The Alvarez & Pescoli Series

by Lisa Jackson

  Gina Walters, also married, had come to the funeral and bawled her eyes out, even leaving a white rose on the casket, while Pescoli had stood by and taken it, her young son’s fingers clenched in her own.

  “Bitch,” she said now, ignoring the washing machine that threatened to rock wildly as she headed up the stairs. She made a quick sandwich of leftover ham, Dijon mustard and dry bread, tossed a few scraps to Cisco and downed another Diet Coke before heading out the door.

  It was nearing dark now and she was due back at the office, but as she hit the garage door button she wondered where the hell her son was.

  “I think we’re going to see a break in the weather,” MacGregor said as he spooned a hot glop of some kind of chili into a bowl and handed it to her.

  “When?”

  “Soon.”

  “How soon?”

  “That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?” He walked into the kitchen and rummaged in a drawer. Less than a minute later he returned, handed her a spoon, then walked back to the pot resting in the fire and scooped some of the chili into a second bowl. A pan of pre-mixed cornbread was “baking” in a cast-iron skillet half buried in the coals, the edges of the bread already singed.

  “How do you know? You got a television hooked up to a generator somewhere? Or a direct line to the weather service?”

  “It’s just a feeling.” He glanced out the window to the snowy landscape. Darkness was falling fast, long shadows stretching through the trees, making the cabin feel more isolated than ever.

  “A feeling?” Cradling the bowl in one hand, she stirred the chili, its spicy steam warming her face. She was improving a little, the throb in her ankle lessening, the pain in her ribs muted unless she moved too quickly or laughed too hard. But she wasn’t betting on “feelings.”

  “It’s time. The storm should let up.”

  She looked out the window and shook her head, not daring to believe in miracles, as the storm didn’t show any signs of letting up, not to her. She took a bite. The chili, a brand she’d eaten dozens of times, was now fabulously delicious. She took another bite and watched MacGregor at the fire.

  Using a work glove as a pot holder, he retrieved the cornbread from the fire and cut her a chunk with the very knife she’d stolen earlier. He dropped the large square into her bowl and she picked at the crusty top.

  It was as delicious as the chili, but hot enough to keep her from eating too quickly. Which was probably good, as it was all she could do not to bolt down the food.

  The smell of wood smoke and sizzling tomato sauce scented the air, while firelight played across the walls and the embers glowed red in the grate.

  Even the dog was at peace, his dark, begging gaze never leaving MacGregor as he ate. If she let herself, she might just relax with this man. But she didn’t know him at all. Everything he had told her in the past few hours could well be a lie.

  “If the storm breaks like I think it will, I’ll try to get out of here tomorrow.”

  “On a snowmobile?”

  He shook his head. “I’ve got a four-wheel-drive.”

  “Then we could have gotten out of here at any time?”

  He shook his head. “Don’t think so. And I couldn’t take a chance of being stuck with you laid up in a blizzard. I’m not even sure about tomorrow, but we’ll give it a shot, as I said, if the storm breaks.”

  “And if not?”

  “You really want to think about that?” He took a bite of cornbread while the dog, watching, licked his lips.

  “Where will we go?”

  “Grizzly Falls. They’ve got a small hospital. I’ll leave you in the ER.”

  “And then tell the police about my car.”

  His face was shuttered. “I’ll leave that to you.”

  “But you have to tell them where it is. I don’t know the area.”

  “It’s in September Creek, off Johnson Road, about six miles from the cutoff to Missoula. Think you can remember that?”

  “Yeah,” she said, but wondered at his change in attitude, the newfound tension in his shoulders. “What is it you have against the police?”

  One side of his mouth twisted. “Nothing.”

  “Liar.” She wasn’t buying his denials. Something was bothering him.

  His nostrils flared a bit. “It’s not what I have against them so much as what they have against me,” he said and stood suddenly. “Want a beer?”

  “No.” The last thing she needed was any kind of alcohol. She had to keep her wits about her. “Tell me,” she said as he tossed on a parka and gloves, then disappeared through the kitchen. The dog was on his feet and took off after MacGregor as the back door opened and shut quickly. Harley whined and scratched for all of thirty seconds before the door opened again and MacGregor’s voice asked, “Miss me, boy?” He laughed and she heard the sound of a cap being pried from a bottle. And then another. Seconds later he returned with two long-necked bottles in his hand. “I keep ’em in the garage, in a cooler, otherwise they’d freeze.”

  “Oh.”

  He set a bottle on the table next to her. “Thought you might change your mind.”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Then I’ll finish it.” He took a long swallow, set his bottle down and stripped off the parka before settling into his chair again.

  “So you were dodging the question,” she said as he picked up his beer again. “What do the police have against you?”

  He thought for a moment, staring at the label on his bottle of Coors, then rolling the long neck between his palms. The tension in his shoulders was evident.

  “What happened, MacGregor?”

  A muscle worked in his jaw and he took another long swallow before looking at her again with such intensity her heart nearly stopped.

  “Believe me, Jillian, you don’t want to know.”

  “Try me,” she said, her voice a whisper, her nerves suddenly tight.

  “Shit.” He raked angry fingers through his hair and glared at the fire. Harley, sensing the shift in the atmosphere, whined.

  “What did you do, MacGregor?” she asked, the cabin suddenly feeling more isolated than ever. Old timbers creaked. The glass in the windowpanes rattled loudly enough to be heard over the soft breath of the fire. “Why don’t the police trust you?”

  He hesitated and closed his eyes.

  She steeled herself for the worst.

  “I killed a man, Jillian. It happened a long time ago, but the truth of the matter is that the son of a bitch had it coming and I gave it to him.” He took another swallow of his beer and the lines around his mouth were etched deep, showing white.

  “It was an accident, right?”

  “An accident.” MacGregor snorted. “I don’t know.” He shook his head. “I didn’t intend to kill him that night, but the truth of the matter is that for a few seconds—just long enough—I wanted that son of a bitch dead.”

  Alvarez finished her forty minutes on the elliptical machine, then concluded her workout with two circuits of weights, all the while listening to her iPod blasting out some of her favorite upbeat songs from the eighties. It was just after three when she’d showed up here, opting for a quick carton of yogurt and a workout for her lunch break, and was nearing four when she finished. Today was fairly quiet, the storm keeping everyone but the most dedicated at home.

  Clicking off her headset, she walked toward the locker room, passing a row of treadmills occupied by a handful of people. One woman was reading a magazine, but the other stationary runners stared at a wall-mounted television, sweating, hearts racing, legs moving at different speeds, all going nowhere.

  On the screen, Ivor-the-Idiot was prattling with great animation to a petite newswoman in a blue parka. Snow was falling, catching in Ivor’s thick eyebrows and dusting the steps of the courthouse behind them. Over the whine of several treadmills, Alvarez couldn’t hear much of what Ivor was saying, but it didn’t matter. She got the message.

  Her day, already far from st
ellar, took a nosedive. Couldn’t that old coot keep his mouth shut?

  Not on a dare. You know the old man wallows in all of the attention.

  “Terrific,” she muttered under her breath, then made her way down a hallway past a group of teenaged boys playing basketball in the gymnasium. Further on she passed a step-aerobics class consisting of a handful of diehards exercising to a trim dance teacher’s instructions.

  Alvarez grabbed a towel from a bin and stepped into the locker room, where she stripped off her sweaty workout clothes, then headed to the shower.

  All the while, she thought about the case.

  It was getting to her, like a lover who had turned stalker. It kept her awake at night, nagged at her in the morning and throughout the day, even when she was supposed to be on her own time, relaxing or having “fun.”

  She lathered her body and laughed at herself.

  Fun.

  What the hell was that?

  She was only thirty-three and she wasn’t sure she remembered the last time she’d really let her hair down or kicked up her heels, or got down or whatever the hell you called it. Her life was her job.

  Which was not only stupid.

  It was pathetic.

  She rinsed off, toweled dry and put on clean jeans, a black turtleneck and a down vest and checked her image in the mirror bolted to the inside of her locker. She was fit and pretty, no doubt about it, but her lips didn’t pull into as quick a smile as they once had and her eyes sometimes looked haunted.

  Where was the girl who had once liked shiny lipstick, hoop earrings, loud music and high heels? The freshman in high school with a perfect figure to go along with her perfect GPA?

  Oh, her! Don’t you remember? You left her nearly twenty years ago. And when you fled, you didn’t look back at family, friends or the grinding poverty of Woodburn, Oregon.

  Her stomach twisted and she had the insane urge to make the sign of the cross over her chest, a rite she’d abandoned and buried along with her poor Hispanic roots and her secret…the damned secret that haunted her to this day.

  Knock it off!

  Alvarez grabbed her bag and slammed the locker shut.

  She didn’t have time for reminiscing or wondering about the rocky path she’d taken that had ended here in Grizzly Falls, Montana. Far from her dreams. Far from what she’d planned for herself. Not that it mattered today. All she needed to concentrate on now was catching the twisted sicko who was terrorizing this part of the state.

  The gym was located fifteen minutes from the sheriff’s department, though the drive took her nearly half an hour, as the streets were tangled from bad weather. Several vehicles were abandoned on the roadside and a collision made the icy conditions more difficult. Alvarez stopped to see if she could help, but the city officers who had responded had the situation handled. There were no injuries aside from the bruised ego of a driver of a Land Rover that had slid into a Ford Taurus.

  She cut through the heart of the city, the part that had been first settled, on the banks of the river. Christmas lights winked in store windows. Snow was piled high along the gutters; walkways carved out on the sidewalks. A few shoppers braved the elements and in front of the courthouse a band was assembling for a holiday concert at the base of a huge fir tree strung with clusters of white lights in the shape of snowflakes. One tuba player, dressed in a thick coat, earmuffs, gloves and boots, was blowing a few practice notes.

  She drove along the plowed streets, electing to take the longer, less steep road to the upper part of the city, where the sheriff’s department was housed. For the first time since joining the Pinewood County Sheriff’s Department, Detective Selena Alvarez was late.

  “Wait a second…let’s back up,” Jillian insisted, her heart tapping a drum. It was one thing to suspect that the man who had pulled her from the wreckage of her car wasn’t what he seemed, but another thing for him to admit he was a killer. “Why did you want the man dead?”

  “My business.”

  “I need to know,” she said tautly, wishing she’d never given up the knife. She didn’t think he would do her harm, otherwise why bring up the killing at all? But she was still nervous. “Why did you want him dead?”

  MacGregor’s lips whitened. “Because he was beating his wife to a pulp.”

  “What? Where?”

  “I was in a bar in Denver. This guy is drunk and starts insulting his wife, pushing her around, and he gets kicked out of the bar. His wife goes with him. I leave a few minutes later and he’s in the parking lot, has her on the asphalt and is wailing on her, beating and kicking at her.” MacGregor leaned on the mantel, staring at the coals, and his face looked a dozen years older. “She was swearing and writhing and yelling about the baby. Begging him not to hurt the baby. Pleading with him. And he just kept kicking.”

  Jillian’s jaw slackened in empathy.

  “I saw red,” he went on. “She’s screaming and crying, and I jumped over the hood of a car and grabbed him. He threw a punch and I threw a better one. Knocked him to the ground.”

  Jillian barely breathed. She knew that MacGregor wasn’t in the room with her any longer, that in his mind’s eye, he was reliving the whole nightmare scene again.

  “She was just lying there, shuddering in the snow and slush, blood everywhere. Her face was…hardly a face. Jesus, it was black and blue, cuts everywhere, her jaw and nose broken. And her jeans. She had on tight jeans and there was blood running down her legs….” He drained his bottle of beer and the room went deathly quiet. When he spoke again, his voice was softer. “I remember…oh hell…I remember sirens and the air crackling and the blue-and-red flash of lights against the snow. Someone had called the police and they yelled at me to put my hands in the air and get down on the ground. I did and the next second some two-hundred-fifty-pound cop was on me, forcing my face into the slush and gravel, cuffing my hands behind my back.” Frowning, he set his bottle on the mantel.

  “They arrested you?”

  “Yep.”

  “But just until everything was straightened out.”

  He turned to face her, his eyes dark, his lips curved in irony. “Nothing ever got straightened out. The guy died that night. Cracked his skull wide open. Intracranial hemorrhage, I think it’s called. Bleeding in the brain.” MacGregor sighed through his nose. “And the wife…her name was Margot, not that it matters. Margot claimed that I was the one who was beating her, that I tried to rape her, that her husband Ned was the hero.”

  “What?” Jillian whispered, horrified.

  “Yeah.” He shook his head. “The evidence proved otherwise. The toes of good old Ned’s boots told the story, but the end result was that he was dead. If I hadn’t stuck my neck out for Margot, he could have survived. The baby wouldn’t have, regardless. Margot miscarried. But I was directly responsible for Ned Tomkins’s death. At least that’s what the coroner and judge decided. I pled down to a lesser charge and spent sixteen months in jail.”

  “That’s terrible!”

  “Margot blamed me for losing her husband and baby.” He managed a humorless smile. “So much for being a good guy.” He nodded toward her beer. “You still haven’t touched it.”

  She ignored that. “Then what?”

  “The upshot was that I got out and the last I heard, from one of the guards who knew her, Margot hooked up with another loser who beat the crap out of her, too.” He walked to the gun closet, unlocked it with a key he kept in his jeans and pulled out a long-barreled rifle, then locked the cabinet again.

  “What’re you doing?” Jillian watched with sudden trepidation.

  “Going out.”

  “Now?” What the hell was he thinking? After telling her he’d killed a man, he pulls out a rifle? Was he trying to freak her out?

  “Before it gets dark.” He found some shells in a drawer of the bookcase and carried his Winchester and pack of ammo to the pegs near the front door, grabbing his jacket. Stuffing his arms down the sleeves, he said, “I need to check the roads
. If the storm really does break, maybe we’ll be able to get out of here soon.”

  Jillian didn’t dare believe it. But then, she had trouble believing a lot of things, maybe even MacGregor’s latest story. Was it true? It sure seemed like it was. The pain etched across his face, the anger burning deep in his eyes—it all seemed real enough.

  And, he hadn’t done anything to hurt her.

  It appeared, also, that he wanted to get rid of her as much as she wanted to leave.

  And yet…he still put her on edge. Especially with a rifle in his hands.

  Get over it, Jillian. If he’d wanted to hurt you, he would have done it by now.

  “You’re making me nervous.”

  He looked up, saw her staring at the rifle and nodded. Quickly he opened the door and set the gun on the porch. “Bad timing.”

  “Horrible timing.”

  “I just realized how dark it was getting. And there are cougars and bears in this neck of the woods, not that they would attack, but just to be safe.” He flashed her a guileless smile as he pulled a pair of snowshoes from the spot where they hung over the door. As he stretched upward, his jacket and sweater moved upward and she caught a glimpse, as she had before, of taut, rock-hard muscles.

  He caught her looking at him and she pulled her gaze away, picking up her beer and finally taking a sip as he left the snowshoes by the door, then walked through the kitchen. “I’d better leave you with some more wood.”

  Dutifully, he brought in more firewood and stacked it on the hearth. Then he strapped the snowshoes over his boots while Harley danced around his feet, ready for an adventure, but MacGregor shushed him. “You stay. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  Harley started to whine, but MacGregor snapped his fingers. “None of that.”

  The dog quieted and sat, gaze focused on his master.

  “Good boy.” MacGregor pulled on a ski mask, cap and gloves. “You hold down the fort.” He glanced over at Jillian and her breath nearly stopped in her lungs. Tall and looming, all in black. Was he the person she’d thought she’d seen while she’d been trapped in the car, the evil presence she’d sensed?