by Lisa Jackson
“That’s what cats do. Work you,” Linnie had agreed, smugly satisfied that Jillian was hooked by the kitten and there would be no returning the little calico to the Humane Society shelter. “And it’s why they’re so much like husbands.”
“Fine, fine, Marilyn can stay. Just don’t go to the ex-husband pound and bring me one back, okay?”
Linnie smiled. “Funny girl. Didn’t I tell you not to marry Mason, huh? I distinctly remember mentioning something about you not being over Aaron when you took up with him.”
“Mom, Aaron was dead four years when I married Mason.”
“He was missing for four years. And you always suspected something else was going on with Aaron before he disappeared.”
“So did the police. But it’s ancient history now,” Jillian reminded her, not wanting to think what her ex had done, how he’d set her up, how she’d been hounded after his death.
Linnie had clearly wanted to say more, but for once had thought better of it. “So stick with cats for a while.”
“Oh, I will,” Jillian had agreed. “Believe me.”
“No men?”
“No, Mom, no men. Not for a long, long time.”
And so the cat had stayed, and so far, Jillian had kept her vow. Which didn’t answer the burning question: who was calling her at the crack of dawn? No, make that before dawn.
She took a sip of coffee, set a squirming Marilyn onto the ground and was about to walk up the stairs to her bedroom when her cell, still in her hand, jangled.
She answered before the second ring. “Hello?”
“He’s alive,” a reedy, paper-thin voice whispered.
“Pardon?”
“He’s alive.”
“Who? Who’s alive? Who is this?”
“Your husband. He’s alive.”
“I know he’s alive. And by the way, he’s my ex.” She knew Mason Rivers was very much alive and still driving a BMW, practicing law and most likely cheating on his most recent wife. Lots of women wished him dead, but Mason was just too damned egotistical to die. “Who is this?”
“Not your ex.”
“I’m hanging up,” Jillian said after a moment. A cold sensation was climbing up the back of her neck as she stared out the kitchen window at the gray waters of the lake. Her own pale reflection in the glass looked frightened. “Who are you?”
Click.
The phone went dead and as she stared at it she saw that her hand was shaking. Trembling. Her throat as dry as dust.
Aaron. Whoever was on the other end of the phone was telling her…warning her…that Aaron was alive? What the hell was that all about? And it wasn’t true!
But they never found his body, did they?
You never quit believing that someday he would walk back through your front door to explain how he’d left you alone after he’d embezzled all that money. After the police had suspected you were in on the plot to steal over half a million dollars in funds from people who had invested with him, trusted him.
“Oh God,” she whispered and dropped the phone, sending it clattering across the tile floor. Tears welled in her eyes and her heart was pounding as she slumped against the side of the sink. Aaron was dead. As in forever. An accident while on that damned hiking trip in Suriname. Just because his body had never been recovered from the rain forests of South America didn’t mean he was alive.
And then she was angry. Infuriated with whomever had called her. She hated practical jokes. Hated them. Aaron was dead and gone and had been for years.
With an effort, she calmed herself down slowly. Marilyn was staring at her in an unnerving way and it sent a funny little chill down Jillian’s spine.
“He’s dead,” she told the cat firmly. For an answer, Marilyn uneasily flicked her tail and scurried back out the cat door. Jillian was left staring after her…and wondering.
Chapter Three
“Rise and shine,” Regan Pescoli ordered from the open doorway of her son’s bedroom. Posters of grunge and heavy metal bands battled for space on the walls and ceiling with oversized pictures of pro basketball players. Clothes, DVDs and dishes, complete with the dried-on remains of spaghetti or pizza, littered the floor, desk and top of the small television. In a word, the ten-by-ten room in the basement was a sty.
No response from the huge lump in the middle of the futon he’d claimed as his bed.
“Hey, Jeremy, did you hear me? It’s time to get up for school.”
This time she heard a grunt.
“You know you’re not out of the woods yet. One more tardy and Mr. Quasdorff is going to—”
“I don’t give a…a rat’s ass what Quasdorff will do!” her son declared, throwing back the covers. Glaring at the ceiling, he looked so much like her first husband, Regan felt as if she’d been kicked in the gut. “He’s so damned gay!”
“I wouldn’t be spouting that off. Especially to his wife and kids.”
Jeremy rolled morosely out of bed and Cisco, their mottled terrier of some kind, hopped onto the floor. Cisco was ten and graying but still thought he was a puppy. “I could use a little privacy,” Jeremy groused, all six feet two of him. Regan sipped her coffee and didn’t move. “I get it, Mom, okay?”
“And give your sister a ride to junior high.”
“I know.” He glanced at her with eyes still filled with sleep and she saw only a glimmer of the happy-go-lucky kid he’d once been. Now, he was trying to grow a soul patch, scraggly, uneven whiskers, a darker spot on his chin, and talking about getting tattoos and piercings despite her protests that he wait at least until he was eighteen.
If only his father were still alive. If only Joe hadn’t been a hero and died in the line of duty. If only I’d been a better wife…
Jeremy nearly ran into her as he made his way up the stairs to the single bathroom and slammed the door. Through the thin panels she heard him turn on the shower, and as the water warmed, flip up the toilet seat and pee like a racehorse.
Things would have been better if Joe had lived, she thought. No, check. Change that. Things would have been different; that much she knew. Better? That was just conjecture.
She walked the few steps to the kitchen, where her daughter, perched on a bar stool, was ignoring a slice of peanut butter toast and text messaging as if she’d been born with a cell phone trapped between her slim, be-ringed fingers. With thick, near-black curls, smooth Mediterranean skin and eyes as blue as a summer’s day, Bianca was a small, feminine version of her father, Luke Pescoli.
She’d often wondered why, after carrying her children for nine months in her womb, neither had the courtesy to look like her. Jeremy was the spitting image of his father, Joe Strand, while Bianca was a miniature Luke. Sometimes Regan felt like little more than the vessel in which her husbands’ DNA had sprouted.
“Eat up,” she said, her gaze sliding through the dining area to the living room, where, beside a tired mock-leather couch, a Christmas tree festooned in a billion lights and innumerable strands of tinsel was shoved into the corner, inches from a non-working fireplace. The chipped porcelain nativity scene that had been in her family for generations was strung along the mantel, atop glittery cotton that once had resembled snow but now was tattered and torn. This would be the snow’s last year.
Bianca, fingers still flying, the phone clicking, ignored her. The toast was untouched. “Bianca, Jeremy will be ready soon and you know he won’t want to wait around. Eat your breakfast.”
Click, click, click, click. “Ugh, Mom. Gross! Don’t you know that peanut butter is just fat?”
“I believe there’s some protein in there.”
“Whatever.” Bianca didn’t bother looking up. The tiny keys kept clicking softly.
Not in the mood to argue, Regan refilled her cup from the pot warming on the coffeemaker. The kitchen was cramped, like the rest of the house—a small “starter home” that Regan worked hard to pay the mortgage on each and every month. The furnace was rumbling loudly, trying to make up for the cold air
seeping through the cracks in the caulking around the windows and doors.
Cisco was whining and scratching at the slider door leading to the deck. “Need to go out?” Regan walked to the dining area and opened the door. “Hurry back,” she said as the terrier, spying a squirrel trying to break into the bird feeder on the rail, took off on all cylinders, his bark low and gruff, the hackles on the back of his neck raised at the audacity of the rodent.
“I’ll cook you an egg,” Regan said to her daughter as she closed the door.
“Are you even remotely serious? Do you want me to puke? Geez, Mom, Michelle doesn’t make me eat breakfast.”
Bully for Stepmom. Though Bianca’s father, Luke “Lucky” Pescoli, and Regan had been divorced three months before he began dating Michelle, Regan had never liked the woman, who was still in her twenties, for God’s sake, and had no business trying to be the kids’ second mother. No business! Built like a Barbie doll, if not an airhead, Michelle had the dumb-blonde routine down pat. Regan figured the ditziness was an act worthy of an Oscar. Beneath those long blonde tresses and behind the impossibly wide blue eyes, there was a cunning twenty-six-year-old who had graduated from college. Michelle knew exactly what she wanted and how to get it. She just needed enough lip gloss and stiletto heels to make it happen.
The fact that she’d wanted Lucky was a mystery, one Regan hadn’t yet been able to solve.
Not that it mattered much.
Rather than think about the twit, Regan found a glass on the counter, rinsed it out, filled it with water and poured some into the rapidly wilting speckled poinsettia on the counter, adding a few drops into the soil surrounding the Christmas cactus, which was going nuts with vibrant pink blooms.
Bianca, never one to leave an argument alone, added, “Michelle says a person should only eat when they’re hungry.”
“Does she?” Not that Regan cared.
“Uh-huh, and she never has a weight problem.”
Good for her, Regan thought as she picked up Bianca’s rejected toast and bit into it. No reason for it to go to waste. Or was that waist?
“I’ll make you some of that instant oatmeal.”
Bianca glanced up, her pretty face twisted into a knot of disbelief. “You really do want me to throw up!” Her cell phone beeped again, another text that had her absorbed as a bellow of rage echoed from the bathroom. Old pipes groaned as a faucet was slammed off.
“Shit!” Jeremy yelled loudly enough to be heard throughout the small house.
Regan sipped her coffee and nibbled on the toast. “Guess your brother is finally awake.”
The door to the bathroom opened so hard it banged against the wall. Jeremy, towel slung over his slim hips in an attempt to hide, or maybe call attention to, his nether regions stormed into the kitchen. “Who the hell used all the hot water?” he demanded, skewering his sister with an intense stare of hate that could have come straight out of a teen horror flick.
“The tank’s small.” Regan dusted her fingers of crumbs. “Want some breakfast? Peanut butter toast.”
Jeremy wasn’t about to be derailed. “So that means she has the right to hog it all? Jesus, Mom, aren’t you always preaching about consideration?” He walked to the refrigerator, pulled out a carton of orange juice and held it to his lips.
“Get a glass.”
“I’m finishing it.”
“You brought up consideration.”
He guzzled juice and left the carton on the counter next to last night’s pizza box.
“Jeremy?”
“What?” he called as he hurried down the stairs.
“We need to talk about your chores around here.”
“I thought my chore was to take the dingbat to school.”
Bianca snorted. “The dingbat who’s on the honor roll. What a creep. He hasn’t seen anything above a two-point for so long, he wouldn’t know what it was.” One eyebrow lifted in prim smugness, though the truth of the matter was that her grades had been slipping lately. Something was up.
“About those grades,” Regan said. “Yours have been—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Bianca finished her text and looked up. “I’m bringing them up. I told you Miss Lefever has it in for me.”
“Maybe it’s all the time you’re spending with Chris.”
At the mere mention of her boyfriend’s name, Bianca absolutely lit up, her bad mood disappearing for an instant. Her lips twitched into a happy little smile, which Regan found more than slightly disturbing. “Chris has nothing to do with my grades.”
“Since you started”—Regan made air quotes—“‘going with’ him, you haven’t been so interested in school.”
“Big deal.”
“Bianca—”
“Oh, what? I’ve got a boyfriend?” she mocked. “Yeah, that’s right. But he’s not affecting my grades, okay? Maybe you’re just jealous or something.”
Regan stared at her silently.
“I mean, it wouldn’t hurt you to date. You know, get a life. Then maybe you’d be off my…case.” She swept her backpack from the counter and slid off the bar stool as Jeremy’s heavy tread pounded up the stairs again.
“Gotta go,” Bianca said quickly and slid her phone into her book bag.
“We’re not finished with this discussion,” Regan warned as Jeremy appeared in an oversized sweatshirt, sweatpants and a stocking cap pulled low over his forehead. As he slipped on a pair of sunglasses, Regan thought her son was a dead ringer for the Unibomber or half a dozen other police sketches of wanted men.
Bianca had already grabbed a jacket and was out the door as Jeremy, keys jangling from one hand, followed after her.
“What about your backpack?” Regan asked, eyeing her son.
“In the car.”
“So you didn’t do your homework?”
“Oh, Mom.” One hand on the doorknob, Jeremy rolled his eyes just as Cisco shot into the house.
She fought the urge to light into her son about his schoolwork. Now wasn’t the time. “Drive carefully. Some of the roads have been closed and there’s another blizzard predicted, for this after—” The front door slammed behind them and Regan walked to the living room to stare through the window as her son dutifully turned on the old pickup’s engine, then went about scraping off the windows as the defroster heated the glass from the inside. Even inside the house she heard the heavy beat of some indefinable rock music.
“At least it’s not rap, at least it’s not rap,” she said, her mantra for the past five years. Within minutes, the windows were clear enough and he folded himself into his twenty-year-old Chevy truck.
When had it come to this? When the kids took off without saying good-bye or buzzing her cheek with a kiss? Or even listening to her?
She watched them drive away and waved, though, of course, neither of them turned to look back at the house. She felt a little like a fool. She had to do something about the kids. She knew they were both headed for trouble. Jeremy was still dealing with issues about his deceased dad and Bianca was trying to find a way to fit herself into her father’s new family.
And it didn’t help that Regan was a single mom, working with the sheriff’s department on the first serial-killer case in this part of Montana that anyone could remember. She’d spent almost every waking hour trying to figure out who the bastard was and when he would strike again.
It had been two weeks since the last body had been found. Wendy Ito had been identified by her two grief-riddled parents, the father stoic and grim while Wendy’s mother had dissolved into a rage of tears and had to be held up by her slight but rigid spouse.
It had been hell.
And all the interviewing in the world hadn’t brought the sheriff’s department, or the friggin’ FBI, for that matter, any closer to the killer. Wendy Ito’s new Prius hybrid hadn’t been located and none of the friends she’d spent the weekend with had been much help. No one, it seemed, had any idea as to the identity of the girl’s killer. Just like with Theresa Charlet
on and Nina Salvadore. But it wasn’t over.
“We’ll get you, you son of a bitch,” Regan said as she walked back to the kitchen and dumped the remains of her coffee into the sink. She rinsed out her cup and left it with the ever-growing stack of dishes piling on the counters. “We’ll get you.”
The trouble was, if the killer was still in his same pattern, it was about time for another “accident” where he, presumably, would stage the scene, shooting out the tire of his next victim, then showing up to “rescue” her. That’s how he did it. Shot out the goddamned tires. Bastard. Regan set her jaw.
The ME was certain that the women who had been found staked to trees in desolate parts of the mountains had spent at least a week, maybe two, healing from the injuries sustained in accidents where their vehicles had skidded off the road. The medical examiner theorized that each of the dead women had received basic first aid, or medical care, before they’d been marched naked to the place where they would be forsaken and left to die.
She wondered vaguely if there were others—victims who hadn’t survived the staged accidents, lucky ones, maybe, who hadn’t been made to suffer and die in the elements—but she dismissed the thought. No other wrecked vehicles had been discovered.
After feeding Cisco and making sure the dog had ample water for the day, she walked to her cramped bedroom to change into slacks, a red turtleneck sweater because it was the holidays damn it, her shoulder holster, a jacket and boots. She then made certain the Christmas tree lights were unplugged and the exterior doors were locked, and headed through the attached single-car garage to her Jeep.
There was a chance that today would be the day they caught the prick.
Maybe they’d get lucky.