Born To Die

  He looked suddenly uncomfortable and worked hard at smoothing his hair while avoiding her eyes.

  “What happened?”

  He hesitated. “Okay, I got laid off.”

  Her heart took a nosedive. “Because?”

  He shrugged his big shoulders. “Dunno. The economy, I guess.”

  “You guess?” Not now. She didn’t need this now.

  Jeremy heaved a loud sigh, then fell onto the couch. The old springs groaned. Cisco leaped up to his lap, and he absently petted the wriggling dog’s head. “I got fired,” he admitted.

  “Fired,” she repeated in a careful voice.

  “Lou claims I stole from the station, that the receipts didn’t add up.” Head lowered, he looked up at her from the tops of his eyes. “Swear to God, Mom, I didn’t do it.” His Adam’s apple bobbed, and his big hands clamped over his jean-clad knees.

  “You told Lou that?”

  “About a hundred times! You know what? I think it’s either Manuel or Lou himself, like maybe he’s covering his ass. Manuel’s a good guy. Really honest. But I thought Lou was, too. Shit!” He gritted his teeth. “How could this happen?”

  Her heart was pounding, and a mixture of anger and fear slid through her blood. “I don’t know, Jer, but you have to fix it. Figure it out. If you didn’t do it—”

  “If ? Really? You don’t believe me?” He was shocked and offended, his lips flattening. “Come on, Mom!” Slamming a fist onto the arm of the couch, he declared vehemently, “I’m not a thief! Someone set me up!”

  “You didn’t let me finish, Jer. I was saying that if you didn’t do it, then you have to find out who did. Prove it. It couldn’t be that tough. The station has cameras and records of all the transactions.”

  “Are you crazy? You think they’re going to let me see any of them?”

  “They’ll have to if you sue them and they fight it. Your attorney will—”

  “I don’t have an attorney, and I can’t afford one. Get real!” He was starting for the back stairs.

  “Where are you going?”

  “My room.”

  “You moved out, remember?”

  “It’s still my room.” Big feet began clomping down the steps.

  “I was going to turn it into a sewing room.”

  “You don’t even sew!” he yelled up the stairwell.

  His door slammed shut, though not with the same righteous, passionate thud as Bianca’s had.

  “I’m a failure as a mother,” Pescoli confided to the dog. “A complete and utter failure.” Opening the toolbox, she searched for a screwdriver with which to pry the pins out of Bianca’s door hinges. After digging through the rarely used wire cutters, pliers, and wrenches, she found a large screwdriver with paint drips on it, proof she’d used it to force open stubborn paint cans, and was about to attack the door in question when her cell phone rang.

  “Pescoli,” she said as she pressed the talk button.

  “Alvarez,” her partner answered her. “I think you should come up to the bluff over Grizzly Falls. Looks like a jogger slipped and fell over the railing up around the park. No ID on her.”

  “Dead?”

  “Nearly. EMTs are working with her. Probably an accident. It’s slippery as hell out here.”

  “Don’t you have enough to do with the cases we’ve already got?” Pescoli asked. “This isn’t even a death yet, much less a homicide.”

  “Hmmm . . . yeah.”

  “Well, it beats what’s going on here,” Pescoli decided. “I’m on my way,” Pescoli said, tossing the screwdriver back into the open toolbox. Clicking off, she yelled loudly toward her daughter’s closed bedroom door, “This is a reprieve, Bianca, but only a short reprieve. I’ll be back.” For once she didn’t change her voice into her pathetic Arnold Schwarzenegger impression.

  Today, she figured, it wouldn’t be appreciated.

  Cisco trotted after her as she headed for the back door. “Not this time,” she told the dog as she zipped up her insulated jacket and stepped into her boots. She patted him on his furry little head. “Today you’re in charge.” His tail began moving so quickly, his whole rear end nearly gyrated. Then she slipped out the back door to the garage, where her Jeep was still dripping melting snow.

  She opened the garage door, slid behind the wheel, and backed out. Jeremy had parked in his usual spot, as if he’d never taken a stab at moving out. There was a part of her that wanted him back home, but that was a purely emotional mother response. She knew better, had witnessed some of her friends allowing their kids to yo-yo in and out of the house.

  That wasn’t for her.

  The kid had to start making some serious choices.

  She threw her Jeep into gear, hit the remote on the visor, and saw the garage door begin to close.

  How had it come to this, where she and her kids were forever testing each other, and they were determined to make the wrong choices? Last year, when she’d been in the clutches of a madman, thinking she would never see either of her children again, she’d vowed to make it up to them, to either turn in her badge or change her ways, work only a forty-hour week, put her family above all else. And her kids, too, had promised to change their self-involved habits, to walk the straight and narrow, get good grades, make the right choices, never give her a minute’s grief.

  All those New Year’s Eve vows had been broken by Valentine’s Day, and they’d slipped into their same old, dysfunctional routines.

  Maybe she’d made a mistake by not moving in with Santana. Maybe a strong male role model was just what Jeremy and Bianca needed.

  “It’s never too late,” she told herself.

  Obviously what she was doing alone wasn’t working.

  On the outskirts of town, where the neon lights began to glow, she told herself to close her mind, for the moment, to her kids and their problems and turn her attention to whatever lay ahead.

  By the time she reached the crest of Boxer Bluff, she saw police and rescue vehicles, their lights strobing in the night, flashing red and blue on the surrounding snow. Firemen, rescue workers, and several cops were working the scene of the accident. Alvarez, dressed in department-issued jacket and hat, was standing near a short, crumbling wall overlooking the falls and talking with one of the town cops.

  Pescoli nosed her Jeep into an empty parking slot near the park as two medics loaded a woman on a stretcher into the back of a waiting ambulance. A crowd of about fifteen people had gathered, all craning their necks and talking amongst themselves beyond a police perimeter. A news van and camera crew were following the EMTs’ every move as they transported the injured woman.

  Pescoli flashed her badge at the town cop, who seemed to be in charge of keeping the bystanders at bay.

  “What gives?” she asked Alvarez.

  “She’s alive, but barely. Looks like she was jogging and either tripped or slid and fell over the rail.” Alvarez indicated a spot where the snow was disturbed on the top of the crumbling guardrail, an old rock wall that had been built over a hundred years earlier and was barely two feet high.

  She shined her flashlight over the broken snow and path where the woman had fallen over the cliff face. “She hit on that ledge down there and somehow didn’t slide farther, into the river. It’s a miracle that she’s alive.” The beam of her flashlight played upon the broken ground below.

  “Is she conscious?”

  “No. Don’t know how long she was out here or how serious her injuries are, or if she’ll make it.” Frowning, Alvarez shined the light back on the path. “Too many footprints and too much snow to see if anyone was with her.”

  “And no ID, no car?”

  “Her run didn’t start here, just ended here.”

  “But you think it’s more than an accident.”

  “Unknown.” But Alvarez was clearly puzzled, eyeing the snow-covered path where dozens of footprints had been left. “The crime scene guys are doing what they can, separating out her prints, the ones that match her sho
es, and they’re looking for anything that might help, other prints.”

  “Nothing on her to ID her?”

  “Just a key. No cell, no iPod, or anything else.”

  “She could have just tripped.”

  “Yeah.” Alvarez’s breath fogged in the air.

  “No witnesses?”

  Alvarez shook her head.

  “Who found her? And please don’t tell me it was Ivor Hicks or Grace Perchant,” she said, mentioning a couple of the locals who had a history of being in the middle of trouble. Ivor thought he’d been abducted by aliens years earlier, and Grace Perchant claimed to talk to ghosts. Pescoli didn’t think either of them was all that reliable.

  “No,” Alvarez said. “Iris Fenton was out taking a walk.” She motioned to a woman bundled in a heavy down coat, gloves, and a red stocking cap, from which silvery curls protruded. “She lives on the other side of the park with an invalid husband. Already checked her out.”

  Pescoli was nodding.

  Alvarez glanced to the departing ambulance. “Hopefully she’ll wake up and tell us she’s just a klutz.” She then eyed the embankment, the steep ravine, and the river, tumbling over the falls, the water roiling wildly far, far below. “Helluva place to slip so hard that you vault over the rail and land just where the cliff drops off, four feet from the wall, right here at the very top of the bluff. A few years ago this part of the hill fell away.” She ran her light over the outside of the rail, to make her point. In either direction the drop-off beyond the guardrail wasn’t as sheer, the vegetation more viable, but the spot where the accident occurred was the most steep. “Real bad luck.”

  “That why the crime scene people are here?”

  She nodded. “I’ve already called Missing Persons. We’ll see if we can find out who she is. In the meantime, I want to go to the hospital and talk to the docs who examine her, find out if her injuries are consistent with her accident.”

  “Which you’re not buying.”

  “The jury’s still out,” Alvarez said as she reached into her pocket and withdrew her keys. “You coming?”

  “Meet you there.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Early the next morning Trace looked out the front window and saw snow falling steadily, only to pile up around the fence posts and drift onto the front porch.

  Eli was still asleep, though he’d had a bad night, the pain in his arm and his cough waking him every few hours. In the end, around three this morning, Trace had carried the kid downstairs, and together, with Sarge curled up near the banked fire, they’d bunked on the oversized sectional. At five thirty Trace had woken, let the dog out; then, once Sarge had taken care of business and Trace had started the coffee, he’d turned on the television to catch the weather report.

  The first thing he’d seen was a woman reporter on the screen, snow covering her blue hooded jacket, a microphone clutched in her gloved hands as she stood near the entrance to the park on the crest of Boxer Bluff. Rescue and police vehicles were visible behind her, lights flashing in the dark as snow continued to fall. She was speaking to the camera, but her voice was too soft to hear.

  Trace scooped up his remote and upped the volume.

  “. . . where an unidentified female jogger was discovered just an hour ago on a rocky ledge that juts out over the river nearly a hundred feet below street level.”

  The camera panned behind the reporter, to the steep grade and an area below. A narrow shelf protruded over the roiling water, and upon it was one rescue worker in a harness, a coil of rope in his hands. The snow on the ledge had been disturbed by boot prints and what Trace assumed was the area where the jogger’s body had lain before the rescue.

  “You can see how lucky this unknown jogger was,” the reporter was saying. “Had she slid off the ledge, she would have fallen into the river.” The camera panned to Grizzly Falls, where white water sprayed and churned before a swift current sliced beneath a hundred-year-old bridge and past the glittering lights of the town.

  The camera’s eye returned to the reporter. “This is Nia Del Ray,” and she signed off to the two anchors sitting behind a joined desk. The blond female anchor clarified, “That footage was shot last night, and the latest report from the hospital is that the woman is in critical condition, but the identity of the jogger has not yet been confirmed.”

  Trace stared at the set and felt that same sense of doom that had been with him when he’d visited Jocelyn’s apartment. Without a thought to the time, he picked up the phone and dialed Ed Zukov’s number. He’d need his neighbor’s help; someone would have to look after his boy for a couple of hours. Though he didn’t want to believe that Jocelyn Wallis was the unidentified jogger who’d lost her footing and nearly her life at the crest of Boxer Bluff, he had to find out.

  Pescoli’s cell phone rang sharply near her ear.

  She groaned and rolled over to the side of the bed, scrabbled for the damned thing where it was charging on her night table and knocked her reading glasses onto the floor.

  “Great,” she muttered as she flipped on the lamp, then said into the phone, “Pescoli.”

  “I think you’d better come down here,” Alvarez said as Pescoli eyed the clock near her bed. The digital readout shone a bright red 5:57.

  “And ‘here’ is where? The station? Geez, Alvarez, it’s not even six. What the hell time do you get up in the morning?” How could anyone be so alert at this god-awful time of day?

  “Yeah, the station. I think we might get an ID on the Jane Doe.”

  “Give me half an hour.” Pescoli rolled out of bed and stumbled into the main bath, where she yanked off her University of Montana Grizzlies football jersey and panties, then stepped under a much too cold shower spray.

  Twenty-eight minutes later she was walking toward the back door of the sheriff’s department. Ignoring the rumbling in her stomach and Joelle’s winking snowflakes in the windows, she clomped the snow from her boots and walked inside, down a series of short hallways to Alvarez’s desk, where her partner was busy talking to a tall man in an unzipped fleece jacket, faded jeans, work shirt, and sporting a dark beard stubble. He was sitting in the visitor’s chair but got to his feet as she approached.

  Alvarez glanced up. “This is my partner, Detective Pescoli, and he”—she hitched her chin to indicate the visitor—“is Trace O’Halleran. He thinks he knows who our Jane Doe is.”

  O’Halleran’s lips pinched at the corners a bit. He shook Pescoli’s hand. “I just think it’s an odd coincidence that a woman I know is missing about the same time. She jogs, too, and I dropped by her house yesterday because I heard she hadn’t shown up for work.”

  As Alvarez waved him back into his chair, she listened to O’Halleran while he explained that he and Jocelyn Wallis, a schoolteacher whom he’d met through his kid at Evergreen Elementary, had dated a few times and that the relationship had stopped before really getting started. Then, yesterday, he had gotten a call from a friend who worked at the school and was informed that the Wallis woman hadn’t shown up for work. He’d noticed she had phoned him but hadn’t left a message, so he’d gone to her apartment, investigated on his own by letting himself in with a hidden key he knew where to find, and subsequently discovered her missing. Her purse and car had still been at her home. As had been her phone. He’d found it odd, as it was out of character for her; to his knowledge Jocelyn Wallis had never missed a day of work.

  “Then I saw this morning’s news,” he said, wrapping up. “That woman was pulled from an area of the park ... one of the trails Jocelyn runs. So, I came to you.”

  Pescoli watched him closely all through the recitation. He seemed earnest, intense, and worried. His hands were clasped between his knees, the thumb of his right hand working nervously. He hadn’t called her family, hadn’t wanted to worry them, thought maybe the school would start contacting friends and relatives, and hoped that she would show up.

  He was emphatic that he and she weren’t dating. There had been no big blowup; they’
d just quit seeing each other. It had been O’Halleran who had cut things off.

  Pescoli wanted to trust the rancher. Handsome in that rugged way she’d always found sexy, he was used to working outside and had the winter tan to prove it. His thick hair brushed the collar of his fleece jacket, and his hands were big, calloused, and had a few tiny white scars. A single father whose wife, he’d admitted, had left him, O’Halleran seemed sincere, and he had come in of his own accord, but that didn’t mean a whole helluva lot.

  She’d seen the most pious, timid of men turn out to be cold-blooded killers.

  “So, is this Jocelyn Wallis?” Alvarez asked as she slid a couple of pictures of the battered woman to him.

  O’Halleran swept in a breath. “God, I hope not,” he said fervently but studied each of the two shots. “I—I don’t know. Maybe. Jesus.”

  “I’ve got a few pictures of Jocelyn Wallis,” Alvarez said.

  “From the school’s Web site?” Pescoli guessed.

  “Motor vehicle division.” Alvarez clicked on her keyboard, and a driver’s license appeared on the screen. The woman in the picture was somewhere in her early thirties with a bright smile and long reddish brown hair.

  “Could be.” Pescoli looked at O’Halleran. “Any identifying marks? Tattoos? Scars? Birthmarks?”

  He lifted a shoulder. “Don’t know.”

  “You didn’t see her naked?” Pescoli questioned. “She didn’t talk about any surgeries or injuries as a kid? Or getting a tattoo?”

  “We didn’t get that far.”

  “You didn’t sleep with her?” Pescoli asked.

  He hesitated and looked down at his hands before meeting her eyes again. “Once. At her place. I didn’t see anything. She didn’t tell me about anything like that, but she did wear earrings. Three in one ear, I think, and two in the other.”

  “That’s something,” Pescoli said. “So why don’t you come down and see if you know her?”

  “The hospital will allow it?” he asked.

  “We’ve got friends in high places.”