by Lisa Jackson
Every aspect about it was disturbing.
Straightening with effort, she squinted into the shadowy undergrowth rising with the walls of this canyon. Yes, this part of the wilderness was somewhat remote and certainly not a tourist attraction, but in summer there were outdoor enthusiasts who hiked or mountain-biked, fished or picnicked, birdwatched, picked huckleberries, or generally communed with nature. So not as remote as it might seem.
“Detective. Please?” one of the crime scene techs said as she aimed her flashlight’s beam over the tufts of dry grass not far from Pescoli’s shoes. “Do you mind?” The tech was a thin woman with angular features, a pinched mouth, and thick, oversized glasses.
Pescoli backed up and took a broader look at the area. The path that was being examined cut down from the surrounding cliff to angle along the shores of what, during the spring thaw, was a sizeable, fast-moving stream. Now, in August, the water was shallow and sluggish, the pool in which the body lay the deepest part of the creek.
Alvarez, who’d been okayed by the same tech, was crouching over the body, carefully studying the victim’s face and hairline before using the illumination cast by her own flashlight to explore the shallows. Water riffled over shiny stones as it flowed slowly over the girl’s face, distorting the macabre features even more. From there, the creek moved around her torso to run past her legs and bare feet. The skirt of her short dress billowed around her thighs.
Pescoli had seen enough.
Another tech, Lex Farnsby, was searching the hillside, and Pescoli followed him along the steep trail, the dusty path—she was certain, from Bianca’s description—on which her daughter had recently fled. “Footprints?” she asked, breathing hard, beads of sweat collecting near her hairline.
“Mmm. A few, hard to tell exactly how fresh,” he said as he kept at his job, sweeping the beam of his flashlight over the dust. The climb was taxing but slow, and Pescoli stopped several times, looking over the canyon, trying to imagine if the victim had come down this path. Had she been followed? Chased like Bianca? Seen “a monster”? Had someone caught up with her, attacked her, and either killed her or injured her and left her for dead? If so, had she known him? Had her attacker been a male? Or had she died in some freak accident?
“Holy . . .” Farnsby said from about ten feet above Pescoli on the trail. A short, compact man with a receding hairline and a perpetual scowl, he was studying the ground intently. “What the hell is this?”
“What?” Breathing hard, Pescoli followed him to a narrow space between two boulders that loomed over her. He’d angled his flashlight to run its beam on the ground between the huge stones to a spot in the trail where several footprints, with what appeared to be the tread of a running shoe, had left an imprint. Next to them was another massive print, clearly defined and shoeless, as if it had been made by an immense man.
Pescoli froze. Studied the print. “Big guy?”
“Bigger than anyone I’ve ever seen.” He crouched next to the impression, then placed a folding scale next to the print and snapped a photo. The flash further illuminated the footprint.
It was pretty damned big.
Using a slim tape measure, he took measurements of the length and width of the print. “Wow,” he whispered, rocking back on his heels and frowning, his features visible in the light from Pescoli’s flashlight. “Don’t move,” he ordered and swung his beam around the area in an obvious attempt to find another print. “What the hell made that?”
Though he was probably talking to himself, she ventured a guess. “Grizzly bear?”
“You see any claws?” he snapped, as if she were an idiot.
“A mountain man?”
“With size-twenty or more shoes?”
“Basketball player?”
Farnsby glanced up at her. He didn’t bother to hide his contempt. “I don’t think Shaq or Yao Ming has been to Grizzly Falls lately.”
“So what’re you saying?”
“I don’t know.”
But she thought he had an idea, one she wouldn’t like. She saw the spark in his eyes, the bit of wonder in his features in the half-light from their flashlights. “Don’t say it, Farnsby,” she said, guessing what he was thinking. “Don’t even go there.”
His gaze locked with hers. “Gotta be.”
“Sasquatch?” She shook her head. “Don’t tell me you’re a Big Foot guy.”
“Well, this here”—he pointed at the print with one finger—“came from a helluva big foot. Okay? I’m not saying it was made by a Sasquatch—”
“Big Foot’s a myth. That’s it. Nothing more.” But just as the words were rolling over her tongue, she, for a second, remembered what Bianca had said: This . . . this thing was huge. Massive. Like way taller than me and it ... I mean, I couldn’t tell, but it was on two legs. Rearing up. And it smelled. Bad. . . . maybe a really big human. Massive. And hairy.
“I’m just sayin’—” Farnsby said, but Pescoli had heard enough.
She held up a hand to stop any further argument. “Yeah, I know. Just collect the evidence, bring it in, and . . . let’s not go anywhere near the whole Sasquatch thing. Okay? We just need to ID the victim, find out what happened to her, prove it, and if foul play was involved, nail the bastard who did it to her. That’s our job. End of story.”
What the investigation didn’t need was anything that would turn a tragedy into a media circus. Like some tech, a supposed man of science, bringing Sasquatch into the mix. If it was anything, it was some kind of hoax.
“Big Foot,” she muttered under her breath and wondered why those two words sounded like an omen.
Pescoli headed downhill and met up with her partner; then, seeing that Alvarez was dealing with the coroner, she made her way back into the graveled area where the kids were being detained. By now, parents were at their children’s sides.
Wiping the perspiration from her forehead, she observed the little groups of parents, kids, and cops standing between the parked cars of the teenagers. The interviews were progressing.
The thing of it was, Pescoli knew most of the teens, as well as a good many of the adults. She’d met several sets of parents, or the single parents, over the years that Bianca had been in school, some of them as far back as preschool, over a dozen years earlier.
Interviewing them would be a trip down memory lane—make that a bad trip, considering the situation.
Reading their faces in the strobing lights from the department-issued cruisers, she noted that a good percentage of the parents were horrified, as would be expected, a few seemed angry and nervous, and a few others refused to have their children talk to the cops at all, as if the kids, or maybe the parents themselves, had something to hide, or because they’d been down this road before and decided to say nothing until they lawyered up.
Too bad. The way Pescoli figured it, every last one of them, including herself, should be relieved that it wasn’t their child being hauled out of the woods in a body bag sometime this morning.
The interviews weren’t going to be fun. That much was certain. She headed to a clutch of women she recognized, all of whom had aged in the dozen or so years that had passed since she’d seen them every morning as she’d dropped off or picked up Bianca from preschool. At this time of night—make that morning—being pulled out of sleep to come and get their kids at a wild-ass party where a body had been found—yeah, it didn’t look good on anyone. Except maybe for Mary-Beth Delaney, who was as trim as ever, her auburn hair without any gray, no lines marring a face with high cheekbones, pointed chin, and wide eyes. She was dressed in a jogging suit, her hair drawn up in a messy bun, hooped earrings glinting in the harsh lights from the cruisers, not a smudge of makeup out of place.
She smiled at Regan, though her gaze did flick down Pescoli’s body for a quick, judgmental second.
Never had Pescoli felt so hugely pregnant.
“This is so awful. So awful. Can we just get out of here?” Mary-Beth asked anxiously, as if she and Pescoli were ti
ght, had been friends for years, though they hadn’t seen each other for a decade. Pescoli remembered Mary-Beth as being a pushy mom in preschool, already insisting her little Simone excel at letters and numbers or whatever it was the kids did then. While Bianca was coloring butterflies outside the lines and drawing some additional free-form insects on the page, Simone had been encouraged to keep her work neat, the coloring shaded, the hues blended, each stroke of the crayon smooth. Like the little toddler was going to become some female, twenty-first-century Michelangelo or something.
And yet both of their daughters had ended up here, in the forest, in the dark of the night, where a classmate had apparently died.
“You can go soon. I just have a few more questions for Simone,” Pescoli said, turning toward Mary-Beth’s daughter. She forced a smile as Mary-Beth flicked another glance at her protruding waistline.
“Bianca left,” Simone asserted. Challenging. Defiant.
“Yes, she did,” Pescoli agreed.
“I don’t see why she got to leave, and I have to stay.” She flipped her hair off her face, her eyes narrowed, her lips in a flat angry line.
“It’s not fair,” Lindsay Cronin chimed in petulantly. In a quicksilver moment, Pescoli remembered Lindsay as a preschooler, chubby arms crossed over her chest, chin pointed out, lips turned down, spouting the same words, “It’s not fair,” over some minor infraction at the school. Then, as apparently now, Lindsay felt the need to point out when things didn’t go as she liked.
“She gave her statement. I already spoke with her,” Pescoli said.
That was too much for Mary-Beth. “They let you interrogate your own daughter?” One manicured hand flipped skyward in an expression of disbelief. “Isn’t that like a major conflict of interest?”
Well, yeah. “Not interrogate. We’re interviewing. Asking a few questions. That’s all. Someone else from the department will talk with Bianca again. Of course.”
Mary-Beth silently accused her of lying.
“It’s so unfair!” Simone crossed her arms over her chest. Her pouting was nearly palpable.
A step behind her daughter, Mary-Beth was nodding.
Pescoli agreed. “You’re right. It’s not. Fair, that is. But then nothing is.” She eyed the girl, who was wearing enough makeup to look like she was trying out for a reality show. Simone’s eyeliner and mascara were applied nearly as thickly as her haughty expression.
“And I heard Bianca thinks she saw a monster, some kind of big hairy ape thing in the woods.” Simone’s chin inched up a fraction.
“You heard that?” Pescoli really wanted to downplay any talk of a monster. Finding the dead girl up here would create enough of a media frenzy as it was.
“Everybody heard it. Rod Devlin said she was raving like a lunatic. Emmett Tufts says he was walking back to base camp, and Bianca came racing down the hill and nearly knocked him over, she was so out of it.”
Pescoli caught a glimpse of Emmett and his brother, Preston, standing next to a pickup with a king cab. Between them was their mother, Terri. The boys had gotten their height from their mother, as she nearly looked eye-to-eye with her sons, both of whom were over six feet and had played basketball for the high school. Terri, she’d heard, had played college ball. As had she. Terri had been a center, Pescoli a guard.
“Everyone knows about the Big Foot,” Simone said, and Lindsay nodded vehemently.
Pescoli thought of the huge footprint Farnsby, the supercilious Sasquatch-believing tech, had discovered and even now was probably casting. It wouldn’t be long before the story got out.
Pulling her small recorder from her pocket before the girl could protest again, she said, “Let’s get started, so we can get you home.” She hoped she sounded affable, but she wasn’t quite able to hide the sarcasm in her words. Too bad. “So, Simone, why don’t you tell me what you were doing up here at around two in the morning?”
Her mother winced.
Good.
“Just hanging out. With friends,” the girl said, some of her attitude dissipating.
“What time did you get here?”
“I dunno. Maybe a little after midnight?” she said slowly, eyeing her mother for her reaction. Mary-Beth’s tight mouth seemed to pinch even tighter.
“Were you alone, or did you come with someone?”
“With Lindsay,” she admitted, blowing air through her nose as if disgusted with herself.
“Lindsay?”
“Lindsay Cronin.”
“The girls are best friends,” Mary-Beth cut in. “Good girls. Simone even volunteers at the hospital.” She placed her hands over Simone’s shoulders, her fingertips clenched in the girl’s T-shirt, as if she were trying to silently and subtly warn her daughter to tread carefully.
Of what?
A cop they’d known forever? Pescoli remembered a time when Simone, all of four, had been on a playdate with Bianca after preschool, where Simone had played dress-up and tried to master Candy Land. Even then, Pescoli had caught the little girl cheating, if she’d even understood what she was doing, which Pescoli hadn’t believed.
Now, in the middle of the hot August night over a decade later, she considered that maybe she had.
The rest of the interview didn’t go well, no surprise, nor did any of the others.
As it was: Nobody knew nothin’.
At least that’s what all the teenagers who’d been rounded up wanted the cops to believe. But Pescoli wasn’t so sure. She figured they were more interested in covering their asses than finding out the truth. Most of them smelled like a brewery, and talking to any of them to get any relevant information was like pulling teeth from a cement jaw.
Madison Averill, who’d probably been instrumental in getting Bianca to come up here in the first place, had been sullen and clinging to TJ O’Hara, “Teej” to the kids. TJ had tried to shrug Madison off, but she’d wrapped her fingers tightly around his arm and looked at him with doe-soft eyes.
Teenage angst on display. At a tragedy. Pescoli had trouble dealing with it.
TJ had been polite enough, but had kept his answers short and had avoided eye contact with Pescoli. In fact, he’d kept tossing looks across the parking lot to a spot where Lara Haas was engaged in a whispered conversation with both of her parents. She was hard to miss with blond hair, and a tight, white T-shirt and shorts, not exactly the kind of outfit one would wear trying to hide in the game of hide-and-seek that Bianca had described.
The girl was a knockout with a body the stuff of teenage boys’ wet dreams; a porn movie producer’s opinion of a “real woman.” Huge breasts, nipped-in waist, and a rounded butt above legs that wouldn’t quit.
No wonder TJ was throwing surreptitious glances in her direction. Most of the boys were, including the Bell kid, who had been belligerent, almost defiant, just like his old man and older brother, Kip. In the Bell brothers’ case, the bad apples certainly hadn’t fallen far from the rotten tree.
Some of the girls had been crying and couldn’t or wouldn’t tell them anything,
Lindsay Cronin’s histrionics had apparently taken over her ability to speak coherently as she’d looked up at the sky and sobbed, only to be comforted by TJ’s brother, Alex. Older than TJ by a couple of years, Alex O’Hara was also taller and heavier, a football-lineman type. He had his arm around the wailing Lindsay while Simone Delaney, standing a few steps away and still with her mother, took in the scene and scowled darkly. Something was definitely going on there, Pescoli thought and made a mental note.
It didn’t look like those “besties” were all that close, at least not as tight as Mary-Beth Delaney wanted Pescoli to believe.
The worst of the lot, Pescoli thought, was Austin Reece. He was smart and privileged and wasn’t about to be intimidated by the authorities.
“I don’t have to talk to you without my lawyer present,” he first told Detective Sage Zoller, a bit of a thing with a tight, gymnast’s body, springy curls and a bad-ass attitude. Now he was giving Pescoli
the same song and dance all served up with a smug, frat-boy smile. “I know my rights.”
“We’re just trying to find out what was going on.” She was attempting to hold on to her patience, but it was growing thin . . . fish-line thin.
He arched an imperious eyebrow. “I’ve called my dad. He’s on his way.”
Perfect. Not that the kids didn’t need their parents. Hell, hadn’t Bianca? But this one? Not so much. Reece’s imperious attitude rankled. Big time. Pescoli was hot, tired, and not interested in playing nice. What she’d like was a cool bath, a cigarette, and a Coors Light, not necessarily in that order, but she’d given up nicotine—well, kinda—years before, drinking anything alcoholic was out while she was pregnant, and a cool bath, well, that would have to wait.
“My father’s with Reece, Connors and Galbraith,” Austin reminded her. “Actually, he’s the ‘Reece,’ in the firm’s name. You know, as in senior partner.”
Pescoli regarded him with a cool eye. He really had a bad case of the I’m-better-than-you flu. A lot of it going around these days. “I know who your daddy is. And I don’t care. But when he gets here, I’ve got a few more questions for you.”
She was rewarded with a bored “oh-sure” expression that was mostly a smirk, but she held on to her fast-escaping cool for all she was worth.
Now was not the time to get in a wrangle with a teen.
CHAPTER 5
At her desk, Alvarez glanced at her watch. Barely 6 AM. And she’d been up all night. From the crime scene, she’d driven to the morgue, then here, to the office. Her muscles ached, and a slow, steady headache was building at the base of her skull as her stomach rumbled to remind her that her last meal had been half a cheese sandwich she’d grabbed the previous afternoon. She’d been up for over twenty-four hours, and it would be a few more before she could go home and tumble into bed. A nap, that’s what she needed, then a hot shower, a cup of tea, and a bowl of fruit, yogurt, and granola. Better yet, a long yoga session to stretch her tense muscles. As it was, she’d have to settle for the tea.