Deep Freeze (33 page)

So why did she continue to haunt him, not only at night when his dreams would take him into her bedroom and into her bed, but during the day?

The images were vivid and visceral.

Ice glazed the windows. Snow fell steadily outside. A fire crackled near the bed where he made love to her in every position, his muscles straining, her body soft but compliant, her lips warm, her eyes gazing up at him with innocent eroticism. Their coupling was feverish, nearly brutal, filled with wanting and a desire that didn’t stop until both their bodies were soaked with a sheen of sweat.

Afterward, Carter would awaken.

Feel like a fool.

His body sated.

What the hell was he thinking?

Realist, my ass.

Wasn’t Carolyn also above your station, the daughter of an ex-governor? A woman who had once modeled for print ads in
The Oregonian?
Why can’t you settle for a nice, local woman, someone who owns a bakeshop, or works for an insurance agent, or runs an ad agency, someone who would look up to you rather than the other way around?

Teeth clenched so hard his jaw ached, he snapped his keys out of the ignition. He was hungry, dead tired, and whether he liked to admit it or not, horny as hell. “Shit,” he growled as he slid out of the truck, and walked the few steps to his front door, where he kicked off his boots and hung his jacket.

Unbuckling his shoulder holster, he reminded himself that he had a job to do—he couldn’t be distracted by a woman.
Any
woman. He draped his holster over the back of a chair, dropped his briefcase onto the couch, stoked the fire in the woodstove, and tossed a frozen “man-sized” dinner into the microwave and set the timer.

Pouring himself a stiff shot, he tried to keep his mind off of Jenna Hughes. He had too much to do to be thinking about a woman, especially
that
woman. She was the intended victim of a stalker and he had to keep his perspective. Which, of course, was proving impossible. She’d somehow gotten under his skin and burrowed deep into his thoughts.

An idiot, that’s what he was.

As the microwave hummed and he sipped his drink, he clicked on the television and found the news. Old footage of Charley Perry up at Catwalk Point came into view, then a discussion of Sonja Hatchell and Roxie Olmstead’s disappearances. A police source “close to the investigation” had said there was no link to the crimes, but the newscasters speculated upon the possibility of a serial kidnapper, or perhaps a serial rapist or serial killer.

“Great,” Carter said sarcastically.

The two anchors, a woman and man in matching suit jackets, chatted about the public taking precautions and promised a statement from the Oregon State Police.
Fine.
Carter rattled the ice cubes in his drink.
Let Lieutenant Larry Sparks handle that one.

The microwave dinged and he refreshed his drink, carried the hot little plastic plate on a towel into the living room, and using his ottoman as a table, watched the weather report.

More bad news. Yet another cold front was blasting in via Canada and temperatures were expected to drop to the lowest level in more than fifty years. A reporter standing in front of Multnomah Falls was dwarfed by six hundred feet of frozen, cascading water. The ice climbers were already arriving to try and scale the second largest waterfall in the contiguous United States.

“Damned fools,” he muttered, swallowing a forkful of lasagna.
Like David.
Inside he cringed, refused to think of the day that David Landis had slipped, fallen, and plunged to his death. He muted the television, left part of his dinner uneaten on the ottoman, and carried his drink to his desk. Typing rapidly, he logged onto the Internet, checked his e-mail, then clicked onto Jenna Hughes’s official home page before surfing through her fan sites.

Who, he wondered, was doing the same? How many people across the country, or throughout the world, were, at this moment in time, trying to learn more about the sultry actress? Who was nearby, the sicko close enough that he could gain access to her home?

Pulling BJ’s list from his briefcase, he cross-referenced the people who had rented or bought videos of her with the list of people she’d said had been in her home within the last few months.

He came up with Wes Allen, Harrison Brennan, Scott Dalinsky, Rinda Dalinsky, Travis Settler, Yolanda Fisher, Ron Falletti, Hans Dvorak, Estelle Thriven, Joshua Sykes, Seth Whitaker, Lanny Montinello, Blanche Johnson, and Shane Carter. He cut the women’s and his own name from the merged list and realized the resulting “suspects” were really just a start. There were probably people she couldn’t remember, workers who had been at the place, friends of friends, and the truth of the matter was that the guy might not be anyone she knew. It could be someone who either had a key from a previous owner or access from another source, perhaps someone she’d never known had set foot upon her land. Carter drummed his fingers on the desk and studied the picture of Jenna Hughes still radiating from his screen, a publicity shot where her long hair fell over one shoulder and she looked at the camera as if it were a lover. Her shoulders were bare, suggesting that she was naked, though that was just an illusion, as was much of the public’s perception of her persona. He flipped through a series of screens showing Jenna in her various roles. Katrina Petrova, her first starring role, a teenaged prostitute in
Innocence Lost,
Marnie Sylvane, the schoolteacher living a double life in
Summer’s End,
Paris Knowlton, a scared young mother in
Beneath the Shadows
. There were other images as well, from films where she’d played bit parts, and finally, there were several shots of her in her last, doomed movie,
White Out,
produced by her husband never released, where her sister, Jill, had been killed on the set. Jenna played Rebecca Lange, a downhill racer, and for the part her looks had been altered slightly.

In the pictures from the set, Jenna’s eyes were a clear blue, the result of contact lenses, Carter guessed. Her hair was blond for the role, and in one of the photographs, there was a picture of her battered and bruised, when Rebecca was in the hospital recuperating from a near-fatal skiing accident. Her face was swollen, her skin discolored, her teeth broken, and she was barely recognizable as beautiful Jenna Hughes.

It was as if she was a different woman.

Because of the art of makeup and prosthetics.

Carter stared at the image and a slow recognition stole over him.
Makeup!
That was the key.

His brain spinning ahead, he clicked onto a Web site he’d bookmarked on his computer. It was dedicated to alginate. He scrolled down quickly, skimming the article about alginate’s use for taking dental impressions, and flashed to Mavis Gette’s filed-down teeth. He’d thought it might be to disguise her identity, but maybe not.

Remembering Jenna’s broken teeth in her role as Rebecca Lange, he imagined the process used to achieve that look. Someone, either a dentist or a makeup artist, had taken an impression of Jenna Hughes’s bite, then fitted a set of fake, broken teeth over her own to make it appear as if she’d lost and cracked teeth in the skiing accident. Kind of like the vampire teeth a kid would buy for a Halloween costume.

“Hell,” he whispered, as he considered the possibilities and kept reading. He noticed a mention of alginate as used in making prosthetics and masks, and he felt as if the wind had been knocked out of him. Was it possible? Had he missed something so obvious?

Eagerly he spent the next hour researching the making of masks and molds, learning that masks could be made by covering a subject’s body part in liquid alginate to create a reverse image or mold. Once the alginate had solidified, the body part was carefully removed, leaving a space, or the reverse-image mold. If plaster was cast into the mold, the artist would have a perfect copy of the original body part, be it face, hand, foot, or whatever.

“Hell,” he whispered, realizing the copy would be the mask that would look like the subject’s original body part. From this point, the mask could be painted, added to, or cut. Other pieces of alginate or latex could be glued to the original mask to change or distort the image.

There were artists in the movie industry who created monsters or comic book characters or aged characters in just this fashion.

Carter stared at the screen and watched a short, fast-forwarded video of a normal-looking Hollywood actor transform into a werewolf by the use of an alginate mask, prosthetics, contacts, false canine teeth, and a shaggy wig. Not only his face, but his hand, too, morphed slowly from a human hand to a furry paw with razor-sharp talons.

“An artist or a makeup person,” Carter said to himself as he thought of the traces of alginate found on Mavis Gette. “Not a dentist.”

They’d been looking in the wrong direction.

He watched the video again. When casting the actor’s face in alginate, straws were inserted up the subject’s nose so he was able to breathe.

And live.

But what if the subject, such as Mavis Gette, had been dead already? Then her face and other body parts could be used for a mold without the need of straws to keep her breathing.

Except that the crime lab had found traces of alginate internally. As if she’d ingested it.

His thoughts turned dark. Was the liquid alginate applied while Mavis had still been alive, the ultimate death mask? Why hadn’t she struggled and ruined the mask? Perhaps she had. Or else she’d been drugged or somehow comatose…Jesus.

This was something out of an old B sci-fi flick.

Leaning back in his chair, he stared at the computer monitor. He felt the urge for a smoke—he could always think better when he relaxed with a cigarette. Rummaging in his desk, he found an old stick of Nicorette gum and popped it into his mouth. It was weak, far from a real hit, but he chewed the stuff and began surfing again, this time to Web sites dedicated to the making of movie monsters.

He watched another short video and witnessed an actor transform into an alien, another morph into a frightening image of Satan, while a third was aged by decades.

Was it possible?

Had the guy cast a mask of Mavis Gette’s face?

Why else would there be traces of alginate attached to her skull?

Was this the same creep who had kidnaped Sonja Hatchell?

Carter chewed thoughtfully and took notes, doodling as he tried to make sense of what he’d just learned. What kind of psycho would kill a woman for a mold of her face or body?

Could Mavis Gette’s killer be a studio artist, someone connected to Jenna Hughes? Someone who had been in the business?

His mind went to Vincent Paladin, who had worked in a video store, but Paladin had no history of being involved in maskmaking or filmmaking as far as Carter knew. And he wasn’t around. Carter had double-checked with his parole officer. Vincent was minding his Ps and Qs in Florida.

So who else? Someone local? A transient? What kind of guy was he?

Carter looked at the list of people who had rented Jenna’s films. Wes Allen led the pack. Wes Allen was an artist, though never with makeup, to Carter’s knowledge and Wes Allen had never lived in California.
But he had visited his sister and nephew when they resided near L.A.

Leaning back in his chair, Carter listened to the fire hiss in the woodstove. He had to be careful and not let his personal feelings about Wes get in the way of his perspective. Associating Wes Allen to the crime had to be real, not a personal vendetta.

Examine the evidence!

Sitting up, he tapped the eraser end of his pencil on the desktop. His mind ran in circles and he thought of Jenna Hughes. Beautiful. Smart. Sexy. And now a target.

Of adoration?

Or murder?

Pulling the keyboard from its tray, he clicked onto his list of favorite bookmarked Web sites, then scrolled down to her name. Again. With a touch of his finger, her image appeared on his monitor. He couldn’t help the tightening in his groin as he slowly flipped from one picture to the next. Each image was gorgeous, the kind of photos meant to be sexy and innocent and intriguing.

Even so, the computer screen was a flat, poor replica of the vital, real woman.

Chewing his tasteless gum, he thought about Jenna longer than he should have and figured BJ was right—he was in lust.

With a Hollywood star.

Just like a hundred million other men.

One of whom was stalking her.

Possibly Wes Allen.

Who could easily be eliminated from the suspect list? He spat his gum into the trash and pulled open the top desk drawer, searching in the back until he found a small cardboard box. Inside, lying upon a bed of cotton, were three rings. His wedding band and Carolyn’s engagement set, complete with a one-carat diamond.

Ignoring the jewelry, he lifted the cotton. Tucked into the box was a single, worn key from an ancient lock. One he’d never used, though he’d been tempted over and over again.

Without a second thought, Carter slipped the key into his wallet. Just in case.

At that moment, his cell phone beeped.

He hit the Answer key and stared at the images playing upon his computer screen. Pictures of Jenna Hughes.

“Shane Carter.”

“Sheriff, it’s Dorie.” The dispatcher sounded breathless and unnerved.

Carter braced himself.

“Yeah?”

“We just took a 9–1-1 call,” she said. “Derwin Swaggert’s wife is missing.”

“Lynnetta?” Time seemed to stand still.

“That’s right.”

“Hell.” Carter knew in an instant that another woman had been abducted. “How long has she been missing?”

“Only a couple of hours, but he’s out of his mind with worry. He’s already called the city police, but wants you involved, so I’m giving you a heads-up. I know it hasn’t been the full twenty-four hours, but I figured you’d want to know.”