Left To Die (46 page)

Alvarez lifted a shoulder, but by the time Sandi came around, Pescoli had thought twice about it and ordered a Diet Coke, hamburger and curly fries. “Live a little,” she advised Alvarez.

“I’m thinking more like ‘live a little
longer,
’” Alvarez said, and ordered a spinach, apple and hazelnut salad with broiled chicken in lieu of bacon and hot tea with lemon in lieu of alcohol.

“Still fighting a cold?” Pescoli asked.

“I’ll be all right.”

“Whiskey might help.”

“Couldn’t hurt.” But she stuck with tea, adding extra slices of lemon when Sandi delivered the drinks.

Pescoli sighed. “You know, you get pregnant and bring home a baby, this precious, innocent little bit of life whose whole future is in your hands, and you think, ‘I’m gonna do everything right for this kid. I’m going to be the best damned mother he could want and his life is going to be perfect. I’ll make sure of it.’ He’s little and sweet and inquisitive and crazy about you and…” She shook her head dolefully. “And then life happens to the kid. Little things like scraped knees and slivers and forgotten homework assignments. Then bigger things like being bullied on the playground and teased cuz his mother’s a cop, and then really big things like losing his dad and suddenly gaining a stepdad and a sister and a divorce and…oh hell. Suddenly, and I mean it seems like that,” she said, snapping her fingers, “…he’s seventeen and in trouble. Big trouble.” She leaned back in her chair and took a long swallow from her Diet Coke.

“But you don’t regret your children.”

“Not for a second.”

“And you’d do it again.”

“In a heartbeat.” Pescoli nodded. “So what about you? Why no kids?”

“It just never happened,” Alvarez lied, then added in all truthfulness, “I never found the right guy.” That much was patently true. The boys she’d met in high school were unimpressive, and then there had been the “incident,” as her mother had called it, though they both knew better. Alvarez didn’t want to think about it now, what had happened to her when she was seventeen, just Jeremy’s age, but it was always chasing after her, a ghost touching a cold finger against the back of her neck, a faint voice echoing in her ear.

You have a son. Somewhere. A boy you haven’t seen since he was a few minutes old….

“You still looking?”

“What?”

“For a husband. You’re only thirty-two.”

“Three. I’m thirty-three.”

“Not exactly ancient.”

“Well, yeah, but I have this job,” Alvarez said, trying to lighten the heavy conversation. “It takes up a lot of time.”

“That it does. And believe me, sometimes husbands are vastly overrated.”

Sandi returned with their orders and they lapsed into silence, letting the buzz of conversation and the soft strains of music fill the gaps while they ate.

Alvarez was about half-finished with her salad, though her appetite had waned with talk of children and her headache was back, her nose still threatening to run, when a gust of cold air caused her to look up. Grace Perchant, dressed in some kind of medieval-looking tunic and long velvet coat, walked slowly from the foyer into the dining area. She was about to be seated, following Sandi toward a window booth, when she stopped suddenly.

“Uh-oh,” Alvarez said. Grace, the woman who saw ghosts, communed with the dead and had found Jillian Rivers’s Subaru while walking her wolf-dog, froze in her tracks.

Pescoli looked over her shoulder. “Oh Christ.”

At that, Grace’s head swiveled and her faded green eyes zeroed in on Pescoli.

“Great,” she whispered, “just what we need,” as Grace walked unerringly to their table.

Grace’s usually calm expression had lost any trace of serenity as she laid a long-fingered hand over Pescoli’s shoulder before the cop could pull away.

Pescoli scooted her chair back, out of Grace’s reach, and instinctively reached for her sidearm, before she caught herself.

A couple with two kids at the next table stopped eating to stare.

“He knows about you,” Grace whispered, those weird eyes fixed on something in the middle distance, on a point, Alvarez was certain, only she could see.

“Who?” Pescoli asked.

“The predator. He knows about you.” Grace’s words were murmured but loud enough to cause every hair on the back of Pescoli’s neck to stand on end.

“What predator?” But she knew. Alvarez saw it in her eyes. They both knew.

“The one you seek.”

“We seek a lot of predators.”

“This one is different. This one is evil….”

“They are all freakin’ evil, Grace, but I figure you’re talking about the whack job who leaves women in the friggin’ blizzard. That the one?” Pescoli demanded, but her face, instead of turning red with rage, had whitened. “I sure as hell hope he does know about me, cuz I’m going to nail his ass.”

“Don’t listen to that, honey,” the wife at the next table warned her son of about ten.

Grace was unmoved. “He’s not afraid.”

Pescoli gave her a long look. “The last time we met, I believe you told Alvarez, ‘You’ll find him.’ What happened to that?”

Grace’s gaze, that faint, watery green, slid to Alvarez, then back again to Pescoli. “I’m speaking to you now.” Again she touched Pescoli’s shoulder with her fingertips, and again Regan pulled away. “You, Detective, are in grave danger.”

“It comes with the job, Grace,” Pescoli said, brushing off the woman’s warning, some of her color returning.

“Be careful.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Be more than careful. He’s relentless. A hunter.”

Alvarez snapped to attention. Hunter? She was out of her chair in an instant. “Come on, Grace, let’s go outside and have a talk.” She put a hold on the weird woman and escorted her into the vestibule, while patrons nearly fell out of their seats watching her. They moved past the glowering eyes of the grizzly bear done up in holiday attire and into an empty, dark room used for banquets. Pescoli was only a step behind.

Once away from the interested eyes of the patrons, Selena released Grace and said, “If you know this son of a bitch so well, why don’t you save us all a lot of trouble and tell us who he is.”

Grace frowned. Rubbed her arm as if wounded. “There is no reason to get violent. I’m just warning you. Her.” She slid Pescoli a confused glance.

“What’s this about him being a hunter?” Alvarez asked.

“He hunts his prey.” Grace’s face had a wounded look to it, and she kept rubbing her arm, as if she couldn’t believe the policewoman had been so angry with her for imparting her wisdom.

Alvarez wasn’t backing down, wasn’t buying into the frightened-deer routine. “So why are you warning Pescoli, singling her out?”

“When I walked into the dining area a few minutes ago, I sensed a disturbance in the atmosphere, heard a voice in my head.”

“And what did that voice say?” Alvarez asked with extreme patience.

“Regan Elizabeth Pescoli.”

Alvarez glanced at Pescoli, who nodded and swallowed hard. “You know my middle name?” she asked.

“Not until a few minutes ago.”

“It’s common knowledge,” Alvarez heard herself saying, but Pescoli was shaking her head. “I use my maiden name for my middle name. Regan C. Pescoli. C for Connors. Not E for Elizabeth. I stopped that in grade school.”

Alvarez felt a chill deep in her heart. Something was wrong here. Very wrong.

Pescoli stepped closer to the odd ghost whisperer of a woman. “How did you know what my middle name was, Grace? Have you seen my birth certificate?”

“It came to me. I can’t explain any further. I just know that you’re in danger, and instead of roughing me up and pushing me around, I would think that you’d thank me.”

“Is there a problem in here?” Sandi strode into the darkened banquet room and her pinched lips said it all. “I got me a room full of people trying to eat their lunch here after church and all, and then you go and make a scene.” Her eyebrows were raised high over the frames of her glasses, her green eyelids stretching. “This might be called Wild Wills, but it’s a family kind of restaurant. I’ve no use for any arrests or police shenanigans.”

“It’s all right, Sandi,” Grace said with her usual calm. “I was just warning the detectives.”

“Warning them?”

“Everything’s under control,” Alvarez assured Sandi, and she headed out of the banquet room to the register. “What do we owe you?”

“Just a sec. I’ll get the tab!” Sandi was quick as a cat in retrieving her tickets, adding their bill and handing it to Alvarez.

“I assume I can leave now?” Grace asked Pescoli.

“You’re free to go,” Pescoli said. Grace sent her a strange look as she headed back to the dining area. If she noticed the interested gazes following her, she didn’t show it, didn’t so much as falter in her steps toward her table.

Alvarez retrieved their jackets and met up with Pescoli. “You owe me ten,” she said, stuffing her arms down the sleeves of her down coat.

“I’ll buy next time.”

“You bet you will.”

Together they walked outside. The wind was kicking down the street, smelling of the river, and Alvarez, yanking on her gloves, noticed the clouds beginning to roll in again.

She felt a chill, as much from the scene with Grace Perchant as the breeze plucking strands of hair from the knot at the base of her neck.

As one, she and Pescoli jaywalked to the Jeep. Once again the temperature seemed to be falling.

“Good thing you didn’t smack Grace’s face down in the middle of my catsup and fries,” Pescoli said, as if to break the tension. “Now
that
would have been a scene.” She unlocked her Cherokee and climbed inside.

“Sandi would have had a heart attack.” Alvarez climbed into the passenger seat again and rubbed her hands together, trying to get warm. “What do you think about what she said?”

Pescoli checked her sideview mirror and fired up the engine. “About the hunter? God, who knows?”

“No, about you.” Alvarez buckled up as the Jeep darted between two cars. “Her warning.”

“Grace is a nut job.”

“Yeah, I know, but…”

“But nothing, and don’t give me any lip about having a smoke, okay? This is my last one.” She pulled a final cigarette from her pack of Marlboro Lights, and for once Alvarez didn’t make a sarcastic remark as she lit up, cracking the window, holding her filter tip just outside in an effort to draw out the smoke. Whether Regan Elizabeth Pescoli was admitting it or not, she was shaken up. Grace’s predictions weren’t always spot-on, but she had enough of a track record that it would make anyone worry.

“If the sicko comes after me, I’ll be ready.” She snorted. “How stupid would he be to target a cop?”

“Maybe he wants to make a point. Keep showing us how clever he is.”

Regan drew hard on her cigarette, then shot a stream of smoke out of the corner of her mouth. “You know, if anyone wants to get back at me or put a hit on me, it’s my ex. Lucky’s making noise about taking the kids.”

“Really?”

She snorted. “I should let him have ’em. It wouldn’t last a month.” She switched lanes and melded the Jeep into the traffic heading up the hill to Boxer Bluff. Alvarez didn’t like what had gone down in the restaurant and was worried. She stared out the window, where snow was falling rapidly again, and as the Jeep climbed she caught a view of the falls, wild white water tumbling over a ledge of rocks that had forced settlers to homestead on the lower banks nearly two hundred years earlier.

“Right now, Lucky’s the fun parent,” Pescoli went on. “I’m the authoritarian.” She slid a glance in Alvarez’s direction. “I can’t friggin’ win for losin’.”

A cell phone blasted. “It’s mine,” Alvarez said.

“This is Grayson,” the sheriff said when she answered, his voice low and disturbed. “Jillian Rivers checked herself out of the hospital here in town. In the company of Zane MacGregor.”

Alvarez groaned. “Is she nuts?”

“Nothing we can do. She doesn’t want protection. We think she’s not the target of the serial, and my guess is, she’s going out of our jurisdiction. The Feds aren’t involved, since it’s not a kidnapping or part of the ongoing serial-killer investigation.”

“Great.”

“It only gets better,” Grayson assured her. “We just got a call from Chandler up in Missoula. Hannah Estes died this afternoon. Someone pulled her life support before the Feds got up there.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The problem with returning to Spruce Creek was that it was located in the wrong direction. North and west of Grizzly Falls, it was backtracking away from Missoula, where Jillian was certain all the answers to her questions lay.

Or was she?

She still had the feeling that she was missing something, a piece of important information that was right under her nose or locked deep in her damned subconscious. But she’d gone along with this plan, hoping she’d learn something in Spruce Creek, the last place she’d stopped before someone had decided to use her Subaru as skeet practice.

They drove into the small town and had no trouble locating the coffee shop/deli/diner where she’d stopped. MacGregor parked, and with Jillian still using the troublesome crutch, they made their way up a few steps and through ancient glass doors.

The Chocolate Moose Café wasn’t anything to write home about. A once-upon-a-time post office and general store, it had been converted into a coffeehouse and diner, which now seemed to be in the middle of a major renovation. Part of the walls were painted a dusky blue, another part mustard yellow, the rest brick red, and Jillian wasn’t certain if the colors were supposed to be complementary or if the owner had just run out of paint and scrounged around in the garage for whatever was left over.

But what the Chocolate Moose Café lacked in ambiance it made up for in enthusiasm, as there were moose replicas everywhere—all reigned over by a huge stuffed moose head hanging over a potbellied stove that no longer seemed to work. There were moose salt and pepper shakers, napkin holders, napkins, pot holders, and moose silhouettes in the plaid of the checked tablecloths and stenciled on the walls in the opposing colors of paint. Each chair had a moose head painted on its back and there was moose memorabilia for every kind of collector.