by Lisa Jackson
Chandler nodded. “When your car was located, we started searching for you.”
“And digging into my personal life.”
Chandler didn’t crack a smile. “We wanted to find you.”
Halden said, “But we just found the photographs at the cabin today. We’ll analyze them.”
“I’ll get them back?”
“Eventually.”
“I need them.”
Chandler nodded again. “So do we. Now, tell us. Who do you think called you?”
“I don’t know.”
“You didn’t recognize the voice?”
“No, it was a whisper and caller ID didn’t come up with a name or number.” She looked from one agent to the other. “And I don’t know who sent me the pictures. The postmark on the envelope was Missoula, so I was going to confront my ex-husband, as he lives there.”
“Mason Rivers?”
“Yes, he’s an attorney, excuse me, a partner in the law firm of Olsen, Nye and Rivers,” she’d said, but had the feeling they already knew this information as well. “We were divorced two years ago.”
“When was the last time you saw him?” Halden asked.
“Just a few days after the divorce was final. We exchanged the final things we had of each other’s. It was all very…civil.”
“And since then?”
“Nothing. I wasn’t invited to the wedding.” Jillian felt a twisted smile curve her lips. “Sherice, that’s Mason’s new wife, she’s not a big fan.”
“Of yours?”
“Of any woman Mason remotely showed an interest in. That goes double for ex-wives.”
Halden chuckled, but Chandler didn’t react.
They asked a few more questions, then, satisfied for the moment, concluded the interview and took their leave.
Jillian had been left alone, hooked up to an IV she didn’t think she needed, her vital signs monitored by one nurse after another.
The feeling that lingered after the FBI agents left made her uncomfortable. She sensed the detectives and agents were trying to trip her up so she would incriminate MacGregor. And that just wasn’t right.
And then her mind circled to her own circumstances. Why had someone lured her to Montana in an effort to kill her? After the second attempt on her life, she was damned certain, as the police were, that she had become the target of a serial killer.
How did that fit?
Who hated her so much?
Who hated the other women?
She glanced up at the muted television, noticing that the local news was on the air. There, on the screen, was her own face, the photo from her driver’s license.
“Oh God,” she whispered as she turned the sound on. A reporter dressed in a blue parka, snow falling around her, currently stood in front of the emergency room doors of this very hospital. Brunette and serious, a gust of wind ruffling her hood, she explained about Jillian’s abduction.
The image on the screen changed quickly to an aerial shot of a snow-covered clearing surrounded by forested hills. Near the edge of the snowy glen was a lone cedar tree.
Jillian started shivering when she recognized the area. The snow around the tree was trodden and mashed, and ropes lay like dark snakes on the white ground.
Her stomach roiled as she stared at the lengths of nylon that had cut into her skin.
Deputies from the sheriff’s department were examining the roped-off scene as a camera from a helicopter recorded the whole tableau.
Jillian told herself to turn the damned television off, to stop looking at the place where she’d nearly died, but the images held a macabre fascination for her.
Even tucked in the warmth of the hospital bedding, she quivered. Her memories were vivid. Visceral. She remembered waking up tied to the rough bark, her flesh so cold it stung, the nylon rope digging into her skin like teeth.
She remembered the dark, gloved hands mashing that chemical-soaked rag into her face. And the glimmer of a scar on the wrist. Or was that her own wrist? She checked her arms, looking for a crescent-shaped scar. Nothing. Was it a memory? Or part of a nightmare?
Think, Jillian, think, she told herself as the screen switched again to the anchor desk, and then, to her horror, they listed the names and photographs of the women who hadn’t survived the maniac’s attack—pictures of vital, smiling women. Jillian thought she might be sick as the voiceover continued and yet another victim’s smiling face filled the screen.
“…and as an update, the other victim who survived the killer’s attack, still unidentified, is listed in critical condition at a hospital in Missoula. The victim, we’ve learned, has not regained consciousness at the time of this report….”
Another woman survived?
Riveted, Jillian watched the rest of the newscast, much of which was devoted to reporting on the “Star-Crossed Killer” and his targets. She learned of the victims, of how they had endured the same fate as she, stripped of clothing and tied to a tree, where a star had been cut over their heads.
She clicked off the television and glanced out the window again to the night, where snow was falling rapidly, millions of tiny flakes visible as they danced in the light from the security cameras.
Even now, the killer could be outside.
Waiting.
The soft strains of music filtered in from the hallway, an instrumental rendition of “Silent Night.”
She was exhausted and, deep down, frightened. Yes, she’d survived, but how did she know the killer wouldn’t try again? She thought of Zane MacGregor, now behind bars, and of Harley, still alive but suffering…all because some whacko wanted her dead.
Why?
Who?
What unknown enemy had she made? One determined to take her life?
Back to the same old questions.
She thought of Aaron and their marriage, how at times it had been strained and distant. There had been incidents when he’d seemed to not be in the same room with her.
Jillian yawned, fighting exhaustion. Aaron hadn’t liked living in Seattle. A wanderer at heart, he’d wanted to get away from the gloom of the city, go somewhere with more seasons. He’d always brought up moving east, over the mountains….
All of her bones seemed to ache and she realized how truly spent she was. She could barely keep her eyes open and figured the hospital staff had slipped some kind of sedative into her IV.
Well, fine.
For tonight, she’d stop worrying about the danger that lurked outside the windows in the darkness. Maybe she could forget that something deadly and intent waited for her. Tonight she would stay in the hospital, warm and safe.
But come the morning, she was outta here.
As she started to doze off, the words to the Christmas carol slipped through her mind.
“Silent night, holy night.”
Uncomfortable, she drifted off to sleep.
Chapter Twenty-One
“MacGregor’s not our guy,” Pescoli ground out as she parked her rig at Shorty’s, an all-night diner on the main drag not far from the sheriff’s department. Shorty, a cook for a mining company back before the turn of the twentieth century, had established the restaurant and, though he was long dead, his name, in flickering neon, had been indelibly etched on the landscape. A huge sign had been planted near the highway sometime in the last century.
“I thought you were convinced he was good for it.”
Pescoli spit her wad of tasteless gum into a wrapper and tossed it into the ashtray. Rather than hear Alvarez bitch about her smoking, she’d found a pack of nicotine gum in her purse, popped a stick into her mouth and chewed it for the last hour or so as if her life depended on it. “I was hoping.” She cut the engine and threw open the door of her Jeep, nearly hitting the side of a King Cab truck that was parked cockeyed in the lot. “I wanted him to be good for it.” She locked the rig and trudged through the snow that was swirling down from the dark heavens. Would the storms ever abate long enough to give them a break?
“M
e, too,” Alvarez admitted.
Shorty’s was long and low with a slightly pitched roof that was now thick with snow. Icicles dripped from the eaves and, in honor of the season, a leering, winking Santa had been propped on the roofline near one of the original smokestacks. Not so jolly, this Saint Nick. To Pescoli he looked like a pervert in a red suit and fake beard, a creepy old guy whose image had been captured on a plywood easel.
She shoved open a double set of glass doors and stepped into the “dining” area of the establishment. A wave of heat smelling of fried foods hit her hard in the face. For the most part, the open room with worn floor tiles was empty. It was too late for the dinner crowd and those patrons who remained had migrated to the sports bar that was attached via a short hallway where a vintage cigarette machine, circa 1960, still stood guard beneath “space age” dangling lights.
This was one of her regular hangouts, so just inside the door Pescoli plucked a couple of plastic-encased menus from the empty podium then walked to the back of the seating area. After taking off her jacket, gloves and hat and tossing them onto one of the faux-leather bench seats of a booth, she slid in beside them. Alvarez, too, stripped off her outerwear, but she took the time to stuff her gloves and hat into the pockets of her jacket, then hung everything on a peg attached to the side of the booth. They sat across from each other, Alvarez, as always, in a position where she could eye the front door.
They were both in lousy moods, disgusted that they were back at square one on the case, and Pescoli was looking for comfort food. She’d forgo the booze for the night, because, though officially she was off duty, she was still working the case. Everyone was. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t have fried food and calories galore.
They had found nothing in MacGregor’s cabin to indicate he’d held any of the victims captive. Aside from the fact that he’d “rescued” Jillian Rivers and kept her with him during the storms, the only other evidence against him—and it wasn’t anything worthwhile—was the fact that he had some maps of the area as well as a collection of astrology books.
It did seem as if he hadn’t intended to harm Jillian Rivers, that he had in fact pulled her from harm, not once, but twice.
Which only made their job harder.
Stomach rumbling, Pescoli glanced over the menu she’d read weekly ever since the place opened and settled on a Reuben sandwich. Tonight she needed comfort food, so she changed from her usual side salad to fries, and traded her default drink of Diet Coke for a “Shorty’s famous” black-and-white milkshake, which was a decadent confection of hot fudge, chocolate syrup, vanilla ice cream and crushed Oreo cookies. As the waitress Lillian had always said, “Only one way to describe the black-and-white: to die for.”
Which was probably true considering the amounts of sugar, fat, and every other edible sin imaginable chocked into it.
To hell with it.
Tonight she didn’t care.
Lillian appeared without a notepad. In her seventies, she was as sharp as she had been fifty years earlier, never so much as writing an order down, never making a mistake.
“You two are in here late,” she observed.
Regan made a face. “Long day.”
“Yeah. It was all over the TV and we had some news guys from outta town. Big van with a satellite dish, parked right over there near the Bull and Bear, just off main street.”
“I know where it is,” Pescoli said. She knew Rod Larimer, the B&B’s innkeeper. A guy who looked like he enjoyed the breakfast part of the B&B too much, Rod loved any publicity the town could garner, was all for developing the hell out of Grizzly Falls.
“Man alive, what a day!” Lillian said, then asked slyly, “you any closer to getting that guy?”
“All the time,” Pescoli said breezily, and Alvarez almost smiled.
“Three women in one day! Scares the living crap outta me, let me tell you. And I ain’t the only one. I hear the customers talking, don’t ya know, and everyone’s pretty wigged out. We’re all counting on you to kill that son of a bitch or lock him up and cut off his balls.”
Lillian was nothing if not opinionated.
“I think they outlawed castration a few years back,” Alvarez said dryly.
“Big mistake, if ya ask me. That’s the trouble, ain’t it? No one asks. Now, what can I getcha?”
Alvarez ordered a cup of lentil soup, a lettuce-wedge salad with lite bleu cheese dressing and an iced tea with extra lemon.
Was she kidding?
After a day like today?
Pescoli didn’t understand it, but Alvarez never seemed to give in to pressure. She didn’t smoke, barely drank, stayed clear of most men and stuck to her damned diet and exercise regimen like Super Glue.
Well, Pescoli wasn’t bashful. She ordered up a heart attack and sent Lillian off grinning.
“It’s worse than just MacGregor not being the doer,” Alvarez said once the drinks had been delivered and Lillian had disappeared behind the swinging doors to the kitchen. They were alone in the restaurant aside from a single guy reading the paper in the far corner and some antsy teenagers sucking down sodas, eating fries and blowing straw wrappers at each other.
Thankfully the background music wasn’t, for once, Christmas carols. Instead the strains of “Hotel California” could be heard over the fan of the furnace and the clink of dishes from the kitchen.
Alvarez swirled her tea with a long-handled spoon while watching the lemon slices dance around the ice cubes in her drink. “I hate to say it, but I think we’ve got a copycat.”
Damn it all to hell. Pescoli had come up with the same irritating conclusion on her own, but she’d tried to talk herself out of it. Didn’t want to believe it. “I’m listening. Why?”
“First of all, there was no note left at the scene where Jillian Rivers was found. I thought maybe MacGregor had second thoughts about killing her and had somehow destroyed the note when he went back for her, but that just doesn’t work.” Alvarez tested the drink, sipping through a plastic straw. “The star carved into the tree was different. Six-pointed, not five.”
Pescoli decided to play devil’s advocate. She plucked the cherry from her milkshake. “So maybe he was interrupted. Didn’t have time to post the note.”
“Still doesn’t explain the star. Huh-uh. Something’s up.”
“It could be he’s evolving. They do that.” She dropped the red maraschino into her mouth.
Alvarez lifted a shoulder. “He’s escalating. That much is given. But evolving?” She shook her head.
“Well, then he’s panicking. That’s why he’s dumping the girls so fast. He’s scared.”
“Why?”
“Maybe we’re closer than we think.” Pescoli took a long swallow of the sweet drink and nearly gave herself an ice-cream headache.
Alvarez snorted. “We’re close to nothing. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Zilch.”
“Could be he doesn’t know that.”
“Still…three in one day, after a pattern of one a month?” Lines of frustration showing around her lips, Alvarez shook her head and took a sip of her tea. “Nope, I’m not buying it. What does he think we know? What would it be that scares him? How could we be closer?”
Pescoli grunted. “Does the guy have a damned harem, or what? Three women, well, maybe two, if Jillian Rivers is out of the mix, both of whom we think were held hostage for a while before being dumped in the forest. How many more does he have stashed away?”
Alvarez looked up at her with horror. “Oh God…you think he’s got others?”
“I hope not. God, I hope not.”
Lillian swept through the doors from the kitchen about the same time one of the teenagers was opening his table’s saltshaker. “Hey, there! Cut that out.” The boy, a pimple-faced kid in a stocking cap pulled low over his eyes, froze. “I mean it.” Lillian’s thin lips were pursed in anger and her eyes flashed fire from behind eyeglasses rimmed in tiger stripes. The kid, flushing so that his acne was even redder than before, dropped the s
altshaker, and it fell, spilling its contents across the table.
“Sorry,” he muttered with a look to his friends. They all scrambled out of the booth and into the night.
“Little twerps.” Lillian deposited Regan’s and Selena’s food on the table. “Who needs ’em? I’ll clean that up and be back, if you need anything. Darn fool kids probably didn’t even leave a tip!”
The man reading the paper held up his cup for another shot of coffee, and Lillian, in her ire, swept past. “Be right with ya,” she said, intent on cleaning up the spilled salt.
Alvarez cautiously spread a little dressing onto her lettuce wedge. “I guess we’ll know more when we ID the victims.”
Pescoli nibbled a crispy, thick fry. Fried heaven. “Missing Persons is working on that.”
“Yeah, along with the FBI and agencies in the surrounding states.”
“You’d think we’d find their cars.” She snagged a catsup bottle from the end of the table and squirted a large pool on one side of her plate.
“Maybe they were grabbed another way.”
“Doubt it.” Pescoli took a long drink from her milkshake. “At least now we have two witnesses, though Jillian Rivers can’t remember anything about the guy. Maybe when EH or HE wakes up she can ID him.”
“If she wakes up.”
“Oh hell, she’d better. She’s our only witness. So far, since Ms. Rivers thinks Zane MacGregor is her knight in shining armor—”
“Face it, Pescoli, he might just be. Not all men are losers,” Alvarez said, blowing over her steaming cup of soup, sending the scent of warm spices drifting across the table.
Though Alvarez hadn’t mentioned Regan’s love life specifically, it felt like a barb. Alvarez had made no bones about the fact that she thought Pescoli wasn’t particular enough in her choices in men. Well, hell, she was probably right. Not that it was any of her damned business.
“MacGregor might have saved her,” Alvarez said.
“But from whom?”
“That’s the million-dollar question.”
“Only part of the question.” As she was picking up half her grilled sandwich, some of the sauerkraut fell onto her plate where the sauce was already dripping. She didn’t care. “The other part is, who’s the original killer, the guy with all the notches on his grisly belt?” Taking a large bite, she barely tasted the blend of corned beef, Swiss cheese, kraut and secret sauce the chef piled on rye bread. Instead, she felt that old rage, the anger she tried to keep tamped down in order to maintain her perspective, her cool. Tonight, considering the number of terrorized and murdered women piling up, it just wasn’t happening. Her brain was moving too quickly and she was scared to death that the surviving victim found up at the abandoned lodge might die before she could identify her attacker.