Left To Die (36 page)

Assured that they would release the cell phone “as soon as possible,” they’d asked a few more questions and thanked her, as if to end the interview. Alvarez had clicked off the recorder and Pescoli was one step from the door.

“Wait a minute,” Jillian had called, and both women stopped in their tracks. “I just want to say again that Zane MacGregor never did anything that would indicate he wanted me dead and he had ample opportunity. I was unconscious, unable to walk on my own, nearly immobile with my bruised ribs. If he wanted me dead, believe me, I would be.”

The cops didn’t say a word and she couldn’t help but add, “I know you’ve got a serious problem on your hands with this serial killer. You have to find him. But keep looking. You’ve got the wrong man.”

Alvarez met her gaze. “We’re checking into all possibilities, Ms. Rivers. MacGregor is only one person of interest.”

“But I told you—” she started, then read something she didn’t like in the smaller woman’s eyes. Though she had been trying to hide it, Detective Selena Alvarez, the one detective she’d trusted, hadn’t believed her story, or at least not all of it.

“Oh my God,” Jillian had whispered, aghast. “You think…you think what? That I’m lying? Or…or that I’m confused or that I’ve fallen for my abductor?” Her heart sank as the two women stood in front of the doorway, blocking her view of the nurses’ station.

“Right now, Ms. Rivers,” Pescoli said, “we’re not sure what to think.”

“I’m telling you, it’s not MacGregor.”

“Duly noted. Thanks.” Pescoli, obviously irritated, stepped out of the room.

“We might have more questions later,” Alvarez said and took the time to return to Jillian’s bedside. “If you think of anything else, or have questions of your own, please call.” She left her card on the table near Jillian’s water glass. “This,” she added, tapping the card with a slim finger, “has my direct line at the sheriff’s office, as well as my cell. Thanks again.”

And then she left, walking briskly to catch up with her partner.

Jillian had picked up the card and slipped it into her wallet. She’d thought she’d been finished with questions but she’d been wrong.

Within the next hour the FBI had sent agents Halden and Chandler to double-team Jillian one more time. As if she’d remember something new.

They’d gone over the same information but were a little more reserved and held back their emotions better than the local cops had.

Not that Jillian had liked them much better.

Stephanie Chandler, tall, blond and athletic, without so much of a hint of a smile in her blue eyes, had led the interview, while her partner, with his slight southern drawl and easy smile, had come up with a few questions of his own. Of the two, Craig Halden had seemed vastly more relaxed and approachable. But Jillian had suspected the good ol’ boy charm was an act and she was damned tired of answering questions.

“Okay,” she’d finally said, her eyes focused on Chandler. “I’ve already said everything I know to Detectives Pescoli and Alvarez. You can check with them. It’s all on tape.” She shifted in the bed, her IV tugging on her wrist, the bedclothes starting to wrinkle.

Halden, as if he agreed with her, had nodded thoughtfully. He’d offered the kind of aw-shucks grin meant to put her at ease. The country-boy smile had only had the opposite effect and ratcheted up her anxiety level. “Yeah,” he said. “We know. This is just routine.”

“I wouldn’t think there is anything routine about a serial-killer investigation,” Jillian countered, and for the first time saw a twitch in his partner’s arched eyebrows. Despite her cool façade, Stephanie Chandler was an intelligent woman who didn’t miss a trick.

Which wasn’t surprising. The woman was an FBI agent, after all.

So Jillian had felt a little outgunned and unnerved. In the span of her lifetime, Jillian had never considered the police the enemy. Sure, she worried about speeding tickets whenever she was being followed by a police cruiser, but her uncle had been an Oregon State police officer and one of her cousins was with the Reno, Nevada, police department. Aside from a few drinks before she was twenty-one, experimenting with pot a total of twice and inadvertently running a red light or pushing the pedal to the metal on the freeway, Jillian had never broken the law.

The only time she’d had the slightest inclination to think the authorities might not be looking out for her best interests had been in Suriname when Aaron had gone missing. Maybe it had been the language barrier, or a natural distrust of foreign police fostered by the news and movies or her own prejudices. Whatever the reason, Jillian had doubted that the men in power in that remote area of the jungle were on the up-and-up.

“The thing is,” Jillian told the federal agents, “the only reason I was in Montana in the first place was because of the pictures I was sent, the phone calls I received, all indicating that my first husband, Aaron Caruso, was alive.”

“Caruso as in Robinson Crusoe?”

“Spelled differently,” Chandler said.

So they had already checked. “You’ve looked into it,” Jillian said.

Chandler nodded. “When your car was located, we started searching for you.”

“And digging into my personal life.”

Chandler didn’t crack a smile. “We wanted to find you.”

Halden said, “But we just found the photographs at the cabin today. We’ll analyze them.”

“I’ll get them back?”

“Eventually.”

“I need them.”

Chandler nodded again. “So do we. Now, tell us. Who do you think called you?”

“I don’t know.”

“You didn’t recognize the voice?”

“No, it was a whisper and caller ID didn’t come up with a name or number.” She looked from one agent to the other. “And I don’t know who sent me the pictures. The postmark on the envelope was Missoula, so I was going to confront my ex-husband, as he lives there.”

“Mason Rivers?”

“Yes, he’s an attorney, excuse me, a partner in the law firm of Olsen, Nye and Rivers,” she’d said, but had the feeling they already knew this information as well. “We were divorced two years ago.”

“When was the last time you saw him?” Halden asked.

“Just a few days after the divorce was final. We exchanged the final things we had of each other’s. It was all very…civil.”

“And since then?”

“Nothing. I wasn’t invited to the wedding.” Jillian felt a twisted smile curve her lips. “Sherice, that’s Mason’s new wife, she’s not a big fan.”

“Of yours?”

“Of any woman Mason remotely showed an interest in. That goes double for ex-wives.”

Halden chuckled, but Chandler didn’t react.

They asked a few more questions, then, satisfied for the moment, concluded the interview and took their leave.

Jillian had been left alone, hooked up to an IV she didn’t think she needed, her vital signs monitored by one nurse after another.

The feeling that lingered after the FBI agents left made her uncomfortable. She sensed the detectives and agents were trying to trip her up so she would incriminate MacGregor. And that just wasn’t right.

And then her mind circled to her own circumstances. Why had someone lured her to Montana in an effort to kill her? After the second attempt on her life, she was damned certain, as the police were, that she had become the target of a serial killer.

How did that fit?

Who hated her so much?

Who hated the other women?

She glanced up at the muted television, noticing that the local news was on the air. There, on the screen, was her own face, the photo from her driver’s license.

“Oh God,” she whispered as she turned the sound on. A reporter dressed in a blue parka, snow falling around her, currently stood in front of the emergency room doors of this very hospital. Brunette and serious, a gust of wind ruffling her hood, she explained about Jillian’s abduction.

The image on the screen changed quickly to an aerial shot of a snow-covered clearing surrounded by forested hills. Near the edge of the snowy glen was a lone cedar tree.

Jillian started shivering when she recognized the area. The snow around the tree was trodden and mashed, and ropes lay like dark snakes on the white ground.

Her stomach roiled as she stared at the lengths of nylon that had cut into her skin.

Deputies from the sheriff’s department were examining the roped-off scene as a camera from a helicopter recorded the whole tableau.

Jillian told herself to turn the damned television off, to stop looking at the place where she’d nearly died, but the images held a macabre fascination for her.

Even tucked in the warmth of the hospital bedding, she quivered. Her memories were vivid. Visceral. She remembered waking up tied to the rough bark, her flesh so cold it stung, the nylon rope digging into her skin like teeth.

She remembered the dark, gloved hands mashing that chemical-soaked rag into her face. And the glimmer of a scar on the wrist. Or was that her own wrist? She checked her arms, looking for a crescent-shaped scar. Nothing. Was it a memory? Or part of a nightmare?

Think, Jillian, think
, she told herself as the screen switched again to the anchor desk, and then, to her horror, they listed the names and photographs of the women who hadn’t survived the maniac’s attack—pictures of vital, smiling women. Jillian thought she might be sick as the voiceover continued and yet another victim’s smiling face filled the screen.

“…and as an update, the other victim who survived the killer’s attack, still unidentified, is listed in critical condition at a hospital in Missoula. The victim, we’ve learned, has not regained consciousness at the time of this report….”

Another woman survived?

Riveted, Jillian watched the rest of the newscast, much of which was devoted to reporting on the “Star-Crossed Killer” and his targets. She learned of the victims, of how they had endured the same fate as she, stripped of clothing and tied to a tree, where a star had been cut over their heads.

She clicked off the television and glanced out the window again to the night, where snow was falling rapidly, millions of tiny flakes visible as they danced in the light from the security cameras.

Even now, the killer could be outside.

Waiting.

The soft strains of music filtered in from the hallway, an instrumental rendition of “Silent Night.”

She was exhausted and, deep down, frightened. Yes, she’d survived, but how did she know the killer wouldn’t try again? She thought of Zane MacGregor, now behind bars, and of Harley, still alive but suffering…all because some whacko wanted her dead.

Why?

Who?

What unknown enemy had she made? One determined to take her life?

Back to the same old questions.

She thought of Aaron and their marriage, how at times it had been strained and distant. There had been incidents when he’d seemed to not be in the same room with her.

Jillian yawned, fighting exhaustion. Aaron hadn’t liked living in Seattle. A wanderer at heart, he’d wanted to get away from the gloom of the city, go somewhere with more seasons. He’d always brought up moving east, over the mountains….

All of her bones seemed to ache and she realized how truly spent she was. She could barely keep her eyes open and figured the hospital staff had slipped some kind of sedative into her IV.

Well, fine.

For tonight, she’d stop worrying about the danger that lurked outside the windows in the darkness. Maybe she could forget that something deadly and intent waited for her. Tonight she would stay in the hospital, warm and safe.

But come the morning, she was outta here.

As she started to doze off, the words to the Christmas carol slipped through her mind.

“Silent night, holy night.”

Uncomfortable, she drifted off to sleep.

Chapter Twenty-One

“MacGregor’s not our guy,” Pescoli ground out as she parked her rig at Shorty’s, an all-night diner on the main drag not far from the sheriff’s department. Shorty, a cook for a mining company back before the turn of the twentieth century, had established the restaurant and, though he was long dead, his name, in flickering neon, had been indelibly etched on the landscape. A huge sign had been planted near the highway sometime in the last century.

“I thought you were convinced he was good for it.”

Pescoli spit her wad of tasteless gum into a wrapper and tossed it into the ashtray. Rather than hear Alvarez bitch about her smoking, she’d found a pack of nicotine gum in her purse, popped a stick into her mouth and chewed it for the last hour or so as if her life depended on it. “I was hoping.” She cut the engine and threw open the door of her Jeep, nearly hitting the side of a King Cab truck that was parked cockeyed in the lot. “I
wanted
him to be good for it.” She locked the rig and trudged through the snow that was swirling down from the dark heavens. Would the storms ever abate long enough to give them a break?

“Me, too,” Alvarez admitted.

Shorty’s was long and low with a slightly pitched roof that was now thick with snow. Icicles dripped from the eaves and, in honor of the season, a leering, winking Santa had been propped on the roofline near one of the original smokestacks. Not so jolly, this Saint Nick. To Pescoli he looked like a pervert in a red suit and fake beard, a creepy old guy whose image had been captured on a plywood easel.

She shoved open a double set of glass doors and stepped into the “dining” area of the establishment. A wave of heat smelling of fried foods hit her hard in the face. For the most part, the open room with worn floor tiles was empty. It was too late for the dinner crowd and those patrons who remained had migrated to the sports bar that was attached via a short hallway where a vintage cigarette machine, circa 1960, still stood guard beneath “space age” dangling lights.

This was one of her regular hangouts, so just inside the door Pescoli plucked a couple of plastic-encased menus from the empty podium then walked to the back of the seating area. After taking off her jacket, gloves and hat and tossing them onto one of the faux-leather bench seats of a booth, she slid in beside them. Alvarez, too, stripped off her outerwear, but she took the time to stuff her gloves and hat into the pockets of her jacket, then hung everything on a peg attached to the side of the booth. They sat across from each other, Alvarez, as always, in a position where she could eye the front door.