The Alvarez & Pescoli Series

by Lisa Jackson

  He sank into himself, heard voices ... men and women. . . couldn’t respond.

  Kacey’s alive . . . she’s alive . . . but Eli . . .

  He loved them both . . .

  “Don’t you leave me, Trace O’Halleran!” she yelled at him from somewhere far off. “Damn it, Trace, it took me thirty-five years to find you and you’d better not die on me. Do you hear me? Stay with me.” Her voice broke. “Come on, Trace ... come on. I love you. Oh, Holy Christ, I love you!”

  I love you, too . . .

  She was losing him!

  Right here, right now, Trace O’Halleran was dying in her arms.

  And the woman lying next to him, dead in the snow, she was now certain must be Leanna, his ex-wife, probably another one of Gerald Johnson’s sperm bank children, and mother to Eli.

  “Hang in there,” she ordered Trace as the sound of sirens blasted around them and lights bobbed up the driveway.

  She didn’t look over her shoulder but prayed the EMTs had the equipment to save him. He’d lost a lot of blood, but she wasn’t going to let him die. Not on her watch. Quickly, she stripped him of his pants, yanking out the flashlight from her pocket to get a good look at the bullet wound in his thigh. Blood was pumping out of the hole in his flesh and she suspected his femoral artery had been hit. She crossed one hand over the other and pressed them to the wound just as she heard, “Hey! Over here!” from a deep voice yelling near the house. Then footsteps and heaving breaths and conversation swirled around her in the snow. “We’ll take over, ma’am,” someone said and she felt a man’s hand on her shoulder.

  “But I’m a doctor—”

  “Holy Christ, there’s another one!” He started bending over Leanna’s body.

  “She’s dead.”

  “Hey! Over here!” A woman shouted from the vicinity of Cam’s corpse. “Holy shit, what happened here. Looks like goddamned Armageddon!”

  “Here, ma’am . . . I’ve got him now,” the EMT said, turning back to Trace.

  “But I’m—”

  “A doctor. I know.” He was firm. “Hey, Annie,” he called over his shoulder as Kacey was vaguely aware of colored lights strobing the night. Red and blue flashes through the ever-falling snow. “I could use some help over here! This one’s in shock,” the EMT said and glanced up at Kacey.

  The O’Halleran ranch was a madhouse.

  All hell had broken loose before Alvarez and Pescoli arrived, their Jeep sliding around the corner at the end of the drive and nearly taking out the mailbox. Two department issued vehicles were parked near an open gate and an ambulance too, idled, waiting to transport the injured.

  At the back of the big farmhouse while battling the elements EMTs were tending to Trace O’Halleran, strapping him to a stretcher while a search team had been dispatched to find O’Halleran’s missing son. Cameron Johnson, dressed in black and wearing night goggles, was dead from two gunshot wounds, inflicted, admittedly, by Kacey Lambert.

  Shivering, a blanket thrown around her shoulders, Kacey herself admitted to cutting him down when he refused to drop his weapon. Pale as death, obviously in shock, Kacey swore that Cameron had already killed the woman still lying in the snow in front of them.

  A woman who could have been her twin.

  “I think it’s Leanna,” Kacey said, almost numbly, her gaze fastened on the woman’s frozen features.

  “Dead,” one of the EMTs confirmed.

  “I need to go with him,” Kacey insisted as two burly rescue workers carried Trace on a stretcher through the piling snow to the waiting ambulance.

  “You can ride with us,” Pescoli said.

  “Hey!” Trilby Van Droz, one of the road deputies, cocked her head toward the main road. “Looks like we’ve got company.” Twin headlights glowed at the end of the drive, but Pescoli couldn’t make out the vehicle. “Five will get you one, it’s the press.”

  A news van.

  Of course. Great. Just what they didn’t need. “They have to back off. Until we know what went down,” Pescoli shouted and Van Droz began heading down the lane, following the tracks of the ambulance that carried Trace.

  “I think O’Halleran is going to be okay,” Alvarez said.

  “But Eli. We have to find him,” Kacey insisted. “Leanna . . . I thought she was in the house with me . . . warning me . . . but the timing probably couldn’t be. I thought she was an angel.”

  Pescoli glanced at her partner. “Let’s have a doctor look at her, too.”

  “I’m fine,” Kacey insisted, but her face was pretty bruised, the skin scraped, her chin covered in blood.

  “Okay, let’s go,” Pescoli said. As the ambulance sped off through the snow, Pescoli, Alvarez, and Kacey trudged through the drifts to the Jeep. Kacey climbed into the backseat. Her car was still in the police garage, the black paint transferred from her fender bender, not yet analyzed. Alvarez settled into the passenger seat and Pescoli backed up, then rammed the Jeep into gear.

  Even though Cam Johnson was dead, Pescoli still felt a sense of urgency, and the missing kid didn’t help. Where the hell could he be? she wondered as she flipped on the lights and hit the gas. There were too many loose ends to be tied up, too much evidence to be collected, other stories that had to jibe with what Kacey was saying before Pescoli would be satisfied. Even though the doctor was half mad with worry about the boy’s whereabouts and beyond concerned that Trace O’Halleran might not make it, Alvarez and Pescoli were required to haul her to the station.

  After their trip to the Emergency Room.

  True, Pescoli thought as she drove onto the county road and saw the news team from a local station huddled in their van, Kacey Lambert had called 9-1-1 as well as left Alvarez several voice mail messages on her phone. It had been the doctor who had drawn the authorities to the scene, but she hadn’t played by the book, had ignored the 9-1-1 dispatcher’s advice and taken the law into her own hands.

  Had she saved O’Halleran’s life?

  Probably.

  But two other people were dead and a kid was still missing.

  The sketchy statement Kacey had given coincided with everything the crime scene guys had put together so far, but it was too early in the game. They still had to cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s.

  She headed toward Grizzly Falls.

  The night was dark aside from the snow, only a few farmhouses in the area, those with generators, showing any light in the windows. Tow trucks had stopped for a vehicle that had slid into the ditch, and other traffic was slow, battling the storm.

  Pescoli had the heater working overtime, the interior of the Jeep as hot as a sauna, yet Kacey Lambert couldn’t seem to get warm and was shivering as she told her story for the second time, then worried aloud about Eli.

  “If anything happens to him, I’ll never forgive myself,” she said and stared out the window, her breath fogging the glass. “Never.”

  Two minutes later, just as they reached the snow-covered sign welcoming all to Grizzly Falls, Alvarez’s cell phone jangled. She took the call and listened, the conversation one-sided. “What? . . . Where ... Thank God.” She twisted in the passenger seat. “We’ve got him.”

  “What? Who? Eli?” Kacey demanded.

  “Yes, ma’am. He’s safe.”

  “Thank God!” Kacey’s voice broke and she sniffed loudly.

  Pescoli’s hands held the wheel in a death grip, but she felt a rush of relief, a dam of fear breaking inside her. “Shhh!” Alvarez held up a hand and finished the call. “Yeah, well, bring him into the office. We’ll meet you there.” She hung up and even her usually icy all-professional facade cracked. “He’s fine.”

  Pescoli glanced in the rearview mirror and saw tears of happiness well in her passenger’s eyes.

  “Okay,” Alvarez went on, “I don’t know all the details, but it looks like he was kidnapped by his mother, dropped off at the neighbors—Ed and Matilda Zukov’s house—and they’ve been trying to reach someone ever since. Apparently Leanna O’Hall
eran cut their phone line and stole their cells to give herself time to fulfill some mission.”

  “She was after Cam,” Kacey said quietly. “She knew.”

  “Apparently,” Alvarez agreed. “We’ll be getting more information from the Zukovs. An officer is bringing them into the station, along with the boy.”

  Pescoli grimaced against the glare of particularly bright high beams as a truck rumbled past. “So she was out of the picture for most of the kid’s life, then she suddenly, in what some kind of cosmic mother instinct rolls into town at just the right moment to blow some nut case away?” Pescoli shot a look at her partner. “What did she know?”

  Alvarez shook her head. They might never fully figure it out.

  Kacey went over her statement three times and answered a slew of questions, though it was obvious Pescoli and Alvarez, and even the sheriff himself believed her. They’d planned on taking her directly to the hospital but she’d insisted on getting the interview at the sheriff ’s department over with first. As soon as they got there she took time to head to the bathroom, wash her face, down three migraine-strength Excedrin, and use a slightly too large Band-Aid that the woman at reception had given her on her chin. She’d called the hospital on Trace’s cell, but had only learned that Trace was in surgery.

  Deputy Van Droz brought the Zukovs and Eli into the room where Kacey was being interviewed just as Kacey had finished another run-through of the events that had taken place at the O’Halleran ranch. She threw her arms around the boy, tears filling her eyes. “Thank God you’re safe,” she whispered fervently and ruffled his hair.

  “I saw Mommy,” Eli said, biting his lower lip.

  “I know, honey.”

  “She came to pick me up.”

  “I heard,” Kacey answered with a smile that was difficult to muster. Seeing Leanna on the snowy ground, her face gray in the half light, her eyes fixed, had been like staring into her own grave.

  “She signed my cast,” he stated proudly.

  Kacey glanced up at Tilly who nodded while Ed looked away. Proudly, Eli displayed the bold scrawl that said. “Love you, Mom xoxo.”

  “It’s beautiful,” she said, remembering how Leanna had saved them all. She wondered if she’d really heard Leanna’s voice or if it had merely been a hallucination. It hardly mattered, for either way she intended to take really good care of Leanna’s son.

  “Wanna get some hot cocoa?” Pescoli asked Eli who, after glancing at Kacey and the Zukovs and receiving hearty ‘yes, go aheads’ eagerly followed after the taller, red-haired detective.

  Once the boy was gone, the Zukovs told their tale. Leanna had shown up at their house carrying Eli. She’d apparently trudged through the snow to deliver her son, and then she’d disabled their truck and landline and stolen their cell phones. She’d also taken their computer, so that they had no means of communicating with anyone while she said she was taking care of some “unfinished business.”

  Tilly went on to say that Leanna had admitted that she knew about the killer who was taking out all of the daughters of Gerald Johnson as he believed most of them had serious mental problems. He was intent on protecting his family name and made up an elaborate plan to take care of the problem. He also had a personal vendetta against Kacey and Leanna because he’d fallen for Leanna, not knowing who she was, and he’d despised Kacey as well for being born to Gerald’s mistress. He had bad feelings for Robert Lindley, too, but until he’d eradicated all of the “Unknowings” as he’d called them, he would take his time with Robert.

  During the recitation Kacey recalled Cameron’s taunts after he’d hit her with the rifle butt. He’d believed she and Leanna and the rest of Gerald’s female offspring weren’t mentally sound when his own mental illness was the reason he’d targeted all of them.

  Tilly wound up by adding that Cameron had admitted his deadly deeds to Leanna when he’d tried to kill her years before, but she’d gotten away and found Trace. She’d left her son with Trace fearing Cameron would take his sick vengeance upon Eli. But her fear for Eli was the reason she came back, to save the boy everyone assumed she’d abandoned and to stop Cameron in his tracks.

  “We were horrified,” Tilly finished. “And trapped. We wanted Eli to be safe, but we were worried sick about you all. Ed even tried to start the old John Deere in hopes of getting to the Foxx’s, our neighbors to the north and calling the police.”

  “Dang thing wouldn’t even turn over in the cold,” Ed admitted. Both he and his wife looked worn out and beleaguered.

  Pescoli returned with Eli who was interested in poking at the fake marshmallows floating in his hot chocolate. She also brought several cups of steaming coffee. Kacey took one, more for the warmth than anything else.

  She turned to Ed and Tilly, softly asking the question that was now haunting her, “So . . . Eli is Cameron’s son?”

  “Not according to her. She was very adamant on that,” Tilly said and Ed nodded his agreement.

  “I’m my dad’s son,” Eli put in, blowing across his cocoa.

  “Of course you are.” Kacey walked across the room and hugged him fiercely, sorry he’d overheard her; she’d thought he was out of earshot. She was so glad that he was safe. She would have to deal with his questions about his mother, she knew that, but she was willing to do it; to be with him and to be with Trace. Her feelings about Leanna were torn, but she couldn’t deny that the woman had sacrificed herself for the sake of her son.

  Alvarez’s cell phone jangled and she looked at the screen. “I’ve got to take this,” she said, before walking into an adjoining room.

  She was gone about ten minutes and when she returned, she said. “Looks like we can convict Cameron Johnson for more crimes than we know. The team who went to his house found a secret room down in the basement. There are pictures of the victims, information about each of them, many already dead, some who escaped.”

  Kacey thought of Gloria Sanders-O’Malley, the fitness instructor.

  “I’m going to have to call Jonas Hayes in L.A.,” Alvarez said to Pescoli. “I think we can tie Cam Johnson to Shelly Bonaventure’s supposed suicide.”

  “He was the creep who attacked me in Seattle,” Kacey said. “He admitted as much.” She sighed and shook her head. “If we’re done here, can I get a ride to the hospital?”

  Pescoli nodded. “I’ll drive.”

  Turning to Eli, Kacey said with a smile, “Come on. Let’s go see your dad.”

  As it turned out, Kacey wasn’t alone in wanting to go to the hospital. Pescoli and Alvarez planned to question Trace when he woke up and Ed and Tilly, though tired, drove to St. Bart’s as well.

  But being back in the familiar hospital halls was a little surreal for Kacey. Though everything looked the way it had the last time she’d been here, after all she’d been through, it seemed different. Changed. She told herself that it was because of the fact she’d been hit in the back of the head with the butt of a rifle, but it was more, a deeper disconnect that all had to do with meeting a murderer face-to-face and killing him. Though she felt no regret for taking Cameron Johnson’s life as he’d intended to murder Trace, she still felt out of step. She’d dedicated her professional life to helping heal, to save lives, and now she’d purposefully taken one.

  Shake it off, she told herself and after leaving a protesting Eli with Tilly and Ed, made her way to the Recovery Room as she was a doctor on staff. Alvarez and Pescoli were right behind her, but hung back to give her a second’s privacy when she headed to the bed where Trace lay.

  He was just coming around and woozy, his leg bandaged, his hospital gown askew. His leg had been saved, the femoral artery nicked but repaired. He moaned, his head dark against the white sheets. He blinked slowly awake.

  “Hey, there,” she said, leaning over his bed as the Recovery Room nurse stepped away to allow them some privacy.

  With obvious effort, he tried to focus.

  “It’s me.” She took his hand and her heart squeezed at the sight of h
im, his hair rumpled on the pillow, his jaw dark with beard shadow. God, she loved him and for a few harrowing minutes she’d thought she’d lost him forever. “Trace?”

  One side of his mouth lifted in a dopey grin, but his eyes were far from clear. “Kacey?” he said, his voice rough.

  “Yeah, it’s me.” Her throat nearly closed as his grip tightened over hers.

  “Eli?” he whispered.

  “He’s fine.” Tears burned the back of her eyes. “And he’s here, waiting to see you. He’s with the Zukovs, just down the hall.”

  He seemed relieved, then goofy again. “Oh. Tilly. Ed.”

  “Yes.” She knew he wouldn’t remember much about waking up, maybe nothing, but she couldn’t help herself from squeezing his hand. “Trace, I need to tell you something,” she said.

  “Hmmmm . . .” He was drifting again.

  “First of all, Leanna turned out to be okay. More than okay. I think she saved your life.” He didn’t respond. Probably hadn’t heard. “And there’s something else,” she admitted, leaning close over the bed. “I love you.” She smiled, though she felt warm tears slide down her face. “It’s crazy and I know it, but damn it, I love you.”

  “I know . . .” His voice was far away. “You’re gonna marry me.”

  He was still out of it; didn’t know what he was saying, but it filled her heart with joy. “We . . . we’ll talk about it when you’re better . . .”

  His eyes opened suddenly and in that split second his gaze was clear. “I am better,” he said, and reached up quickly, his fingers sliding around her nape, as he lifted his head from the pillow and pulled her close so that their noses were nearly touching. “And you’re gonna marry me, Dr. Lambert.”

  Before she could say a word, he pressed his lips to hers in a kiss that was as crushing as it was desperate. “No arguments,” he said when he finally released her and fell back on the sheets, spent, his eyes closing again.

  “Faker,” she accused.

  He didn’t respond.

  She felt a smile tug on her swollen lips and she didn’t say it, but thought. I am going to marry you, Trace O’Halleran. Count on it.