by Lisa Jackson
Her pulse skyrocketed for a moment, jarring her awake.
Jesus, help me!
Her every nerve was strung tight. Blood oozed through her fingers as she clenched the shard of glass. The blackness toyed with her brain, seducing her to let go.
She held her breath. Listened hard, her ears straining, her eyes trying to pierce the coming darkness.
But she saw nothing and the wind died inexplicably.
Goosebumps pimpled her flesh and she fought to stay awake.
Suddenly, the silence within that deep, frozen chasm was deafening.
Chapter Six
Alvarez was naturally suspicious.
But then again, it came with the territory.
She hadn’t been born distrusting people; no, she’d been a happy child, but all that had changed about the time she’d entered high school.
You can’t outrun your past.
She knew that, of course, but couldn’t help trying. She probably always would, she thought as she hurried through the lobby of the courthouse, where she’d testified in a domestic violence case. She’d heard before that she was a good witness. Cool. Calm. Not rattled easily.
Defense lawyers hated to come up against her and today had been no exception.
She pushed open the doors of the courthouse and, feeling the bite of the wind, tightened the scarf around her neck. Despite the fact the temperature was hovering near freezing, she was wearing a knee-length skirt, high-heeled boots, a snug turtleneck and a jacket. Small silver hoops and a matching pendant necklace were her only accessories and she’d twisted her hair away from her face a little less severely. Her testimony had been clear and concise, no matter how hard the defense lawyer tried to make her say something that would let the sleazebag of a stepfather off the hook. No way. Not when he’d been abusing his wife’s teenaged daughter for the past three years.
When the jury returned, she’d bet her badge the guy would be sent to prison for a long while.
Good. She found her car in the lot and drove directly to her studio apartment, where she changed into slacks and shoes with lower heels. She loved this tidy little space with its Murphy bed that flattened up against the wall, love seat, chair and ottoman. A small gas fireplace filled one wall, its mantel covered with framed pictures of the members of her large family, and a collapsible desk occupied the small space usually reserved for a kitchen table. As it had been for the past three months, the desk was littered with books, notes, diagrams and her laptop computer. She hated to think how many hours she’d spent at that very desk in the past few months, all trying to solve the latest murders.
She didn’t begrudge herself the time, but it really ticked her off that she wasn’t any closer to solving the crimes. “Patience,” she reminded herself as she pulled on her heavy down coat and headed outside, locking the door behind her.
She noticed that in the short time she’d been in her apartment, the wind had kicked up again, thick-bellied clouds roiling overhead, promising another storm.
“Just what we need,” she thought aloud as a sharp gust tossed dry leaves across the parking lot, sending them dancing and reeling over the snowy landscape.
As she crossed to her car, she felt as if someone were watching her. She actually looked over her shoulder but spied no one.
“Just your imagination,” she told herself.
But as she slid behind the wheel, she felt it again, that sharp, clear premonition of death.
Hers?
Or another poor victim, bound naked to a tree, hoping and praying to be rescued but all the while knowing she was doomed to die.
“God help us,” Alvarez whispered, and for the first time since she was fourteen, she fervently made the sign of the cross over her chest. “God help us all.”
Bam! Bam! Bam!
Jillian attempted to open an eye.
God, it was cold.
So cold.
And dark.
An ear-splitting groan reverberated through her brain.
What the hell?
Where am I?
“Hey! Lady! Wake up!” a man’s deep, anxious voice ordered. “Help me out here, would ya!”
What?
She tried to focus and felt the throb in her ankle.
What in God’s name? Is this a dream?
In a flash, she recalled waking up in the mangled Subaru. She’d been trapped in the car, hoping for help, sensing an evil presence, when she must have slipped into unconsciousness….
Her heart kick-started and she squinted into the darkness. The shard of glass she’d been gripping was still in her clenched fist, now nearly frozen solid.
Was this person who was trying to pry open the door the same one she’d thought she’d seen furtively darting through the snowy forest? The one she’d been certain was evil incarnate?
“Hey! Are you okay?” her would-be rescuer yelled.
Was he out of his mind? Of course she wasn’t okay. Did she look okay?
“Can you push on the door?”
If only.
She caught a glimpse of him then through the thick flakes of falling snow. A ski mask and goggles, all in black, covered his face, making him look more alien than human. He was wearing a thick ski jacket but she saw no insignia indicating he was with the police or forest service or any agency….
“Hey!” He reached through the broken windshield and touched her shoulder. “Wake up!”
“I—I am!” she tried to yell, but it came out as a faint whisper.
“Can you move?” he shouted so loudly she twitched with a painful jolt.
Dear God, had she slipped into unconsciousness again?
She tried to answer, but failed, fighting like hell to keep her eyes open.
Should she trust him?
Did she have any choice?
“I can’t pull you through here…the roof’s crushed. I’m gonna try the door.”
Her teeth were chattering again and she no longer felt the same intense pain she had earlier. Probably because she was numb and frostbite was settling in.
Her eyes were so heavy. So damned heavy.
“Hey! Lady! Stay with me! Oh for Christ’s sake! Come on, hang in there. What’s your name?”
She blinked. Had she fallen asleep again? Blacked out?
“Son of a bitch.” He had something in his hand, a crowbar, she thought vaguely…like the one in her trunk. If she could just sleep, only for a few minutes…five or ten…that was all she needed.
She heard a deep, tortured groan. Metal twisting and resisting as the man used the crowbar on the driver’s-side door. From the corner of her eye she saw him pushing hard against the lever, throwing his weight into it, grunting and straining with the effort. “Come on, you miserable son of a bitch,” he said through clenched teeth. Metal squealed. Resisted. Frozen locks torqued but refused to give way. “Come on, come on, you bastard,” he swore at the car as he tried desperately to pry the door open.
She should feel fear.
Or worry.
Or anything.
But all she wanted to do was be pulled back under, into a warm, soft cloud of unconsciousness.
“Stay with me!” he ordered.
She was drifting away….
Snap!
Something broke, she thought, but didn’t know what. Didn’t care.
Metal shrieked, and somewhere, far away, she thought she heard a man’s voice over the rush of a bitter cold wind. “Don’t you die on me. Do you hear me? You’d better not damned well die on me.”
She felt the icy wind and the jostle of someone touching her, feeling her neck, as if for a pulse, reaching over her….
But she couldn’t force her eyes open, and for the next few hours–-or was it longer?—she was in and out of consciousness, hearing him yelling at her through a long, dark tunnel. She would drift off to blackness until she was jarred by movement or noise, which roused her back to the surface until she faded out again. She was barely aware of the noise of an engine, of movement,
and it seemed as if she were gliding, floating through the universe, with stars falling all around her…. Her ankle and ribs still hurt, which was probably a good sign, but the numbness that had settled over her skin made her feel dreamlike and buoyant, her soul weightless.
“Don’t you let go,” he kept saying to her over the thrum of some engine, his voice seeming disembodied, coming from far away. “Whoever the hell you are, hang with me.”
The call to the sheriff’s department came in two days later, with a break in the weather. Another car had been found, wrecked, abandoned and covered in snow.
Selena Alvarez had been at her desk when dispatch phoned with the location of the vehicle and therefore she was one of the first detectives on the icy scene. She rode with Johnson and Slatkin in the county crime lab truck down a closed access road to the bottom of a canyon where the snow was nearly two feet deep.
“Hey, Alvarez, over here!” Deputy Pete Watershed’s voice echoed through the desolate canyon.
She looked up from where she was crouched by the front wheel of the mangled car covered in snow. It had once been a Subaru, but with its shattered windshield, dented body and mashed frame, it was nearly unrecognizable.
She clicked off her handheld recorder. “Just a sec,” she called over her shoulder, then returned her attention to the right front wheel of the sedan.
Pictures had already been taken of every angle of the wreckage, so she brushed away a dusting of snow and examined the hole torn through a snow tire.
Identical to the others.
No doubt the result of a bullet being shot from a long-range rifle.
“Son of a bitch,” she muttered, though she wasn’t surprised. She’d been at two similar crime scenes in just as many months. The right front tires of the cars registered to Theresa Charleton and Nina Salvadore had been shot by a high-powered rifle, causing the cars to careen off a high cliff, only to land, crunched and twisted, at the base of the steep hillside. They were still looking for Wendy Ito’s vanity-plated, white Prius, but this car didn’t belong to the dead woman.
Alvarez said as much into her pocket recorder, the quickest way to take notes in freezing conditions, then clicked the recorder off and straightened as she gazed over the snowbound ravine.
Today the normally empty canyon was transformed: detectives, deputies and criminalists working together, using the best equipment Pinewood County and the State of Montana had to offer, hoping for some bit of evidence leading them to the son of a bitch who was behind three, now possibly four, brutal murders.
As with the previous single-car crashes, all personal effects and the driver of the vehicle itself were missing from the scene. The killer had left each car’s license plates intact, though that was of little help, as a car’s owner could be traced from the vehicle identification number. Otherwise, all that had remained in each case was a twisted piece of metal that had once been a vehicle, skid marks on the road above and a few broken trees and branches that the plummeting vehicle had snapped in its free fall to the bottom of a canyon deep in the Bitterroot Mountains.
So far the right front tire had blown, and Alvarez was willing to bet her master’s degree in psychology that upon further investigation, the reason for this latest blowout would be the same as the others—a bullet from a .30-caliber rifle.
“You sick son of a bitch,” she muttered, her breath a cloud, and despite her down jacket, gloves, ski pants, thermal underwear and boots, she felt a chill deep inside, far colder than the icy breeze sweeping through the canyons.
She pointed at the tire and said to the tech with a camera, “Let’s get a shot of this.”
“You got it.” Virginia Johnson, a black woman bundled in a county-issued jacket, gloves and ski pants, snapped off several shots as Selena picked her way through the crusted snow and downed branches littering the floor of the ravine.
“So what’ve you got?” she asked Watershed, who, as always, appeared impatient, his eyebrows pulled together, his thin lips in a perpetual scowl. He, too, was wearing a down jacket issued by the department and a wool hat with a wide brim that shielded his glasses while collecting the falling snow.
“Take a look here.” He squatted down close to the ground and pointed one gloved finger to a spot in the thick, newly fallen snow where, beneath nearly two inches of the frigid fluff, bits of red were visible. “Blood,” he said, “a trail.” He motioned east, toward a bend in the creek bed where a forest service road was partially hidden. “Looks like he dragged her out on some kind of stretcher.”
Alvarez shone the beam of her flashlight onto the drifts of snow and, sure enough, ruts were visible in the drifts and between them was a definite blood trail, dark drips of red beneath a thin crust of snow.
“Let’s collect it,” she said.
Mikhail Slatkin, one of the forensic techs who’d been attempting to take a casting of a boot print in the snow, nodded without looking up. Tall and raw-boned, the son of Russian immigrants, he was barely twenty-six and was one of the best forensic scientists Alvarez had ever met. “I’ll get it in a minute. Just let me finish here.” He worked fast, racing against the elements as snow was blowing through the canyon, covering evidence at the rate of half an inch an hour.
Over the whistle of the wind, Alvarez heard the rumble of an engine and looked up to see Regan Pescoli’s rig grind to a stop behind the county truck. Pescoli was out of the car in an instant, pulling on a stocking cap to cover her tangle of reddish curls. She was pale and wan-looking, dark smudges beneath her large eyes indicating she hadn’t gotten enough sleep.
Which wasn’t a surprise.
Though Pescoli’s private life wasn’t any of Alvarez’s business, she couldn’t help but be a little ticked off. Nine times out of ten she had to cover for her partner, either because she’d had a long night waiting up for one of her kids, a battle royale with her ex or a late night at a bar with one of her many loser boyfriends.
Despite it all, Pescoli was a brilliant detective. And that’s all that mattered. She had a knack for pegging a person on first meeting, for cutting through the usual BS and finding the truth. It bugged the hell out of Alvarez that all of her education and degrees didn’t seem to stack up to her partner’s gut instincts.
It was a slap in the face, but Alvarez would get over it.
Alvarez looked back at Watershed as Pescoli signed in to the crime scene with one of the deputies, her eyes already taking in the single-car accident as she scribbled her name on the sheet. “Same damned thing,” she said, heading toward Alvarez. “Same bloody damned thing.”
She smelled of cigarette smoke and looked like hell, but then, no one was their best at this hour of the morning, bundled in outdoor gear.
“So what’ve we got?”
“Nothing new. Take a look.” Alvarez walked her partner through the trod-on snow to the car.
“Wendy Ito’s?”
“Nope. Washington plates, but this is an older-model Subaru Outback. Ito drove a newer Toyota with vanity plates.”
“A Prius. I remember.” Pescoli’s jaw tightened as she bent down to peer into the twisted wreckage. “So we’ve got another one.”
“Looks like.”
“Hell.” She sighed as she straightened, her eyes, usually a gold color, darkening. “Driver’s door jimmied open? Tire shot? No ID, no personal effects like a wallet or purse?”
Alvarez nodded, snowflakes drifting from the steely heavens. “Same as before.”
“But no body found?”
“Not yet.”
Alvarez walked Pescoli around what was left of the silver Subaru and gave Pescoli a rundown of what they’d found. She had to shout, as the wind began to shriek down the canyon again, tearing through the trees, rattling bare branches and blowing tiny sharp flakes of snow against Alvarez’s skin.
“Just like the others,” Pescoli observed, her full lips pulled into a frustrated scowl. “What the hell is the bastard up to?”
A moot question.
Pescoli
squinted upward, toward the ridge, suspecting that this car, like the others, had been forced off the road, then plunged and careened down the canyon wall to land at the bottom of the canyon floor, in this frozen creek bed.
Alvarez followed her gaze and knew what her partner was thinking. It was a wonder anyone survived the crash.
But then, they weren’t certain anyone had. Just that the driver had been removed. Damn.
“We know when this happened?” Pescoli asked.
Alvarez tugged her gloves on tighter. “It could’ve been as early as yesterday afternoon, judging by the snowfall.”
“Then the victim’s probably still alive.” Pescoli glanced around the bleak ravine with sheer walls of ice and rock. “The son of a bitch tends to them, nurses them like some damned Florence Nightingale, then ties ’em to a tree and leaves ’em to freeze to death. Sick bastard.”
Amen to that.
“Who found the car and called it in?” Pescoli asked.
Beneath the brim of his wool hat, Pete Watershed winced.
Pescoli wasn’t about to be coddled. “Tell me.”
“Grace Perchant. Walking her dog.”
“Walking her dog? When it’s ten degrees below freezing? Down here? Why the hell was she doing that?”
“Why does Grace do anything?” Watershed asked with a lift of one shoulder.
Good question. Grace Perchant was another one of the town’s oddities. Alvarez reminded her partner, “Grace claims to see ghosts, too, and talk with the friggin’ dead, for crying out loud. And that dog of hers is half-wolf.”
“Three quarters,” Mikhail cut in, looking up with a knowing smile.
“You know this how?” Alvarez wasn’t certain she really wanted to hear the answer.
“I’m interested in a pup.”
“Oh, for the love of God! You know that Grace’s dog is practically a wild animal! She probably wasn’t walking it; the damned thing was walking her.”
“She’s right,” Pescoli said. “We’ve had complaints about the wolf-dog more than once.”
“It bit someone?”
“Nah. Howled. Kept the neighbors awake.” Pescoli tucked a stray strand of hair beneath her cap.