Expecting to Die

  Maybe.

  Stretching her arms over her head and twisting her neck, she eyed her computer monitor, where pictures of the crime scene were displayed, the screen cut into four images with different angles of the victim visible.

  The girl in the photos was definitely Destiny Rose Montclaire. Not only had she been reported missing, but distinguishing marks had helped the department ID her. The victim’s stature, her coloring, her tattoos, and a scar, which was still visible on her ankle from a surgery she’d endured as a four-year-old, had matched those described on the missing persons report.

  Two deputies had been dispatched to her home in the wee hours.

  At 4 AM, her ashen-faced parents had walked into the viewing room of the morgue, where, in abject horror and denial, they had identified the unknown girl’s remains and promptly broken down.

  It was the worst part of her job, Alvarez thought now as she reflected on the scene. She’d been little comfort to the father, whose lip had trembled as he’d held his wife as she collapsed against him. Alvarez had warned them about the condition of the body, but, of course, both had insisted on viewing their daughter despite her disturbing and grotesque appearance. Helene Montclaire, a heavyset woman with filmy blond hair and drizzling blue eyes, had keened and crumpled in that tiled room, her knees giving way and buckling as she took a long look at the corpse that had once been her child.

  “No, no, no!” she’d cried, needing to deny what her eyes had confirmed as she’d clung, fingernails twisting in his T-shirt, to her white-faced husband. He’d appeared haunted, his eyes shining with unshed tears, his hands shaking despite his efforts to stay strong.

  “You’ll get whoever did this,” Glenn Montclaire had stated through lips that had barely moved. It wasn’t a question.

  “If it does prove that Destiny was the victim of homicide—”

  “What else could it be?” he’d cut in, pained dark eyes cutting into her. “What? An accident?”

  “We’ll know more after the autopsy,” she’d replied, not wanting to go into the possibility of suicide. “We will do our best. I’ll see to it personally.”

  “Make sure your best is good enough.” He had held her gaze as a tear slid from the corner of his eye and his wife, Helene, buried her face in his shirt. Her shoulders had been shaking, her muffled sobs echoing against the tile walls and floor of the sterile room.

  “And once you confirm that . . . that this wasn’t an accident, check out Donald Justison,” he’d added as his wife’s sobs increased, her shoulders shaking in the cold room with its tile walls.

  “Justison?” Alvarez had repeated, making a mental note.

  “Yeah. Don Junior, the mayor’s son.”

  The mayor being Carolina Justison.

  “Donny’s her ex-boyfriend. A pissant loser if there ever was one. And a stalker! He couldn’t leave her alone after she broke up with him.”

  “Is that right?”

  “You bet it’s right. He’s been calling her. Harassing her!” His once-ashen face showed color again.

  “Do you know if they’d been together recently?”

  “Probably.”

  “When was the last time you saw your daughter?”

  He’d looked at his wife. “A week ago last Friday. Around eight o’clock. I already put all this in the report I gave to the missing persons officer.”

  “I know. Just refresh my memory.”

  “It wasn’t anything unusual. Not at the onset. She’d come back from volunteering at the hospital. Northern General. She’s worked there for nearly a year. First in the cafeteria and lately in the children’s ward. You know, played with the kids, read them stories and such . . . and . . . that was, I don’t know, maybe around six, I guess, because she said she stopped off and saw a friend before driving home, so she was later than usual. Her shift is over at five. Then, after dinner, she went out for a walk. Never came back.”

  “With anyone?”

  “Alone.” Glenn had shaken his balding head. “Someone called and no, she didn’t say who, but I heard her phone ring and then she took off, said she’d be back in an hour or so. We didn’t think anything of it. It was still light, probably seven, seven-thirty. She did it all the time. Loved being outside in the summertime. Ever since she was a kid.” His voice had cracked. “Oh, Jesus . . .”

  “Had she done this before?”

  Destiny’s mother had given off a soft mewling sound.

  “A couple of times. That’s why we didn’t report it until . . . until well into the next day, after we’d checked with some of her friends. No one had seen her or talked to her or texted or nothin’.”

  “Did you talk to Donny?”

  “He wouldn’t answer the phone,” Glenn had said bitterly. “So we filed a report.”

  “My baby, my baby, my baby,” Helene had whispered brokenly, and her husband had held her for several minutes, whispering into her hair to comfort her when he, himself, was blinking back tears.

  “We’re going home now,” he’d said, shepherding his wife out of the viewing room. “Come on, Helene,” he’d whispered. “It’ll be all right.” Then he’d thrown Alvarez a final dark look that said what they both knew: It would never be all right. Not ever.

  Alvarez had barely been able to control her own emotions, which was unusual. She prided herself on staying calm and keeping her expression unreadable. She’d trained herself, practiced remaining emotionless for years, ever since high school, when she’d had to rein in her feelings, her anger and shame and hatred after her girlhood had been stripped from her.

  She could usually pull it off—the heartless ice-princess image—but grieving parents got to her. Always had. Her heart had bled for the Montclaires.

  Now, despite her lack of sleep and the fact that her eyelids felt like sandpaper scraping against her eyes, she was bound and determined to do whatever it took to find out what had happened to Destiny Rose.

  Officially, the jury was still out on whether Destiny had met with foul play or suffered a fatal accident.

  But Alvarez was betting on option one.

  Nonetheless, she’d withhold judgment until all the facts were in. Cause of death determined. Alvarez had requested a rush on the autopsy.

  She pushed her desk chair back and made her way past Blackwater’s office on her route to the lunchroom. The acting sheriff hadn’t yet arrived, but then few had at this early hour. She hesitated for a second at the closed door, one that had always been left ajar when Dan Grayson was sheriff. Her heart twisting, she remembered how she’d looked up to Grayson, even fancied herself in love with him at one time, how comforting it had been to see him at his desk, his Stetson hung on a peg, Sturgis, his black lab, curled on the dog bed near his desk. Grayson had had an easy smile and there had been kindness and intelligence lurking in the depths of his firm, uncompromising stare.

  She still missed him.

  And though she was now deeply involved with Dylan O’Keefe and was considering marriage to the private investigator, she would never forget Dan Grayson. She couldn’t. He still came to her in her dreams, even once when she was locked in O’Keefe’s embrace. A bit of guilt ran through her at the thought, but Grayson had been her mentor and so much more. There had never been a physical relationship between them, but there had been a connection, an unspoken meeting of the minds or souls or whatever you wanted to call it. Though rationally she couldn’t explain it, she felt that link still existed.

  Which was ridiculous, of course.

  And against everything she held true.

  She’d always been a realist, trusted the facts, relied on science. Anything considered remotely paranormal was dismissed as just plain bunk. Reaching out to the dead or communing with spirits in a twilight world of afterlife was folly. Dreams were just dreams, misfires of neurons in her subconscious. Nothing more.

  For a nanosecond, she considered Grace Perchant, a loner of a woman who lived outside of town with two hybrid dogs, each part wolf, and believed she co
mmuned with the dead and was a conduit from this world to the next, could even see the future.

  Alvarez hadn’t bought any of it, though the ghostly woman with white-blond hair and pale eyes had made some predictions that had come eerily close to the truth and it had put this niggling, persistent doubt in her brain.

  Was it possible that she, Selena Alvarez, could somehow communicate with Grayson?

  No. Not a chance. She knew better. Dan Grayson did not “visit” her in her dreams. It was just her subconscious working its way through her grief and guilt. Nothing more.

  Yet, as she stood outside his old office, she placed her hand, fingers splayed, on the solid wood frame, and whispered, “I miss you.” Then, squaring her shoulders, she forced herself to shake off her case of nostalgia and continued down the hall toward the lunchroom. Time to bury her ancient fantasies. She was now with the man who was certainly the love of her life, and the dreams she was having of Grayson were all because of her own guilt that she’d survived when an assassin had taken him down. It was still so unbelievable that no one in the department, including herself, had been able to protect the man who had helmed this office with such a fair and even hand.

  In the break room, which smelled faintly of coffee and some pine-scented cleaner, she glanced through dust-streaked windows mounted high overhead. The sun was rising, thin shafts of light oozing through the dirty panes as the sky started to lighten, dusty lavender turning to a hazy blue. She eyed the half-empty pot that had been warming for hours over a hot plate, but decided today was not the time to start a coffee habit. Instead, she heated water in the microwave while scrounging through the basket of tea bags and settling on the last packet of chai green.

  Dunking the bag in her cup, she returned to her office. At her desk, she rotated her neck, stretched her arms over her head, and tried to release some of the tension from her muscles. Then she sipped from the hot brew and once again looked over the information that had been gathered from the crime scene, the pictures and video now on her computer. She’d already read all of the statements from the kids they’d found at the reservoir. She skimmed them again, hoping she’d missed something important the first time through, but they didn’t hold much information. Everyone interviewed said he or she had come to the area to “hang out” or “party” or “play a game.” Each had been reluctant to name their peers and had denied any use of alcohol or drugs. Most importantly, they’d sworn they didn’t know about the victim, who, it seemed, had been in the creek for over a week. Unless the body had been moved, but so far there was no indication that it had been.

  Alvarez frowned. She hated that the kids were holding back, but she had to agree that the victim had been dead long before the party with its bizarre game of hide-and-seek had begun. That, of course, didn’t mean any of the kids didn’t know more about the girl or who might have been with her at Reservoir Point.

  The teenagers and their code of silence irked her, but she understood it. While in high school, she’d kept secrets that should have seen the light of day, secrets that could have changed her life and the lives of her own set of friends, her own family.

  Her lips flattened as she considered that old black cloud of her own past, then steadfastly pushed it aside. For now, she had to concentrate on the job at hand. She thought of the kids gathered up at the Point last night, Bianca Pescoli included.

  “Teenagers,” she muttered.

  Boot heels rang down the hallway, and from the sound of the purposeful stride, she guessed the acting sheriff had arrived.

  Though she missed Dan Grayson’s easy manner and quick smile, she didn’t really mind Cooper Blackwater as a boss. If she took her feelings for Grayson out of the equation, she knew that Cooper Blackwater was a good cop, thorough and determined. His attitude meshed well with hers: all business. He was very “gung-ho,” as Pescoli said, and his style was crisp, almost military, but it worked for him. Though he was more inclined to use the media to his advantage, get his face on camera while the department was working a case, he didn’t seem overly conceited or self-aggrandizing, not to Alvarez anyway. His cocky attitude was different from his self-deprecating predecessor, but still effective. Detractors had faulted Grayson for being “too laid-back” or “not hands-on enough” or “too folksy, everyone’s best friend.” For Blackwater it was just the opposite, “too cold” or “too ready for a photo op” or “more interested in power and climbing his way to the top than in helping the people of Pinewood County.”

  It seemed here, in Grizzly Falls, you were definitely damned if you did and damned if you didn’t.

  “How’s it going?” Blackwater asked as he paused in the open doorway to her office. His black hair was military-clipped, his jaw freshly shaven, his dark eyes interested and piercing. His coloring and bladed features probably harked back to a Native American ancestor, presumably the same one who had handed down his surname. “I saw our victim is definitely the Montclaire girl,” he said, his eyes showing a little bit of empathy. “Anything new on what happened? Don’t suppose the autopsy’s been done yet? Probably not started.”

  “I put a rush on it.”

  As if her request weren’t good enough, he said, “I’ll make a call.”

  “Good.” She wouldn’t let herself be irritated that he pulled rank, using his influence as sheriff. Whatever worked. “’Til we get the results, we’re not sure what we’re dealing with.”

  “Which is?”

  She gave him a quick, brief update on what they’d discovered, most of which he probably already knew. She finished with, “I’ve got a list of family, friends, and acquaintances that I’ve added to current and ex-boyfriends. We’re checking phone records and trying to confirm who was the last person to see her and when that was, double-checking it with the missing persons report and cross-referencing any names to those kids who were up there last night, but that, so far, seems to be just a coincidence.”

  “No such thing.”

  “Maybe.”

  “What’s with Pescoli’s kid being up there?”

  “Part of the group. All friends, or at least they all knew each other, ran with the same crowd.”

  “And the Montclaire girl?”

  “No. At least she wasn’t tight with any of them. Most of the kids said they knew her or had seen her in school, but no one admitted to being her friend.”

  He leaned against the doorframe and rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. “I hear Pescoli’s kid thought she saw a monster or Big Foot or something.” Dark eyes pierced hers. Questioning.

  “She doesn’t know what she saw. But something was chasing her.” Alvarez felt her muscles tense a bit. She was ready to defend Bianca, if necessary.

  But Blackwater’s attention had turned to her computer monitor, where the picture of Destiny Rose Montclaire’s body was visible. “You think she was murdered?” he asked, nodding to the screen’s disturbing image.

  “It’s definitely a possibility. Trying to figure it out.”

  His eyes narrowed. “I’m betting homicide, but don’t quote me on that.” He flashed a rare smile. “I’m not a betting man.” With a couple of slaps to her doorframe, he said, “Keep me in the loop,” then charged down the hallway toward his office.

  “Will do,” she said, though it was to herself. And she wasn’t going to take his bet. She, too, believed that someone had killed Destiny Rose Montclaire. She didn’t have the proof yet, but she’d lay odds that when she received the autopsy report, she’d find that the victim had been murdered.

  She turned her attention back to the names of friends, neighbors, family, and anyone considered an enemy or adversary. The ex-boyfriend whom Glenn Montclaire had mentioned, Donald Justison Junior, was at the top of her list. She’d done a preliminary check on him and found out that Justison, barely nineteen, had already had a couple of run-ins with the law, little brushes that hadn’t come to much, but she wondered if Mommy Mayor had stepped in for him, cleaned things up.

  Now you’re starting to think lik
e Pescoli.

  She sipped her rapidly cooling tea, the sweet scent of chai filtering up her nose, the warm liquid soothing.

  There was nothing in the files to suggest that Carolina had used her municipal influence to save her kid’s reputation.

  Anyway, Alvarez was definitely getting the cart before the horse. First, the department had to have a confirmation that a homicide had been committed.

  She flipped through the computer images, pictures of the rotting body in the creek, pale hair floating around a decomposing face, then an earlier yearbook shot of a blonde girl with wide, ingenuous blue eyes, a turned-up nose, and a timid smile.

  What happened to you? Alvarez thought, setting her cup aside to study the image of the girl who appeared so innocent. So far, she didn’t have a profile on the girl, didn’t understand her relationship with her parents, family, or friends. She’d just begun to scratch the surface of Destiny Rose Montclaire’s life.

  Why, she wondered, would anyone want this nearly angelic-looking girl dead?

  CHAPTER 6

  Pescoli opened a bleary eye and saw that it was ten o’clock and sunlight was streaming through the cracks in the blinds to stripe the foot of her bed. Santana wasn’t with her; he’d probably gone to the Long ranch to oversee the daily routine and, it seemed, he’d taken the dogs with him or at least moved them from the room. There were now three canines, a pack in Pescoli’s groggy mind. She envied her husband’s energy; he’d been up as late as she, filling her in on the trip to the hospital before he’d fallen asleep. Fortunately, Bianca’s injuries were minor, and she was only supposed to wear a splint to stabilize her foot for a week or two to make sure she didn’t tweak it again.

  She threw back the covers but continued to lie in bed. The bedroom was warm despite the fan moving the air slowly overhead and the summer breeze that wafted into the room from the open sliding door that led to the deck.