The Alvarez & Pescoli Series

by Lisa Jackson

  “Rona Anders,” Alvarez said aloud. “It says she’s from Billings, Montana?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But not the same address as where the SUV was registered, so she’s not living with the owner of the Explorer.”

  “Doesn’t mean she didn’t borrow his car.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Alvarez thought aloud as she glanced out the window to the snowy night. If she were going to be traveling through the mountains and didn’t have a four-wheel-drive vehicle, she might borrow a friend’s.

  “We’ll know soon enough,” Zoller said, and settled back into her chair. She picked up her drink while Alvarez walked over to the maps on the wall, eyeing the terrain, noticing where new pushpins had been placed on the map. All the victims and cars were confined to a circle with a ten-mile radius. Jillian Rivers, too, had been found in that area, her car located within the boundaries of the imaginary circle.

  So what was in the middle?

  She stared at the map and found its center, a spot not far from what was left of Broken Pine Lodge, where they’d found the victim who’d survived, and only a quarter of a mile away from Star Fire Canyon, where Wendy Ito’s Prius with its vanity plates had been discovered. But that area was uninhabited, for the most part. Mesa Ridge, a flat-topped mountain, was the biggest attraction in the area for hikers in the summer months and snowshoers and cross-country skiers in the winter.

  She narrowed her gaze on that mountaintop and wondered why there was something about it that bothered her.

  She heard Zoller typing on her computer. “Hey,” she said, “looks like the first of the pictures is coming through. Your Jane Doe in the hospital? Her name is Hannah Estes and she lives in Butte. Got her address here.”

  “Good. I’ll call the hospital and we’ll try to find out what she was doing in the Bitterroots in the middle of a storm, while you keep on looking for her friends and family.”

  “This might be the break we’re looking for,” Zoller said, already making a call.

  “Let’s hope,” Alvarez said, without much enthusiasm. The map of the Montana wilderness was flattened in front of her on the wall, a daunting picture of rough terrain where a smart killer was hiding. “Let’s hope.”

  Pescoli shouldered her way through the main doors of the sheriff’s department and waved at the guard. The linked rooms were quiet, only a few officers working the graveyard shift. One operator manned the phones in the task force room and only a few bits of conversation wafted through the cubicles. A bedraggled man, hands cuffed, feet in shackles, was clicking his way to a chair near a deputy’s desk. Ashen-faced, hair matted, jeans showing bloodstains, the guy looked strung out on something. He sat down and nearly missed the chair as she passed by.

  Merry Christmas, she thought, unbuttoning her coat as she found Deputy Kyan Rule making himself at home in her cubicle. He was waiting for her, one leg tossed over the edge of her desk, big hands clasped over his knee.

  “I’m not going over and getting Jeremy out of lockup,” she said.

  “I was afraid that would be your attitude.”

  “It’s not an ‘attitude’; it’s a fact.”

  “Hey! You can’t arrest me!” The strung-out guy was finally cluing into the fact that he was in trouble. Funny, he must not have gotten it when he was handcuffed and shackled.

  Rule sent the guy a look and said to Pescoli, “Let’s go where there’s a little more privacy.” He climbed from the desk and they walked down the short hallway to the back of the building.

  Thankfully, the kitchen was empty. She threw her coat and hat onto a table and pushed her hair out of her eyes. “And for the record, I’m not phoning my son either. Not tonight.”

  “You sure about that?” Rule didn’t seem to believe her new tough-love act.

  “You bet. He can’t think that just because he’s the son of a cop, he gets special privileges. If anything, he’s got to work harder to walk the straight and narrow.”

  “You never screwed up when you were a kid?”

  “Never.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Okay, right,” she admitted with a shrug as they paced the kitchen, where the wastebasket was overflowing and chairs were pushed cockeyed from the tables. “But now’s not the time to confide in my son and tell him about my mistakes. That can come later.” She walked to a counter in the adjoining room, the one with the only window. Through the tiny pane and across the yard she had a view of the juvenile detention center. Most of the county buildings, aside from the courthouse, were located up here on Boxer Hill and the juvenile center was no exception. It was a long, low, sand-colored brick building with wide lawns now white and crusty with snow, the lights within glowing warm against a frozen night.

  Her heart ached and her first instinct was to run as fast as she could across the frozen parking lot and snowy lawn, burst through the doors and demand to see her son. She would love to haul him out of there and make the whole scene disappear. Grateful that he was alive and, from all accounts, uninjured, she would like nothing better than to close her eyes and wish it all away.

  Oh, Joe, she thought, conjuring up a mental picture of her first husband, Jeremy’s father. If only you were here….

  Pescoli caught herself. Found her fingers gripping the edge of the counter so tightly her knuckles bleached through her skin.

  “You all right?” Rule asked, his baritone voice cutting into her thoughts. He was a good man. Kind but tough. Big-hearted but strong as steel. His dark eyes assessed her, and for just a heartbeat, she second-guessed herself. Her instinct to get Jeremy out of the detention center, to talk to the officer who’d brought him in, to some way use her status and influence to erase the fact that he’d broken the law, came up to the surface.

  She gritted her teeth.

  She had to let him sit and stew in his own juices. He needed time to think about his mistake, to come up with an alternative way of dealing with his problems. He was too old to automatically think his mother was his fail-safe, that she would do anything to get him out of any trouble he got himself into. Especially when it came to breaking the law. And with all of the statistics about teenagers and alcohol, drugs and driving…

  No, he had to learn the difference between right and wrong and to stand on his own feet now. However, as she wandered into a separate dining space and stared through the glass, she saw two people emerge from the squatty building that housed the juvenile facility. A tall man was walking rapidly. At his side, far enough away so that he couldn’t touch her, was a small woman, nearly running to keep up with him. Her blond hair was loose and free, catching in the light of the security lamps. The scarf around her neck billowing behind her, her arms were wrapped around her dark coat as she ran. No, not a woman. Make that a girl.

  Heidi Brewster.

  Pescoli’s stomach twisted as she recognized the undersheriff as he unlocked his rig. Brewster seemed to have no qualms about using his influence to get his kid released.

  “You sure you don’t want to go over there, get Jeremy out and then give him the talkin’-to of his life?” Rule asked from the other room, where she saw him lifting the coffeepot off its warming burner. Only a thin bit of sludge was visible at the bottom of the glass carafe. “Then you could ground his ass for…uh, I dunno, maybe six or seven years?”

  He was trying to lighten the mood. Pescoli’s gut wouldn’t let her laugh. “I don’t think it hurts Jeremy to chill out and think about what he’s done.”

  Rule carried the dirty coffeepot to the sink and squirted a stream of dishwashing soap into it. Swishing the soap around, he flipped on the faucet.

  “You think differently?” Pescoli returned to the kitchen and stood in the wide archway separating the two areas.

  Rule lifted a muscular shoulder. “Jeremy doesn’t have the easiest path. Dad dead. Mom working round the clock as a homicide dick. Stepdad who took a hike and hooked up with a new woman.” Soapy water was cascading out of the pot. He turned off the tap and let t
he carafe soak in the sink. “It’s a tough row to hoe, Regan,” he said, using her first name, as they really were friends. “I know. I’ve been there. My old man was a cop. My mom, she died when I was born. I had three step-mamas and none of them cared a lick about me or my older sister. So, I’m just sayin’ it’s not easy for your boy.”

  Sighing, she shook her head. A few strands of hair fell into her eyes as the clock mounted above the sink ticked off the seconds of her life. “Nothing is, Rule.” God, she needed a shower and about twenty-four hours of sleep. Make that forty-eight hours. Or seventy-two. She was exhausted deep into her bones. “I’m going home. Let him sleep it off. Besides, I’ve got a dog who probably has had an accident in the house and a daughter who may have already heard about her brother.”

  “She with Lucky?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe you need a little time for yourself,” he suggested, and she realized he was probably talking about Nate.

  It seemed everyone in the department knew she was involved with Nate Santana. Why did people have such a hard-on for him? Some called him a drifter just because he hadn’t lived his whole damned life in Pinewood County. And she figured that a lot of people resented Nate because he worked for Brady Long, the richest man in Pinewood County. Brady was local legend, even if he was considered to be the black sheep of the Longs, a family made rich from their copper mines.

  Right now a tangle with Nate would be the perfect de-stresser. But not tonight.

  Not when attacks from a serial killer were escalating, her son was locked up and she was too tired to think straight.

  Stepping a little closer to her, he draped a steadying arm around her shoulders, then gave her a squeeze. “Y’know, Pescoli,” he said, his voice low and familiar. “You don’t always have to be so damned tough.”

  “No?” she said, forcing a lightness in her tone she didn’t feel. “Then who would take care of your sorry ass, hmm? All you wimps in the department might have to start carrying your own damned weight.”

  He laughed, squeezed her again, then let his arm drop as the old refrigerator in the corner hummed to life. “Okay, I’ve said what I had to. Now I’m going out on the road again. Catch me some speeders.”

  “Thanks, Rule.”

  “You take it easy, Pescoli.” He turned and walked out of the kitchen and she let her gaze wander back to the window in the adjoining room.

  Rule’s footsteps rang down the hallway.

  Pescoli returned to the small room and pressed her face to the window. Through the bulletproof glass, she noticed Cort Brewster’s pickup driving out of the lot near the juvenile center. Inside the truck, huddled against the passenger door, putting as much distance as she could between herself and her father, was Heidi.

  Good.

  Brewster could blame Jeremy all he wanted, and it was true, Jer was older, should have known better, could be accused of leading the younger, more innocent girl down the wrong path, but Heidi Brewster, apple of her father’s eye, wasn’t entirely innocent. Fifteen or not, Heidi Brewster, in Pescoli’s estimation, was no angel.

  Alvarez was about to leave the building.

  The clock on the wall was inching past one in the morning and she was dead tired.

  She’d spent the last hour reading anagrams, playing with programs trying to figure out how the letters on the notes went together to make any sense.

  WAR T HE SC I N

  She tried filling in the blanks and came up with nothing that made any sense: “WAR OF THE SCREAMING”? “WAR TO THE SCHOOLS IN…”? Or maybe “WAR” didn’t start the note. Maybe it was gobbledygook.

  What a nightmare.

  When the phone rang, Zoller caught it before it jangled for the second time. Alvarez watched as she began making notes and typing on her computer all at once. Her eyes brightened and she looked up to signal Alvarez.

  “Okay, I got it…. Yeah, repeat that address again…. Good. Thanks.” Zoller hung up. “Rona Anders is our Jane Doe in the morgue. This C. Randall is an attorney who lives in Bozeman and Rona is his fiancée, a grad student at Montana State. According to the trooper, the guy was devastated at the news, had been holding out hope that she wasn’t one of the women who’d been abducted. She was on her way to visit her folks in Bend, Oregon, for the holidays. When she didn’t show up, they filed a separate missing persons report, just like C. Randall did here in Bozeman. I’m sure we have both of them, just hadn’t sorted through them yet. At first the parents weren’t concerned, and since she and her fiancé had a major fight, she’d told her folks she might take a detour up the Idaho panhandle, give herself time to think.”

  “How long has she been missing?”

  “Her fiancé saw her last Tuesday. I don’t know about anyone else.” Zoller’s usually animated face had gone somber and Alvarez felt that same old despair she always did in the face of a young person’s death and their family’s grief. “The OSP are on their way to the parents’ house in Bend now.”

  “I’ll tell Grayson and Pescoli,” she said. “Why don’t you contact the FBI agents?”

  “I will.”

  Alvarez walked out of the task room, but didn’t hunt down her partner. It was late; the news would wait until morning.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  MacGregor wanted to crawl out of his own skin.

  Sitting in a holding cell, staring through the bars, reminded him too much of the time he’d spent locked up for that mess in Denver. The place smelled bad, that particular blend of piss, body odor and despair MacGregor hated. He’d sworn he’d never go through the particular hell of incarceration again.

  But he’d been wrong. Here he was, sitting on his butt in the Pinewood County Jail, waiting to find out if he’d be charged with some crime. Attempted murder? Kidnapping? Resisting arrest? Oh hell, who knew? The more important question was: Why?

  Why the hell was he here, staring through bars and across a hallway to a series of like cells, some of them inhabited by drunks, derelicts and drug dealers? Because, just like before, once again, he’d done what he thought best to save a woman. And it had backfired. Big-time. The cops actually thought he was the maniac who had been terrorizing this area of the Bitterroot Mountains.

  “I want my lawyer,” he said to the guard who opened the door at the far end of the cell block, where the floors gleamed as if freshly polished but couldn’t hide the ground-in dirt visible under coats of wax and the walls, once blindingly white, had grown dingy. “And I want him now.”

  “It’s five thirty in the morning.” The guy, a big lug of a man whose nametag read “A. Schwartz,” obviously wasn’t in the mood to help. With hair buzzed close to the skin, big ears and the thick neck of someone who had once played football, Schwartz was a man who didn’t want any grief.

  Other prisoners who had been quiet now began to stir, to come to the edges of their pens and press their noses through the bars. Like dogs in a kennel.

  MacGregor wasn’t going to back down. “I don’t care what time it is. I’ve been here all night and I want to talk to my lawyer, or believe me, I’ll have your job.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Garret Wilkes. In Missoula. He’s independent.”

  “And I would care why?” the guard asked. “Oh, that’s right, you think I should be worried about my job.”

  “Wilkes is a personal friend of the sheriff.”

  “Now I’m shakin’ in my boots.”

  “Get him for me. His number is on my cell, which someone here has. It’ll save you looking it up in the phone book.”

  “We’re not exactly keepin’ lawyers’ hours, y’know? So why don’t you all just cool your jets?” He motioned to MacGregor and to the rest of the men who were locked up.

  “Either you get me my damned lawyer, give me a phone so I can do it or you charge me, right here and now.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” The big guy’s smile was patient, but there was an edge to it, too, something just a little ophidian. As if he might enjoy being a bul
ly. As if he was actually waiting for the chance.

  MacGregor had done his bit, answered all their questions, but he’d had it. He’d played by the rules, even managed to get a little sleep, all the while his mind filled with images of Jillian tied to the tree and his dog bleeding in the snow. Some bastard was out to harm those he loved and he’d had it. Loved? Oh hell, he didn’t love Jillian Rivers. She was really just a pain in his backside. But he didn’t like the fact that not only was someone determined to leave her in the cold to freeze to death, but this person was using him as a scapegoat. Worse yet, the bastard had shot his dog.

  He ground his teeth.

  He’d had it with being patient and waiting for the authorities to release him. No more. He wanted to know about Jillian and Harley and no heavyset cretin of a jailor with a bad haircut and snaky smile was going to push him around.

  “If I were you, I wouldn’t get so riled up,” Schwartz advised. “But then if I were you, I wouldn’t be behind bars in the first place. That’s the difference between us, MacGregor. I’m on the outside and you’re fuckin’ locked up.”

  “Hey, I want out, too!” a thin reedy voice called from a cell closer to the door.

  “In the morning, Ivor.”

  “It is the morning,” the voice responded.

  “It ain’t even light out. I mean later in the morning.” Schwartz rolled his eyes at MacGregor, as if they were suddenly buddies.

  “It will be too late.”

  Schwartz chuckled and shook his head, his bald pate shining under the bright lights overhead. “Why is that, Ivor? Is Krypton gonna invade or somethin’?”

  Through the bars, MacGregor caught a glimpse of a small wiry man with a thick shock of white hair on the other side of the aisle separating the cages. He had a scrawny neck, stretched thin, and owlish glasses that made his eyes appear bulbous and oversized for his face.

  “Is that what’s gonna happen?” Schwartz taunted again, enjoying himself, as he ran his nightstick along the bars, the noise reverberating. “Is the lizard king gonna come down from outer space and devour all us poor little earthlings?”