Chill of Fear (19 page)

Quentin's frown deepened, but before he said anything else, he took off his zip-up sweatshirt jacket.

"Here, put this on. Your skin's like ice."

Diana looked down at herself, abruptly aware of her very skimpy attire. The silky camisole was clinging to her chilled flesh like a second skin, leaving nothing to the imagination. Feeling heat rise in her cheeks, she hastily shrugged into the jacket, wrapping herself in the warmth and scent of his body.

"Christ, your feet are nearly blue," Quentin said. "The stable manager used to keep extra boots and sometimes shoes in the tack room, but it'll be locked. I need to get you back to the cottage."

Realizing more by intuition than any movement of his that he meant to pick her up and carry her, Diana took a step toward the tack room and said, "The door isn't locked. And we... we can't leave yet."

"Why not?"

Without answering, Diana went to the door, only dimly aware that her feet really were numb; she could barely feel the rough pavers beneath them. She turned the door handle and stepped up into the wooden-floored tack room.

It was Quentin who flipped on the light switch as he entered close behind her, saying, "Good, they still keep the extra stuff here." He went to the other side of the large space, where a low shelf held riding boots and several pairs of shoes.

Diana stood looking around her. Secret place? Was there a secret place here? All she saw was a tack room, a roughly eighteen-by-twenty-foot space crowded with saddles on stands, and bridles and halters and lead ropes on pegs, and numerous utility trays on shelves holding brushes and combs and hoof picks and other grooming equipment and supplies.

"Sit down, Diana." He took her arm and led her to one of the two long benches placed back-to-back down the center of the space. Diana sat on the nearest end of the bench, but reached for the shoes he held in one hand before he could sit down beside her.

"I'll do that. You take a look around in here."

He frowned down at her. "What am I looking for?"

Diana hesitated only an instant before replying, "A secret." She bent over to pull on the fairly new-looking but definitely too-large running shoes he had found for her.

"Everything's pretty much out in the open here," Quentin noted, looking around. "Except for the first-aid cabinet over there, I don't see any closed storage at all. What kind of secret could be hidden here?"

Diana didn't hear in his voice any sign of humoring her, and she saw only intent interest in his face when she straightened and looked up at him, but she was still wary of saying any more than she had to, at least for now.

Not because she feared he'd think she was crazy, but because she was afraid she'd convince herself of that fact if she started talking.

"Diana?"

"What're
you
doing down here, anyway?" she asked abruptly.

Quentin replied matter-of-factly, "I looked out my window last night and realized I could see your cottage. And something told me to watch. That little voice I hear sometimes. So I did. Saw you come out and head toward the stables a little while ago. It seemed like a good idea to follow you." He paused, then added, "It wasn't a blackout, was it? Your eyes were closed. You were walking in your sleep."

"Something like that."

"Something
like
that? Diana—"

"Could you just please look around in here?"

Quentin didn't move. "Does this have something to do with the murders? The disappearances?"

She drew a breath. "You tell me. A... guide... brought me down here. A little girl, maybe twelve years old. Said her name was Becca."

Barely hesitating, Quentin said, "Rebecca Morse disappeared from The Lodge nine years ago. No trace of her has ever been found."

"Then I guess this does have something to do with the—the murders. Because she led me here. In the gray time."

"And told you what?"

"That this place held a secret." Diana looked around the neat, silent tack room. "Becca told me that there were secrets everywhere. She told me to tell you to look for the one hidden in here."

"Me? By name?"

"No. She said 'him.' But she was talking about you." Diana shivered and drew the jacket even tighter around her. She should have felt lost in all the material, except that it was warm and smelled very pleasantly of him, and that gave her an odd and very unfamiliar feeling of security. She wished she could luxuriate in it. "There's something hidden here, Quentin, and we need to find it."

Still without moving, he said, "In that case, we need to call Nate and then talk to the manager of The Lodge. Before we do anything else. This is private property, Diana, and we're in here after hours and without permission."

"You sure as hell are," a grim voice agreed from the doorway.

Cullen Ruppe was a dark man in his fifties, powerfully built through the shoulders and arms, and with a longtime rider's slim hips and strong legs. He was also, Nate had informed Quentin under his breath, apt to view himself as a badass, possibly why he was apparently hell-bent on giving everybody a hard time.

Nobody was searching his tack room, not without permission from Management or, failing that, a warrant.

"I can't get a warrant," Nate told Quentin in a low voice as he joined the other man near the entrance end of the long barn, leaving Ruppe scowling just outside the tack room door. "Not on the word of a maybe-psychic who could have been walking in her sleep for all we know."

Quentin kept his voice low as well when he said, "I believe her, Nate. I believe we need to search that tack room."

"Yeah, I know you believe her. The question is, what do I tell Steph—Ms. Boyd—to convince
her}"

"You said she was agreeable when you talked to her last night."

"Yeah, but she wasn't happy about the situation. Now I'm supposed to get her up at dawn to okay this? Look, what do you really expect to find in there?"

"I don't know. Something. Something to help us figure out who murdered Missy and Jeremy Grant—

and who knows how many of the others."

"You're expecting a lot of a lousy tack room, Quentin. People in and out all day, every day. What could be hidden in there?"

"I don't know," Quentin repeated. "But I think we need to find out."

Nate pursed his lips and blew out a slightly impatient breath. He looked tired, which wasn't surprising; he might have gotten five or six hours' sleep before Quentin's call pulled him out of his own bed, but it was more likely he'd been working in his office until well after midnight.

"You're asking me to go out on a pretty goddamned long limb here," he said finally. "We both know a thorough search of that room is going to mean checking under floorboards and behind walls. If we don't find anything after all that, the owners of this place are going to raise hell."

"I know. I wouldn't ask it, Nate, if I wasn't convinced we'll find something worthwhile in there."

The cop studied him for a long, silent moment, then sighed again. "Ah, shit. Okay, I'll go roust Ms.

Boyd, see if I can think of a reasonable explanation to give her. You got any suggestions?"

Quentin was more or less accustomed to coming up with reasonable explanations for psychic

"hunches" or leads, since the SCU members often found themselves in that position, but this time he was stumped. Absolutely nothing he knew of in the information he had on the missing and dead kids connected them in any unusual way with these stables. Nothing.

No connection, no warrant.

"I wish I did, but... sorry."

"And I don't suppose Ms. Brisco is ready to go public with this psychic stuff?"

"I doubt it. She's only beginning to believe it herself."

"She believes enough to insist there's something hidden in that tack room. Because another ghost told her so?"

Diana had already returned to her cottage to get dressed—at Quentin's insistence—by the time Nate had arrived, so the cop hadn't yet spoken to her. About any of her... encounters, including the one the previous afternoon. Which was probably why he sounded frustrated.

Probably.

"The ghost of another one of the missing kids told her so, Nate. Rebecca Morse. That's one missing kid you should definitely remember; you worked on her case."

Nate was frowning now. "Yeah. Yeah, I worked on it. She went out to play in the gardens one morning, and nobody admitted to seeing her once she stepped off the back veranda. We never found a trace of her. My boss at the time decided her father had snatched her; there'd been an ugly divorce. But we couldn't trace him."

"Trust me, the father didn't snatch her. Or, at any rate, she never left The Lodge." Quentin glanced toward Ruppe, and added, "I'll wait here while you talk to Ms. Boyd, if you don't mind."

"You suspect Ruppe?"

"He was here twenty-five years ago. He's here now. That's all I know." Quentin was also wary of the fact that Ruppe had turned up here when, if Quentin hadn't followed her, Diana would have been alone and vulnerable. Maybe the stable manager would have posed no threat to her even so, but Quentin wasn't prepared to accept that as a given.

There had to be a reason, after all, why his own abilities had sent him down here after her. Maybe he had just needed to wake her, to pull her from the gray time before she remained there too long. Or maybe the threat to Diana had been of the flesh-and-blood sort.

Quentin didn't know. Yet.

"Considering the precious little we've got," Nate said with another sigh, "I can't say as I blame you for what's probably grasping at straws."

"I know he was questioned after Missy was murdered. I read the file." He had memorized it.

"Then you know the cops at the time couldn't find a whiff of anything suspicious about Ruppe."

"I know. But like I said, he was here then. He's here now. If nothing else, maybe he knows something he doesn't know he knows."

Nate considered that and nodded. "Yeah, maybe. People do, often enough. But don't question him, Quentin, not yet. He woke at what he states is his usual time and came down from his apartment to find two guests poking around in his tack room, so he's got a right to be rattled and pissed. Let's not make things worse until we've got reason to, okay?"

Quentin nodded. "Understood."

"Are you okay? You look a little..."

Thinking he probably looked a lot, Quentin grimaced and said, "Headache. A real bitch of a headache." Plus his ears felt as if they were stuffed with cotton, like his sinuses, and his eyes burned and ached. He was definitely paying the price for his all-night vigil.

"You should take something for that," Nate said.

"Yeah. Yeah, I will." Quentin didn't bother to explain that painkillers couldn't touch this sort of thing.

Nothing ever had, except time and rest.

Nate headed off toward The Lodge's main building, leaving Quentin and Ruppe eyeing one another across nearly half the distance of the barn's long hall. Quentin knew Ruppe undoubtedly had work to do; managing a stable comprising three separate barns and more than thirty horses was a full-time job even if others did most of the grunt work. The horses were already restless in anticipation of their morning feed, stamping their hooves and snorting softly; the maintenance crew would be showing up any moment to feed them and begin mucking out the stalls.

The clipboard hanging by the tack room listed three trail rides scheduled for today, as well as half a dozen classes for those beginning riders who wanted to do more than just hang on for dear life during future trail rides.

Ruppe clearly didn't have time to stand around all morning, much less engage in a pissing contest with the cops or Quentin. But it was just as obvious that he was jealous of his authority, and not about to give ground unless forced by Management to do so.

Quentin knew the type. He'd come up against them often enough in his years as a federal cop. He also knew that Nate was right in saying this wasn't the time to question the stable manager, badly as Quentin wanted to do that.

Nate would probably point out, however gently, that there was really no hurry, after all; Missy had been gone twenty-five years, and a few more hours or days or even weeks wasn't going to change that.

Probably.

But the restlessness Quentin had been conscious of last night had shifted abruptly into a deep, cold sense of foreboding this morning when Diana had opened her eyes so suddenly to make an eerily familiar statement.

"It's coming."

And it had required all his willpower to allow her to leave his sight. To walk away from him, back up the well-lit paths to her cottage in order to change. Because that was exactly what Missy had said to him twenty-five years before.

The last time he had seen her alive.

Ellie Weeks ate a piece of plain toast and sipped hot tea, longing for the black coffee that was her usual morning pick-me-up. But pregnancy and black coffee didn't appear to go together, at least where she was concerned; drinking the tea was infinitely preferable to puking her guts out. Besides which, The Lodge's head housekeeper, Mrs. Kincaid, had been watching her very closely the last few days, and Ellie couldn't afford to do anything even remotely suspicious.