by Emery Hayes
He lowered the binoculars and gazed at the scene from a distance. He knew how cops worked. Soon their tight circle would grow larger, closer, and he would have to be gone by then. He had people waiting on him, appearances to keep up. An alibi to maintain.
One more look, he told himself, because he found her obsessive. Nicole in action, tall and solid. He hated her calm, her strength, that she had once beaten him and beaten him badly. And Benjamin Kris did not like to lose.
He was tired of dangling from her string. Killing her would eliminate the threat, but he wanted more than that. He wanted to destroy her, and that took more time, more effort, more closeness. It would take striking her where it hurt most. Going for what she had been afraid of all along. Jordan. Losing him would crush Nicole. And Benjamin was looking forward to it.
2
“Two predators, one prey,” Nicole said, thinking aloud as they paced back to MacAulay and the dead girl. “If they didn’t know about each other, if they weren’t working together, then we have separate motives as well.” She gazed at the vic. MacAulay was wrapping tape around her wrists, securing her bagged hands. Her clothes were intact. Fitted jeans, a cami under the cashmere sweater. Nothing disturbed. “Our killer had an agenda.”
Lars nodded. “I think he missed his opportunity.”
“The girl caught on, or maybe they were interrupted and she ran.” From one of the more than a hundred homes that clustered around the lake. “That would explain the absence of her coat.”
“Not the first time roofie made an appearance at a party,” Lars agreed.
“But the prints, they never cross?”
“Never. For close to a hundred yards, they run parallel but are separated by thirty or forty yards.”
“But the soft soles, he’s on the vic from the beginning? Not the hiking boots?”
Lars nodded. “The hiking boot picks up the vic in the woods. He cut in from the lake road sooner. Could be they started out together and split up to corral our vic.”
“The third set of prints, the soft soles, what happens to him?”
“He stopped.” And Lars turned and pointed toward the crest of a slope that overlooked the lake. “He stood there, but it’s hard to tell for how long. Minutes is my guess. Long enough to watch the kill.” He turned back to Nicole. “He shifted his weight on his feet—the prints overlap. At one point, he took a single step forward.”
“Indecision,” she said.
“Maybe in the clutch, he wanted to help the vic.”
“Or the perp.”
Either way, a witness to murder. The thought put an irritating tic in her blood.
She turned and focused on MacAulay’s progress. Slow and methodical. But the man never made a mistake.
In a murder investigation, that was never enough.
“Make sure you cross-reference the snow with anatomy.” A tech would scoop the drift and preserve it in a cooler chest for slowmelt once it was brought back to the lab. If there were epithelials, hairs, fibers under the vic’s nails, there was a possibility some could be recovered in the snow.
“Of course,” MacAulay agreed, unruffled. The man didn’t know urgency. He had one frequency, but it was stable. It was predictable. It was even long-range. So what if his engine never kicked into high gear? MacAulay was reliable.
She turned back to Lars. His hands were at his sides, the evidence bag clutched in one.
“There a name on the prescription bottle?” she asked.
“Beatrice Esparza,” Lars confirmed. “Augmentin, five hundred milligrams, twice daily.”
Doc whistled through his teeth. “That’s a heavy dose. A kid her age and weight, I’d prescribe half that.”
“What for?” Nicole asked.
“Could be she had a bad case of bronchitis. Maybe walking pneumonia. Urinary tract infection, a stubborn skin infection. Those are the most common uses for the drug. But five hundred milligrams?” His frown deepened as he considered it. “No.”
Lars shook the bag, and they listened to the rattle of pills. “That’s not penicillin.”
“Can I take a look?” Doc asked.
Lars opened the baggie and removed the bottle. Gloved, he twisted open the cap and warned the doctor to look and not touch. MacAulay obliged.
“You’re right. That’s not Augmentin.”
“But is it Rohypnol?” Nicole pressed.
“That or cold tabs,” Lars returned. “You know where my money is.” He replaced the bottle and zipped the bag and held it up for Nicole to take a good look, though she didn’t need to. Lars was right. The pills and condom packet led them down an obvious path.
Date-rapers were smooth and deceptive. They were violent offenders who spun lies that looked like gold.
Lars peered over her shoulder, into the darkness beyond the halogen lamps.
“Two perps. We need to know if they worked together,” she said. “Right now it’s just best guess they didn’t.”
“We need motive for the soft-soled guy. He was after something.”
“It bothers me,” Nicole said. “The two perps. It makes this more than a date rape gone wrong.”
“Something else is at play,” Lars agreed.
“And the roofie,” Nicole said. “It has more than one use.” Of course it did. The drug wasn’t manufactured to facilitate sex crimes. Though illegal in the United States, it was widely used in Mexico and Europe to treat anxiety and insomnia. “It makes a victim agreeable. It wipes out memory. But sex isn’t always the prize.”
“The condom makes it the go-to.”
She agreed, but there were too many players on the board. And the UGG boot—more women wore those than men.
“We’re missing something.” Nicole said. “Find it.” She turned to MacAulay. “Bag the body. A thorough exam,” she reminded him. “Make sure you look for bruising around the thighs and hips, inside her mouth.”
“I know how to confirm rape,” he said, but his voice was tight, and when Nicole looked into his face she found what he never tried to hide: his humanity.
“But you don’t know how to think like a cop—or even an ME,” Nicole pointed out. Brutal, and she was sorry for it, but sorrier that it was necessary. “Someone killed this girl. It’s our job to speak for her now.”
“Agreed,” he said. “I want him caught as much as you do.”
Nicole held his gaze and took a breath. Then she nodded, because she knew his words were true. MacAulay cared. “Was she wearing underwear?”
Because sometimes, especially in cases of date rape, the victim’s clothing was restored after the crime was committed, and the underwear almost always forgotten.
He bent and peeled back the waistband of Beatrice Esparza’s jeans, exposing a strip of pink cotton.
“Sheriff?”
A deputy approached, wrapped head to toe in Gore-Tex and down. He held up a sealed evidence bag. The gloves. They were insulated, lined with fleece, and looked new.
“Maybe,” Doc said. He took the bag and flattened it between his hands. MacAulay was a big man with hands the size of oven mitts. By comparison, the gloves were ridiculously small. “The hands that fit these gloves could also fit the bruise markings on Beatrice’s neck.”
“Who are we looking for, MacAulay? A kid or an adult, small or medium?”
He looked beyond her, his eyes focused as he thought. “I’ll know better after I’ve measured the markings and completed some comparisons. But without the forensic backup?”
“For now,” she assured him.
“Aged fourteen to seventy. Small to medium stature. During strangulation, it’s the pads of the fingers that dig in, leave their mark.” He nodded toward the body. “These hands were thin but average in length. The killer was taller than the vic by maybe seven or eight inches. I can tell that by the angle of the bruises. What does all this mean? Small to average size for a man, taller for a woman.” He hesitated. “If it was a juvenile?” he posed. “Tall and thin. But this is all guesswork.”
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br /> “That’s good,” Lars said, and the surprise was evident in his tone. MacAulay wasn’t known for extrapolating, and they were rarely able to get him to manipulate facts for direction. Nicole chewed on it for a moment as she began to profile the perp.
“The impressions in the snow—are the castings finished?” she asked.
She loved impression analysis. One hundred percent factual. Castings were tangible evidence that the DA often lined up on a table in front of a jury, next to each the shoe that matched the print. It was a solid link between perpetrator and crime. It was like building a stone wall in an open field. Obvious. Small but unmistakable, even in satellite photos.
Lars nodded. “Until we hear from Arty, I’d say our killer is somewhere between a hundred fifteen and a hundred and fifty pounds. The other guy, the soft-soled boots, he weighs in between one twenty and one hundred, sixty-five pounds.”
Jordan, at eleven years old, weighed a hundred pounds soaking wet. But he was small. Nicole wanted a probable age range. She was building a profile of their most likely suspect. Rarely was murder committed by a person under fourteen years of age.
“How much does the average fifteen-year-old boy weigh, Doc?”
MacAulay shrugged. “Current guidelines, about one hundred twenty-six pounds. That gives us a range of one nineteen to one hundred thirty-two pounds.”
He pulled up his hood and stepped closer to the body. He raised an arm and waved the attendants over. Nicole noticed that his limbs had stiffened and knew the cold wasn’t to blame for it. MacAulay took death personally, and it was even more offensive when it was murder. Talk of kids harming kids wasn’t just disturbing for the doctor. It was unnatural.
Nicole was stuck with a temperamental family doc for an ME, and at this point she doubted that she would change that.
“He’s a healer,” Lars said, and Nicole noticed that some of the past complaint was absent from his tone.
“Lucky for us.” Nicole watched MacAulay hunker down next to the body and slide his hands under her shoulders. The girl’s head settled into the cradle of his arms. He nodded his readiness, and the forensic tech lifted her feet. Together they tucked Beatrice Esparza into a body bag.
3
The resorts were northwest of town, many of them in the foothills of Glacier National Park. Part of the allure of Montana, especially this far north, was its rugged, secluded landscape, and Big Business knew this. The consortiums that came in and bought large tracks of land left as many trees standing as they could. The Huntington Spa was set back from the road and was perched on a small rise nestled between mature aspen and evergreen. On its list of amenities were snowshoeing, tobogganing, and tubing, and the place was classy enough not to charge an additional fee for the fun.
Nicole turned into the sweeping driveway and followed the blacktop to the front doors. The place was big, accommodating a maximum of 433 guests. A wall of paned glass let the ambient glow from the lobby seep into the parking lot. Christmas lights were strung from the eaves, red and green, yellow and blue, twinkling to the tune “Silver Bells.” A twenty-foot noble fir stood in the center of the lobby, lighted and tinseled. Beneath it were an assortment of boxes wrapped in bright paper. She parked and climbed out of the department Yukon, then looked back the way she’d come. Lake Maria, the site of their crime scene, was less than three miles southeast. How had their vic gotten there? Despite her time in the elements, Beatrice Esparza hadn’t looked chapped by the wind, and she’d died before frostbite could set in. There’d been no gray patches of skin nor missing fingers or toes, which were a common find in people exposed to the cold.
And somewhere along the way she’d taken off her coat, hat, scarf, and gloves. Had she bolted from a car, stopped along the Lake Road, suddenly fearful for her life? Or from a nearby home, chased by malignant intent?
They knew what their killer had wanted, but what about the soft-soled pursuer?
Nicole walked through the glass doors and stood with her hands on her hips as the warm air pressed against her skin. She turned and looked through the windows toward the horizon. Nothing yet. Sunrise was still a few hours away, but when it touched the sky and warmed the air, snow would fall from the banked clouds.
Her team was scrambling over the ice, preserving evidence. Still, much would be lost, destroyed by the weather. And there was nothing they could do about that. She had depleted her department of manpower and borrowed from MHP. Even Border Patrol had sent over dogs. She looked at her watch. They’d have arrived by now. A handful of German shepherds and their handlers prancing through the snowy woods. They would scent off the gloves easily. Where would it lead them?
The rapist-turned-murderer and the watcher.
Who was Beatrice Esparza? Why had she caught the attention of two predators?
Nicole approached reception and smiled at Daisy Le Duce. The woman had worked at the Huntington as long as Nicole had been in Toole County, but she was also the matron of the arts for the Summer Sunlit Festival and volunteered one evening each month at the lockup. She read Bible verses or recipes from the Betty Crocker All-American Cookbook—the only reading material currently allowed at the jail.
“The Esparza family,” Nicole said. “What room are they in, Daisy?”
The older woman was slow to move. The papery skin around her eyes crinkled and she leaned against the counter, closer to Nicole’s words. “She never came back, did she?” Daisy asked.
“Who?”
“The girl. Beatrice.”
Nicole removed her gloves and tucked them into her coat pockets. Then she leaned against the counter and studied Daisy’s open face. She was solid. She fussed some but stepped up more. “You saw her leave?”
“Yes. And I haven’t seen her since.”
“When was that?”
“Yesterday, around four, I think. When the family left for Christmas dinner.”
Twelve hours had passed. “And she didn’t return with the family?”
“No. I asked Dr. Esparza about her. Beatrice was a talker. Real friendly. She would have stopped by to say good-night.”
“But not yesterday?”
“No.”
“And you’ve been on shift?”
She nodded. “A double or swing every day this week and next—for the families, you know.”
Daisy’s husband had passed away two years ago and her children lived out of state. She visited them every spring, but they seldom came north to see their mother. Daisy filled in so others could spend time with their families over the holidays.
“Dr. Esparza? That’s Beatrice’s father?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say when you questioned him?”
“He said that Beatrice was tired,” Daisy informed her. “That she’d been on the slopes, in the hot tub, that the whole family had gotten up early to open presents, so a long day.”
Plausible. But it was 4:00 AM. The parents had to know their child was missing, and yet they hadn’t called the police. That was like waving a red flag in front of a bull.
“When did the Esparzas check in?”
“December twenty-first. They’re staying through the New Year.”
Nicole nodded. “Call their room.”
Daisy dialed and handed the phone to Nicole. It rang only twice before it was picked up, and the male voice on the other end was crisp, clear, and bore no evidence of sleep.
“Dr. Esparza?”
A long pause, and then the single word—“Yes”—wavered in the thick, slightly accented voice.
“My name is Nicole Cobain, sheriff of Toole County.” She waited. She let the moment draw out a full thirty seconds without a response and felt the tension gather on the other end of the line. She heard the exhale of breath, a steady, almost measured movement. She heard a voice behind him, in the room—muffled, rapid speech. “Sir?” she prompted.
“Yes, Sheriff?”
He put weight on her title, spoke louder than he had before. The changes weren’t subtle.
He was sending someone in the room a message: police.
This wasn’t a first-time experience for Nicole. A call from the police made a person edgy. In the early-morning hours it intensified fear, narrowed purpose. Something was wrong, and it would be life changing.
“I’m on my way up, sir,” Nicole informed him. “Could you wake your wife, please?”
“She is awake,” he assured her.
Nicole took the elevator to the third floor and, following Daisy’s directions, turned right into a corridor that was more window than plaster. Outside, scattered light poles pressed back the shadows of evergreen trees. The courtyard had been shoveled, and the stone tables and benches were ready for seating around fire pits that were ignited at dawn and extinguished at 10:00 PM. Inside, the walls were covered in local art. Mostly landscapes, but there were a few canvas portraits. Nicole recognized Standing Bull and Asiniiwin, the Chippewa leader who had managed, through much strife, to keep peace during the Land Act years. Artifacts from the cowboy life were mounted on the walls—a frayed and obviously used lasso; a collection of spurs dating back, according to one placket, 118 years; and a series of shots of the once-famous Jim Shoulders, the sixteen-time pro-rodeo world champion, in full motion atop a Brahman bull.
The Wild West was a best seller.
She found the room and knocked on the door. She let a moment pass and then identified herself through the solid wood, keeping her tone even. She was aware of three things: their daughter was dead; if Beatrice Esparza had gone missing, the family had neglected to alert police; and Dr. Esparza was a careful man.
He answered the door wearing flannel pajama bottoms and a hooded sweat shirt. He stood an inch or two shorter than Nicole and was slim and graying. A small dagger of hair grew under his bottom lip.
“Come in.” He stepped back and allowed Nicole into the suite.
Mrs. Esparza sat on the couch, perched on the very edge of it, with her hands clasped between her knees. She was wrapped in a fleece robe but hadn’t removed her makeup. Their son, whom Dr. Esparza introduced as Joaquin, slouched in the doorway of one of the bedrooms. His long hair was pulled back in a ponytail.