Born To Die

“Wonderful!” Joelle was pleased with herself. “Now, don’t forget to leave him or her little gifts at least one a week, until Christmas!”

  Pescoli unfolded the piece of paper, and her stomach dropped as she read the name scrawled across the small scrap:

  Cort Brewster.

  “I have to draw again!” she blurted.

  Joelle snatched back the basket and raised a condescending, if perfectly tweezed eyebrow. “There are no doovers, Detective. That’s what happens when you come late to the party.”

  Pescoli wanted to argue the point but decided she couldn’t stoop to groveling over something so trivial. She nearly forgot her cup of coffee as she left the lunchroom, with its festive snowmen and sparkling lights, and made her way to Alvarez’s cubicle.

  Her partner, as usual, was bent over paperwork. “Trade with me,” Pescoli said.

  “What?” Alvarez glanced up.

  “For the Secret Santa thing. Trade with me.”

  For once, Alvarez actually laughed. “No way.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I.”

  “The whole thing is ridiculous,” Pescoli grumbled.

  “So don’t worry about it. Just buy some candy or a DVD or something, leave it on Brewster’s desk, and call it good.”

  “You know?”

  “I am a detective. No one else’s name would get you so agitated.” Her smile was knowing. “You could have some fun with this, you know.”

  “It’s not that easy,” Pescoli said, thinking of how the undersheriff and she hadn’t gotten along since the debacle last year, when Jeremy had been arrested. At the time he’d been with Heidi Brewster, and her father had intervened. Pescoli hadn’t, and her son hadn’t really ever forgiven her. Nor had Cort. He seemed to blame Pescoli for her son’s and his daughter’s bad behavior.

  “Sure it is. Or opt out.”

  “Joelle said—”

  “That it was mandatory? Seriously? The Secret Santa thing? I don’t think so, but I’ll double-check the personnel policy manual.”

  “Do that,” Pescoli said, annoyed.

  Alvarez’s grin widened, and she slowly shook her head. “Since when do you listen to Joelle?”

  “Since I don’t want to appear to always be bucking the system.”

  “Then quit bitching, okay?” Alvarez turned her attention back to the stack of papers in front of her. “I hate it when you start whining like a baby.”

  “I can’t believe you bought into it,” Pescoli declared, then noticed her partner’s expression turn more serious, her eyes darken a bit. “Is this a sheriff’s department or a damned bridge club?”

  “Maybe we could all use a little Christmas spirit,” Alvarez said, adding, “Don’t you have something more important to worry about?”

  “Only about a million things.” Not only her work, but there was that meeting at the school later today to discuss Bianca’s waning interest in anything to do with Grizzly Falls High School. Then there was Jeremy . . . always Jeremy.

  “So forget Secret Santa. Who cares?”

  She was right, Pescoli supposed, sipping her cooling coffee on her way to her office. It was nothing and yet she was bothered. Working with Cort Brewster and having him as her boss were bad enough; sucking up to him by buying inane little Christmas gifts turned her stomach.

  “It could get worse,” Alvarez said.

  “I don’t see how.”

  “Joelle could have your name.”

  Pescoli closed her eyes and shuddered, envisioning myriads of plastic elves, cards that sang Christmas carols, windup nutcrackers with their grouchy faces, and chocolate reindeer, which Joelle, no doubt, had already squirreled away. Soon some of those items could litter her desk, every day a new and even more ridiculous cutesy Christmas gift hidden between the gory images in her homicide files.

  “Pray that isn’t so,” she muttered under her breath and found her way to her desk, where so far, thankfully, no tiny surprises from her Secret Santa lay in wait.

  “You gotta let it go.” Gail Harding had sneaked up on Hayes, approaching his desk without him knowing. The department was buzzing, voices filtering over the half walls, telephones jangling. Jonas Hayes had barely noticed. He’d been lost in thought.

  Shelly Bonaventure’s file lay open on his desk, her death certificate on the top of the stack of papers, her picture, a head shot taken just last year, staring up at him.

  “I’m not letting anything go. Not yet.”

  “Her death was ruled a suicide.” Harding pointed to the appropriate line on the certificate. “See here? Cause of death. Probable suicide.”

  “Probable being the operative word.”

  “Case closed. It’s over.”

  Hayes shook his head and shoved back his chair. “It doesn’t hurt for me to work on this, on my own time.” He stood and, in so doing, towered over her by nearly a foot. They were an odd pair, he knew. He was an ex-jock, a black man who still kept his body honed with ratball and weights, and she was a petite white girl with spiky red hair and huge eyes.

  “I’m on my way over to an ‘accident’ on Sepulveda, a few blocks from the airport. A motorcycle pulled into oncoming traffic. First reports are that there was no reason for it. It looked intentional. The Honda, with a rider on the back, got hit by an SUV going the other way. You coming?”

  He grimaced. “Wouldn’t miss it.”

  Glancing at the file one more time, he gave it a cursory scan before shutting it and following Harding to the elevators. She was probably right. It was time to let the Shelly Bonaventure suicide go, but he just couldn’t.

  They’d interviewed most of her friends and family, none of whom had seen the suicide coming. Yes, there had been a little talk of depression, and yes, her career wasn’t on the upswing, and her love life had been nonexistent for the past year, but suicide still seemed unlikely.

  The bartender at Lizards had mentioned that she’d been flirting with a man who hadn’t paid with a credit card and whose image hadn’t been clear on any of the security tapes of the building. But he had left after Shelly and, according to the one camera near the front door, had headed in the opposite direction that Shelly had taken twenty minutes earlier.

  Just a chance meeting at the bar?

  Or something more?

  “Hey!” Harding said as they pushed open the doors and stepped into the warm winter sunshine. Seventy-five degrees, and already the local stores were decorated to the max with wintry Christmas images, festooned with fake fir trees and even faker snow. Santas, reindeer, elves, and gingerbread houses were on display, and it wasn’t quite Thanksgiving.

  Strings of colored lights had been wound over the trunks of the royal palms, their fronds billowing in a balmy breeze blowing in off the Pacific.

  Christmas in L.A.

  He slid into Harding’s car. The interior of her hatchback was sweltering, and he rolled down the window. “Okay, so tell me, why do you think someone murdered Shelly Bonaventure?” she asked.

  “Not sure.”

  “She had no enemies, no angry boyfriends, no life insurance, no will, and less than three hundred dollars in the bank. Her biggest assets were a ninety-five Toyota and her cat. Who would want her dead?”

  “I don’t know,” he reiterated as she tore out of the lot, her lead foot pressing hard on the accelerator.

  “Yet,” Harding added as she sped toward Sepulveda. “You didn’t finish your sentence. You don’t know yet. You’re not letting go of this.”

  “I’d just like to personally talk to the guy at the bar. He’s the last one to have seen her alive. He might remember something more.”

  “Good luck with that. You’ve heard about needles and haystacks, right?”

  “Right.”

  She slashed him a knowing grin as she took a corner a little too fast. “That might not ever happen.”

  For once, he couldn’t argue.

  But he still wanted to have a chat with the mystery man at the bar.

 
Trace grabbed his cell phone by the third ring. As he did, he noticed that it was nearly four and caller ID listed Evergreen Elem. as the caller. Eli’s school. “Hello?” he said into the phone.

  “Mr. O’Halleran? This is Barbara Killingsworth, the principal here at Evergreen Elementary. I was just calling to check on Eli.” In his mind’s eye, he pictured the woman: midforties, impossibly thin, with pinched features and a wide mouth that was forever in a tight, forced smile.

  “He’s doing all right,” Trace said, glancing over at his son, who was sleeping on the couch, his arm in the cast, the television turned to some movie he wasn’t watching, the dog curled at his feet. “But I want to know who was supposed to be watching him.” He walked into the kitchen of the old farmhouse and pulled the swinging door to the family room shut so that he wouldn’t disturb Eli.

  “We had several teachers on playground duty.”

  “And none of them saw the potential danger in . . . ?” He let his question fade away and forced his anger at bay. What was the point? He knew accidents happened. No one at Evergreen Elementary was malicious or even inattentive. The kids were just messing around, and his boy got hurt. End of story. He didn’t want to come off like some overprotective jerk, and yet when it came to Eli . . .

  “I’m very sorry.”

  “I know. Look, he’s got a double ear infection and possibly strep throat, so I’m going to keep him home for at least a couple of days.”

  “I’ll have his teacher e-mail you, and tell Eli that we’re all thinking of him.”

  “I will,” he said and hung up just as he heard a rumble outside. He glanced out the window and saw Ed Zukov’s truck as it rolled down the twin ruts of the long drive.

  Sarge, who had been sleeping seconds earlier, lifted his scruffy head and gave a low bark.

  “Shh!” Trace headed for the back door.

  Ed and his wife, Tilly, were the neighbors a quarter of a mile down the road and had been friends of his father. Trace had known the couple, now in their seventies, all his life. He walked through the kitchen and back porch with Sarge at his heels.

  The wind was picking up, causing the old windmill’s blades to creak as they turned and the naked branches of the trees in the orchard to rattle. Snow was falling steadily now, big white flakes swirling and beginning to cover the ground, as the old truck slowed to a stop near the pump house.

  Spry as a thirty-year-old, Tilly hopped down from the cab of the ancient truck the minute her husband cut the engine. “We heard about Eli,” she said, a baseball cap covering her head as she marched around the front of the old Dodge. She was carrying a hamper, which wasn’t unusual. In the face of any crisis, Tilly Zukov turned to her pantry and stove.

  “He’ll be fine.” Since Tilly was a world-class worrier, he decided not to mention the ear infections. “How’d you know?”

  “I have a niece who works in the kitchen at Evergreen.”

  “Small town.” Ed, a solid man with a wide girth and arms as big as sapling trunks, slammed the door of his truck behind him and followed his wife up the two stairs of the screened-in back porch. “Jesus, it’s cold!”

  “Ed! Do not take our Lord’s name in vain,” Tilly reprimanded as they stopped just inside the kitchen door. In her plaid jacket and faded jeans, she was tiny, half her husband’s size, but she obviously ruled the roost. Her hair was steel gray and tightly permed, and rimless glasses were perched on the bridge of her tiny nose. From behind the lenses, dark eyes snapped with intelligence. To Trace, she said, “I brought over some stew and fresh baked corn bread, and some ranger cookies, ’cuz they’re Eli’s favorite.”

  “She also brought a pie,” Ed added. He took off his trucker cap, showing off a bald spot in his snow-white hair, then unzipped his down jacket, beneath which were bib overalls and a flannel shirt.

  “I had to!” Tilly insisted. “I wanted to try out this new recipe I found in the Better Homes and Gardens, last year’s holiday edition. It’s pumpkin custard with sour cream.”

  Trace eyed the pie. “Sounds great. But, really, it wasn’t necessary.”

  “Course it wasn’t.” Tilly was already stuffing the pie into his bare refrigerator. “But I wanted to give it a whirl before I served it on Thanksgiving. Ed’s sister, Cara, she’s pretty picky, so you and Eli are my guinea pigs.”

  “Nothin’ wrong with the old recipe,” Ed grumbled.

  “The one on the pumpkin can?” she demanded. “We’ve had that every year for the past forty-five years! Time to try something new.”

  “It’s a tradition.” Ed was unmoved.

  Tilly rolled her eyes. “Oh, show some originality, would ya, Ed?”

  “Cara likes it,” Ed pointed out.

  “What does she know?”

  “You’re the one trying to impress her.”

  “And I don’t know why,” Tilly admitted. “Ever taste her banana cream? Soggy crust. Overripe bananas. Horrible! Just ... horrible!”

  “Then quit tryin’ to impress her, and make the damned recipe that comes with the fillin’.” Her husband sighed broadly, his teeth stained slightly yellow from years of chewing tobacco. “I always say, if it ain’t broke, then don’t fix it.”

  “You always say a lot of things, and I don’t listen to too many of ’em! Now, let’s quit bickering and I’ll heat up the stew.”

  “She’s a bossy one, ain’t she?” Ed said to Trace.

  “And you love it!” Despite the bite to her words, she sent him a fond glance, the kind they’d shared since high school, some fifty-odd years earlier.

  “Seems to have worked out between you two,” Trace observed.

  “That’s because he usually does what I ask.”

  She began fiddling with the stove as her husband said, “I thought I’d help you with the livestock. Tilly, here, was frettin’ and fussin’ over at the house, worried you wouldn’t be able to get the chores done with Eli laid up.”

  Tilly’s features pulled into a knot as she turned to Trace. “It’s just that I didn’t see how you’d leave the boy and take care of the cattle all at the same time.”

  “Dad?” Eli called from the living room.

  “Right there, bud!” Trace slipped through the swinging door and found his son in his stocking feet, looking groggy. “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Who’s here?”

  “The Zukovs. Come on into the kitchen.”

  “Is that my boy?” Tilly called loudly, and for the first time all day, Eli smiled.

  He was already tossing the blankets aside when Trace said, “I think she brought you something.”

  “I heard that, and I sure did!” Tilly raised her voice and added, “Eli, you come on in here and sit up to the table. We’ll have ourselves some cookies and milk and a quick game of checkers. That is, if you don’t mind being beat.”

  “I’m pretty good!” Eli was already through the swinging door and finding the box of checkers on the shelf in the dining cove.

  “We’ll see how good you are.... Oooh weee, take a look at that cast, would ya, Ed?” Tilly had placed a plate of cookies on the table and had poured Eli a glass of milk as she spied the boy’s arm. “Blue as a summer sky!”

  “That it is,” her husband agreed.

  Beaming, Eli scrambled onto his chair and began pulling the checkerboard out of its battered, taped-together box.

  Ed, who had snatched a cookie, was at the back door. “Let’s go deal with the cattle.”

  Trace snagged his jean jacket from a hook near the back door, then stepped into his boots and followed Ed along a cement path that petered into a trampled dirt trail on the other side of the gate that separated the yard from the barnyard.

  Snow was still falling steadily, covering the ground in a fine layer that allowed patches of grass to poke through. Most of the cattle were already inside the barn, and when Trace pushed open the wide doors, rolling them aside, the smells of hay, dust, and dung reached his nostrils.

  He climbed to the hayloft, his boots ringing
on the metal rungs as the cattle mooed and shuffled. Once in the loft, he pushed bales through the opening in the old floorboards. They landed with soft thuds, and Ed took over, slicing through the string and breaking the bales before strewing them in the manger where part of the herd of Hereford and Angus mingled.

  Once the bales were scattered inside the barn, they carried several outside the doors to a covered area, where the roof was supported by poles, and mangers and a water trough filled the inner area.

  Cattle shifted and lowed, their black and red hides wet where snow had melted upon them, their breaths fogging in the cold air.

  After the herd was cared for, Trace and Ed walked to the stable, and the whole process started over again, though Trace owned only four horses, so the job was quicker. They added grain to the mangers, and Trace rubbed the palomino’s muzzle and scratched the ears of the dun, who tossed his head, his dark eyes gleaming with fire.

  By the time they returned to the kitchen, the scents of garlic and rosemary filled the room. Tilly’s stew was simmering on the stove, and it looked like Eli was beating his mentor at their game of checkers.

  “You’re sure you didn’t cheat?” Tilly teased him.

  “No way!” Eli insisted. Half his milk had disappeared, and the crumbs on the table in front of him indicated he’d had at least one of Tilly’s cookies.

  Trace had just taken off his boots when his cell phone jangled.

  “Second time that’s happened since you went out to feed the cattle,” Tilly observed as her final checker was captured by a beaming Eli.

  “Better see who it is.” Trace gave his son a high five, then scooped up the phone as it jangled for the fourth time. “Hello?”

  “Trace? This is Mia Calloway. I’m the school secretary at Evergreen and . . . well, how’s your boy? Eli?”

  “Doing better. I already talked to the principal.” He was walking out of the kitchen and into the living area, where he could have a little more privacy.

  “Yes, yes, I know. . . . This isn’t really about Eli,” she admitted and seemed a little nervous. “It’s about Jocelyn Wallis.”

  His stomach tightened, but he didn’t say a word, just let her ramble on.