Left To Die (29 page)

Tramping through drifts of snow that rose above her knees, Alvarez thought of her siblings, how, years ago, they had all prayed for a huge snowstorm, a snow day. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen too often in Woodburn, Oregon.

Field agents from the FBI arrived as she was signing in at the crime scene, which had been secured by Pete Watershed, the first detective to arrive. As a group, they made their way down the snowy road and saw, as the hiking couple had reported, a dead woman strapped to a tree. The people who’d called 911 were huddled in their SUV and agreed to wait to be interviewed by the detectives.

“God have mercy,” Alvarez said, and made the sign of the cross over her chest. A professed woman of science, she always fell back on the religion of her youth when she was faced with the darkest parts of human depravity.

Selena Alvarez believed in God, maybe not as deeply as her grandmother Rosarita had wished, but she believed and made no excuses for it. At times she’d gotten sideways glances from Brewster and Watershed but ignored them. Pescoli, at least, had never commented or acted like anything was out of the ordinary.

Now, as she stared at the body of the dead woman, she needed the tiniest connection to her faith, though reassurance was fleeting as she stood in the bitter cold and stared at the dead, naked woman roped to a solitary fir tree. She was petite and Caucasian, though her skin was tinged blue. Her short blond hair hung in frozen strands. Her head, covered with snow, tilted forward. Bruises were evident on her body, the heavy ropes having cut into her skin.

“Sweet Jesus,” Brett Gage whispered, his expression grim.

“Not pretty, is it?” Pescoli was serious as she studied the gruesome scene. “God, I’d love to nail the psycho who did this.”

Stephanie Chandler eyed the tracks in the snow. “Maybe we’ll catch a break this time. Maybe the dogs can pick up a scent.”

“Let’s hope,” Alvarez whispered. So far, the search-and-rescue dogs had proved useless, but today the weather was clearer, as were visible tracks leading to and from the clearing on the far side of the woods. “What’s over there?”

“No access road, at least not one that’s used, but there was a private lane leading to a mining operation that hasn’t been in use for decades.” Gage had pulled out a map and was folding it so that he could view the area where they were located.

“Any of the buildings left?” Alvarez asked.

Gage shook his head. “Don’t know.”

“One way to find out.”

“I’ll go,” Gage offered. Giving the tracks wide berth so as not to disturb any piece of evidence, he started toward the stand of pines at the far edge of the clearing, the area from where the tracks appeared.

“The guy wouldn’t be so stupid as to be nearby.” Alvarez was sure.

“Really?” Pescoli viewed her partner through amber-colored sunglasses. “Everyone makes mistakes. Even psychos.”

True enough, Alvarez thought.

“Not this guy.” Stephanie Chandler was standing a few feet away, her blond hair tucked into a navy blue FBI hat, her gaze taking in every inch of the crime scene. “He’s too precise. He’s worked this out in his head a million times. No mistakes.”

Pescoli didn’t back down. “They make mistakes. It’s what trips them up. So you’d better hope our guy isn’t flawless or we’re in for a world of hurt.”

Chandler said, “They only make mistakes when they’re pressured. We haven’t been able to do that with this guy.”

“Yet,” Pescoli said. “We will.”

“We’d better.” Chandler was eyeing the surrounding woods.

“I don’t think she’s been dead long,” Watershed said. “The body’s warmer than the others and no snow is covering the tracks. Maybe the dogs can come up with something.” He squinted, his gaze following Gage and the broken path in the snow, the killer’s trail. “He went out the same way he went in.”

“Just like before,” Alvarez noted.

The crime scene team arrived and got down to business, collecting any kind of evidence from the body and surrounding area, taking pictures of the scene and victim from all angles, searching for anything the killer might have left behind.

“She’s not Jillian Rivers,” Alvarez said abruptly.

Pescoli nodded. “She doesn’t look like the picture on her driver’s license. The physical description’s all wrong. Rivers is around five seven and weighs around a hundred and thirty and this woman couldn’t be more than five one or two, barely tips the scale at a hundred pounds.”

Alvarez braced herself as she studied the corpse. “Rivers has hazel eyes and long dark brown hair; this one’s blond. Could have been dyed and cut, I suppose, but I don’t think so. Looks natural.” The victim’s pubic hair was a dark shade of blond and her dead, sightless eyes were bright blue. “Eye color is wrong, too. And check out the note.”

WAR T SC I N

“If our theory is right, then Jillian Rivers’s initials should be somewhere in the message. There’s an R, which could be for Rivers, but no J. Instead we’ve got an A.” Alvarez shook her head. “This isn’t right, unless he’s changed his MO.”

“No way,” Chandler said, shaking her head as she studied the scene from twenty feet away. “He wouldn’t. He’s toying with us, yes, but trying to tell us something. He wants us to figure out what it is, so he can prove how smart he is.”

Alvarez watched as Mikhail, a forensic technician, removed the note with tweezers, gently placing it in a plastic bag, and held it out to her. “Did you want a closer look?”

“Thanks.” She pinched the edge of the bag and stepped away from the woman’s frozen body, grateful for the chance to turn her back on the gruesome death scene. Although she had learned to hide it, especially on the job, Selena Alvarez struggled when it came time to process violent crime scenes. Especially crimes against women. Her cross to bear, as her grandmother Rosarita would say.

She liked to think that turmoil gave her the edge when it came to catching a psycho like this, a man who made a game out of killing.

The bastard.

It was also the reason she’d avoided employment in forensics. Much as she appreciated the science of it, she couldn’t stomach it. Now, as the crime scene unit did their job, carefully bagging the woman’s frozen hands, checking her body, combing the lone fir tree and the surrounding area, Alvarez stared at the most recent note, determined to work the case from this angle. Whether it was meant to be unscrambled, translated or decoded, she wasn’t sure, but she sure as hell was going to spend some time trying to figure it out.

It was like finding a needle in a haystack.

Pescoli frowned as she eyed the rugged terrain that surrounded the latest crime scene. Mountains, ravines, frozen creek beds, curving rim roads. They’d been searching that area for Jillian Rivers, to no avail. Now the search would be on for this woman’s vehicle.

If the weather held.

A goddamned needle in a haystack.

She thought about the topographical maps at the office. Maybe she could use her computer program and come up with potential sites for the next killing ground.

There were dozens of small meadows in these mountains and it would take forever to search them all out, but what choice did they have?

“At least we know Jillian Rivers isn’t dead and we missed her. There’s no J on the note. All the initials have bodies attached,” Alvarez pointed out.

“Yeah, but it doesn’t mean she’s safe. He might have her ready to go,” Pescoli said.

Alvarez stepped closer to the tracks. “True, but he was here in the past few hours. These are fresh, not covered in snow, and the weather’s been clear only a few hours.”

“Not much consolation there. The prick could be doing Jillian Rivers now for all we know,” Pescoli said.

The
whomp, whomp, whomp
of helicopter rotor blades could be heard approaching. Already, it seemed, the state police were going airborne to search the area. Good, Pescoli thought, they might be able to see something from the air that would take days of good weather and a lot of luck to see on the ground.

“What the hell does the note mean?” Pescoli asked, staring over her partner’s shoulder at the latest note.

“Beats me.” Brewster glowered at the block letters and weird star.

“How about ‘WAR TO SCIENCE’?” Watershed asked. “Maybe this guy’s a religious nut. Maybe this is a sacrifice, some kind of rite.”

“Satanic rite,” Pescoli added.

“Could be ‘WART SCIENCE.’” Although his face was red from the cold, Pete Watershed wasn’t about to give up. “Or ‘WAR OF THE SCIENTISTS’ or even ‘WARY OF THIS COIN.’”

“Then where would Jillian Rivers’s initials fit in?” Alvarez asked. “I mean, assuming she’s next.” She glanced up at Pescoli. “The psycho must still have her.”

“Son of a bitch,” Pescoli whispered. “This guy just won’t give up.”

“Or…‘WAR OF THE SCHOOL INSTITUTIONS’…Hell, if that’s the case, we got a whole lot more victims.” Watershed was worried, scratching his jaw.

“Of course he won’t give up.” Stephanie Chandler walked the perimeter of the crime scene. “He can’t. He lives for this.” She read the note at a distance. “If anything, he’ll escalate. We need to be looking for a missing person with the initials AR or RA in her early twenties. Who found this body again?” She turned her attention to Sheriff Grayson, who was standing twenty feet from the lone fir tree, hands stuffed in his pockets, lips flat against his teeth, as he eyed the dead woman.

“Eldon and Mischa York, who were out hiking. They have a summer cabin out here and came for a week. Their story is that they’d been cooped up with the storm and took advantage of the break in the weather to get a little exercise. The good news is that they saw the scene and all the footprints and hightailed it back to their cabin, climbed in their four-wheel-drive and drove to a spot where they had cell phone service, then called 911.” Grayson finally turned his attention to the FBI agent. “Both of ’em are waiting in their rig, if you want to talk to them.” He motioned a gloved hand toward the access road, where all the vehicles from the sheriff’s department and crime lab were clustered around the Yorks’ SUV.

“We will,” Chandler said as the noise from the helicopter rotors sliced through the silence.

“Looks like we got lucky this time. We might get an actual cast out of the boot prints, something we can use,” Alvarez said.

“Not lucky enough for the victim,” Grayson muttered, and walked away, his gloved hands fisted, his jaw rock-hard. “Whoever the hell she is, she didn’t make it.” He glanced up at the sky as a helicopter appeared above the timberline, hovering over a sheer, rocky ridge covered with ice and snow.

The chopper moved in, coming in low, skimming the tops of trees surrounding the open space. It wasn’t the police search-and-rescue chopper they’d all expected. A blue call sign announced that it belonged to a local news station, and a cameraman, his huge lens trained on the clearing, was leaning as far as he dared out of the noisy aircraft.

Pescoli wanted to wave the news copter away. “Looks like we’ve got company.”

“Wouldn’t ya know?” Grayson muttered between tight teeth. “Just when I thought things couldn’t get worse, the damned press decides to show up.”

“It was bound to happen sooner or later,” Agent Chandler said, squinting up at the chopper. “Maybe we can use the footage to our advantage. See what else they locate and make a public statement. Use the news crew, rather than be used by them.”

“Did you just say screw the news crew?” Brewster asked, an amused glint in his eye.

Chandler nodded. “Close enough.”

Pescoli glanced up at the helicopter hanging in the crisp mountain air. Chandler had a point; the news copter would give them free aerial support.

“Go for it,” Grayson told the FBI agent. “KBIT is all yours.”

Jillian thought she would go out of her ever-lovin’ mind. She stared out at the expanse of snow sparkling in the sunlight and knew this was her chance to finally get out of here.

And go where?

How?

She had to wait for him. MacGregor had talked about it and had left with a chain saw hours before. She’d watched as he’d driven off on the snowmobile, hearing the big engine roar, but once the sound from the Arctic Cat faded, she’d waited, hoping to hear the grind of saw teeth biting through wood.

No such luck.

The dog, having finally accepted her, was curled up near the door again, the fire stoked. Jillian had tried to get into several of the books she’d found but couldn’t. She was too jangled. Too wired. Too anxious to get out of here. Time was moving along, and if she wanted to find out if Aaron were really alive—or just get back to her real life!—she couldn’t be waylaid any longer.

So what about MacGregor? Are you just going to leave him here?

“Of course,” she bit out. The man was nothing to her. Yeah, she found him a little bit intriguing, but she chalked that up to being alone with him in this isolated canyon. She knew of Stockholm Syndrome, how a hostage came to trust, even depend upon, her abductor; how once rescued she wouldn’t turn on the very person who kidnapped her.

Was that what this was? The root of all her fantasizing?

She remembered his lips brushing her cheek.

So he kissed her. Big deal.

So he was attractive. Who cared?

So he was mysterious. Then run the other way!

Adding wood to the fire, she listened hard, hoping to hear the roar of the snowmobile, but no sound broke the silence of the cabin. She dug in her bag and fiddled with her cell phone, trying it in every corner of the house, but just when she thought she might get a signal, the screen would flash and show “no service.”

“Great,” she muttered to the dog, walking to the windows and wishing MacGregor would return. She still didn’t hear the growl of a chain saw ripping through fallen trees, nor the buzz of an approaching snowmobile.

As she gazed out the window she wondered exactly where she was. He had a stack of maps on the table, so she flipped through them before selecting one that she thought encompassed the area.

She saw roads and rivers and towns, including Grizzly Falls and Spruce Creek, both of which rang bells in her mind. She noticed Missoula and stared at the letters, thinking of Mason and how she was certain he was the one who had lured her to Montana.