The Alvarez & Pescoli Series

by Lisa Jackson

  Kacey shook her head. “He’s been faster. When he had the Porsche.”

  Heather sighed. “I remember.”

  The sporty car had lasted one winter, and then he’d traded it in for an upscale four-wheel drive that could deal with the mountainous terrain and harsh winter weather.

  The phone started ringing, and Heather retreated to the front desk just as the back door opened and closed sharply. Dr. Martin Cortez had arrived.

  Kacey glanced at the article about Shelly Bonaventure, and yeah, she had to admit to herself, there was a slight resemblance between them, but it was minimal.

  She tossed the article into the trash just as Martin stuck his head into the room. Already wearing his lab coat and a warm smile, he started the conversation with, “You pick up a triple-shot caramel mocha with extra whip this morning?”

  “In your dreams.” It was their morning joke. Every once in a while Kacey did surprise him with some outrageous, over-the-top coffee drink, but not today.

  “How will I get through another minute?” He splayed one hand over his chest and looked to the ceiling, as if for holy inspiration.

  “It’ll be tough, but you’ll manage,” she said. “Soldier on, okay?”

  “I’ll try.” His smile, a quick slash of white against his tanned skin, was infectious. No wonder half the single women in the county were interested. Dropping the Oscar-worthy pose, he turned serious. All local GP again. “So did you take a look at Amelia Hornsby’s chart?” Martin knew the names of the family members of nearly everyone who stepped into the clinic. Amelia was an eight-year-old who had been through several rounds of antibiotics to fight a throat infection that just wouldn’t go away.

  Randy Yates, a male nurse just out of school, stuck his head into the door. “Hey, Docs, time to rock ’n’ roll,” he said, flashing a quick grin. His brown hair was shaved nearly to his skull, leaving little more than stubble over the top of his head, but he made up for it with a neatly trimmed goatee. “I’ve got exam one, two, and four ready to go. Vitals taken.”

  “I’ll take Mrs. Whitaker,” Martin said.

  Kacey checked the chart on exam room two. Elmer Grimes. “I’m in two,” she said and opened the door to her first patient.

  Detective Jonas Hayes of the LAPD wasn’t buying the setup. He hadn’t last night, when he’d responded to the call to Shelly Bonaventure’s apartment, and he didn’t today, as he sat at his desk and clicked through the images of the crime scene on his computer. This morning the department was buzzing, phones ringing, conversations drifting from one desk to the next, footsteps shuffling, computer keys clicking, and somewhere a printer was clunking out copies.

  Hayes took a swallow of his coffee, a cup he’d picked up at the Starbucks a few streets down, as he worked his way through the statements collected the night before. Again. He had perused them all around four in the morning and now was reading them more slowly five hours later.

  Last night, from the minute he’d stepped through Shelly Bonaventure’s front door, he’d been hit by the sensation that everything wasn’t as it was portrayed. He felt as if the crime scene had been staged à la Marilyn Monroe some fifty years earlier. Half a century later there were still conspiracy theories and the question of murder still hung over Marilyn’s grave. He didn’t want the same controversy to be a part of Shelly Bonaventure’s death. Not on his watch.

  And the crime scene just hadn’t felt right last night.

  Still didn’t.

  And that, in and of itself, was odd. A man of science, Hayes believed in cold, hard facts. He wasn’t big into gut feelings or hunches. He believed that the truth of a crime was found in evidence.

  But this case was different.

  For one thing, he didn’t believe that Shelly, no matter what her mental state, would call 9-1-1 while stark naked. If she’d had enough sense to make the call, then why not put on a robe at the very least? Was this a ploy for publicity? Did being nude ramp up the curiosity factor? Had she wanted to die sensationally?

  Then where the hell was the suicide note?

  Rubbing the back of his neck, he felt a craving for a smoke, but he’d given up cigarettes years before at Delilah’s urging. God, he missed them. Almost as much as he missed her.

  Scowling, he turned his thoughts back to the case. He expected, when the tox report came in, to find a concoction of pills and booze in her bloodstream. Xanax, if she’d taken her own meds. A bottle of the sedative had been right there on her nightstand, not in the medicine chest with the rest of her prescriptions. Only three pills were left in the vial, and according to the label, the prescription had been filled only last Saturday.

  It was obvious she’d OD’d.

  So, why was he not buying the pat suicide theory? She could have kept the pills at her bedside, he supposed, and she might have been naked because of a recent shower. The shower stall and curtain had been wet.

  But her hair and skin had been bone dry; her makeup only slightly smeared and faded. More like worn off rather than scrubbed away. The shower cap hanging on a hook near the stall had been damp, so maybe she’d stuffed her hair in it so well that not even the tiny hairs around her face had gotten wet ... maybe.

  And her cat wasn’t inside, but out. Would she really kill herself and leave her usually pampered cat on the patio? He didn’t think so, yet, of course, anything was possible. Maybe she thought it would be more humane than having kitty locked up with a rotting corpse.

  Frowning, he tapped a pencil eraser on his desk as he pored over the crime scene photos. Shelly was sprawled on the bed, her right hand still holding her cell phone, as she’d used it to call 9-1-1 minutes before slipping into a drug-induced coma and dying.

  Rotating the kinks from his neck, Jonas went over the past twelve hours in his mind. He had gotten the call around midnight and had driven to her apartment, where the responding officer had already started a crime scene log.

  Hayes and Gail Harding, his junior partner, had waited for the crime scene guys from the scientific investigative division and the coroner’s office.

  Eventually Shelly’s body had been sent to the morgue, the crime scene techs had come and gone, the next of kin had been notified, and a press release from the public information officer, already in sound bites for the morning news, had been issued. The tabloids had already been calling, as Ms. Bonaventure was much more fascinating in death than in life. Shelly’s agent had given a short statement, lauding Shelly’s talent, career, and good heart, then asking the public for privacy for the deceased’s family.

  Everyone he’d interviewed who knew her claimed she’d been full of life, a fighter, never too depressed. In a town where uppers and downers were tossed down like M&M’s and rehab was a way of life, Shelly had seemed to stay relatively clean and out of trouble.

  Hayes glanced down at the hard copies of the sworn statements they’d taken. According to the neighbor who lived above her, Shelly had been calling for her cat less than half an hour before the 9-1-1 call. He’d heard her front door open and close around eleven.

  And within forty minutes she was dead.

  The suicide theory just seemed too easy. Too pat.

  And she’d died pretty quickly from the time she’d taken the pills, if she’d swallowed them all upon returning to her apartment. But maybe he was wrong; there were still phone records to check, friends and neighbors and old boyfriends to call. Leaning back in his desk chair, he eyed a five-by-seven of his daughter, Maren. Now in high school, she was blessed with her mother’s good looks and wide smile. Her skin was a soft mocha, her eyes dark and vibrant, and she’d confided that she wanted to be an actress, that she saw herself as a new Angela Bassett or Halle Berry or Jada Pinkett Smith.

  And she was good, too.

  But, man oh man, Hollywood? For his kid?

  He turned his gaze from the picture of Maren’s smiling face to his computer monitor and the image of Shelly Bonaventure, her skin gray, her lips blue, death having claimed her. What, he wondered,
had Hollywood had to do with her death?

  Maybe nothing.

  Maybe everything.

  Hayes climbed to his feet and heard the soft, unfamiliar ruffle of the heating system, which was barely used. Even in winter the temperature in the police administration building, where the robbery-homicide division was housed, rarely needed a boost.

  He heard the clip of Harding’s footsteps before he saw her rounding the corner. She was frowning, her plucked eyebrows pulled into a thoughtful scowl.

  “You got something?”

  “Not much,” she said. “Finally caught up with the bartender who was working the late shift at Lizards, the place Shelly was last seen. That would be Lizards as in Lounge Lizards, according to the cheap advertisement on the Internet.”

  “And?”

  “She was pretty drunk,” Harding told him. “The guy she was with kept buying her drinks to celebrate her birthday.”

  “A friend?”

  “Some dude. Maybe a pickup. The bartender wasn’t sure. He remembered the guy, though. Mid- to late thirties, good-looking, dark hair, medium length. Caucasian, but with dark skin. Couldn’t remember the eye color or any distinguishing characteristics, other than he seemed pretty interested in Shelly, and the bartender was surprised they didn’t leave together. A lot of flirting going on.”

  “I don’t suppose this guy paid with a credit card.”

  She smiled, showing off the hint of teeth that weren’t quite straight, as her incisors flared slightly. “We’re not gonna get that lucky.”

  “Suppose not.”

  “Besides, we think it’s a suicide, right?” Harding prodded.

  “Yeah.” He said it without a lot of conviction. He figured he would check into the last few days of Shelly Bonaventure’s life and delve into all her relationships. He was also interested as to whom would benefit from her death. There was talk of her being up for a part in a new television series and a rumor of her nearly inking a deal for a tell-all book. First, though, he’d start with the last person to see her alive.

  “So, you’re buying the accidental overdose?” Harding asked, eyes narrowing, and when he didn’t respond, she nodded, as if agreeing with herself and a foregone conclusion. “You’re still thinking homicide.”

  “I don’t know what to think. Not yet,” he admitted. “I’m just not ruling anything out. Let’s go talk to the bartender, face-to-face. Maybe we can jog his memory about our mystery man.”

  “You’re the boss,” she said, and there was just an edge of sarcasm to her voice.

  “That’s right,” he teased her, grabbing his jacket off a hook near his desk. He slipped his Glock into its shoulder holster. “Just don’t forget it.”

  “How could I when you remind me of it every day?”

  “No reason to cop an attitude.”

  “Huh,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  His footsteps creaked on the old stairs as he slowly descended to the basement, located under the garage end of the house, which had been built before the turn of the century. The last century.

  Cool and airtight, once used for stacked wood and a wood-burning furnace, now its purpose was primarily storage. Crates, old furniture, broken lamps, canning jars, and pictures from bygone eras collected dust.

  No one ever ventured down here.

  Except for him.

  And only when he was alone.

  Cobwebs dangled from the exposed beams of the floor above, where the old John Deere sat parked, as it had for the better part of a decade. He ignored the scrape of tiny claws against the bricks of the floor. Let the mice and rats and squirrels, or whatever rodents chose to live down here, be. A rattler or two wouldn’t be bad, either. Anything to ensure that he wasn’t bothered.

  He walked past bins of rusted tools to his private room, the old chamber once used for root vegetables and apples to winter over. His great-grandmother’s old milk separator, a device that hadn’t been used in fifty years, still stood guard at the heavy, padlocked door, and there was rust on the walls where pipes had once brought water to and from a wringer washer that had occupied a space in the corner. He had to duck to keep from hanging himself on the lines where once upon a time, long, long ago, sheets had been draped to dry in the winter.

  Unlocking the padlock, he pulled open the old door his great-great-grandfather had built before refrigeration. The door was nearly a foot wide and filled with sawdust. When the door was sealed shut, any sounds from within were completely muted.

  Once inside, he snapped on the fluorescent lights and locked the door behind him. The room was instantly awash in the unsteady bluish illumination, and it was as if he’d been propelled forward in time by a century and a half. Stainless-steel counters gleamed against three walls; a computer center complete with wireless modem, twenty-five-inch monitor, and all the technology to keep his private business safe and secure filled one corner.

  An oversized map of North America stretched over a bulletin board that filled one long wall. It was a political map, showing state lines, cities, and roads. Scattered across its flat surface were red pushpins. Thirty-seven in all. Each indicating the spot where one of the pretenders lived. Like spatters of blood marring the smooth surface of the map, the pins reminded him of how much work he had to do and soon.

  They were a worry, those pins, a serious worry.

  There were far too many of them, he thought. There were a few other pins as well, ones with black heads, indicating death. Those pins affixed photographs to the map, though the pictures were turned facedown, showing only white squares of paper with dates of birth and death written in solid black letters. There were six of these in all, scattered across the United States.

  But he was making progress—steady progress. It was slow going because he could rely on no one but himself; he’d learned that lesson the hard way.

  Smiling to himself, he removed a red pin from the Southern California area, then walked to his printer, where a digital picture had already been printed. Shelly Bonaventure’s frightened face stared back at him, and he grinned again, satisfied by the look of pure terror on her countenance. She’d known at that moment that she was about to die. He’d snapped the shot with his cell phone just before exiting the back door of her apartment, then sent it wirelessly here.

  He’d taken too much time with her; he’d heard the sound of sirens fast approaching as he’d let himself out and dashed across the street.

  But he’d managed to get away.

  Again.

  Using the scissors he kept in a drawer, he cut the small picture from the paper, trimming away the excess, then carefully placing her date of birth and death on the back of her picture before pinning it, facedown, with a black pushpin. No longer could he see the small Photoshopped head shot she’d used as her publicity picture.

  Perfect.

  He surveyed his work, noting the others that had died before Shelly, and the raft of faces of those still alive, those waiting to serve out their sentence. They were in their own ways striking, all between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-six. Mostly brunettes, though there were a few bottle blondes in the group and a couple of redheads.

  The pictures were clustered mainly in the Northwest. Two in British Columbia, both near Vancouver Island, one in Alberta, several in Washington State, a slew in Oregon, and some scattered in California. Three in Nevada, two in Arizona, and a handful in Montana. One lived as far away as Delaware, and there were six in the Midwest. Three in Chicago.

  The ones who lived within the same district or state worried him as the deaths could be considered suspicious if he wasn’t careful. Shelly’s “suicide” was a risk. The others, so far, appeared to have died in accidents, no questions asked.

  All of which was perfect.

  Meticulously orchestrated.

  But there were so many more.

  He glared at the cluster of pins that swarmed around Missoula and Grizzly Falls. Access to each of those pretenders would be easy as they were nearby.

 
But when so many people in their late twenties and early thirties ended up dead, the authorities would take note.

  Unless there was a huge catastrophe and they all died together, along with others, of course, to throw off suspicion. And he’d have to either distance himself from the tragedy or, more likely, be a part of it and escape, not entirely unharmed.

  That would be tricky; but it caused his blood to sizzle a bit as he thought how clever he was. He’d baffle the police and turn out a hero and be revered ... but no! He had to blend into the woodwork, couldn’t afford to have any kind of light shined upon him, couldn’t allow some idiot member of the press to start digging....

  He walked to a file drawer and pulled it open. Inside were neat folders, information gathered over time on each of the pretenders. Some were thick, others slim, but it didn’t matter.

  He opened the first one, and his gut twisted as he glared at the picture tucked within his notes.

  Dr. Acacia Lambert.

  She was special. A small-town girl from Montana with enough brains to send herself to college and medical school. Married briefly to Jeffrey Lambert, a heart surgeon who still worked and resided in Seattle, Washington.

  Until the mistake.

  When he’d gotten too bloodthirsty, too hungry, too eager to destroy the one person who could ruin everything.

  And the job had been botched.

  Kacey had lived.

  Her marriage had fallen apart, though, and after the breakup Kacey decided to become a small-town doctor in the same town where her grandparents had resided all their lives.

  Touching.

  And perfect.

  After escaping his original plan, she’d nearly fallen right into his waiting hands.

  This time, there wouldn’t be a mistake; this time he’d take care of her for good.

  A slow-burning fury ran through his veins as he studied her picture. His jaw tightened as he noticed her thick red-brown hair, high cheekbones, full lips, and green eyes, which seemed to spark with intelligence, even in the small snapshot.