by Lisa Jackson
But one was here.
She had only to look on her computer screen and see the dead bodies of Theresa Charleton and Nina Salvadore, two women with little in common, to know that a psychopath was either nearby or had passed through.
She clicked her mouse and the dead body of the first victim, Theresa Charleton, came into view on her monitor. A few more clicks and she split the screen with several images: the woman’s driver’s license picture, procured from the Idaho DMV; a photo of the wrecked green Ford Eclipse, labeled Crime Scene One; and another shot of a lonely hemlock tree in a snowy valley with the woman lashed to the trunk, tagged as Crime Scene Two. The final image was of the note left nailed above the woman’s head: her initials, T C, in block letters, written below a star that had been not only drawn on the white paper but also carved into the bole of the tree about five inches above her head. The lab had found traces of blood in the carving, blood belonging to the victim.
Alvarez’s jaw tightened as she stared at what had been left of the schoolteacher from Boise. She’d had no known enemies. Married for two years, no children, the husband devastated. He’d claimed she’d been visiting her parents in Whitefish and his story had checked out. The victim’s parents and brother were beside themselves with grief and anger. Her brother had insisted the police “find the monster who did this!”
“We’re working on it,” Alvarez said to herself as she opened a file and saw a copy of the note.
The star, similar to the one cut into the tree over the victim’s head, had been drawn high over the letters:
T C
Why? Alvarez wondered. What did it mean to the killer? The sheriff’s department had checked on the people who had seen her last and come up with nothing so far. They’d thought the incident was a single murder—until the next victim had been found in an identical situation.
Again Alvarez clicked her mouse and another image, so similar to the first that it turned her blood to ice, flickered onto the screen. A naked woman with long dark hair was bound to the trunk of a fir tree. Different location, but eerily similar.
Victim number two was Nina Salvadore, a single mother and computer programmer from Redding, California. She, too, had been found tied to a tree in a tiny valley within the wilds of the Bitterroots. Her body had been two miles from her vehicle, a Ford Focus wrecked into a nearly unidentifiable crush of red paint, metal and plastic, found several weeks earlier.
The star cut into the tree over Salvadore’s body was located in a slightly different position in relation to her body, and the note that had been left at the scene was slightly different as well. This time, though the star had been drawn on a standard-size piece of printer paper, new letters had been written on it. It appeared that both sets of the victims’ initials had been interwoven:
T SC N
Was the killer playing with them? Trying to communicate? If he wanted credit for both killings, why not write T C N S, the order of the women’s first and last names? Why mix the initials up?
Alvarez narrowed her eyes. She was a computer wizard and had run several programs trying to find out if the four letters meant anything. So far, she’d come up dry.
“Bastard,” she muttered, trying to imagine what kind of monster would do something so brutal and cruel as to leave a woman to freeze in the wilds of Montana in the winter.
Interviews with those closest to Nina Salvadore had provided 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 m
ug 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.
“Some of us have to work.”
“Really?” He rolled over then, instantly awake, and grabbed her hard, pulling her back down onto the bed.
“Hey! I don’t have time for this—”
“Sure you do.”
“Really, I—”
But he’d already stripped her of the bra she’d just put on and had yanked off her panties in one quick, sure motion. He rolled her atop him and she felt his erection, thick, hard and ready.
“You miserable son of a bitch,” she said as he thrust up inside her.
“That’s me.”
God, he was good. Her juices began to flow within seconds and his hands, kneading her breasts before he rose up to suckle her nipples, made her cry out in pleasure.
His movements were quick. Sure. Long.
She was panting, her breath fast and shallow, her blood coursing hot through her veins, her mind spinning in images of lovemaking and desire.
Her fingernails bit into the muscles of his shoulders as she felt herself begin to spasm. One rocking contraction after another as she leaned back her head, her eyes shut. An orgasm started deep inside and shook her to her soul. “Oh God…Oh God…”
He held her tight, strong hands gripping her waist, keeping their bodies pressed together as he jerked upward, thrusting in and out, faster and faster, causing her breath to get lost somewhere in her lungs and her mind to spin out of control again. “Oooooh,” she whispered as at last he lunged upward, thigh muscles straining and taut. With a growl and one last, hard, mind-numbing thrust, he let go, releasing himself into her.
She felt him stiffen, his back muscles convulse, and when she opened her eyes she found him staring at her, as he always did whenever they made love.
“Damn you,” she said, sweat running down her back and curling the hairs around her nape. “Damn you straight to hell.”
“Too late,” he said and laughed, pulling her down into the rumpled bedclothes. “I’m already there.”
“I know.” She let out a long sigh, telling herself she really, really had to get up. “Me, too.”
“You’re late, you know.”
“You love it, don’t you?”
“Love what?”
“Being a prick.”
His grin was a wicked slash of white in the semi-dark. “No, darlin’, you love it.”
She snorted and rolled off the bed, swiped up her clothes and, before he could grab her again, dashed into the bathroom, where the air was so cold her breath came out in clouds of steam. What was it about him that was so insidiously tempting? Why could she never say no and mean it? What was it about him that she found so damned sexy? Hadn’t she sworn over and over again that she was going to get over him, that she wasn’t about to tumble into his trap again?
Yeah, well, a lot of good that did.
If only he weren’t so unabashedly good-looking.
Oh hell. She’d known a lot of men. Many good-looking. Most with rock-hard bodies. But this one…this one was different.
Really? Isn’t he just another bad boy in a long line starting with Chad Wheaton in the eighth grade? Face it, Regan, you have horrible taste in men and enough signed divorce decrees to prove it.
She glanced in the mirror and cringed. Bloodshot eyes, messy hair, ruined makeup, a hickey the size of New Hampshire on her neck. What was the phrase? Rode hard and put away wet? That’s what she looked like. And she didn’t have time to go home and step into a long, hot shower.
Deftly she cleaned herself with warm water and a cloth. Dampening her face, she scrubbed off the traces of last night’s mascara and lipstick. Then she dabbed the cloth at her armpits and between her legs.
Within five minutes she was ready. Clothes on and somewhat unwrinkled, makeup refreshed, hair snapped back into a curly knot at the base of her skull, she stepped into the darkened bedroom and heard him snoring again.
“Bastard,” she muttered, trying to sound angrier than she actually was.
“I heard that.” Muffled, from within the pillow.
“Good.” She pulled on the boots she’d kicked off at the door and snagged her jacket from the back of a chair. Then she slipped on her shoulder holster, checked the safety of her sidearm and tucked her wallet with her badge in her pocket.
Without another word Detective Regan Pescoli pushed open the motel room door and stepped into the bitter cold of another Montana winter morning.
What was wrong with her? she wondered as she walked to her Jeep, unlocked the rig and climbed behind the wheel. Her cell phone chimed as she backed out of the pockmarked parking space and she checked caller ID. Luckily, the caller wasn’t her ex-husband or his sickening Barbie doll of a wife calling about the kids.
But it wasn’t good news. She recognized the cell phone number: her partner, Selena Alvarez.
“Pescoli,” she answered, eyeing her rearview mirror, then shoving the Jeep into drive.
“We got another one.”
Regan’s heart nose-dived. She knew what was coming. Another dead body had turned up in the icy crags and valleys of the Bitterroot Mountains, compliments of their very own serial killer. “Shit. Where?”
“Wildfire Canyon.” Alvarez was all business as she gave Pescoli directions to the killing ground.
“I’ll be there in thirty,” she said and hung up. The remains of yesterday’s super-sized soda, probably frozen, sat in the cup holder between the bucket seats. She didn’t think twice, just grabbed the soggy paper cup, placed her lips around the straw and took a long swallow of the flat diet cola. As she nosed her way onto the county road, she dug in her glove box for the single pack of Marlboro Lights she kept hidden inside. She was down to one pack a week. Not bad considering her habit had once been three packs a day. But this son of a bitch who was killing women and leaving them in the freezing cold, he was playing havoc with all her good intentions.
She planned to quit all together after the New Year, less than two months away, but between the pressures of her ex-husband, her job and this sicko numb-nuts who got off torturing his victims in the Montana cold, she feared all her good intentions and resolutions might just go by the wayside.
She flipped on her siren and lights and trod hard on the accelerator. The man in the motel room flitted through her mind for a second, then she pushed him steadfastly to that locked corner of her brain she rarely opened, the one that reminded her she was still a sensual, sexy woman with needs.
For the moment, and for most of her life, she was a cop.
Bad boys be damned, she had a homicide to investigate.
Chapter Two
