Ready to Die

by Lisa Jackson

  “That’s the way it is.”

  Throwing his hands up, he asked, “So now that I know your version of the truth, did you think that . . . I don’t know, you and I and the girls, we could be some happy little family, that Mallory and McKenzie would start calling me ‘Daddy’?”

  “Of course not.” She flushed. “I haven’t told the girls and I don’t intend to now, unless you want to make a case of it.”

  His eyes slitted suspiciously.

  “Don’t worry, Cade, as I said, I’m not looking for anything from you.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  Her heart squeezed a bit because deep down, the truth was that she did want something for the girls. She wanted them to know their father, to feel the strength of a good man’s arms to comfort them when they were hurt, the stern love and guidance from a father that they’d missed. She, as a mother, would like the solid support of the man who’d sired her children, but then she couldn’t expect it.

  “I messed up,” she admitted. “Big time. I didn’t tell Bart about us until after the problems with conceiving, and then he was . . . well, beyond pissed. At me. And rightfully so. I was engaged to him when it happened. However, the girls always had a father who was there for them. Bart loved them as if they were his biological kids. His feelings for them never wavered. Not a bit.”

  “What about his feelings for you?” Cade demanded, his anger palpable. “How fucked up were they?”

  “He made it crystal clear how he felt about me, about what I’d done. How I’d betrayed him and couldn’t be trusted and never loved him and on and on. I deserved it, I guess, didn’t have much of a defense. He even accused me of never loving him, which wasn’t true, but no amount of denial was good enough. He thought he was my third choice after you and Dan, and he made it all crystal clear, even accused me of wanting to sleep with Zed too.” She shuddered at the memory, at the storm in her husband’s face, the outright disgust and repulsion at her. She’d thought he might strike her, or spit on her, the way his hands had balled and his teeth had shown, but he’d turned and smashed his hand through the wall of their bedroom, blasting a hole in the wallboard and knocking the family portrait off the wall. “He moved out of the bedroom that night and we never slept together again.”

  “Wow.” He shook his head.

  “Yeah.” She remembered those months, the tension in their house, the angry looks, sullen moods, monosyllabic answers to her questions. Bart had completely iced her out and had never let her forget for a second that she’d betrayed him. She’d suggested counseling, then when that hadn’t flown, a temporary separation or cooling-off period, anything to repair the rift between them. Bart, ever more despondent, had refused, his fury and humiliation seething just under the surface. Day-to-day life had become impossible, to the point that Hattie avoided being in the same room with him. While he seemed to revel in his newfound role of victim and martyr, she’d come to resent her part as an evil twenty-first-century Jezebel.

  “Doesn’t seem to be any other way to see things.” Ignoring the envelope, Cade added, “So, after spilling your guts because you were forced to, and him turning his back on you, a few months later you walked out.”

  “Essentially,” she admitted, unable to explain how difficult her marriage had become. “Things were never perfect between Bart and me, but the truth of the girls’ paternity put a bigger strain on the marriage. I just wanted to work things out, but it wasn’t going to happen.”

  “You wanted to work things out?”

  “Yes, but it was too late. The wall between us was insurmountable. He wouldn’t go to a marriage counselor or a psychologist or a psychiatrist, even though he was obviously suffering from depression and the marriage was unraveling.”

  “So you just up and left him.”

  “You can twist this any way you want, but Bart wasn’t willing to work on the marriage. Even though they were young, the girls were picking up that something was wrong, and I couldn’t lie to them any longer, or pretend that everything was fine, so, yes, I gave him an ultimatum: Get help or get out.”

  Cade’s jaw tightened and she thought he was going to lambast her again. Well, fine. She’d said what she had to say and could leave with a clear conscience. She turned for the door, but his voice stopped her.

  “I’m not blaming you,” Cade said nearly inaudibly.

  “Coulda fooled me.”

  “No.” Scowling, he looked up to the rafters, then shook his head, as if he’d been searching for answers in the cold crossbeams and had come up with nothing. “I guess I want to, but I can’t. You’re right,” he said, his voice low, a muscle working at his temple, near the thin scar still visible on his cheek. “It wasn’t just you. I was there too. I should have stopped it, but . . .” He let out a disgusted puff of air. “I just wanted you so damned bad that I didn’t care about Bart. That’s a fact. I didn’t care that you were engaged, that what we were doing was right out of some bad movie.” Regret tugged at the corners of his mouth, reflected darkly in his eyes. “You could have told me before.”

  “And what would have changed?” she asked.

  His look was long and penetrating. “For one thing,” he said, “Bart might still be alive.”

  Chapter 22

  Pescoli glanced at the clock on her cluttered desk and told herself she could take five minutes to call Santana. They hadn’t really spoken since he’d offered her the ring, only a quick text or message to check in. He, too, was disturbed about what was happening, and their only communication these days was about Grayson. Nothing further had been said about his proposal, but time was passing and sooner or later, she would have to face him.

  Picking up her cell, she dialed and waited, but he didn’t pick up, so she was forced to leave a message. “Hey, it’s me. Thought we should get together. It’s, uh, been a while.” That wasn’t quite true. He’d given her the ring on Christmas Eve, and she’d seen him briefly at the hospital, but it still felt like forever since they’d been together. “Give me a call.” She hung up and stared at the phone, wondering why this was so hard. Why had she become such a commitment-phobe? Two rocky marriages didn’t necessarily mean that she would have another. Right?

  No reason to lose sleep over it; she had too much to do. She decided to stretch her legs, so she got up and walked a short distance down the hall. “Still no word on Verdago?” she asked as she stepped into Alvarez’s much too neat office. How did anyone work that way, with everything stacked, filed, and color-coded? Even the top of her desk held only one open file and a bottle of water, its cap screwed on tightly, resting on a coaster near a cup holding several pens and pencils.

  “Nothing.”

  It was near four in the afternoon and outside, night had fallen. Pescoli had spent the last few hours on the phone, running down tips and reevaluating the reports from the crime lab that included any trace evidence that had been collected and processed. Fingerprints, footprints, and tire treads had been analyzed and compared, the preliminary autopsy, without drug information on the judge performed, bullet striations compared, and all of the judge’s personal life, from her telephone records to her bank statements, were already being pored over.

  Every facet of the judge’s life, like that of Dan Grayson’s, was being dissected—professionally, personally, and privately—and laid bare.

  The obvious link between the two victims was their work, the people they came in contact with and the scumbags they’d put away, but that was almost too easy, and nothing yet was fitting. As they’d discussed earlier, Alvarez and Pescoli were searching for any other connection between Dan Grayson and Kathryn Samuels-Piquard.

  Socially, they would run into each other at occasional charity events, but they didn’t really travel in the same circles, primarily because Grayson didn’t seem to have much of a social life.

  There was phone contact between the two, but usually during work hours, and the six times that Grayson had called the judge late at night in the last two years turn
ed out to be on the nights he’d requested search warrants and needed a judge’s signature. Samuels-Piquard had obliged. So far, they’d found no incidences when the judge had called Grayson, except at work, and those had been spotty and few.

  Aside from searching for a connection between the victims, Pescoli was still looking into their personal lives, but so far, Grayson’s ex-wives and Samuels-Piquard’s family seemed clean. However, there was still Vincent Piquard, the judge’s ne’er-do-well, and lately invisible, brother. The cell phone number Winston had given her for him had been a bust; the elderly woman on the other end of the phone said she’d gotten the number only six months earlier and, sure enough, phone records had concurred.

  Vincent was off the radar.

  Even though his sister’s death had been splashed all over the news.

  Odd.

  Very odd.

  Even if the siblings had been estranged, it seemed Vincent would have appeared, have talked to his nephew, or have contacted a lawyer about his part, if any, of the estate. Death of a relative usually brought out the rest of the family—the good eggs, the black sheep, and the bad seeds.

  And then there was the missing Maurice Verdago. The more time that went by, the more Pescoli was thinking he might be the guy. His violent streak was a matter of record and though he’d never actually been convicted of a homicide, there was the Joey Lundeen cold case. Lundeen had disappeared nearly fifteen years earlier and had known Verdago. Maurice had been a suspect in his disappearance. Pescoli had already requested the records.

  As if reading her mind, Alvarez rolled her chair away from her desk and said, “Verdago’s still missing, and no one in his family or close friends seem to know where he is. I checked.”

  “What about his wife?”

  “Nothing nice to say about him. Seems she wasn’t aware that Maurice had a woman on the side. Carnie Tibalt. Actually, her full name is Carnival, and Wanda, who didn’t know about his girlfriend until we started nosing around, went ballistic when she found out.”

  “Oops,” Pescoli said. “Have you talked to either woman?”

  “Only Wanda. I was the lucky person who asked her about Carnie after she told me she had no idea where her husband was. But she must’ve suspected he had something going on with Carnie because she didn’t argue the point or scream that it was impossible. What she said was, ‘That fuckin’ bitch!’ and hung up. Hasn’t answered her phone since.”

  Pescoli actually grinned. “What about Carnie—geez, Carnival, really, who would do that to a kid?”

  “I’ve heard lots worse.”

  “Okay, me too,” Pescoli allowed. “Any luck with her?”

  “Not much. She won’t even pick up the phone, and no one answers at her last known address.”

  “Work?”

  “Like Verdago, she’s gone. Worked as a barmaid over at the Long Branch. Picked up her last paycheck and disappeared.”

  “What about vehicles? They’ve got to be driving something.”

  “Maybe her car. The wife has Verdago’s old Chevy Blazer, so it’s out of play. Carnie has no car registered to her, but she drives an old Dodge van according to her coworkers at the bar. No one remembers much about it, so it must have Montana plates, nothing that stood out. All I know is it’s white or light gray or silver, depending on who you ask, and has a dent in the driver’s side door. About twenty years old.”

  “Big enough to sleep in.”

  “You still have to park it somewhere.”

  Pescoli agreed, “But Montana’s a big state with too many damned hidey-holes.” Leaning back in her chair, she added, “Verdago could have it stashed in an old barn or shed, or just at the end of an old mining road that’s closed for the winter. Camp out.”

  “They’d still need supplies.”

  “Not too many so far,” she said, and that was the truth. Though it seemed like forever since she’d witnessed Grayson being shot, actually only a few days had passed. Less than a week. She knew that fact very well, as the minutes were ticking down on her ultimatum with Santana. New Year’s was approaching fast. “We have a BOLO alert out on the van?”

  “Yes, ma’am, the Be On the Look Out for is in place. No hits so far. And we’re also checking on stolen vehicles in the area.”

  “All this is assuming Carnie is actually with Verdago,” Pescoli said on a sigh.

  “Since she’s missing about the same time, a distinct possibility, I’d say.” Alvarez uncapped her water bottle and took a swallow, then twisted the cap back on again before setting the bottle back onto its coaster.

  Of the five recently released prisoners who might have had it out for Grayson, four had been sentenced by Judge Samuels-Piquard: Maurice Verdago, who had tried to kill his profit-skimming brother-in-law, joined Floyd Cranston, would-be ax murderer, and Gerald Resler, who’d attempted to cut his girlfriend with a can opener way back when but had been Pescoli’s collar. Edie Gardener might have won over the jury, which found her guilty of a lesser crime, but when it came to sentencing, Judge Samuels-Piquard had meted out as harsh a penalty as the law would allow.

  “What about the others?” Pescoli asked.

  “Mendoza never actually faced Judge Samuels-Piquard, and he’s in a Mexican jail, Juarez, fighting extradition. He was definitely out of the country at the time of the attack on Grayson, so I’m scratching him for now. As for your good buddy Gerald Resler, he was at a church retreat, working on his marriage.”

  Pescoli had trouble believing that the acne-faced kid with the violent temper and a Texas-sized chip on his shoulder had changed. “The can-opener king found God?” She snorted. “Prison must’ve turned him around.”

  “That or having a kid. Several people at the retreat vouched for him, so, unless he’s taken up with a sect of Methodist liars or he hired someone to do his dirty work, he’s clean.”

  “Narrows the field, I guess,” Pescoli said as over a soft thrum of conversation, someone’s cell phone chirped from a nearby office. The department was still out of sync, it seemed, without Dan Grayson at its helm. The connecting hallways and offices, bustling with activity as usual, the sounds and smells the same, but the feeling was off, devoid of that quiet calmness Grayson emanated. Pescoli glanced down the corridor to his darkened office where once Sturgis would have curled lazily on his dog bed tucked into one corner, or Grayson’s Stetson would sit atop his desk where he’d so often left it.

  She missed him, from his bushy, graying mustache to the glint of humor in his intelligent eyes. With Grayson in the department, it had seemed balanced somehow.

  Now, she felt the change. Now there was a void, an emptiness that reminded Pescoli that Dan Grayson might never return, that someday his office could be occupied by someone else. The thought soured her stomach.

  It seemed light-years since she’d driven to his home intent on handing in her resignation, a lifetime since she’d planned to let him know that her living arrangements were changing, that she was looking forward to a life with Santana, eons since she’d watched his body, almost in slow motion, jerk with the bullets’ impact, the kindling in his arms flying in all directions.

  No wonder she was tired and cranky, the world seeming off-kilter.

  “What about Edie Gardener?” Pescoli asked. “I don’t suppose she’s surfaced.”

  “She’s definitely in avoidance mode and we haven’t zeroed in on her yet, but according to her sister-in-law, she’s talked to Edie, who, it seems, has been hiding out at her new husband’s home.”

  “We know where that is?”

  “Twenty miles toward the Idaho border,” Alvarez said, “I just got the address out of Edie’s sister-in-law. She was pretty reticent about giving out information; I think worried that the family will see her as a rat, but she felt compelled to come clean, I guess. And, even more interesting, I think, is that the sister said Edie’s newfound love is an ex-con who’s a major hunter. Has bragged about taking down a bull elk with a clean shot to the head from a quarter of a mile or so.�
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  “Could be just talk.”

  “Maybe, but worth checking out.” She was already reaching for her jacket and sidearm. “Let’s see what Edie and her new hubby have to say for themselves.”

  “I’ll meet you at my Jeep,” Pescoli said, reaching into her pocket and withdrawing her keys. “One quick stop to make first.” She tossed the keys to Alvarez and made a detour to the ladies’ room where she downed two ibuprofen to help fend off that lingering headache and used the toilet.

  Ever since lunch she’d felt a little queasy and at first had blamed her upset stomach on the corned beef and sauerkraut that she’d wolfed down, but now, she wondered if she was coming down with the flu that Bianca had suffered from just last week.

  “Great,” she whispered, washing her hands and heading out to meet up with Alvarez. With everything else on her plate, the last thing she needed right now, the very last thing, was to get sick.

  She walked out of the restroom and nearly plowed into her son. Carrying a teetering stack of boxes, Jeremy muttered a quick, “Excuse me,” before realizing who she was. “Oh. Mom.”

  “Got a sec?”

  “I’ve really got to get these boxes down to—”

  “This’ll only take a minute,” she said, “Alvarez is waiting for me. But I wanted to say . . . I was wrong.” The words nearly stuck in her throat, but as she stared at her son, standing straight, hair combed, clean-shaven, wearing a pressed T-shirt with the department’s logo embroidered into it, she felt pride swell her chest.

  “About what?”

  “You, kiddo. If this is what you want to do, then, hey, go for it.”

  “Don’t call me ‘kiddo,’ ” he whispered.

  “Hey, I apologized, okay? Admitted I was wrong, but I’m sorry, I’m probably going to call you what comes to mind. ‘Kiddo’ could be the least of your worries, Jer-Bear.”

  He cringed at the childhood name. Years before, while still in grade school, he’d begged her to drop it and she had. Until now, when a stricken look washed over his features. “Don’t, Mom. Please, just don’t.”