The Alvarez & Pescoli Series. Lisa Jackson
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no additional clues. She’d been on her way back to California, though she’d planned to meet up with friends in Oregon first, and had driven from Helena, Montana, where she’d been visiting her sister. The missing persons report had been filed in Oregon first, when she hadn’t arrived in the small town of Seaside and had been missing for twenty-four hours. In Helena, Nina’s sister had filed a similar report that same day.
Despite combing the crime scenes, bodies and wrecked cars, and working with police in the hometowns where the women had lived, the department had no suspects.
Random killings?
Or victims who had been targeted and stalked?
Alvarez bit her lip and found no answers.
After staring at the screen for a few minutes, she gave up, left her cubicle and made her way down a long hallway. She veered to the left and through a doorway to the lunchroom, a windowless area complete with small kitchen and a few scattered tables.
A glass pot of congealing coffee sat on a warmer. Left over from the night shift. Selena dumped the dark liquid and the pre-measured packet of grounds and started over, rinsing the pot, filling the reservoir with water and finding a fresh package of dark roast in a drawer.
All the while the coffee machine sputtered, dripped and brewed, she considered the bizarre killings. The lab had found traces of bark in both victims’ hair. The wood splinters matched those of the trees to which they had been lashed. The bruises and contusions on their bodies had been consistent with being tethered to the trees, and they each had a cut or two from a knife, nothing deep, just a quick little slice, or prick, as if whoever had been urging them to their ultimate place of death had prodded them along.
But other wounds had begun to heal, according to the autopsies. Injuries consistent with what had been sustained in their car wrecks had begun to heal: broken metacarpals, cracked ribs and a fractured radius in Theresa Charleton’s case; a broken clavicle and dislocated knee for Nina Salvadore. Each woman’s bones appeared to have been set, her abrasions tended to. Salvadore even appeared to have had recent stitches on her right cheek and an area of scalp where some hair had been shaved away.
Where had he kept them?
And why?
Why bring them somewhat back to health only to leave their naked bodies out in the weather? Why heal them only to let them die?
According to the ME, neither woman had been sexually molested.
The case was odd. Nerve-wracking. And Alvarez had spent dozens of hours of overtime trying to get into the killer’s head. To no avail.
The FBI was being consulted. Field agents from Salt Lake City had come and left again.
On the kitchen counter the coffee machine gurgled and sputtered its last drops just about the same time Joelle Fisher, secretary and receptionist for the department, breezed in.
“Oh, you already made the coffee. That’s my job, you know,” she said with one of her ever-present smiles. Nearing sixty, Joelle looked ten years younger except for the fact that she insisted upon wearing her platinum hair in some kind of teased hairdo reminiscent of the fifties screen sirens Alvarez remembered from watching old movies with her mother.
“Yeah, I know.”
Joelle’s pretty face squinched up as she quickly picked up some old napkins and stir sticks left on one of the tables, then wiped the surface. “You’ll get me in trouble with the sheriff.”
Pouring herself a cup, Selena didn’t think Dan Grayson gave a flying fig about who made the coffee, but she kept her views to herself. Joelle’s smug self-satisfaction about all things domestic was no big deal. If she considered the kitchen her little kingdom, so be it.
“Hey!” Cort Brewster, the undersheriff, strode in with a newspaper tucked under his arm.
“How’s it going?” Alvarez asked, offering him just a hint of a smile. Brewster was a good guy, happily married, the father of four, but there was something about him that put her on edge a bit. A glint in his eye, maybe, or the way his smile didn’t always meet his gaze. Or maybe she was being super-sensitive. Brewster had never done anything untoward to her, or to anyone else in the department as far as she knew.
“If the coffee’s not to your liking, I’m sorry,” Joelle said, flinging up her hands in resignation. “It was, er, already brewing when I got here.” Her perfect little pink-tinged lips puckered a bit and her eyebrows shot up as if she were a schoolmarm pointing out that little Timmy had been playing with himself under the table.
“My fault if the coffee tastes like sewer sludge,” Alvarez admitted. “I made it.”
Brewster laughed as he found a ceramic mug in the cupboard and poured himself a tall cup.
Joelle, miffed, strutted out of the kitchen, her high heels tapping indignantly down the hallway.
“Looks like you stepped on someone’s toes this morning,” Brewster observed.
“It’s every morning.” Selena poured herself a cup. “Working here should be considered hazardous duty.”
“Meeeow,” Brewster murmured into his cup.
“Comes with the territory.” She shrugged and headed to her desk. Her shift wasn’t due to start for another forty-five minutes, but a few of the night crew were trading stories and packing up.
Her phone rang and she answered it with a grunt of acknowledgment as she sat down.
“Alvarez? This is Peggy Florence in dispatch. I’ve got a call I think you should hear.”
From the tone of the dispatcher’s voice, Selena guessed what was coming and braced herself.
“Came in two minutes ago. From Ivor Hicks. If he can be believed, we’ve got ourselves another one.”
“…and it’s another sub-zero-degree day in this part of Montana, blizzard conditions on the roads and another storm rolling in this afternoon.” The radio announcer sounded way too chipper considering the news he was delivering. “Coming up after this, we’ve got an extensive road report and school-closure list, so stay with us at KKAR at ninety-seven point six on your FM dial.”
He segued into the first notes of “Winter Wonderland.”
Regan Pescoli buried her face into her pillow and groaned at the thought of rousing. Bing Crosby crooning about the joys of snow wasn’t exactly what she wanted to hear, not this morning. Her head was thundering, her mouth tasted like garbage and the last thing she needed was to roll out of a nice warm bed and head to the sheriff’s department office where all hell was surely breaking loose with this last storm.
Besides, it was still only November. There was still a lotta time before Christmas.
She slapped at the damned radio without opening her eyes, missed and realized belatedly that she wasn’t in her own bed. Holy crap! Lifting an eyelid, she focused on her surroundings only to recognize the scarred, shabby furniture of room seven at the North Shore, a small, local motel where she stayed overnight with her sometime lover. Never mind that the low-slung concrete-block motel was situated at the south end of town, near the county line, and there was no shore, no river, no lake and certainly no ocean for miles.
She blinked at the mocking, red digital display of the clock radio: 7:08. If she didn’t get cracking, she’d be late for work.
Again.
“Oh hell,” she muttered, untangling her legs from the faded striped quilt of the queen-sized bed.
He was just lying there, snoring softly, his incredible, muscular back to her, his hair black and gleaming against the pillowcase.
“Sweet dreams, hotshot,” she muttered ungraciously as she searched in the dark for her clothes. Black lacy undies, matching bra, slacks and a sweater.
“Back atcha, sunshine,” he whispered without so much as lifting his head.