The Alvarez & Pescoli Series

by Lisa Jackson

  “I’ll be back soon.”

  “And if you’re not?”

  “You’ll survive. The rest of the beer’s in the garage and there’s enough canned food to keep you and Harley alive until the spring thaw.”

  “Comforting.”

  He smiled, walked out the door and shut it behind him with a thud, the catch clicking into place.

  “At least you’re still alive and almost well,” she said aloud, and her voice seemed to echo a bit. Already the cabin seemed quieter, darker, lonelier. “Just your imagination,” she reminded herself. She sipped from her bottle, though she really wasn’t much of a beer drinker. “Give me a glass of Cabernet any day of the week,” she said, and Harley, with his two-toned face, looked over at her and cocked his head. At least he wasn’t growling and snarling and acting as if he would tear her limb from limb. No, he was planted near the door, staring at the panels, waiting for some indication MacGregor would return.

  “Looks like it’s just you and me,” she said to him, wondering at her need to converse with the animal. Was it because the cabin seemed so quiet and desolate, so cut off from any kind of human contact?

  She glanced out the window to the bitter cold and wondered when he’d return. Or if he’d return. She could be up here alone for days or weeks. She shuddered, suddenly cold to the marrow of her bones. Whether he was friend or foe, she wasn’t sure. But she had to admit she felt better when Zane MacGregor was around.

  Chapter Thirteen

  In the task force room, most of the team had assembled by the time Alvarez entered. One uniformed officer sat manning the phones on a desk shoved in a corner near the windows. Even the typically tardy Pescoli was seated at the table with the sheriff and two FBI agents. As Alvarez took an empty chair next to Pescoli, Cort Brewster, the undersheriff, showed up, as did Detective Brett Gage, the chief criminal deputy.

  “Something up?” Alvarez asked, but Pescoli shook her head, a whiff of cigarette smoke suggesting she was once again smoking. Not that it was a big surprise. From the day Alvarez had met Regan, she’d discovered that in times of great stress, Pescoli took up the habit again. In the time since they’d become partners, which was nearly two and a half years now, Pescoli had quit four times.

  “Since it’s nearly the weekend and some of you will be officially off duty, whatever that means around here,” Halden said, “we thought we should bring each other up to speed. It looks like Wendy Ito’s Prius has been found in a ravine about four miles west of town.” He walked to the map and pointed to a spot in Star Fire Canyon, about three miles from where Ito’s body was discovered. “An officer has secured the scene. The car looks the same as the others, wrecked and pried open, tire shot out, only this car was nearly buried in a foot of snow. We’ll all be rolling out there in a couple of minutes.”

  “Who found the car?” Alvarez asked.

  Gage interjected, “Bob Simms. Lives up the road. Looking for firewood during a break in the storm.”

  “Or setting traps,” Pescoli said with a scowl. “Simms thinks it’s still the eighteen hundreds and he can do whatever the hell he wants. Kills and traps whatever he can without permits. Sells pelts on the black market. You name it.”

  Gage agreed. Around forty, whip thin, with a prominent nose, glasses and brown hair starting to show the first evidence of gray, the chief criminal deputy snorted. “Hell, he’s an anarchist.”

  “With a dead wife and half a dozen boys running wild. All those kids have been in trouble with the law,” Grayson reminded.

  “That’s the trouble—they don’t believe in government or the law. I’m surprised Simms took the trouble to call it in.”

  Pescoli said, “Even anarchists have consciences.”

  Gage snorted. “At least he found the car and not another body.”

  “Yet,” Agent Chandler said. Today she was in government-issued outerwear, her blond ponytail sticking out of the back of a navy baseball hat, her jacket unzipped to show off a navy blue sweater. “We’re still looking for Jillian Rivers. Something we’ve got to consider is the timing of the deaths. Because of the frozen conditions of the corpses, it’s tough to pinpoint, but it looks like our guy tries to kill them around the twentieth of the month. September for Charleton, October for Salvadore, November for Ito, and now, December for Rivers. The dates are a little off, and we’re basing this on when the women were reported missing and when the ME guesses they died. They all went missing around the middle of the month, killed what appears to be a few days later, found later still. So, Jillian Rivers might already be dead.”

  “Jesus,” Brewster said, and tossed his pen onto the table in disgust.

  Chandler didn’t miss a beat. “It could be that the stars carved over the victims’ heads and on the notes have something to do with timing. Where a star might be positioned in the sky during the time of abduction.”

  “Or death,” Halden added.

  Chandler nodded. “Maybe our guy is into stargazing or astronomy or astrology.”

  Alvarez frowned. She’d thought of the night sky, of course. She’d also thought about witchcraft, or devil worship, or anything to do with the dark arts. Stars meant a lot of different things to different people.

  “He could just be jerking our chain,” Brewster said. “Maybe the stars are for decoration.”

  “They’re part of his MO,” Chandler disagreed. She traced her finger over the stars on each of the notes, which had been blown up and put near the pictures of the victims. “He’s too precise. See how perfectly the initials are written, almost as if he traced them? If you put the pages one atop the other, you’ll see that the letters remain in exactly the same positions, but the star moves. I’m willing to bet he’s on some kind of astronomical calendar.”

  “Hey, isn’t the twentieth when the astrological sign switches? Around the twentieth of the month, the signs of the zodiac change,” Pescoli offered. “Though I think it varies a little; I’m not really into it. If it means anything.”

  “I don’t like the word ‘zodiac,’ not when we’re talking about serial killers,” Grayson said.

  “Jesus, no,” Brewster agreed. “That bastard terrorized San Francisco during, what? The sixties or seventies? I remember my mother talking about it. She had a sister in the Bay Area at the time and was worried sick.”

  “Made a movie out of it,” Alvarez said.

  Pescoli nodded. “Never caught, was he?”

  “Never.” Chandler’s face grew even more taut, the sharp angles of her cheekbones and chin prominent. “But Zodiac would be too old to be our guy, if he were alive, which I doubt.”

  “Could be a copycat. Someone who knows about the original. The killings are different, yeah,” Pescoli said, “but the Zodiac’s name might have been inspiration. And he plans the murders meticulously.”

  Alvarez had a mental image of a man with a pen, sitting at a desk, carefully creating his notes, all the while plotting the death of the woman he had captured, a woman probably bound and caged, locked in a dark, airless room, a frightened, injured woman who couldn’t comprehend the extent of her jailor’s depravity.

  A killer who planned out his victim’s capture and death in minute detail, all around the position of the stars in the heavens.

  “These killings are way different from Zodiac’s. Let’s go check on Ito’s car, unless you have anything else,” Grayson said. Chandler and Halden discussed tips that had come in, none of which had developed into a true lead, then concluded the meeting.

  Alvarez was left cold inside. Just the mention of the Zodiac killer chilled her to the bone. The monster had been on a rampage, picking out his victims, sometimes disabling cars. One woman had nearly been decapitated, others were shot at point-blank range, sometimes trophies were taken and the police were forever being taunted.

  And he was never caught. Never.

  Grayson scooted his chair back and gave a short whistle to his dog, a black Lab named Sturgis who rarely left his side. The dog, a reject from the K-9
unit, had been with Grayson for a couple of years, ever since the department had decided not to “hire” him. They’d been inseparable ever since and Alvarez had wondered if the Lab was some kind of replacement for the wife who had dumped him. Usually the retriever stayed in Grayson’s office, but today, he’d been allowed into the task force room and now trotted happily, tail wagging, at the sheriff’s boot heels. They disappeared into his office as Alvarez and Pescoli headed for the side door to the parking lot.

  She walked with Pescoli outside to the parking lot and tucked her hair into a stocking cap. A sharp wind was blowing, dusk descending rapidly, and it was cold as hell. Already Pescoli’s Jeep was collecting ice on its windshield.

  “Cheery little meeting,” Pescoli said, unlocking her Jeep and climbing behind the wheel while Alvarez slid into the passenger side.

  “Yeah, a real upper.”

  They discussed the case as Pescoli flipped on the heater and wipers, driving away from the town, toward the hills. “Merry Christmas,” Pescoli said under her breath as she reached in the console for her pack of cigarettes, cracking the window. “Mind if I smoke?”

  “Yeah, but it’s not gonna stop you, is it?”

  “Sure it will. For a while.” Pescoli dropped the cigarette into her near-empty pack, which she tucked back into the console. Meanwhile, the police band crackled, officers talking to each other while they drove through the foothills. She didn’t light up until she’d driven to Star Fire Canyon, near the area where the car was discovered, and parked as close as possible.

  This time there was no safe way down to the bottom of the ravine, though two deputies and a firefighter rappelled down the side of the sheer hillside to the narrow creek bed below.

  “How the hell did Bob Simms find the car?” Alvarez asked.

  “He patrols all the woods around here. Doesn’t matter what the weather,” Deputy Pete Watershed said.

  “He must be half mountain goat.” Pescoli drew hard on her filter-tip and stared down the embankment. “Hell, that’s a drop.”

  “He wears snowshoes or cross-country skis.”

  “Doesn’t matter, the man’s a damned mountain goat.”

  Alvarez eyed the surrounding area, looking for the spot in the road where the Prius was hit.

  As if reading her thoughts, Watershed pointed up to the next ridge. “We think the car was shot up there. It’s a little off the beaten track if she were returning to Spokane, but when it’s clearer weather there’s a ridge across the canyon. From there a shooter with a sniper rifle might be able to make the shot. If conditions were right.”

  Alvarez squinted against the falling flakes and coming darkness, trying to understand what madness would consume a person and make him lie in wait in the bitter cold. She imagined seconds ticking off before he took aim and fired, blowing out the tires of his victim’s vehicle.

  None of the victims’ phone records had helped. The friends who’d left messages on their cell phones, MySpace pages and other computer lists—none had yielded any clues. The three victims had nothing in common aside from the fact that they’d been stalked, abducted, then abandoned, naked, tied to trees, to die alone.

  Deep in her jacket, Alvarez shivered, her thoughts turning to Jillian Rivers. Was she even still alive?

  Jillian used the time that MacGregor was out of the cabin to snoop. She didn’t know anything about him, so this was her chance. She maneuvered around the cabin with one crutch, ignoring the pain as she carefully searched through drawers and cupboards, looking for some clue as to his identity, his life, his past. She felt a little guilty, as if she were a trespasser, but all she had to do to allay the sense of wrongdoing was remind herself that he’d brought her here. She was his guest, and prisoner.

  From the books in the bookcase she gleaned that he was interested in hunting, fishing, astronomy, backpacking, survival in the wilderness, first aid and medicine. In drawers, he had maps that covered the states of Montana, Idaho, Washington and Wyoming. Topographical maps, road maps, forest service maps, even satellite maps.

  But there wasn’t a framed photograph in the place; not on the mantel, walls, bookcase or tables. Not one single snapshot. It was as if he kept the images of his life hidden, even from himself.

  “How odd,” she said under her breath, then wondered if she was wrong. Dead wrong. This cabin might just be his mountain retreat, his second home.

  His lair, her mind taunted, as if he were the serial killer she’d heard something about. Rationally, she’d pretty much dismissed the idea, but irrationally, on a purely gut level, she reminded herself to tread lightly, to be on the alert, to remember that she didn’t know anything about her savior except what he told her.

  It could all be a pack of lies.

  It took a little effort, but she managed to feed the fire, tossing a couple of chunks of fir into the grate and not hurting her ribs too much. As the flames rose, crackling hungrily, she replaced the screen. Using her crutch, she hobbled past the table to the far side of the room. She’d just reached the bookcase and was going to examine some of the titles when she felt it—that sensation that someone was watching her. She froze and turned, glancing around the empty room. No one was inside, and even the dog had curled up by the door, content to wait, eyelids closed.

  No one is watching you.

  She glanced up to the ceiling, searching, ridiculously, for a hidden camera.

  “You’re getting paranoid,” she told herself but couldn’t keep her pulse from racing, her heart from beating a little faster. Using her crutch, she made her way to the windows. It was getting close to dark, twilight shadowing the rugged hills, and she had to squint to see into the shadows.

  Snow was falling, but slowly, and she thought there might be a chance that the sky would soon clear. In her mind she prioritized the tasks of returning to civilization. First get to the hospital, then call her mother and Emily, her neighbor, about her cat. She’d have to deal with the insurance company about the car, check her phone messages to see if anyone had work for her and…and…She froze, thinking that she would still have to track down Aaron, if he were truly alive.

  And if not? What if this is a wild goose chase? What if someone lured you here just to shoot at your car and cause the accident? What if Zane MacGregor is a part of the “accident”? What if everything that’s happened to you is scripted?

  “Oh, shut up!” she said so loudly Harley lifted his head and let out a startled little woof. She felt like an idiot. “Sorry,” she said, but couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching her, a pair of malevolent eyes glaring at her with hatred from the twilight shadows.

  She edged away from the window. Whoever had shot at her car had used a high-powered rifle, and even though the overhang of the roof was low, Jillian was backlit by the soft, warm glow of the fire and lanterns. Someone who forced a car over a ledge wouldn’t think twice about shattering a window.

  And then there was MacGregor.

  With his rifle.

  She licked her lips and eased away from the light so that she, too, was hidden in partial darkness.

  Who are you, you bastard?

  And what do you want with me?

  Her fingers tightened over the handle of her crutch as she thought of the reason she’d shown up here.

  Her first husband.

  Supposedly dead.

  From deep in the cabin she glared through the window, trying to locate the source of her fear. Okay, you prick, how the hell are you connected with Aaron?

  Pescoli was eyeball deep in reports. Lab reports, notes on the victims’ relatives and friends and cell phone bills. She’d read each of the women’s backgrounds until she felt that she knew them as well as their siblings did. All of the victims, it turned out, had traces of Valium in their systems, so Pescoli figured the guy who’d held them had restrained them all with drugs, probably tranquilizers and pain pills. The FBI was already all over the local distributors, hoping to find a link to where the killer could have gotten the
drugs.

  The trouble was, each of the victims had prescriptions. Legal prescriptions for anxiety, pain and sleep.

  Her back was beginning to ache a bit; she’d never been one to sit for hours on end. She just had too much restless energy and had to keep moving. She never would have been able to handle a desk job. As it was, the time she spent at her desk, reading through files and clicking on the damned mouse of her computer, was enough to drive her crazy.

  She walked down a hallway and saw, for the first time in days, a sliver of late-afternoon sunlight shining through the windows, bright rays cutting through the clouds, which were collecting again. For a few seconds, the light was nearly blinding as it bounced off the thick drifts of snow piled outside around the parking lot and the yard where the flagpole stood. Old Glory moved slightly in the breeze, the State of Montana’s flag, too, billowing a bit, gold fringe glinting in the sun.

  Thank God for the tiny break in the weather, even if it was predicted to be short-lived.

  Now, if there was only a break in the case.

  She walked to the kitchen, poured herself a cup of “Joelle’s Special Blend,” according to the note left on the counter, and headed back to her desk.

  Taking a sip as she sat in her chair, she thought the coffee tasted the same as it did every day. “Special blend, my ass,” she whispered, setting the cup down and scanning the lists of friends and relatives of the three women one last time. None matched, nor did towns where they lived, schools they attended…anything. As far as she could tell, the women didn’t know each other. But they were all targeted by one guy who had connections with each one; she was sure of it.

  Her cell phone rang and she recognized her son’s number on the ID. She let it ring twice and reined in the urge to answer with “Where the hell are you?” Instead, she picked up and said neutrally, “Detective Pescoli.”

  “You called me?”

  “Yeah, Jer, I did. You’re supposed to be with your fa—with Lucky this weekend.”