck to pass before she stepped into the crosswalk. The snow on the road was patchy, scraped by plows and melted by the warmth of vehicle engines as they passed. “And out of town as well. There’s a guy in Hood River and a woman in Gresham who are uber-fans, it seems. Around here, Wes Allen has a collection, as does Blanche Johnson and Asa McReedy, the guy she bought her place from. Then there’s a lot of kids in the high school including Josh Sykes…well, you’ll see the entire printout, but believe me, it only expands our suspect list rather than shrinks it.” They were walking up the courthouse steps to the warmth inside. They passed the security checkpoint and the records room before taking the stairs to the second floor. “Give me a minute,” BJ said, and showed up in Carter’s office five minutes later with not one stack of printouts, but three. The first list, of people who had rented or bought videos, was over thirty pages.

“This many?”

“That’s right,” she said. “And we’re just getting started. These are the people who’ve rented or bought a Jenna Hughes movie in the last two years and live within a hundred miles of Falls Crossing.” She sent Carter a sly look. “I was afraid the department might run out of paper if I expanded the search, but we can always change the perimeters, go back more years, or increase the physical area. I went a hundred miles because that will include the Portland metro area and the zip code for the postal station where the letter was postmarked. It allows an extra twenty-five miles around that zip code, so if our creep decided to be clever and drove across town, or from the suburbs, we’ve covered his ass. If he drove farther, then we need to expand the perimeters, but this seemed right to me, assuming that the guy lives within driving distance of Jenna Hughes’s place. We know that either he or an accomplice left the note in her bedroom.” She dropped the second list onto the first. Again, the printout was a thick sheaf of typewritten papers.

“Popular lady,” he said, reaching for his pencil and wiggling it between his fingers as he skimmed the list of people who had rented or bought movies.

“Too popular, it seems.”

“Mmm.” The names were arranged in descending order. Those who’d purchased/rented the most copies of her movies at the top of the first page, the least on the last page. “Too popular. And too sexy. Though you probably haven’t noticed.”

He shot her a look, then skimmed the list of names. Scott Dalinsky was at the top of the list. “Have you cross-referenced this with the people she knows?”

“Mmm. Last page.”

He flipped through the pages, and there, big as life on the final sheet, were at least thirty names, including his own. Scott Dalinsky, Harrison Brennan, Wes Allen, Travis Settler, Asa McReedy, Yolanda Fisher, Lou Mueller, Hans Dvorak, Rinda Dalinsky, Estella Trevino, Seth Whitaker, Blanche Johnson, Jim Stevens. “Your husband?”

“Hey, Jim’s a red-blooded American male. Not immune. How about this one? Derwin Swaggert, the preacher. Ian’s dad. You think he rented Resurrection because of its Christian overtones, maybe used it for reference in his Sunday sermon?”

Carter snorted.

“Or Beneath the Shadows—probably has something to do with the Twenty-third Psalm. You know, there’s that passage about walking through the shadow of death.”

“You really have a thing against the Swaggerts,” Carter observed.

“Just their kid. And only when he messes with mine.” She motioned to the list. “I’ll leave this with you, and oh…check this out, uh, page seven, I think…” Quickly, she flipped the pages over and ran a finger down the list. “Here ya go. Roxie Olmstead rented Innocence Lost less than a week before she disappeared. Chew on that awhile.”

“I will,” he said, then eyed the other computer printouts she hadn’t yet handed him. “More information, I presume.”

“Ah, Sherlock, there’s a reason you’ve been elected sheriff. It must be your keen detective skills.”

“Oh, hell. All the while I was sure it was good-ol’-boy charm.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s it,” she said, sarcasm dripping from every word. She slapped the second set of sheets onto his desk. “I checked with the Webmaster for Jenna Hughes’s official site, found out who sends her the most e-mail, who logs in the most frequently. I’ve got a huge computer file, but only printed out the names of fans, again, who live within a fifty-mile radius. I can expand that as well.”

He eyed the reports. “Efficient, aren’t you?”

“I like to think so.” She leaned a hip on the edge of his desk. “The next step I took was to look over the fan Web sites dedicated to Jenna Hughes—not only the official fan site, but all those other nonsanctioned ‘unofficial’ fan Web sites. What a trip. She garners more than her fair share of obsessive types, let me tell you.”

Carter’s jaw hardened and he didn’t like the turn of his thoughts—that any sicko with a computer could have a little piece of Jenna Hughes.

Like you do? his mind taunted, and he shushed the guilty questions, didn’t want to go there.

BJ was still explaining. “Some of those sites are filled with all kinds of crap, including nude photos that could be fake, sexual references, and all sorts of discussions about how sexy she is.

“If this is the kind of thing that happens when you’re gorgeous, rich, and famous, count me out. Browsing through some of those Web sites, I thought I should be wearing hospital gloves because my keyboard was probably contaminated. And all the while that I searched, I was getting pop-up after pop-up screen, in continual loops. Damned irritating. I think I should be getting not only overtime, but hazardous-duty pay as well.”