by Lisa Jackson
Pescoli worked through her sandwich half, then munched on the pickle that came with the meal. There were just too many inconsistencies in this case. For one thing, the ropes were all wrong. All of them had been twisted-fiber rope—but the one used for Jillian Rivers was nylon and braided. “Unless our guy’s run out of sisal, or he’s trying to throw us off or just screwing with us, you’re right, we’ve got ourselves a bonafide nutcase of a copycat. Who would want to do that?” She stared for a second at an aluminum tree spinning under a pink spotlight, moving in the opposite direction of the refrigerated pie case revolving on the counter. “And why Jillian Rivers? Simple bad luck? She was the next car through and he wanted to jump in on the action?”
“Or was she selected by the copycat for some reason?”
“A lot of questions with no answers.”
Alvarez sighed and said, “I hate to admit it, but I’m with Chandler on this one. I peg the first killer as someone who likes to toy with us, show us how much smarter he is. He keeps things the same so we know it’s him. Jillian Rivers is an anomaly. It’s not just the rope that makes her a different kind of victim. No one else was ever drugged with ether, right? Or carried to the killing ground?” She stirred her soup. “Uh-uh. They were all marched naked to the place where they were killed, urged along with a knife or some other weapon sharp enough to make razor-like slits in their skin. And the footprints in the snow show only one set going in and out at the spot we found Jillian Rivers. Her footprints weren’t there.”
“She said she was carried. And there were MacGregor’s prints.”
“Aside from his. The other prints were smaller than his size twelves and the first killer’s elevens. These are more like eights or nines, not a huge guy.”
“One with a hard-on for Jillian Rivers.”
“Right. Another woman with no known enemies.”
“Oh, she’s got enemies, at least one, maybe two.”
“Who?” Alvarez asked, eyebrows lifting in interest.
“She’s divorced, isn’t she? Believe me. She’s got enemies.”
“Some divorces are amicable.”
Pescoli snorted before taking another bite. “Spoken like a woman who’s never been married. And here’s the thing. I don’t like her ex. I talked to Mason Rivers. He’s just a little too slick for me.” She dug into the rest of her sandwich and Alvarez polished off most of her soup as they lapsed into silence.
Pescoli couldn’t help thinking of the woman lying comatose in a hospital bed in Missoula. That victim, identified with the initials E and H, was key to the case, so important she was under round-the-clock police guard, even in the hospital. Jillian Rivers, too, had a guard in the hospital, though Pescoli begrudgingly believed Alvarez’s theory, that Ms. Rivers was the victim of a very determined copycat killer. A nutcase? One seeking his own sick notoriety, or something else, something more personal?
Pushing her half-eaten salad aside, Alvarez voiced her own concerns. “It doesn’t look good for the woman we found at Broken Pine. The doctors don’t have a lot of hope.”
“I know,” Pescoli said. She left a quarter of her sandwich, but polished off her milkshake as a middle-aged couple walked into the restaurant and found a private booth. They looked like they’d been married for twenty years and were still in love. Hard to believe. She tossed her napkin onto her plate and set the empty milkshake glass near the edge of the table.
“It’s not like we’re going to learn anything new from the dead one we found up at Cougar Pass,” Pescoli said. “I’d bet dollars to donuts that we’ll get the same information we did off the other victims: no epithelial transfer from the killer, nothing under the vic’s fingernails, no sign of sexual attack or semen.”
“Don’t be so optimistic.”
“She’ll probably have a few broken bones courtesy of the car ‘accident.’” Pescoli made air quotes as she reached for her wallet. “There will also be some bruising and contusions consistent with the accident, and evidence that she was prodded with a knife, along with burns from the ropes that bound her.”
Lillian appeared. “Anything else? We’ve got a killer coconut creme pie tonight, only a couple pieces left. Oops. Did I say that? Killer creme pie? No pun intended.”
“Think I’ll pass,” Pescoli said, and Alvarez, true to her nature and her damned diet regimen, shook her head. Just once Pescoli would love to see her partner cut loose. Have a Long Island iced tea or give in to the urge for a donut or brownie left by Joelle in the break room at the office. Or, better yet, start dating.
They squared up, each paying for her share of the meal and leaving Lillian a decent tip, before donning jackets, hats and gloves again as notes from an old Gordon Lightfoot tune swirled around them.
Outside it was cold and dark, the snow coming down fast enough that half an inch had piled on the Jeep. Pescoli felt the urge for a cigarette but pushed it aside as she squeezed into her side of the rig and noted that the King Cab truck hadn’t moved. So it didn’t belong to the teenagers. Nor the couple that had shown up. Maybe the guy reading the paper in the corner?
Who was he anyway?
No one she recognized. She slid behind the wheel and glanced in her rearview mirror. Sure enough, the guy who had been reading and drinking coffee was still at his table, but he was looking up, out the window, and for the briefest of seconds Pescoli thought his gaze found hers.
Ridiculous!
Her cop radar was working overtime.
“What did you think about the single guy in the diner?”
“Why? Are you looking for a date?” Alvarez snapped her seat belt into place as Regan fired the engine.
“Very funny. Really, what did you think?”
“Single. Maybe waiting for someone. He kept looking at the door.”
“He pay any attention to us?” Pescoli hit the wipers and they began scraping off the snow that had collected on the windshield.
“A little. Nothing serious.”
“You sure?” She turned the fan onto high and hit the button on the dash labeled DEFROST.
“Yeah. Why?” Alvarez asked, and looked over her shoulder to the restaurant, but the guy had turned his attention to his paper again. Lillian was sauntering up with a carafe of coffee, and Pescoli was suddenly uneasy, though the exchange, as Lillian poured more coffee into his cup, seemed routine. Innocent.
Still…
“Don’t know. But he bothers me. Run the plates of the vehicles in the lot, would you?”
“Sure.” That was a simple matter, as the computer was hooked up inside Pescoli’s rig. “But I think this case is getting to you.”
“It’s getting to all of us.” Pescoli pulled out of the tight parking space and shoved her Jeep into drive. The lot was relatively empty, the traffic thin, and the damned snow just kept falling from the sky, covering the parking lots and the streets where tire tracks were visible.
Alvarez checked the system for a few minutes and said, “None of the vehicles were stolen; plates match up. The Buick belongs to Lillian Marsden, the King Cab to a Thomas Cohen, the Toyota to Ernesto Hernandez and the Taurus to—”
“Okay, okay, I get it. I’m being paranoid.”
Alvarez shrugged. “Look, I’m going to call Chandler even though it’s late. The woman never sleeps. I think we’re gonna have to release MacGregor. I’ll call Grayson in the morning.”
“Fine,” Pescoli bit out. She was angry that they’d probably wasted their time. Unless the crime scene people found anything of interest up at MacGregor’s cabin, which hadn’t happened as yet.
She was nearly back at the office, where Alvarez’s car was parked, when her cell phone rang. With a glance, she noticed that the call was coming from the Pinewood Sheriff’s Department. “Guess we’re not off duty.”
“Maybe there’s a break in the case.”
She answered, “Pescoli.”
“Pescoli, this is Rule.”
Kyan Rule was a road deputy, a tall black man with the build of an NBA f
orward and a crooked smile of white teeth that caused many a female heart to flutter. Pescoli herself wasn’t immune to the man’s serious charms.
“What’s up?” she asked as they passed a snowplow heading in the opposite direction.
“Bad news.” For the first time she noticed the sober tone in his deep voice.
“Oh hell, what now? Don’t tell me there’s another victim.” From the corner of her eye she saw Alvarez turn to look at her.
“No. It’s your son.”
The hospital stood starkly in the night, rising above the surrounding clinics and linked parking lots that serviced the medical community of Grizzly Falls. Small in comparison to the complexes in bigger cities, Pinewood General Hospital was still one of the largest buildings in the city. From its position on the bluff, the hospital overlooked the older part of the town and the river far below. The sheriff’s department was less than three miles away.
Tonight, with snow falling steadily, the hospital lights were muted but still visible in the darkness. Among the rows of empty spaces in the snowy parking lot was a cruiser from the Pinewood County Sheriff’s Department, which indicated, just as an earlier newscast had stated, that she was still a patient and under guard.
The damned woman just wouldn’t die!
And time was running out.
Her room was on the third floor.
Her guard, not the sharpest tool in the shed, sometimes wandered down to the cafeteria for a fresh cup of coffee or a snack. Once in a while he walked to the public restroom to take a leak. Other times he flirted with some of the young nurses. But he was there, nonetheless.
A presence.
So contact couldn’t be made tonight.
But come the morning, only a few hours off, when the hospital staff shifts were changing and the damned guard was getting replaced, then there would be a chance.
If not to kill, then to lure once again…
Away from this place.
To a new killing ground.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“My son?” Pescoli repeated.
Her heart nearly dropped out of her chest.
With suddenly shaking hands she guided the Jeep onto the side street leading to the cluster of county buildings where the sheriff’s department was located, high on Boxer Bluff.
“Jeremy?” she whispered, flashing on blood-chilling images of his body in a mangled car that had slid off an icy embankment, or on a respirator in a hospital gasping for life. Oh dear God, what would she do if she lost him?
“He’s all right,” Rule assured her. He’d barely paused in the conversation, but in the span of a heartbeat, Regan Pescoli had faced her worst fears—the fear that every time she came upon an accident scene, one of her children would be trapped in the car, covered in blood, skin the gray of death. “But he’s been arrested.”
“Arrested?” she repeated, letting out her breath. Thank God he was alive. Unhurt. “For what?”
“MIP,” Rule said. “He’s pretty wasted. We sent him to the juvenile facility but he’s yelling that he wants you to bail him out.”
In an instant, her deepest fears turned to anger. “He was drinking?”
“He and three others. One of them is Brewster’s daughter.”
She wheeled with controlled fury into the parking lot, her tires sliding just a bit. “Don’t tell me: Heidi.” Brewster’s youngest. His baby. His pampered princess. Even though he’d made no bones about “trying for a son” before his wife got pregnant with his last two girls, Heidi, the youngest, had become the apple of his eye.
“That’s the one.”
Regan swore beneath her breath. “She’s only fifteen.”
“Exactly what Brewster’s saying.”
Regan could almost hear the undersheriff spouting off about her no-good, useless son. “And not all he’s saying, I’m guessing.”
“Uh…no…”
Things were going rapidly from bad to worse. She threw her Jeep into park. “I’ll be right in. I’m here. In the parking lot.”
“Good.”
She hung up, hit the steering wheel with her fist and swore a blue streak.
“Trouble?” Alvarez asked mildly as Pescoli cut the engine.
“Big trouble. But at least my son’s not dead. Yet. Not until I personally throttle that kid!” She’d gone from scared to death to furious in less than two seconds. She tried to remind herself how she’d feel if the call had been about her son being zipped into a body bag. Worse yet, what if not only Jeremy, but also Heidi and whomever they were with, and maybe some innocent driver heading in the opposite direction, had been killed? “How in God’s name could he be so stupid?”
“He’s a teenager.”
“He’s an idiot. I mean, it’s not like he doesn’t know what’s up. I’ve told him over and over again…preached to him about drinking and driving and…no matter what I say it seems to go in one ear and out the other.”
“Jeremy’s a good kid.”
“Who’s in a lot of trouble.” She was shaking her head, and inside, her guts were quivering. It was hard to believe her reaction, even to herself, as hard-nosed a cop as she was. She’d witnessed horrific crimes, seen charred, bludgeoned and butchered bodies, and was always able to keep her emotional distance from the victims, to keep a level head while solving a crime. But when it came to her own kids, she was just a damned wuss, a mother bear who would do anything to protect her cubs. “Geez, Jer,” she said, as if her son was in the car.
“Take a breath,” Alvarez suggested as Pescoli threw open the driver’s door and a blast of cold air swept into the Jeep.
But Pescoli was having none of it. Ignoring the snow falling all around her, she charged toward the sheriff’s office.
If she could, she’d spit nails.
Dead on her feet, Alvarez followed her partner inside. She gave Pescoli some space and headed instead to the task force room, where one of the deputies, a junior detective named Zoller, was handling all the incoming calls.
“How’s it going?” Alvarez asked.
The junior detective lifted a shoulder. “Lots of action earlier, after the newscasts about the current victims, but they’ve dwindled to nothing.” She climbed out of her chair and stretched, a phone bud still in her ear. All of five feet two, Zoller was fit and trim, a thirty-year-old who ran marathons, mentored teens struggling with school and worked her ass off for the department. “A call came in an hour ago from an upset parent. Seems his kids had snuck out to go sledding up at Timber Junction, and in one of their runs, guess what they came across?”
“Oh God, another dead body,” Alvarez guessed, thinking the worst.
Zoller shook her head, springy curls shivering around her small, elfin face. “No, thank God. A wrecked car. Four-year-old Ford Explorer. Beck O’Day has already been to the scene and roped it off. Waiting for the crime scene technicians, who are going up there to see if there’s any evidence. They can’t wait until morning light with all the snow falling.”
“No body?”
“None.”
“Same MO as the others?”
“O’Day hasn’t reported back in, but she was going to check the tires, see if they’ve been shot. I do know this: she called in the plates and the SUV is registered to C. Randall Jones of Billings, Montana. The C stands for Coolidge, like the president.”
Alvarez snorted. “No wonder he uses an initial.”
“Better than Polk.”
“Why do I think he wasn’t at the wheel?” She thought of the two unidentified women they’d found earlier in the day. One dead. One hanging on by a thread. Both victims. “Jones…none of the notes had a J in them. If our theory is right, the driver wasn’t his wife or daughter or mother.”
“Not married. No kids. I’m waiting for a callback. An officer from the Montana State Police was going to visit him.”
“Good.” If it weren’t for the horrendous nature of the crimes, the police would have waited until the morning to contact him. As it was, t
ime was of the essence and C. Randall would have to get out of bed to answer the door. “Anything else?”
“A list from Missing Persons of people with the initials we found on the notes. These are Caucasian women within the age group we’re looking for who have gone missing in the past two months in a thousand-mile radius within the United States.”
“Amazing what computers can do,” Alvarez said as Zoller handed her the short printout. Only a few names appeared: Helena Estavez, Elle Holden and Hannah Estes for the women with the initials EH or HE, and Roberta Artez, Roxanne Anderson, Rona Anders, Annabelle Rollins and Alicia Rhodes for the others. Two of the women, Helena Estavez and Roxanne Anderson, had been crossed off the list. “Why are these two off?” she asked.
“Anderson’s driver’s license photo was way off from our victim, and Estavez showed up at home earlier tonight. The family called the Idaho State Police but her name hadn’t been taken out of the computer.”
“And it was verified that she returned?”
“Yeah, an Idaho State Trooper called half an hour ago.”
“Where are the other pictures?”
“I’m waiting for them. They’re supposed to be e-mailed to me, but with the holiday people are a little slow to respond. So far none have come in, but it should be soon.”
Unbuttoning her coat, Alvarez studied the list as Zoller made her way back to the desk, where a laptop computer, phone, legal pad and can of Pepsi were at the ready.