ABBY HAD A LATE DINNER: a spinach salad and microwave penne pasta. Afterward she tried to read, but found her attention wandering. TV seemed like an idea, but nothing on tonight grabbed her. Using the remote control, she turned the television off just as her telephone rang.
“Abby, Scott here,” Meg’s husband said. “I’m up at the ski area. Just leaving. I need you to look at something. Can you come?”
“Up to Juanita Butte?”
“I’m sorry. I know it’s late.” He sounded grim. “But I really think you need to see it”
A chill stirred the hair on her nape. “What is it?”
“I’d rather you see for yourself,” Scott repeated.
“Is this something like the fire?”
“Yeah. But uglier. Or maybe it just got to me personally, I’m not sure.”
“All right.” She was already slipping her feet into canvas sneakers. “Don’t move. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
The clock on the dashboard said 9:04. Here at midsummer, night was just settling, the first layer like purple gauze, the next denser and darker.
The mountain loop highway climbed fast, bare at this time of year. Abby rolled down her window and breathed in the distinctive scent of pine and earth ground from red lava. The air was cool, dry; it became cold as the elevation rose. In the shadow of the mountain, nightfall came more drastically. She switched on her bright lights, noting how little traffic she met.
The ski area parking lot opened before her, huge, bare and empty, a paved sea that looked alien in the middle of nowhere. She could just make out the bulk of the lodge and the first lift towers rearing above. Patches of snow still lay up there, where plows had formed towering banks during the winter. Her high beams spotlighted Scott McNeil’s Jeep Cherokee. parked in its usual spot behind the lodge. He was half sitting on the bumper.
She parked next to him and climbed out, flashlight in hand. “What is it?”
A big man with dark auburn hair, he nodded toward the driver’s side of his Jeep. “Over there.”
She circled the back bumper, then stopped, shock stealing her breath.
A child’s car seat sat beside the driver’s door, facing the parking lot and highway. Just as Emily’s car seat had, the freezing cold night when she had been abandoned.
A doll was buckled into this seat. Abby trained her flashlight beam on it, wanting to be mistaken about what she was seeing.
The doll was plastic, the kind with arms and legs and a head that attached to sockets in the hard body.
This one was missing its head. From the empty, blackened socket, trickles of red dripped down the pink dress.
CHAPTER FOUR
IN THE BRIGHT illumination from the headlights of his Bronco, Ben Shea squatted beside the child’s seat. Abby overheard his muttered profanity.
“I shouldn’t have called you,” she said to his back. “I know there won’t be any fingerprints, and there sure as heck aren’t any witnesses.” She glanced involuntarily around at the dark parking lot. “I didn’t think. I assume this is connected...”
“The doll’s neck socket is seared.” He sank back on his heels and shot her a look. “Why wouldn’t you call me?”
“You were home...”
“Staring at the boob tube. Trust me, you didn’t interrupt anything.” Ben stood in a lithe movement. “This is some scary bastard. You’re probably right. We won’t find fingerprints. But I needed to see this. I’d have been fried if you hadn’t phoned.”
Abby could hardly look at the mutilated doll. How must Scott feel, having found this obscene echo of the past?
Emily had been abandoned here in her car seat two and a half years ago. Scott and Meg had found Emily’s mother, murdered, the next day. Somehow she must have persuaded her killer to leave the baby where Scott would find her. But he had admitted once to Abby that he still had nightmares about having bunked down at the lodge, as he used to do sometimes. In his dreams he came out to his car at dawn to find the little girl dead. Frozen, eerily pink in the morning light. He’d shuddered when he described the nightmare.
Abby stole a look at Scott now, standing behind the Jeep, staring at the night. Was he, like Abby, wondering whether somebody sick enough to create such a macabre tableau was capable of carrying through on the implicit threat? Was Emily in danger? Will? Or Meg, too pregnant to defend herself from attack?
Were they all?
“Okay,” Ben said, startling her from her dark thoughts. “Scott, I wasn’t here the night you found Emily. Tell me about it. What did this guy get right? What did he get wrong?”
They discussed positioning; both times, the child’s seat had faced the parking lot and highway, so that Scott had been looking at the back as he approached.
“Which may have been chance, with Emily,” Abby pointed out, “but tonight you know dam well this SOB did it so Scott couldn’t see what was in the seat until he got here. Suspense and shock value.”
Scott grunted. “Otherwise, this is a different kind of car seat. It’s been around the block. Look at the tears. They didn’t make ones like this anymore even when...” his hesitation was barely perceptible “... when my ex-wife and I had our little boy. I think these were designed for babies up to six months old or so. Most of the seats nowadays are convertible.”
Ben made a note. “We’ll check secondhand stores. We can talk to people that had garage sales this past week or so, too.”
“The...doll isn’t dressed anything like Emily was that night.” Scott rubbed his chin. “Maybe he didn’t feel the need to bother with details. God knows, the general message has plenty of punch.”
“You could say that,” Ben agreed dryly. “On the other hand, maybe our friend was dependent on what was printed in the newspaper. Anybody remember how much was written about Emily?”
“Not that much,” Scott said. “Remember, we didn’t find Shelly’s body until the next day. By the time reporters heard about Emily’s abandonment and made the connection, nobody was asking what Emily had been wearing. The focus was on Shelly’s murder and her heroism in saving her daughter. Somebody might have mentioned that Emily was warmly dressed. I don’t remember.”
None of them could help looking at the doll, her bare plastic legs sticking out from beneath the skirt of the pink dress. Socks on both feet, one shoe.
No head.
Ben seemed to shake himself. “Let me get some pictures, and then I’ll take the seat. We’ll let the crime lab go over it. The guy had to have touched the doll. Maybe he was careless.”
Abby doubted it.
The flash created bursts of brilliant light as Ben worked. After he was done, he put on latex gloves and lifted the whole child seat into the rear of his Ford Bronco. When Scott wasn’t watching, Abby saw Ben lift the doll’s skirt. Earlier, before he came, she had done the same. Thank God the creep who’d wrenched the doll’s head from the socket, who’d dripped fake—or real?—blood from her neck, hadn’t committed any outrage with a sexual connotation on the realistic plastic body. She was equally grateful that Scott, who didn’t spend his days dealing with the scumbags of the universe, hadn’t even considered such a possibility.
Or else he’d checked before Abby’s arrival.
Ben peeled off the gloves and held out a hand to Scott. “I’ll let you know what we find. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you to keep an extra close eye on Emily.”
“Have Will be careful,