The Alvarez & Pescoli Series. Lisa Jackson
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over her chest. A professed woman of science, she always fell back on the religion of her youth when she was faced with the darkest parts of human depravity.
Selena Alvarez believed in God, maybe not as deeply as her grandmother Rosarita had wished, but she believed and made no excuses for it. At times she’d gotten sideways glances from Brewster and Watershed but ignored them. Pescoli, at least, had never commented or acted like anything was out of the ordinary.
Now, as she stared at the body of the dead woman, she needed the tiniest connection to her faith, though reassurance was fleeting as she stood in the bitter cold and stared at the dead, naked woman roped to a solitary fir tree. She was petite and Caucasian, though her skin was tinged blue. Her short blond hair hung in frozen strands. Her head, covered with snow, tilted forward. Bruises were evident on her body, the heavy ropes having cut into her skin.
“Sweet Jesus,” Brett Gage whispered, his expression grim.
“Not pretty, is it?” Pescoli was serious as she studied the gruesome scene. “God, I’d love to nail the psycho who did this.”
Stephanie Chandler eyed the tracks in the snow. “Maybe we’ll catch a break this time. Maybe the dogs can pick up a scent.”
“Let’s hope,” Alvarez whispered. So far, the search-and-rescue dogs had proved useless, but today the weather was clearer, as were visible tracks leading to and from the clearing on the far side of the woods. “What’s over there?”
“No access road, at least not one that’s used, but there was a private lane leading to a mining operation that hasn’t been in use for decades.” Gage had pulled out a map and was folding it so that he could view the area where they were located.
“Any of the buildings left?” Alvarez asked.
Gage shook his head. “Don’t know.”
“One way to find out.”
“I’ll go,” Gage offered. Giving the tracks wide berth so as not to disturb any piece of evidence, he started toward the stand of pines at the far edge of the clearing, the area from where the tracks appeared.
“The guy wouldn’t be so stupid as to be nearby.” Alvarez was sure.
“Really?” Pescoli viewed her partner through amber-colored sunglasses. “Everyone makes mistakes. Even psychos.”
True enough, Alvarez thought.
“Not this guy.” Stephanie Chandler was standing a few feet away, her blond hair tucked into a navy blue FBI hat, her gaze taking in every inch of the crime scene. “He’s too precise. He’s worked this out in his head a million times. No mistakes.”
Pescoli didn’t back down. “They make mistakes. It’s what trips them up. So you’d better hope our guy isn’t flawless or we’re in for a world of hurt.”
Chandler said, “They only make mistakes when they’re pressured. We haven’t been able to do that with this guy.”
“Yet,” Pescoli said. “We will.”
“We’d better.” Chandler was eyeing the surrounding woods.
“I don’t think she’s been dead long,” Watershed said. “The body’s warmer than the others and no snow is covering the tracks. Maybe the dogs can come up with something.” He squinted, his gaze following Gage and the broken path in the snow, the killer’s trail. “He went out the same way he went in.”
“Just like before,” Alvarez noted.
The crime scene team arrived and got down to business, collecting any kind of evidence from the body and surrounding area, taking pictures of the scene and victim from all angles, searching for anything the killer might have left behind.
“She’s not Jillian Rivers,” Alvarez said abruptly.
Pescoli nodded. “She doesn’t look like the picture on her driver’s license. The physical description’s all wrong. Rivers is around five seven and weighs around a hundred and thirty and this woman couldn’t be more than five one or two, barely tips the scale at a hundred pounds.”
Alvarez braced herself as she studied the corpse. “Rivers has hazel eyes and long dark brown hair; this one’s blond. Could have been dyed and cut, I suppose, but I don’t think so. Looks natural.” The victim’s pubic hair was a dark shade of blond and her dead, sightless eyes were bright blue. “Eye color is wrong, too. And check out the note.”
WAR T SC I N
“If our theory is right, then Jillian Rivers’s initials should be somewhere in the message. There’s an R, which could be for Rivers, but no J. Instead we’ve got an A.” Alvarez shook her head. “This isn’t right, unless he’s changed his MO.”
“No way,” Chandler said, shaking her head as she studied the scene from twenty feet away. “He wouldn’t. He’s toying with us, yes, but trying to tell us something. He wants us to figure out what it is, so he can prove how smart he is.”
Alvarez watched as Mikhail, a forensic technician, removed the note with tweezers, gently placing it in a plastic bag, and held it out to her. “Did you want a closer look?”
“Thanks.” She pinched the edge of the bag and stepped away from the woman’s frozen body, grateful for the chance to turn her back on the gruesome death scene. Although she had learned to hide it, especially on the job, Selena Alvarez struggled when it came time to process violent crime scenes. Especially crimes against women. Her cross to bear, as her grandmother Rosarita would say.
She liked to think that turmoil gave her the edge when it came to catching a psycho like this, a man who made a game out of killing.
The bastard.
It was also the reason she’d avoided employment in forensics. Much as she appreciated the science of it, she couldn’t stomach it. Now, as the crime scene unit did their job, carefully bagging the woman’s frozen hands, checking her body, combing the lone fir tree and the surrounding area, Alvarez stared at the most recent note, determined to work the case from this angle. Whether it was meant to be unscrambled, translated or decoded, she wasn’t sure, but she sure as hell was going to spend some time trying to figure it out.
It was like finding a needle in a haystack.
Pescoli frowned as she eyed the rugged terrain that surrounded the latest crime scene. Mountains, ravines, frozen creek beds, curving rim roads. They’d been searching that area for Jillian Rivers, to no avail. Now the search would be on for this woman’s vehicle.
If the weather held.
A goddamned needle in a haystack.
She thought about the topographical maps at the office. Maybe she could use her computer program and come up with potential sites for the next killing ground.
There were dozens of small meadows in these mountains and it would take forever to search them all out, but what choice did they have?
“At least we know Jillian Rivers isn’t dead and we missed her. There’s no J on the note. All the initials have bodies attached,” Alvarez pointed out.
“Yeah, but it doesn’t mean she’s safe. He might have her ready to go,” Pescoli said.
Alvarez stepped closer to the tracks. “True, but he was here in the past few hours. These are fresh, not covered in snow, and the weather’s been clear only a few hours.”
“Not much consolation there. The prick could be doing Jillian Rivers now for all we know,” Pescoli said.
The whomp, whomp, whomp of helicopter rotor blades could be heard approaching. Already, it seemed, the state police were going airborne to search the area. Good, Pescoli thought, they might be able to see something from the air that would take days of good weather and a lot of luck to see on the ground.
“What the hell does the note mean?” Pescoli