Frozen (Detective Ellie MacIntosh) Read Online Free PDF

lived, Bryce slowed the car to a crawl, searching for the driveway. It had been pitch dark, wet, and nothing looked particularly familiar, but finally he spotted the dip of a drive, and through the leafless branches the roof outline of a small cabin, almost invisible from the road.
    Yes, this was it, or so he thought, but in the light it was all different, though he was reassured by the gouge of fresh tire tracks going up the muddy drive. His tires splashed through standing puddles of water as he turned in.
    The place was small, neat, with weathered siding and a stone chimney. There were brilliant scarlet and yellow wet leaves plastered to the shingles on the roof and the drapes were still drawn. Bryce glanced at his watch. It was only about eight-thirty and a Saturday morning. Did bird-watching grad students sleep in on weekends or was her research project a seven-day-a-week job? He hesitated to wake her, but on the other hand, she no doubt wanted her phone back. Without it she was literally stranded.
    He got out, slammed the door, and walked around to where a small set of wooden steps led to a miniscule porch that had a pot of long-since-withered ferns sitting by a wooden screen door. It opened with a protest of rusted hinges and he knocked.
    No answer. The morning was chilly and his breath blew puffs of steam. Bryce shoved his hands into his pockets and waited.
    Nothing stirred inside that he could hear. He tried again, resisting the urge to lean over and look through the slight part in the curtains in the window next to the door.
    He knocked again a little bit louder.
    It was possible, of course, she was out working on her project. He could just leave the phone on the stoop, he supposed, but he hated to do that because it wasn’t cheap and electronics didn’t always do so well when left outside in the damp of late Wisconsin October.
    She couldn’t have gone far without the Jeep. He glanced around, wondering where she’d go on foot. Birds, he realized, were everywhere.
    He went down the steps, looking around at the slender stands of trees crowding the narrow drive, and wasn’t sure quite what to do. He could go ahead and go to town, do his shopping, and then come back and try and catch her …
    It was at that moment he saw the shoe.
    And the blood.
    *   *   *
    The swirl of blue and red lights on a quiet Saturday morning was all wrong, Ellie thought as she pulled up, seeing the wash of revolving color against the white scarred bark of the slender birches. The first police officer to step forward was a square-shouldered, square-jawed blond man, a silver deputy’s badge pinned to his jacket, his familiar face set. “Could be we’ve got another one,” he said by way of greeting as she got of her car.
    Not quite what she wanted to hear. The lack of sleep made her eyes gritty. “Fill me in.”
    Rick Jones nodded once. “Got an emergency services call from a man who says he gave a woman a ride home from a bar last night. She left her cell in his car and he came here to return it. No sign of her, but we do have blood, a pair of shoes, and it looks like she might have been dragged off into the woods. He says she was a grad student from UWM studying birds or something.”
    “How’d he know that?”
    “They had a couple of beers at the local tavern. She told him.”
    “Did he know her before?”
    “According to him, no.”
    “Show me.”
    Rick motioned to where an officer stood and she walked over, saw the discarded shoe and dark splotches on the leaves. She wanted to cry, right then and there, but it wouldn’t do this possible victim any good. Instead she swallowed hard and straightened. “I think I see why he called it in. However the blood got here we know it must have happened after the rain stopped, which was about midnight. That’s a start.”
    “He found her other shoe too, in a small stream about a couple of hundred or so yards from here. That’s when he says he really started to get the feeling