Кей Хупер - Chill Of Fear

The fed's eyes narrowed. "You remember me?"

"Of course I remember you. You could ride any horse we had, even the mean ones, and you didn't mind grooming them afterward. Not such an arrogant little shit as most of 'em were. And I'm thinking you were the one the others followed that summer. The bunch of you spent more time down at the stables than anywhere else." Cullen shrugged again. "And left Missy to play alone, more often than not."

He half expected to get a rise out of the fed with that one, but it was clear the younger man had been a cop too long to let something like that get to him. Then again, maybe he just knew Cullen had said it deliberately.

"Yeah, she didn't care for horses. Which makes me wonder how you spent any time with her."

"I'm wondering something else," McDaniel said suddenly in the slightly-too-loud tone of a man who'd been forcing himself to be silent against his will. "I'm wondering why in hell you didn't say a word after she was murdered about Missy having been abducted. Didn't it occur to you that it might be important information?"

Cullen looked at him and, coolly, said, "Fact is, I did say something about it. To the chief of police. And signed my statement, all right and proper. So they knew then. They knew Missy was a stolen child."

It was nearly midnight when Nate hung up the phone in the lounge and turned to face Quentin. "Well, the chief isn't happy with me. I woke him up."

"How can he possibly sleep with all this going on?" Stephanie demanded. She had come into the room as Cullen was leaving, and had been filled in by the others.

"Easily. He's six months away from retirement."

Keeping to the point, Quentin asked, "What about Ruppe's statement?"

"The chief denied it ever happened." Nate sighed heavily. "But either you've infected me with your conspiracy theories and I imagined it, or he was badly rattled by my question."

"Which do you believe? Gut instinct."

"He was rattled. If I were a betting man, I'd bet that Cullen Ruppe made exactly the statement he says he made — and for some reason that statement and any information supporting it were expunged from the record."

"Why on earth would they have done that?" Stephanie asked.

"Secrets," Diana said. She was still sitting on the sofa where she had earlier gone to join Cullen. "Someone wanted the secret of Missy's abduction kept under wraps."

Frowning, Stephanie said, "I suppose someone connected with The Lodge might have wanted that. I mean, if Laura Turner was unbalanced enough to have stolen a child, her living here all those years didn't exactly reflect well on whoever had hired her. But to suppress a statement... even if it had nothing to do with Missy's murder, the information in that statement was important to the investigation. It must have taken a pretty big stick or a hell of a carrot to persuade the chief to bury it."

"My father could have done it."

They all looked at Diana, and it was Nate who said, "If we believe Missy was abducted from your family, Diana, then I'd think your father would be the last one we could suspect of suppressing that sort of evidence. They can't have known who took their child, let alone where she was, or they would have gotten her back."

"That's true enough. But suppose my father only found out after Missy was murdered."

"How?" Nate shook his head. "Cullen claims he never knew who Missy really belonged to, so even if his statement wasn't initially suppressed, no one else would have been notified of her death. And as Quentin has pointed out more than once, there was precious little media coverage. Never a picture run in the press that your parents might have recognized, even if the story had made the news outside this area."

Diana was afraid she sounded paranoid about all this, but Quentin kept telling her to trust herself, her feelings and intuitions, and that's what she was trying to do.

She didn't know who had murdered Missy, but she was utterly certain her father had had a hand in the subsequent investigation, and that he was responsible for the suppression of facts and information.

No wonder Quentin had found the trail to Missy's killer so cold for so long.

Holding her voice steady, she said, "I don't know how it happened. But there is something I do know." She looked at Quentin. "When I talked to Dad on the phone, when I told him where I was, he reacted. He was surprised, unsettled, maybe even afraid. Because I was here, at The Lodge. That's what shook him. And why would it have, if there wasn't something here he didn't want me to find out about?"

"Secrets," Quentin said. "At the very least, your father knew of The Lodge. Had he ever stayed here?"

"We can check the records," Stephanie said.

But Diana was shaking her head. "Dad hates resort-type hotels, always has. He stays in one of two types of places when he travels: downtown penthouse hotel suites in the city, or houses or apartments he rents for the duration. Staying at a place like The Lodge, miles from anywhere, surrounded by mountains and scenery, would be his idea of hell."

Quentin accepted that with a nod. "The Lodge is very well known, though, so he could easily have heard of it. But, as you say, he reacted very strongly to the knowledge that you were here, and there has to be a reason for that." He frowned. "Cullen said he'd overheard enough to know that Laura's own child had died and she'd abducted Missy. My question is, who was she talking to when he overheard the conversation?"

Nate grimaced. "Yeah, I sort of interrupted you, didn't I? Sorry about that."

"It's okay. The way he shut down after telling us about his statement, I have a hunch he'd told us everything he meant to, and no amount of questioning would have gotten anything else out of him. Not tonight, anyway."

Diana said, "I wonder if he overheard that conversation before or after Missy was killed. He didn't say."

"Does it matter?" Stephanie asked.

"It might," Quentin said. "If Laura was unbalanced enough to have abducted someone else's child to raise as her own, Missy's murder may well have pushed her even farther over the edge. In that state, she could have told anybody the truth about Missy's parentage."

Nate asked, "You don't remember how Laura acted after the murder?"

"Not really. In those days, there was a doctor on staff here, and I have the vague recollection that he kept her under sedation at least through the funeral. We left just a few weeks later. I remember seeing Laura at the funeral, but not after that."

Somewhat tentatively, Diana said, "She'd kept the secret of Missy's abduction for a long time, years. It makes more sense to me that she might have talked about it only after Missy was murdered."

Nate was making a note in the small black notebook he carried. "I'll ask Cullen. I definitely want to talk to that guy again."

Stephanie sat on the arm of a chair and said, "What creeps me out is the bit about him putting flowers on Missy's grave. Isn't that the sort of thing a killer might do?"

"It's possible," Quentin said. "But not in this case, I think. Besides, what he said about his alibi was right. He couldn't possibly have killed Missy."

Nate looked at Quentin. "Been meaning to ask you, by the way, about that hunch of yours. It seemed to come out of nowhere. Far as I can remember, you've never asked anything about Missy's grave before now."

"I know. A little voice told me now was the time. I've learned to listen to that little voice." He shook his head. "It was when you told us the other maid had identified Cullen as the man she'd seen talking to Ellie Weeks. Up until then, I was interested in Cullen only because he'd been here that summer twenty-five years ago. And because we found that trap door in his tack room."