by Lisa Jackson
He filled the doorway, a tall man with broad shoulders and a mustache going gray. Sturgis, his dog, a black Lab who was a washout with the K-9 unit, was right behind him.
“You do know it’s a holiday.”
“Thanksgiving. I heard.”
He chuckled deep in his throat, and she hated that she found the sound pleasing, that she, too, wanted to smile. Good Lord, what was wrong with her?
“I haven’t authorized any overtime.”
“And I haven’t asked for any, have I?”
“Or comp time.”
She nodded. “As I said, just tying up some loose ends.”
“Go home. It’s a holiday,” he repeated.
She lifted a shoulder. The truth was that she never made a big deal of holidays. Most of her family was in Woodburn, Oregon, and her studio apartment was really just a place to crash, not exactly homey or a place she’d want to invite the few friends she felt close enough to have over. Besides, they all had families and, holiday traditions. Pescoli had dropped by earlier and, upon learning that Alvarez had no plans for the day, had offered a halfhearted invitation for Alvarez to join her. Though she had declined, Alvarez had felt a stupid pang of regret that she was entirely alone, especially when Pescoli had hurried out the back door on her way to meet Santana. Alvarez, glancing out the window and watching Pescoli’s Jeep drive off through the falling snow, had sighed. She could imagine Pescoli and Nate Santana enjoying a quiet meal alone, in front of a crackling fire, a turkey roasting in the oven of Santana’s rustic cabin, making love until long into the night.
The thought had jolted her.
Time to get a pet, she’d told herself and gone back to work, here at her desk in the department offices.
Now, with Grayson watching her, she said, “It’s quiet here. I get a lot done when no one’s around. No distractions.”
“What about later? What’re you doing?”
“I was thinking Chinese takeout.”
He actually smiled, his lips twitching beneath the mustache. “Great as that sounds, and, y’know, it does, why don’t you stop by my place?” Her stupid heart nearly skipped a beat. “Got a few friends comin’ by. Around six. Real casual.”
So they wouldn’t be alone. Good. “Maybe I will.”
He chuckled again. “That sounds like a thinly disguised ‘No, thanks.’”
“A bona fide, dyed-in-the-wool maybe.”
“I’ll hold you to it.” His eyes, as brown as her own, pinned her and silently accused her of trying to placate him. “And get the hell outta here.” With a nod, as if he were agreeing with himself, he whistled to the dog, then made his way toward the back door, the sound of his boot heels and the click of claws fading away.
She leaned back in her chair and reminded herself that Grayson was her boss. Yeah, she found him attractive in that grizzled ranch-hand way. With his long legs, slim hips, and broad shoulders, he was built like a cowboy, tough as leather, and, as far as she knew, had lived all of his life in the area. He’d been married once, and she didn’t really know all the details there; Grayson kept a lot of his personal life close to the vest, which was another reason she admired him. She did the same.
Today, though, she hadn’t been lying. The offices, for once, were nearly silent, aside from the hum of the furnace as it forced warm air through the vents. She was able to get a lot of work done without coworkers, ringing phones, fax machines, and e-mail blasting at her every ten seconds. But she wasn’t playing catch-up, as she’d told Grayson.
Instead she was reviewing Jocelyn Wallis’s autopsy and tox screen.
The autopsy indicated that the victim had heart disease, more advanced than she might have known. According to the ME, Jocelyn’s arteries were partially blocked and could have been from a woman twice her age, the result probably of bad genes and a hard lifestyle. She probably would have suffered a heart attack if her condition was left untreated and might have died young. There was no sign of recent sexual activity, but along with evidence of the over-the-counter meds she’d been taking, there were traces of arsenic in her blood.
She looked through the report that listed the contents of the victim’s stomach and found nothing out of the ordinary. It looked like chicken vegetable soup and coffee and little else.
Odd. Rather than the evidence absolving her of her suspicions, just the opposite had proved true. Glancing at a photo of the victim, she said, “So what happened to you?”
And more importantly, who did it?
Jocelyn had two ex-husbands, one living outside of Laramie, Wyoming, the other in Edmonton, Alberta, in Canada. Both had ironclad alibis and, it seemed, had had little contact with their ex-wife. Without children or custody issues or jointly held businesses, there had been no reason for them to keep in contact with her.
Also, Jocelyn had next to no life insurance, just enough to bury her. The beneficiaries listed were her parents. Nothing out of the ordinary there. She still owed on her car, so no one would end up with a vehicle. However, her phone records were more interesting. Aside from her girlfriends, she had called Trace O’Halleran a couple of times, though it seemed as if she’d just left messages; the calls were short.
Something? Alvarez wondered. He had gone into Jocelyn’s place, admitted to doing so; his fingerprints would probably match several latents they’d collected. He was one of the only persons they’d found who knew where she hid her spare key, though anyone could have found it.
Still ... Trace O’Halleran was the last man she’d dated with any kind of interest. And he was the one person someone at the school had called when they were worried about her.
He seemed normal enough, but even calm, even-keeled people could be pushed into violence given the right situation.
He was worth checking out.
Clicking off her computer, she decided it was time for a little more investigation. Even though it was Thanksgiving, a skeleton crew was working in the crime lab, so she made a quick call and asked Mikhail Slatkin, the investigator on duty, to meet her at Jocelyn Wallis’s apartment. Now that she had proof that Ms. Wallis didn’t just die of a misstep, she needed to take another, deeper look at her home, life, and job.
He dressed in dark slacks, a crisp shirt, and a casual sweater, then checked his hair in the mirror and decided his look for the command performance on Thanksgiving Day was perfect. Impeccable.
Truth be known, he detested the holidays, all of them, but he put on a good front, pinning on a smile and driving through the snow to his sister’s home, a lakeside manor always in some phase of reconstruction.
His large family collected here each and every third Thursday in November, at his sister’s home, and he was expected to show, which he always did. He feigned interest in all their petty little problems, even played with his nieces and nephews, deflected any questions about his personal life and the women he dated.
Because he knew they didn’t care. In fact, they didn’t trust him. He was, and always would be, the outsider. No matter how hard he tried to fit into their close-knit group.
He brushed his lips across his sister’s cheek as he handed her a bottle of expensive wine that both she and her husband fawned over. He swung his niece off her chubby legs and heard her giggle in delight. He, after all, was the “fun” uncle. He even went to the trouble of going outside and trudging through the snow to view his nephew’s snowman and snow fort, from which the niece, of course, was forbidden.
Inside he was charming, even suffering through one of his sister’s guided tours of what they were “doing” to the house this year—a complete gutting and remodeling of the guest bathroom in the south wing.
“God help us that it gets done before Christmas. Lord, is that only five weeks away?” his sister said, looking around at the gaping holes where sinks and a toilet had once stood. Tile and grout had been displaced; the mirror, still hanging, was cracked in one corner. She sighed heavily. “I guess I’ll have to get on that builder!”
“It’s going to be g
reat,” he answered, forcing enthusiasm.
“I hope so. Then you can stay with us! You’ll have your own suite, and the kids would love it.” Her eyes darkened just a shade with the lie. “I’d love it, too.” Her hand touched his arm then, lingering just a bit too long. She retracted it quickly when her husband walked in, his voice booming, “Welcome to our nightmare. The continuing nightmare.”
They made their way downstairs, and shaking off his sister and her oaf of a husband, he saw that the music continued to play, the wineglasses were always refilled, that his father was never out of the conversation. Of course, he was in charge of carving the turkey, even deigning to wear one of his brother-in-law’s stupid man aprons.
Throughout the meal at the seemingly mile-long table, he smiled and laughed, dodging the most pointed of their prying questions. Over the top of his wineglass he winked at his cousin, and she quickly averted her gaze, one that had been drawn to him throughout the evening, and blushed.
His sister, of course, had seen the exchange, and her lips had pursed in abject disapproval.
All of his family had speculated about his love life, and he’d given them just enough information to keep them satisfied, but it was a game, really, watching them offer help to set him up with different women.
As if he needed their charity.
This year the banter had started when his sister announced that her best friend was going through a messy divorce. The woman’s attributes were pretty, good figure, decent job, no kids. Might even end up with several hundred thou, if her husband, the snake, didn’t screw her over.
Then there was one of his brothers’ old high-school girlfriends, rumored to be back in town and newly single. His mother had made note. However, his father had pointed out, the woman they were all so sure was “the one” did have three girls, the oldest already in her teens.
But what about that woman he used to work with, oh, what’s-her-name? You know the one. A lawyer, wasn’t she? And good-looking, too. Smart as a whip.
Such a shame his job took him so far away so often.
He needed to settle down, his father reminded him. Was the old man afraid? Did he suspect?
Maybe next year his schedule would slow down, and he could spend more time here....
He let the conversation swirl around him, smiling affably, talking about the upcoming holidays and how they would all spend Christmas together, though it was getting more and more difficult.
His sister pulled him aside when he helped clear the plates, and she worried aloud about their father’s health. Who knew if the old man would make it to next Thanksgiving? Every day he was still alive and ambulatory was a blessing, didn’t he know?
Next year, well, she couldn’t think that far ahead.
Of course not. Who knew what new construction project would come between then and now?
But five to one the old man, hearty and hale, would outlive all his progeny. And that was saying something.
He stayed to watch his father finish a last scotch, then load himself and his wife into their waiting SUV, a Cadillac complete with driver. He shook his father’s hand and found the old man’s handshake as firm as ever.
“Say something to Mother,” his sister insisted, and lying through his teeth, he told the old bat that she looked “radiant,” and that he couldn’t wait until they all got together again at Christmas.
The second they were driving away, through a falling screen of snow, his thoughts turned toward the future. He managed a round of quick good-byes, and then, saying he had to get home because he had an early flight in the morning, he half jogged to his car.
Only when the rambling lake house disappeared from his rearview mirror did he let down his mask and unhinge his jaw from the insipid smile he’d pinned there for the past five hours. He rubbed at the scar hidden beneath his sideburn and let his thoughts darken.
He didn’t have time for holidays or nonsense.
The radio was playing some insipid Christmas carol, and he snapped it off, his eyes trained on the road ahead and the twin beams of his headlights cutting through the storm. The miles rolled too slowly under his tires.
He couldn’t waste any time.
He had too much to do.
The ingrates that were his family just didn’t know it. Couldn’t. Not ever.
CHAPTER 13
“ So that’s it,” Alvarez said as she and Slatkin and an assistant, Ashley Tang, packed up the contents from Jocelyn Wallis’s apartment and carried the bags to the waiting van from the state crime lab. The evidence had been photographed, bagged and tagged, then initialed before they hauled the bags along the path broken in the snow to the crime lab van.
Mikhail Slatkin, not yet thirty, was tall and rawboned, with a keen intelligence and guarded demeanor, and was physically the diametric opposite of the woman who worked with him. Petite and Asian, Tang was a woman who, Alvarez guessed, barely tipped the scales at a hundred pounds even in boots and insulated ski suit. Rumored to have graduated from Stanford before she was twenty-one, Tang, at twenty-eight, was sharp and intense, qualities Alvarez understood only too well.
Together they’d gone through the unit, gathering evidence that might have been overlooked before anyone realized that the victim had been poisoned, most likely, in Alvarez’s opinion, murdered, though she didn’t quite understand how the homicide had taken place.
True, there were traces of poison in the woman’s system, but she’d died from the result of wounds from her fall. Had she been delirious and taken a fateful misstep, or had the killer been nearby and, rather than wait for the poison levels in her body to become deadly, given her a little push?
Slatkin unlocked the white van with its shadow of grime where someone had scrawled “WASH ME.”
“I’ll need this ASAP,” Alvarez said as Slatkin arranged the evidence bags to his liking in the back of the van.
Slatkin slammed the back door closed. “Big surprise.”
Tang, her breath fogging in the frigid air as she climbed into the passenger side of the van, assured Alvarez, “We’ll be on it.”
Alvarez made her way to her Jeep just as a blue older model Plymouth rolled into a covered spot and a woman, somewhere in her upper seventies, climbed out. She was bundled in an oversized coat. The second her booted feet hit the cement under her covered parking area, a wildly enthusiastic dachshund in a ridiculous red sweater that matched his owner’s scarf and hat hopped from the car to twirl on his leash. Barking madly, wrapping the leash around his owner’s legs, the dog took one look at Alvarez and stopped dead in its tracks. Dark eyes assessed the newcomer with undisguised suspicion. “That’s a good boy, Kaiser,” the woman cooed as she opened the trunk and hoisted a sack of groceries from within.
Kaiser growled at Alvarez, and his owner, looking over the tops of her glasses, chuckled. “Don’t mind him,” she said. “He’s all bark and no bite.” Slamming the trunk closed, she whistled softly. “Come along, Kaiser.”
“Excuse me, do you live here?”
“Yes. One-C.” She nodded toward her unit, right next door to Jocelyn Wallis’s apartment.
“You’re neighbors with Jocelyn Wallis.”
Her lips drew into a sad frown, and her eyebrows slammed together above the dark rims of her lenses. “Yes. Poor thing. I heard about what happened to her, on the news. I was out of town, you know, visiting Frannie. God, she’s an awful cook. She’s my sister and I love her, but do you think she ever cracks a cookbook or looks up a recipe online? No. Just roasts a turkey the same old way she always does and cooks it until it’s dry as the Sahara, but not her stuffing. Lord, how do you cook a dry turkey and still end up with wet, slimy dressing?” Then, as if she realized she’d been rambling, she said, “It’s too bad about Jocelyn, really. She was a nice enough girl, well, woman, just a little . . .” As if she thought better of what she had intended to say, she lifted her shoulders, tugged on the leash, and half dragged Kaiser toward her front door.
“Excuse me, ma’am.”
Alvarez pulled out her badge and introduced herself. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to talk to you about Ms. Wallis.” The truth was that few of her neighbors had been interviewed as her death had been deemed an accident.
“Surely,” the woman said after studying Alvarez’s badge. “I’m Lois Emmerson. . . . But, please come inside, where it’s warm.” Shifting her groceries to her other arm, she walked to the front door of the unit abutting Jocelyn Wallis’s and let Alvarez into an apartment that was neat and tidy.
After setting the sack on a counter that separated the kitchen from the living area, she unsnapped Kaiser’s leash, hung it up, and took off her coat, gloves, scarf, and hat. Beneath the outer layer was a red sweater with white dots ... just like the dog’s.
“You knit,” Alvarez observed.
“Voraciously! Never met a skein of mohair that I didn’t love!” The dog’s nose was at the crack of the pantry door, so she gave him half a doggy biscuit and said, “I’ll put on some tea.”
Alvarez tried to decline, but it was of no use. Lois Emmerson declared they both needed to be “warmed up,” and it became increasingly evident that the older woman, as she heated water in the microwave, was lonely. Single. No children. Just Kaiser for company and the poor excuse of a cook, Frannie, as family. It appeared as if she wanted to talk, so Alvarez took off her coat and tossed it on an empty bar stool.
“You were saying that there was something about Jocelyn Wallis that bothered you.”
“No, I don’t think so.” The microwave dinged, and Lois was on it like a flea on a dog, quickly sliding the glass measuring pitcher out of the microwave. Deftly, as if she’d done it a million times, she began pouring steaming water from the pitcher into twin porcelain cups that bore the stains of countless uses. She plopped a used tea bag into her cup, then asked, “Orange pekoe or English breakfast?”
“Pekoe,” Alvarez said, just to keep the conversation flowing. She was standing in the dining area, the kitchen counter separating them, and watched as Lois found some loose tea and dropped a spoonful into the second cup.
