Deep Freeze (48 page)

“On my way. Wait near the office. Don’t go anywhere. Do you hear me?”

“Yes! Geez.”

A newfound worry clutching at her, Jenna looked into Travis Settler’s eyes. “Dani’s not with her,” she said as the fire trucks, sirens screaming, rolled onto the street. Two police cruisers slid to a stop, spraying gravel. “I’m going to get Allie,” she said to Shane. “We’ll be right back.”

“I’ll come with you,” Shane said.

“Don’t you think you should tell them what’s going on?” She hitched her chin toward the cops getting out of their cars. “I’ll come back. With Allie.”

Impatiently, Travis said, “Let’s go. I’m right behind you.”

Jenna sped away from the curb and noticed Travis’s truck on her bumper. Three and a half minutes later, they pulled into the school’s lot in tandem.

Allie, backpack slung over one slim shoulder, was waiting near the front doors of Harrington Junior High. Leaning on a post, arms crossed over her chest, she looked angry as all get out. Jenna didn’t care. She threw herself out of the Jeep as Allie started walking to her.

The door to Travis’s pickup burst open and slammed with a thud behind him as he crossed the parking lot.

“Where’s Dani?” he asked, his expression military-hard.

“I already told Mom I don’t have any idea,” Allie said, some of her bravado slipping. “I haven’t seen her since lunch.”

“Has anyone?”

Allie shrugged and shook her head.

“Wait here,” he ordered, then his tone softened. “Please.”

Jenna’s arms had surrounded her daughter. “We will,” she promised as Travis left them standing outside and she, though it was over eighty degrees, shivered. Dear God, what was happening? Where was Dani? And Blanche? Why would anyone murder Blanche?
Payback Time?
What the hell did that mean?

Her cell phone chirped and seeing Shane’s name on caller ID, she forced a smile. “Hi,” she said, glancing around the deserted parking lot.

“Hi. Look, I thought you should know, my gut tells me this doesn’t have anything to do with you or Allie. Whatever happened here is about Blanche.”

“Then why is Dani missing?”

“Don’t know yet. Maybe a coincidence, but—”

“But you don’t believe in coincidence.”

“Right. Listen, we’ll figure it out,” he assured her. “I already called the house. Cassie answered. She’s fine.”

“I was just about to do that.” Jenna felt a new wave of relief that was tempered by her thoughts of Travis and his daughter. What the devil was going on with Dani.
She’s all right. She’s all right. She has to be. Calm down. This is all just a big mistake.

Except that Blanche Johnson is dead.

Jenna squeezed Allie more tightly and was thankful for Shane. For his strength. For his love.

“Are you okay?” Worry edged his voice.

“Fine,” she said, her throat thick with emotion.

“Good. Then, I’ll see you at home. I’m going to be tied up for a couple of hours, so I’ll catch a ride with someone.”

“Or call me and I’ll come get you.” She was eager to be with him again. To feel him close.

“Either way,” he said, then added, “I love you, you know.”

“Yeah, I know. Me, too.”

“The way it’s supposed to be, darlin’,” he said as Jenna heard the muffled sound of another voice vying for his attention. “Look, Jenna, I gotta go.”

“Yeah.” She blinked rapidly.

“See ya later.”

“I’m counting on it, Sheriff,” she teased, her eyes suddenly hot, tears of relief close to the surface as she clicked off, then pulled herself together. This wasn’t the time to fall apart. Her girls were safe. Her life with Shane more secure and filled with more honest love than she’d ever thought possible.

Yet she couldn’t help worrying about Dani Settler. Where the devil was she?

Travis felt as if something inside of him was about to explode. He jogged to the front doors of the school and swung them open. The halls were nearly deserted. No laughing children, no teachers, just a custodian wheeling a large garbage can down a hallway.

Inside the glassed-in office, a secretary was sitting behind her desk. Reading glasses were propped on the end of her nose, a phone was pressed to her ear and she was reading from a computer printout. She looked up at him as he approached. “Oh, Mr. Settler. I’m glad you’re here.” She offered him a forced smile. “Danielle didn’t show up for physical education, the last period of the day. I was just making the call to your house. She’ll need an excuse for—”

“What do you mean ‘she didn’t show up’?”

“Just that. Mr. Jamison had to mark her absent and…”

“Then where is she?” he demanded, his heart thudding in his ears.

“That’s what I was going to ask you.” Behind her reading glasses, the woman’s eyes changed from taciturn to worried.

“The last time I saw her was when I dropped her off this morning,” he said, a dark clawing fear scraping his insides. Images of Dani flashed, like ruffled cards in a deck, through his mind. Dani as a newborn, downy-haired and red-faced, Dani as a three-year-old with an impish smile and tumbling curls, Dani without her front teeth at Christmas when she was seven, Dani at her mother’s funeral…Oh, God, where the hell was she?

“I think we’d better call the principal,” the secretary said. She disconnected her phone and clicked a speed-dial button.

The principal, the police, the National Guard. Call whoever it took. In his peripheral vision Travis noticed Jenna and Allie walking toward the office. Both had strained expressions on their white faces and Travis Settler knew despair as deep and black as all hell itself.

Jenna and Allie stepped through the door, Jenna’s hand protectively on her daughter’s shoulder. “What did they say?” she asked.

The truth of it hit him like a sucker punch. “They don’t know where she is,” he said, remembering Blanche Johnson’s dead body, the weird bloodstained message scratched into the wall and the grease fire with its thick smoke. He swallowed hard and felt as if the very life had been squeezed out of him. All his darkest fears congealed. Life as he’d known it had stopped abruptly. “My daughter’s missing,” he said and knew, without a doubt, that his worst nightmare had just begun.

Dear Reader,

I hope you enjoyed Jenna and Shane’s story. Boy, did I have a great time writing the book! The idea for
Deep Freeze
started when my editor said he wanted a book where the killer only kills in the winter. “Wow,” I thought, “that’s not much to go on. Why would he only kill with the snowfall? Where would the book be set? How would he do it?” But the idea for the story started to form just about the time my editor said, “And you know what? How about a companion book where the opposite is true: another serial killer, linked to the first, who kills either in or with intense heat.”

I’ve always loved the idea of opposites or the yin and yang in life. I thought this was a fabulous idea. I ran with it.

So…the follow-up book that will be available in March 2006 is
Fatal Burn
. You’ll meet old friends from
Deep Freeze
and meet some new ones as well.

Fatal Burn
is Travis Settler’s story. He’s propelled into action as his only child, his adopted daughter, Dani, is missing, presumed abducted. He doesn’t know how, where or why his daughter was stolen from him, but he intends to find her, and he’ll use every method he’s learned from his military/spy past to find her—with or without the cops.

Armed and dangerous, Travis follows a trail that leads straight to Shannon Carlyle’s door in Northern California.

Shannon is Dani’s birth mother as well as a beautiful woman with a dark past she’d hoped was put to rest forever, a woman who never thought she’d get the chance to again see the daughter she gave up as an infant.

Travis is giving her that chance and she leaps at it.

Neither trusting the other, Shannon and Travis have to work together. Time is running out. A serial arsonist has resumed his deadly fires and somehow, they fear, he’s connected to Shannon.

And to Dani.

Don’t forget to log on to
www.lisajackson.com
where you can learn more about
Deep Freeze
as well as my other books, play games, enter contests, take polls or participate in discussions online. At
www.themysterymansion.com,
you can log on and visit the mansion that has interactive rooms from some of my books.

Now, please turn the page, and get an exciting sneak peek at
Fatal Burn.

Keep reading!

Best,

Lisa Jackson

He stood before the fire, feeling its heat, listening to the crackle of flames as they devoured the tinder-dry kindling. With all the shades drawn, he slowly unbuttoned his shirt, the crisp white cotton falling off his shoulders as moss ignited, hissing. Sparking.

Above the mantel was a mirror and he watched himself undress, looked at his perfectly honed body, muscles moving easily, flexing and sliding beneath the taut skin of an athlete.

He glanced at his eyes. Blue. Icy. Described by one woman as “bedroom eyes,” by another as “cold eyes,” by yet another unsuspecting woman as “eyes that had seen too much.”

They’d all been right, he thought and flashed a smile.

A “killer smile” he’d heard.

Bingo.

The women had no idea how close to the truth they’d all been. He was handsome and he knew it. Not good-looking enough to turn heads on the street, but so interesting that women, once they noticed him, had trouble looking away.

There had been a time when he’d been so flattered that he’d rarely turned in the other direction, a time when he’d picked and chosen and rarely been denied.

He unbuckled his leather belt, let it fall to the hardwood floor. His slacks slid easily off his butt, down his legs and pooled at his feet. He hadn’t bothered with boxers or jockeys. Who cared? It was all about outward appearances.

Always.

His smile fell away as he walked closer to the mantel, feeling the heat already radiating from the old bricks. Pictures in frames stood at attention upon the smooth fir. Images he’d caught when his subject didn’t realize he or she was on camera. People who knew him. Or of him. People who had to pay.

His eyes fixated on one photograph, slightly larger than the others, and he stared into her gorgeous face. He traced a finger along her hairline, his guts churning as he noticed her hazel eyes, slightly freckled nose, thick waves of unruly reddish curls. Her skin was pale, her eyes alive, her smile tenuous, as if she’d sensed him hiding in the shadowy trees, his lens poised at her heart-shaped face.

The dog, some kind of scraggly mutt, had appeared from the other side of the woods, lifted his nose in the air as he’d reached her, trembled, growled, and nearly given him away. Shannon had given the cur a short command and peered into the woods.

By that time, he’d been slipping away. Silently moving through the dark woods, putting distance between them, heading upwind. He’d gotten his snapshots. He’d needed nothing more.

Then.

Because the timing hadn’t been right.

But now…

The fire glowed bright, seemed to pulse with life as it grew, giving the bare room a warm, rosy glow. He stared again at his image. So perfect in the mirror.

He turned, facing away from the reflection.

Looking over his shoulder, he gritted those perfect white teeth, gnashing them together as he saw the mirror’s cruel image of his back, the skin scarred and shiny, looking as if it had melted from his body.

He remembered the fire.

The agony of his flesh being burned from his bones.

He’d never forget.

Not for as long as he drew a breath on this godforsaken planet.

And those who had done this to him would pay.

From the corner of his eye, he saw the picture of Shannon again. Beautiful and wary, as if she knew her life was about to change forever.

Look out,
he thought, smiling evilly.
I’m coming, Shannon, oh, yes, I’m coming. And this time I’ll have more than a camera with me.