The Alvarez & Pescoli Series

by Lisa Jackson

  “Sorry,” Gus said without an ounce of apology in his voice. “It is what it is. And what it is . . . is Premium flat black number three-oh-eight. It’s been the same formula for nearly fifteen years.”

  They were talking about the paint marks retrieved from Elle Alexander’s van, and instead of the paint that was transferred belonging to a certain make and model of car, it was from a spray paint can, the kind that could be bought all across the country and was used to paint anything from outdoor furniture to model cars or barbecues.

  “Great.”

  “Hey, I gave you what I had.”

  “I know. Thanks, Gus.” She hung up and considered how many stores in the Grizzly Falls area had sold that particular brand in the past fifteen years. Would they get lucky and find someone who had purchased it lately? And what if the paint had been bought in Spokane or Boise or Missoula or who knew where?

  At least she had the information on the coffee grounds. Alvarez was alone. Pescoli had received a call from Jeremy just as they were leaving. He’d told her that Chris Schultz was over, so she’d had to head home again. Alvarez had told her not to bother returning, but Pescoli had made it clear she would deal with the matter and show up as soon as she could. It seemed Pescoli had been half annoyed, half glad that Jeremy had decided to rat out his sister’s boyfriend. It was almost a sign of maturity.

  Alvarez found Acacia Lambert’s address and turned into the long drive that led to the house, following a couple of sets of fresh tracks. To her unwelcome surprise, Trace O’Halleran was waiting for her as she pulled up beside his truck. The tech crew had already arrived as well, parked to the side of the garage. One of the guys, Rudy, was outside the department-issued van, smoking a cigarette and talking to Trace. Rudy’s partner, Eileen, was inside the vehicle, keeping warm as the van’s engine idled, exhaust fogging in the air.

  Alvarez considered Trace. He wasn’t the killer; his alibis had proved that. But he was in this thing up to his sexy eyeballs; she just hadn’t quite figured out how.

  Yet.

  What was it with him and the women who might just have all been sired by Donor 727?

  There was no time like the present to find out.

  As she opened the door of her Jeep, she heard another vehicle in the drive and saw the play of headlights in the snow. Seconds later Dr. Acacia Lambert herself had parked her car in the drive, behind Alvarez, and had walked over the mashed snow to the group, just as Eileen climbed out of the van.

  They discussed the plan to sweep the house. They were to find the bugs, try to locate the exterior source, but leave everything as it was. Kacey and Trace would talk as if they were the only ones in the house, catch up on the day, while the techs combed each room for listening devices and, perhaps, cameras. Afterward, they would dust for prints.

  Clearly Kacey had been hoping the mics would be immediately removed, and Alvarez couldn’t blame her. But she saw the wisdom of keeping them in place, and so they all headed toward the house.

  If Trace had made a mistake and there were actually cameras in the house as well, they were screwed and would tip off whoever had bugged the house. Then again, if the guy was nearby, there was a chance he would see them, anyway, and probably figure out they were onto him. Even though the house sat back from the road, he could have an observation point.

  They made their way to the back porch but stopped short when a deep-throated dog started barking from within. “Hey, Bonz, it’s me! Hush!” Kacey ordered, but the animal kept up the ruckus until she was inside. Only then did his hackles lower and his tail begin wagging in wide arcs as he happily greeted everyone. Though he looked as if he were aggressive with predominately pit bull genes, he lowered his head like a gentleman and waited to be petted by everyone filing inside.

  Kacey let him outside, then fed him near the back door before heading into the den as planned.

  While Rudy and Eileen worked, Trace and Kacey turned on several televisions to mask some of the noise, then played their roles in the den.

  Alvarez snapped on a pair of latex gloves, collected some of the coffee grounds, as well as the beans still in the canister and grinder, and placed them all in plastic bags. She didn’t expect to find any fingerprints from whoever had planted the bugs, but she believed in being thorough. Who knew? They might get lucky.

  Finding the evidence that the creep was targeting Acacia Lambert, playing with her, listening in on her life, went a long way to proving her theory that the deaths were connected. Could Acacia Lambert also be the progeny of Donor 727? Alvarez planned on asking the woman but was waiting till this debugging was over.

  While Kacey and Trace played their parts at the computer in the den, the dog curled at Kacey’s feet, Alvarez scratched out a quick question on a pad, then placed it in front of the doctor:

  Have you been feeling ill?

  Trace O’Halleran frowned, looked from one woman to the other.

  Kacey hesitated and frowned. She wrote back: Stomach.

  Alvarez wrote back: Maybe poison. Arsenic found in Wallis stomach contents.

  “From what?” Kacey mouthed.

  Alvarez wrote: In the coffee. Most likely a small dosage.

  “Damn it,” Kacey’s voice was barely discernible, probably wouldn’t be picked up on the mic. Her expression turned from concern to anger, and she wrote quickly: We need to talk.

  Nodding, Alvarez scribbled back: My car. She then turned up the television to the point that nothing else could be heard and, carrying the coffee, pot, and grinder, all bagged and tagged, walked through the kitchen and outside.

  The wind was blowing hard, snow slanting sideways at times, a tree branch banging against one of the gutters on the second story. She unlocked her car and climbed in. Trace and Kacey showed up a few moments later.

  “Okay, it’s safe here,” Alvarez said as she turned on the engine and ignored any banter or crackling on the radio. Trace was stretched across the back; Kacey in the passenger bucket seat. Alvarez adjusted the heater, to blow out the condensation, then let the wipers swipe off an accumulation of snow. “I think you may have been poisoned, though probably not more than enough to make you sick. And the reason I think so is because we found traces of arsenic in Jocelyn’s blood. The guy was toying with her. He’d put it into her coffee somehow.”

  “Sick bastard,” Trace said.

  “You think he put it in my coffee, too?” Kacey asked.

  “I’ll find out.”

  “I think this ‘sick bastard’ could be related to me,” Kacey said slowly, picking her words.

  “How so?” Alvarez asked.

  Kacey then, somewhat reluctantly, launched into a story about being the love child of her mother and one Gerald Johnson, a doctor who had invented a certain type of heart stent. She told of her findings that afternoon in Missoula, at Gerald’s place of work, summing up her impressions of him and his children, then dropped the bomb that Gerald Johnson as a medical student had been a sperm donor to a now-defunct clinic.

  Alvarez took a long moment, savoring the feeling of a case breaking wide open. “We were already on the sperm bank angle,” she told Kacey, surprising both her and Trace. “From Elle Alexander’s parents.” Quickly, she recapped what she’d learned, then gazed at Kacey seriously across the dark interior of the car. “But you have to cease and desist. Give me a statement back at the station, then disappear, hide out. At least until we determine if you’re a target and what the story is with Johnson and his kids.”

  “One of them is like me. Robert Lindley. His mother was another of Johnson’s mistresses. And another one of his children, a girl named Kathleen, died in her twenties in a skiing accident.”

  “Another accident,” Alvarez said.

  “You think she was a victim?” Trace asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “What about his other kids?” Kacey asked. “Kathleen died years ago. And Agatha, when she was eight. The rest of them, as far as I know, haven’t had any brushes with death.”

&nb
sp; “That’s just it. As far as you know. For now, though, you have to quit playing detective. It’s too dangerous.” Alvarez was adamant. “It’s our job. We’ll handle it from here.”

  “Jesus,” Pescoli muttered, stunned as she knelt on the snow near the corpse, a cross-country skier who had apparently slammed into the snag of a pine tree perched on the banks of the icy creek. Pescoli had been on her way to the Lambert house when she’d gotten the call.

  The dead skier was a woman with reddish hair, and though her face was mangled from her crash with the pine and blood had frozen over a shattered cheekbone and eye socket, Pescoli felt a shiver of dread run through her.

  The accident victim’s features, though discolored and frozen, were similar to those of Jocelyn Wallis, Elle Alexander, and even Shelly Bonaventure.

  “Son of a bitch,” she said as the body was photographed, then bagged and driven to the medical examiner’s van, which was parked in the lower lot, next to the red Honda, which was registered to Karalee Rierson, who lived ten miles east.

  What were the chances?

  She spent time talking to the couple who had found her, newly married twentysomethings who had been snowshoeing and happened upon the dead body. They’d nearly missed seeing her as she’d been half buried in snow, but the man had caught a glimpse of something red beneath the fresh snow and investigated.

  They had been terrified but, having cell phones with them, had called 9-1-1. Kayan Rule had taken the call and been dispatched to the scene. When he’d seen the victim, he, in turn, had phoned the station again, requesting a homicide detective. Pescoli had been the detective closest, and she’d driven her Jeep up to the lower lot and snowshoed in a quarter mile to the area where the victim had lost her life, in an apparent accident.

  The crime scene crew had arrived and was combing the area for trace evidence, but Pescoli figured they wouldn’t find much. The weapon of death was the tree; bloodstains on a particularly vicious eye-level snag were still visible.

  It could have been an accident, she supposed. A careless or startled skier, maybe. But Pescoli wasn’t buying it for a minute. She figured that the dead woman now on her way to the morgue would prove to be yet another victim of a killer who had a vendetta against the offspring of Donor 727, whoever the hell he was.

  No, the killer was even more precise in his intentions than that. So far, all the victims had been women. Elle Alexander’s brother, Bruce, was alive and well according to her parents.

  A mistake?

  Probably not.

  Now, as she snowshoed back to her Jeep and waited for the truck to come and tow Karalee Rierson’s little Honda, she flipped open her cell phone and called Alvarez. When her partner didn’t answer, Pescoli left a short message: “I think we’ve got another one.” Then watched as the frozen Honda, with snow piled over its hood and dirty icicles dangling like long, snaggy teeth along the wheel wells, was winched onto the flatbed.

  Another “accident.”

  Another dead woman.

  Probably related to good old 727.

  Whatever the hell that meant.

  CHAPTER 32

  Poisoned?

  She’d been poisoned, and she hadn’t even realized it? With Trace at her side, Kacey was seated on a folding chair in the interview room at the sheriff’s department while listening to Alvarez, from the other side of the small, battered table, describe finding arsenic in Jocelyn Wallis’s coffee grounds. Kacey thought of her own symptoms, how she’d never considered that there was a toxin running through her veins. She was a doctor, and she would have noticed if the symptoms had become violent, the pain more intense. Still ...

  It all made sense.

  Now.

  Already the interview was well into its second hour. Detective Alvarez, after warning them to stay out of the investigation, was now doing this by the book.

  Trace, though he tried to appear relaxed, was antsy, his jaw, beneath a darkening beard shadow, tight, his lips flat, his eyes serious. Twice during the conversation, he’d stepped outside of the room to call Tilly and get an update on his son. Though he didn’t really need to be here and Kacey had encouraged him to go home, he’d stayed.

  Alvarez had listened to Kacey’s theory about the dead women being related to Gerald Johnson twice so far, once at Kacey’s house, and a second time now. When her partner, Pescoli, arrived, Alvarez quickly brought her up to speed.

  “Gerald Johnson,” Pescoli repeated, shaking her head. “Think this is his work, too?” She offered up pictures that looked as if they had been taken digitally, then printed out. Kacey inwardly cringed as she looked at the graphic images, not so much from the woman’s injuries—she’d seen worse in medical school and her practice—but because of what she saw beyond the battered, bloody features. The victim’s hair, poking out of a blood-encrusted cap, was a deep red-brown, as close to Kacey’s own color as it could be, and the one eye that was open, pupil apparently fixed, was a green shade that wasn’t quite as blue as her own but was definitely in the color spectrum of all the victims.

  Had her face not been so battered, this woman, too, would have resembled Kacey enough as to have been her sister.

  Which, she thought sadly, was probably true.

  “You know her?” Alvarez asked.

  Kacey shook her head. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen her in my life.”

  “I was talking to him.” Alvarez hitched her chin toward Trace, her dark eyes holding his.

  His jaw was clamped shut, and irritation caused a muscle to work in his jaw. “No.” He slid the pictures back toward Pescoli, who was still standing near the table.

  Kacey asked, “Who is she?”

  Pescoli thought for a moment and said, “I guess we can tell you, considering the situation, but keep it to yourselves. Next of kin is being notified as we speak. Her name is Karalee Rierson. She’s local. A nurse. Divorced. A couple of times. No kids. Lived in Oregon for a while.” She paused a moment, as if thinking things over, then said, “She grew up in Helena.”

  “Dear God,” Kacey whispered, sick inside. Who was behind all these accidents? Why was he killing?

  “Dr. Lambert went to see Gerald Johnson today,” Alvarez said, then nodded to Kacey, who explained again about getting her mother to come up with the truth, then forcing herself on Gerald Johnson and his family.

  “Did you go to see Johnson and his clan to try and flush out the killer?” Pescoli asked, her expression stern. She stood leaning against the far wall, below a camera mounted near the ceiling.

  “I actually went to meet them, show them the pictures, tell them what I knew. I wanted to see their expressions, especially Gerald’s, as he seems to be the link to all of this.” She felt cold inside again, just remembering his reaction and those of her half siblings. Though she didn’t really know them, she realized she would never be close to any of them, might, in fact, never see them again. Her curiosity was satisfied, though; as far as she was concerned, they weren’t part of her family. “Gerald was concerned when I showed him the pictures of the dead women, and even though I don’t think he wanted to, he owned up to the whole sperm donor thing, which bothered most of his kids.”

  “I’d say,” Pescoli muttered.

  “From now on, stay away from them,” Alvarez advised.

  Trace asked, “You think they’re dangerous?”

  “I think it’s police business.” Pescoli was firm. “Not that we don’t appreciate the fact that you found out who our sperm donor is. We only had a number.”

  They discussed the meeting with the Johnson clan, and then Kacey told the detectives about Gloria Sanders-O’Malley, the instructor at Fit Forever. “She looks like the rest of us, and she was born in Helena.”

  “I’ve seen her at the gym,” Alvarez said, her expression growing tense. “She does resemble the others.”

  “For the love of God, how many victims and potential victims are we talking about?” Pescoli broke in. “This is nuts!” She shook her head. “I’m sorry. Go
on.”

  “Once I figured out there were more people like me, those with Gerald Johnson as a father, I went to meet him, see what he was like. I wasn’t sure I’d meet his kids, but once Clarissa barged into his office and figured out who I was, they called a family meeting.”

  “You should have come here first,” Pescoli said.

  “What would I have come with? Some half-baked theory about people who looked like me getting killed off? A few days ago I didn’t even know that Stanley Collins wasn’t my biological father.” The newfound anger and sense of betrayal that had been with her ever since her mother’s confession still burned bright.

  “You know of any other potential victims?” Alvarez asked.

  “I have a friend looking through state files. I’m not going to give up their name,” she said, instinctively covering for Riza. “And I believe, from what I’ve learned, that there may have been others already killed.... It’s as if the guy started out years ago working in a wide circle, then slowly tightened it, until he’s now concentrating here, in this corner of Montana. From as far away as Detroit to all along the West Coast, Seattle and San Francisco, women have been having accidents. I haven’t had time to look into them all, but I’ve got names and addresses and dates of death.” Reaching into her purse, she found a manila envelope that contained the information from Riza. She slid it across the table toward Alvarez, but she didn’t take her fingers off the end of the envelope closest to her.

  Alvarez frowned and placed her fingers on the other side of the envelope. Inside the envelope were copies without any information about Riza or the state offices from which they came, but it would be a simple enough matter for the police, if they were so inclined, to figure out where they had come from, and a simple search into Kacey’s background and her schooling would connect her to Riza. She had to come clean. “A friend of mine risked their job for this. You have to promise me that they won’t get into any kind of trouble. None.”

  “This is a sheriff’s department investigation,” Pescoli reminded everyone in the room.