Deserves to Die (7 page)

“I don’t think he’s all that bad.”

She glared at her son as if he’d uttered sacrilege, which he had. “You’re only there part-time.
Very
part-time. As a volunteer. You don’t really work for him.”

“Yet.” Jeremy caught his mother eyeing the dirty dishes on the breakfast bar and actually picked up the two bowls and placed them into the sink with the stack of ever-mounting pots, pans, and plates. Of course, he couldn’t quite seem to find the dishwasher, but, Pescoli reminded herself,
baby steps
.

Not that long ago, her son was adrift, playing video games all day, smoking weed on the side, and chewing tobacco. Things were improving. He was growing up. Yeah, he still chewed. And of course, he continued to play video games, but even that had slowed down a bit and she thought his pot smoking had abated. Thinking about it, she unconsciously crossed her fingers.

As far as she could tell, Jeremy’s general “hanging out” with some of his suspect friends had tapered off and his steady girlfriend of the past few years had moved away, thank God. It had only been a few weeks, but without Heidi Brewster as a distraction, Jeremy already seemed more focused.

His job at Corky’s Gas and Go coupled with volunteering at the station kept him busy and he was talking about moving out with a friend. Again. So far, he’d bounced back after a couple half-assed attempts at living on his own. She’d already suggested that he move into the room over the garage in Santana’s new home, but Jeremy had balked. Residing in any building attached to his mother’s place of residence obviously didn’t qualify as “moving out.”

Considering her own rebellious history as a teen, she wasn’t about to argue.

He saved your life.

That much was true. If it hadn’t been for Jeremy taking aim at Grayson’s killer during an attack, she wouldn’t be alive.

“Give Blackwater a chance,” Jeremy suggested, opening the refrigerator door and hanging on it again, as if somehow the contents within had changed in the last five minutes. “I think he’s a good guy.”

“We’ll see.” She wasn’t convinced.

He discovered a previously overlooked slab of pie that had to be a week old and pulled it from the depths. “Since we can’t have Grayson back,” he said soberly.

She nodded, swallowed, then checked her watch. “So where’s your sister?”

“At Lana’s. Studying,” he added dryly.

“Ahh. Well, you know, they could be.”

He grabbed a fork that had been left near the sink, then carried the pie into the living room and plopped onto the worn couch. “They
could
be,” he allowed. Both dogs, hoping he might drop a bit of food, followed at a brisk trot and positioned themselves at his feet, their ears cocked, their eyes beseeching.

“You know something I should?” Pescoli asked, following him into the living room.

“Just a gut feeling. Kinda like your cop instinct.”

“Does she need a ride?”

“What she needs is a car.”

“So she tells me. Every day.” She found her cell phone to text her daughter.

“Lucky says she can have one. He’ll buy it for her.”

“And the insurance? And the gas?” Pescoli hated the fact that her ex could offer up extravagant gifts with no strings attached and, when they didn’t work out, leave her to pick up the pieces and deal with the fallout.

“That, you’ll have to talk to him about.”

When hell freezes over,
she thought darkly, relieved to feel something other than grief, if even for a moment, as she texted Bianca. Briefly, she considered having a beer, then immediately banished the thought. A “cold one” after work, one of life’s pleasures, was out the window for around seven or eight more months.

“Have the dogs been fed?” she asked.

“Do they look like they’ve eaten?” Taking a huge bite of chocolate and whipped cream, he found the television’s remote and switched stations.

“Hey, guys!” She found the opened bag of dog food in the pantry, scooped kibblets into two metal bowls and turned to find both animals waiting expectantly. “Hungry?”

Cisco spun in tight little circles while Sturgis swept the floor with his tail.

“Here ya go.” As she fed the dogs, she received an incoming text from Bianca saying she had a ride and would be home within the hour.

Good.
In time for dinner, whatever the hell that was going to be. Spaghetti out of ajar? Tuna casserole or cheese sandwiches and tomato soup from a can? Something Bianca would eat. She was beyond finicky and Pescoli was keeping an eye on her because she was obsessed with her weight, her body, and wearing the tiny bikini her stepmother had bought her for Christmas. At her stepmother’s encouragement, Bianca was talking about becoming a model, so there were all kinds of comments about nutrition and exercise, carbs and fat, calories and workouts falling from her daughter’s lips. Eating healthy would be great, but the operative word was eating, not starving. Working out, again, a great idea, but not to the point of passing out. Pescoli wished Michelle, a smart enough woman who was fixated by her own looks, would just leave her daughter alone and quit putting weird ideas into her head. As a teenager, Bianca already had enough of those.

So what could she whip up in the kitchen that her daughter would find palatable? Nothing she’d already considered and, anyway, the thought of cooking made her already queasy stomach turn over. Maybe takeout, she thought, opening the drawer where they kept pencils, note pads, out-of-date telephone books, and menus for their favorite restaurants in Grizzly Falls. She’d just pulled out the menu for Wild Will’s when her cell phone bleeped and she saw Santana’s name and picture on the screen.

“Hey,” she greeted him.

“I just heard about the sheriff.” Santana’s voice was grim.

“Yeah. Not good.”

“You okay?” he asked.

“Not great,” she admitted. “But I’ll be fine.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.” That was a lie.

“I’m coming over.”

“No. Don’t. Look, Santana, uh, I need to deal with the kids first.” He hesitated and she sensed he thought she was shutting him out. “Seriously. I’m fine. The kids will be, too, but we have to deal.”

Again silence.

“I need you to understand,” she said.

“Okay. But, I’m here.”

“I know. I . . . thank you.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Yeah, I’ll call. It’s crazy at the station. Weird. I . . . just give me a little space to sort this all out.”

“I always do,” he said and she squeezed her eyes shut so she wouldn’t shed a tear.

She hung up quickly. Afraid he might tell her he loved her and want to talk about their upcoming wedding. She just felt too raw and uncertain. It wasn’t that she didn’t love him. She did. Totally. But it was hard for her to be vulnerable, and uttering those three little words could break the dam of her emotions. “I’m sorry,” she whispered as if he could hear her and was so glad he couldn’t.

Jeremy called from the living room, “Hey, Mom. Maybe you wanna see this.”

Still holding the menu, she walked from the kitchen and saw Hooper Blackwater’s image on the screen. In full uniform, standing ramrod straight in front of the half-masted flags that were snapping in the wind, snow blowing around him, he was a somber and solid officer of the law. Looking directly into the camera’s lens, he vowed to prosecute Dan Grayson’s killer to the maximum extent of the law.

“This is what I was talking about,” she said, glaring at the screen. “It’s called grandstanding.” She slid a look at her son. “And for the record? I don’t like it.”

T
alk about doom and gloom. The sheriff’s office couldn’t have been more somber if it were draped in black and a funeral dirge was playing throughout the hallways. Everyone was grim, feeling Grayson’s loss, going about their business in whispered tones, not smiling, just getting through the day. Joelle had toned it down to a long charcoal-colored dress with a lighter gray sweater. Though she still wore three-inch heels, their clip was decidedly less sharp as she made her way down the hallway. Now that he’d spoken to the press and made his position clear, Blackwater had even holed himself into his office.

Pescoli hated the department’s vibe as well as the empty feeling that had stayed with her throughout the night and followed after her like a shadow. She tried burying herself in work, but found herself distracted.

When Alvarez stuck her head into the office, Pescoli looked up, rolled back her chair, and said, “Come on, let’s go,” before her partner could utter a word. “I’ll drive.” She yanked her keys from her purse.

“Where?”

“To the morgue.” Pescoli was already standing and reaching for her jacket and sidearm. “I can’t stand this place another second.”

“Okay.”

“Maybe the ME can tell us about our Jane Doe. Any luck IDing her yet?”

Alvarez stepped out of the doorway to let Pescoli pass. “I talked to Taj in Missing Persons and so far no reports of anyone resembling our victim have been filed.”

Pescoli’s bad mood didn’t get any better. As she waited for Alvarez to grab her own jacket, scarf, and gloves, she wondered about the woman found in the frozen creek. Though it wasn’t conclusive that foul play had occurred, it seemed likely.

Once Alvarez slipped her cell phone into her pocket, they were on the move again, working their way to the back door, skirting a few solemn-faced officers walking in the other direction.

“It’s personal,” Alvarez said as she pushed open the door to the outside and a gust of frigid air swept inside. “If our vic was killed, I mean.”

Squinting against the snow flurries, Pescoli shot a look at her partner. “I’m betting a year’s salary that she didn’t slice off her own finger, find a way to the O’Halleran ranch, and fling herself into the creek to commit suicide.” They reached the Jeep just as Pescoli hit the button twice to unlock all the doors. Across the snow-covered roof, she added, “That’s not how it’s usually done. And an accident? With a recently lopped off finger?” She opened the driver’s door and got behind the wheel.

“I’m just saying all the evidence isn’t in yet.”

“Sometimes evidence only proves what you already know.” Pescoli started out of the lot, but waited for a snowplow to pass. Moving slowly, it piled a berm of snow and clods to the side of the road, impeding the driveways of the surrounding businesses but freeing up the street.

Rather than follow the slow-moving plow, she turned in the wrong direction for a few blocks, then circled back and headed for the main road leading to Missoula, and the basement of the very hospital where Dan Grayson had drawn his last, weak breath. “So
if
our Jane Doe’s a homicide victim, why do you think it was personal?”

“The ring finger. That makes a statement.”

“Could be we have a nutcase who collects fingers,” Pescoli said.

“And possibly rings? Wedding rings? Engagement rings? What’s the significance there?” Alvarez was thinking hard, absently rubbing her chin between her finger and thumb.

“Maybe just the handiest finger.”

Alvarez splayed the fingers of her left hand in front of her. “Nope. One of the hardest to lop off. It’s significant.”

“So we’ve got ourselves another psycho. You know, we’ve been getting more than our share.”

“Uh-huh.” She was still staring at her hand and seemed lost in thought. “And why the creek? Was she taken there? Drowned?” Her lips compressed as Pescoli slowed for a light. “I’m getting a bad feeling about this one.”

Pescoli actually laughed. “Like Grace Perchant?”

Alvarez shot her a pissy look.

Grace was one of the local nut jobs. She swore she held conversations with ghosts, could commune with spirits from the other side of life, poor trapped souls who hadn’t completely passed. She also owned a couple wolf hybrids and had come into town with them in tow to warn some of the citizens about their murky futures. It was a little unsettling.

“More like you and your gut instincts.”

The light changed and Pescoli held herself back from pointing out that Alvarez had always dismissed her sometimes unscientific approach to a case. “Here we go,” she said, spying a coffee kiosk, then making a quick turn to pull behind a dirty red Jetta that was just pulling out. As she found her wallet, she asked Alvarez, “Want anything?”

“Sure. Tea. Hot. Some morning blend. Whatever they have.”

“Got it.” Pescoli turned to face the girl who was standing within the kiosk, waiting. Quickly rolling down her window, Pescoli repeated Alvarez’s request and added a decaf latte for herself.

As the barista turned away, Alvarez asked, “What happened to black coffee?”

“I’m hungry this morning. Thought a latte would take care of it.”

“A
decaf
latte,” Alvarez reminded her. “Aren’t you the same woman who drinks yesterday’s Diet Coke when you find it in your Jeep’s cup holder and orders double or triple espresso shots if your morning gears aren’t revved?”

“Sometimes.”

“All times. ‘Coffee and a cigarette—a working woman’s breakfast,’ to quote you not so long ago.”

“A loooong time ago,” Pescoli disagreed as cash and cups were exchanged. “I’m jazzed enough today, okay?” She handed Alvarez her cup and placed her latte into the drink holder of the console.

Alvarez took an experimental sip. “Just wondered if you were feeling okay. Or coming down with something, considering that you lost your lunch.”

“Weird that, huh? Guess all the changes in the department have gotten to me.” Pescoli cringed inwardly, uncomfortable using Grayson’s death as an excuse. But it was true enough, and she wasn’t willing to admit to Alvarez just yet that she was pregnant.
First,
she told herself,
I have to give Santana the news.
She owed him that much. Then, when she felt the time was right, she’d explain it all to her partner.

But not now.

Though the snow was still coming down, it seemed lighter, the windshield wipers keeping up with the flakes. The interior of the Jeep smelled of coffee, the police band crackled.

“The department’s never going to be the same,” Pescoli observed, keeping emotion out of her voice with an effort as they drove past snow-crusted fields. “I mean, without Grayson.”

Alvarez sighed, frowning into her cup as she obviously struggled with a wave of grief. Then, as if she’d convinced herself that she had to face the inevitable, she took a deep breath and said, “We’ll all just have to adjust. It’ll be difficult, but that’s the way it is.”

“It sucks.”

“Amen.”

Pescoli drove onto a curving bridge, a semi heading in the opposite direction. “I was thinking about cutting back on my hours anyway and since we’ve got Grayson’s killer in custody, I’ll probably put in a request. See what happens.”

“Today?”

“Probably in the summer,” she said.

Alvarez was looking through the passenger window. She nodded as if she’d expected this conversation. “You sure that’s what you want?”

“My kids need me.”

“Okay, but they’re nearly grown.”

“Then there’s Santana.”

“You’re marrying him. Is that a reason to be semiretired? You’re not even forty, for God’s sake.”

“I’m not talking retirement. Just cutting back a little.”

“What’re you going to do? Take up knitting? Join a wine club? Try out new Crock-Pot recipes?”

“Give me a break.”

“Then what? Racquetball? Save mankind by joining some cause for world peace?”

Pescoli actually laughed. “Yeah, that’s it.”

“You’d miss it. Whether you know it or not, Pescoli, you live for this. Being a cop’s in your blood.”

“Now you sound like some B movie from the seventies.”

“I’m serious, damn it.”

“So that’s it? You think we’re destined to be together, riding in these Jeeps in the snow and ice, chasing bad guys, risking our lives and bowing to the likes of Hooper Blackwater?” She finally took a sip of her latte and scowled. “Jesus! People really drink this stuff?” The milky-sweet coffee hit her stomach and seemed to curdle. Dropping the cup back into its holder she added, “I don’t need working eighty hours plus some weeks in my life.”

Alvarez sent her a sharp look. “This is
all
about Blackwater and we both know it.” When Pescoli didn’t respond, she added tautly, “I don’t like the new sheriff either, but he’s what we’re stuck with. For now. You’re not the only one missing Dan Grayson.”

Pescoli should have left it alone, but she was too raw, too bothered. “Yeah, well, I didn’t fancy myself in love with him, either,” she snapped and saw her partner’s lips tighten. “What the hell was that all about?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh, come on.” She hit the gas and sped around a tractor inching down the highway, the driver huddled against the elements in a thick jacket and hat with ear flaps. “Jesus. Why the hell would you pull your John Deere out in this weather?” she grumbled.

Alvarez, obviously stung, didn’t answer. She pulled her cell phone from her pocket and turned her attention to her e-mail and texts, scanning them quickly “Got reports from the O’Halleran neighbors. The Zukovs, Ed and Tilly, who live on one side of the O’Halleran spread. They told the deputy they saw nothing, were inside all day because of the blizzard.”

“Smart.”

“Same with the Foxxes, who are on the other side of the Zukovs. The husband ventured out to his barn, but took care of his cattle and that was it. Haven’t heard from the ranch across the road or the one on the other side of the O’Hallerans yet.” She tucked her phone into her pocket.

“I’m thinking whoever did it came in from the back,” Pescoli said.

“A team checked the nearest access road.”

“Tracks?” She felt a little ray of hope.

“Some. Maybe hunters.”

“In this?” Pescoli said, staring out the windshield.

“Or cross-country skiers or snowshoers. People don’t necessarily stay inside just because it’s cold or snowing.”

“Then they’re idiots.”

Alvarez gave her a long look. “What’s going on with you?”

Oh, shit
. She’d hoped that since the conversation had turned to the case at hand it wouldn’t circle back to her. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t play dumb. You’re even more out of sorts than usual.”

“Nice,” she said, gripping the wheel more tightly as the farmland gave way to the outskirts of Missoula, but she silently admitted Alvarez had a point. Pescoli’s emotions were all over the place. Since there wasn’t much she could do about them, she shut up. Alvarez again buried herself in the information flowing through her phone and they drove the short distance to the hospital in uncomfortable silence.

Each lost in her own thoughts, they parked, hurried inside, and took the elevator down to the morgue. Pescoli tried not to dwell on the fact that Dan Grayson had given up his tenuous grip on the world, because, like it or not, that part of her life was over.

Ryder’s breakfast consisted of black coffee from the machine in the motel’s lobby and a burrito of sorts from a vending machine in the mini-mart located at the intersection half a block from the River View’s front entrance. Even with the addition of hot sauce from a couple free packets he’d gotten at the store, the meal was tasteless, but he didn’t much care. Along with the burrito, he’d picked up a newspaper, a bag of chips, a packet of jerky, and a six-pack of Bud, which he’d tucked into the tiny insulated cabinet the River View’s management had optimistically dubbed a refrigerator.

Despite the fact that the bed had sloped decidedly toward the center of a sagging mattress, he’d slept like a rock. “The sleep of innocents,” his grandmother had said, though, in his case, that assessment was far from the truth. He’d learned to catch his winks wherever he could, whether it be wrapped in a thin sleeping bag on some ridge under the stars, or in his truck in broad daylight, after he’d spent a night huddled in his pick-up on a stakeout swilling strong coffee and holding his bladder until it felt like it would burst. Either way, he’d learned to drop off and catch whatever sleep he could. So the River View’s sagging mattress hadn’t bothered him any more than the meal of processed mystery meat—beef, if the label on the plastic-wrapped burrito was to be believed—trapped inside a tortilla that was probably several weeks past its pull date.

“So where are you?” he asked aloud as he pulled several ziplock bags from his duffel and laid them on the table that sufficed as a desk in the room. From each bag, he pulled out pictures, eight by tens, all in black and white, which had been taken of different-looking women, but whom, he believed, all were one and the same: Anne-Marie Calderone, the object of his search.

If he was right, and he’d bet his truck that he was on the money, she’d taken a crooked path from New Orleans to Grizzly Falls, Montana.

She’d become a master of disguise. Each photo was different; her style of dress, her hair color and cut, the shape of her body, whether she wore glasses or not, the curve and thickness of her eyebrows and lips. In one case where he thought she was wearing a short blond wig, she appeared seven months pregnant. In another, her bare leg was exposed by a short skirt and a tattoo was visible on her calf. In still another, her eyes appeared dark, almost black, though through the gray filter it was hard to determine the shade. Makeup accentuated her high cheekbones, or an appliance stuffed beneath her cheeks sometimes stole them from her. Her teeth were never the same, sometimes crooked, sometimes straight, but always longer or wider or with odd, gaze-catching overlaps than usually graced her smile. He found one where she’d placed a mole above her lip, and another where her fingernails were impossibly long, still another where her hair was stringy and dull. There were all kinds of distractions to catch the eye so that the viewer wouldn’t take in the whole picture of her face and be able to say for certain that she was the woman in the first photograph, the one in color, of the real woman.