Ready to Die

  Maurice Verdago was at the top of Alvarez’s list of suspects, though he’d climbed to that particular rung mostly due to the fact that he’d been out a while and now, after the shooting, had vanished.

  Poof.

  Just like that.

  Definitely suspicious.

  And Pescoli had always thought he was a prime suspect; she was pissed that, so far, he was nowhere to be found.

  Pescoli had mentioned talking to Eric Ingles, Allison Banks’s delinquent of a boyfriend, but he’d given up no info on the Banks family, and anyway, Cara Grayson Banks didn’t really seem the type to set up the killing of her ex. No, Alvarez thought, as Pescoli parked in a roped-off area near the beginning of a snowy hiking trail, the Banks family wasn’t likely to be involved, especially now with the discovery of Samuels-Piquard’s body. She believed that the two attacks were linked and couldn’t imagine why anyone in the Banks family would want the judge dead.

  Still, Pescoli was keeping the Banks family in the mix, so Alvarez wasn’t going to rule them out yet either.

  At the end of the road, they found another county SUV, parked at an angle, the tracks in the snow ending at its rear tires. Pescoli cut the engine and they climbed outside.

  The wind had died and the surrounding forest was silent, eerily serene, towering hemlock and fir trees flocked in white, the sky above blue, sunlight sparkling on the blanket of snow.

  As if she could read her partner’s mind, Pescoli said, “Doesn’t really feel like a crime scene, does it?”

  “What does?”

  Pescoli shrugged.

  They both strapped on snowshoes, then hiked the remaining quarter mile to where the judge’s body had been found, the sound of their boots crunching through the snow the only noise disturbing the tranquility. As they emerged from a thicket, they crested the ridge and, looking downward, saw the spot where the judge had fallen. A deputy, Beau Darville, dressed in uniform and relatively new to the department, stood over the half-frozen body. Sunglasses shaded his eyes and his jaw was set, his mouth a grimace. A second officer, Deputy Patrice Ferrier, was twenty yards away and talking to a couple, both of whom were in their twenties. Alvarez guessed they were the unlucky duo who had found the body.

  “Clear shot from up here,” Pescoli said before they made their way the final fifty yards to the killing ground.

  “Yeah,” Alvarez agreed. From the top of the rise, it would have been far too easy for anyone who was capable with a rifle to hit the judge, who, it appeared from the skis strapped to her feet, had been out for some exercise.

  As they made their way down the short hill, Darville motioned them over to the body. The judge’s body was lying faceup; though, from the disturbances on the snow-covered ground, it was evident that her frozen corpse had been moved.

  “Sweet Jesus,” Pescoli breathed. For the first time that Alvarez could remember, Pescoli looked away from the corpse before pulling herself together.

  “Looks like a single bullet to the brain. Clean shot,” Darville explained, pointing to a hole above the judge’s right eye. “Probably lodged inside. Not through and through.” Bloodstains on the ground confirmed what he’d already concluded.

  “Those are the hikers who found her?” Alvarez asked, with a look to the couple who were standing just outside the clearing with Deputy Ferrier.

  “Yeah, snowshoeing. Liam Maxwell, twenty-one, and his girlfriend, Raney Gorski. She’s twenty. Both home from Seattle, where they go to school at the University of Washington, for the holiday break. They’re both pretty shaken up. Ferrier and I caught the 911.” Darville sent the couple a sympathetic look. “They stayed up here with the corpse until we arrived.”

  Blood had caked, then frozen around the area of the wound. Alvarez knelt down to get a better look, noting that the judge’s hat was still partially on her head, red curls iced into position, eyes open as if she were staring upward.

  “They’d thought there might be some chance to revive her, but . . .” Darville shook his head. “No use. She’s been dead awhile.”

  Pescoli was eyeing the tracks from the judge’s skis, partially covered in snow. “She was coming from the direction of the cabin,” she said aloud, then scanned the surrounding woods. “He could have been anywhere up on the ridge. We saw several spots on the trail as we came over the hill.”

  “Haven’t looked yet,” he admitted. “Waiting for backup.”

  “We’re it.” Sheltering her eyes with a hand, she stared upward, along the crest, back to the trail on which they had just walked, searching for the exact spot where the assailant could have hidden. “Crime lab and coroner on their way?”

  Darville said, “Should be here anytime now.”

  “No other tracks?” Alvarez asked. “We only saw yours.”

  “None that we’ve seen, not a vehicle or a footprint or a ski track.”

  “They’ve got to be here somewhere unless someone helicoptered him in and out,” Pescoli said, her breath fogging in the icy air. “We got dogs? A K-9 unit on its way?”

  “Not yet.”

  “We might need them.” Still studying the area, her gaze scraping the frigid terrain, she squinted toward the forested crest.

  “You think dogs would help?” he asked.

  “Sure as hell won’t hurt.” Staring up the hillside again, her eyes scanning the ground, Pescoli said, “I’m going up to take a look.” Then to her partner, “Don’t worry, I won’t mess up the crime scene.”

  Alvarez was more interested in the witnesses. Gesturing to them, she asked, “They were the ones who moved her, right?”

  “Yeah, they admitted it.” Darville lifted a shoulder. “Just trying to help.”

  “I’d better talk to them,” Alvarez said, and started trudging through the calf-deep snow toward the small group. One of Liam Maxwell’s arms was wrapped protectively around his girlfriend’s slim shoulders. Even so, she appeared to be shaking, either from the cold or the horror of what they’d discovered, or, more probably, a little of each.

  “. . . it’s just awful,” the girl, Raney, was saying as Alvarez approached, her eyes round, her nose red and running. Strands of brown hair poked from beneath a heavy, Nordic-looking stocking cap with long, braid-like ties hanging by her ears.

  “It’ll be okay,” her boyfriend said, giving her a hug, but no smile reached his eyes. He appeared as upset as Raney but was trying to hide it. A reddish, scraggly beard covered the lower half of his face while shaded ski goggles obscured his eyes.

  “I know this is rough,” Alvarez said, “but can you tell me what happened? How you got here? What you saw?”

  “Again?” Raney swiped at her nose with the back of her gloved hand.

  “Please. Everything.”

  “That’s just it,” the girl said. “There’s not much to say. We were just trying out our new gear and . . .” Her gaze slid to the frozen body of the judge and she visibly shivered.

  Maxwell finished her thoughts. “And we saw something that didn’t look right, y’know, a flash of red on the ground. So we checked it out and saw that it was the judge. The red was her jacket.”

  “How did you know who she was?” Alvarez asked.

  “Her picture’s been all over the news,” he answered. “We saw a report about her on TV just last night.” He glanced at Raney, whose head was already bobbing up and down in agreement, the long braid-like ties of her stocking cap dancing weirdly around her chin.

  “I . . . uh, I just never thought we would, you know, find her,” the girl said, her chin wobbling a little. “Can we go now?”

  “Just a few more questions and then, sure,” Alvarez said, learning that they’d been staying in her grandparent’s cabin since winter break began, about three miles north. They’d started today’s hike from that cabin, had seen no other tracks, and their car had been parked in the lean-to garage ever since they’d first arrived.

  Which meant all the tracks in the snow now belonged to the police or, maybe, the killer’s vehicle,
assuming he had one. First, of course, they had to locate those tracks and hope no one else had traveled the surrounding, little-used roads over the past couple of days.

  “Did you hear or see anything or anyone up here during your visit?” Alvarez asked.

  “Nuh-uh,” the girl said, shaking her head vigorously.

  Maxwell added, “Not even a mailman or neighbor or paper delivery guy.”

  “That’s why we came here, to be alone,” his girlfriend said. “It’s way different at U-Dub. People are out all day and night. We . . . we just wanted to do something together. By ourselves.” She linked her gloved hand with her boyfriend’s and bit her lip.

  “No one out in the woods, skiing or sledding or anything? Maybe you heard the sound of a snowmobile or truck’s engine?” Alvarez suggested.

  “Uh-uh. Nothing. Until today. When we found”—Raney glanced at the corpse again and her face crumpled in on itself. “Could it have been a hunter?”

  “Maybe,” Alvarez said, knowing that it was legal to hunt some species at this time of year. Mountain lions and wolves came to mind. “But it’s unlikely. He’d have to have been blind not to recognize a human, and I think a hunter would have reported this kind of accident.”

  “Unless he didn’t want to get in trouble,” Maxwell pointed out. “People are such cowards.” His arm tightened over his girlfriend’s shoulders.

  “No reason to speculate.” This was getting her nowhere and Alvarez felt time slipping away. “Just tell me what you do know,” she suggested. “Go over your last few days.”

  “Well . . .” Raney began, then went on to say that she and Liam had left Seattle on Christmas Day. Only stopping for gas and food, they’d driven directly to the cabin where they’d built a fire, hung out, cooked over the hearth, and played cards and checkers on the board her grandfather had painted half a century earlier.

  They’d seen no one and nothing, aside from three deer peering through the leafless trees the day before.

  They claimed they couldn’t tell the police anything else, and though they dutifully answered any and all questions Alvarez could think to throw at them, they didn’t offer anything further. Nothing new came to light. They simply didn’t have any more information that would help the investigation.

  Alvarez let them go and returned to the body just as Pescoli returned from her reconnoiter. She said she’d found several spots where the assassin could have lain in wait for his victim, but the landscape hadn’t been disturbed, and enough snow had fallen that it would have obliterated the evidence if the judge had been dead for several days, which seemed highly likely by the state of the body.

  By the time the coroner showed up and the witnesses had snowshoed away, back toward their cabin, Alvarez and Pescoli decided they’d seen what they could. They trekked back to Pescoli’s Jeep, where the windows were fogged and the interior was ice cold. “Maybe we’ll find something at the judge’s cabin,” Alvarez said, clicking her seat belt into place.

  “I’d kill for a cup of coffee.” Pescoli fired the engine and backed around the coroner’s wagon, then slid her partner a glance. “What’re the odds of finding a java kiosk up here?”

  “About as likely as Santa Claus and the reindeer showing up.”

  “It’s too late for them anyway.”

  Alvarez smiled for the first time that day, though she didn’t feel any joy whatsoever. “You know, I heard once that if you throw a quarter up in the air in any major city in the U.S., chances are it’ll land a hundred feet from a Starbucks coffee shop.”

  “I don’t think whoever came up with that theory has ever been to the Bitterroots.”

  “I said, ‘major city.’ ”

  “Yeah, I know. Still, a cup of anything hot sounds good.” She fiddled with the Jeep’s heater, which only allowed cool air to blow onto the inside of the windshield. It lent no heat to the interior but did start defogging the glass. “Should warm up soon,” she said, turning the rig around, jockeying between the other county vehicles that had parked haphazardly at the end of the trail.

  “Good.”

  Ramming into first gear, she eased the Jeep down the hill. “You think this is the same shooter who tried to kill Grayson?” Alvarez asked.

  “No doubt in my mind,” Pescoli responded. “What are the chances that we’d have two similar attacks on the heels of each other? Slim and none . . . No, just make that ‘none.’ Whoever dropped the judge is an ace, a sharpshooter, so that should narrow the field.”

  “What happened with Grayson, then?”

  “I showed up just as the attack was going down. Probably rattled the guy, destroyed his concentration.”

  “So now you’re the hero?” Alvarez asked, but the joke fell flat.

  “Hardly.” Pescoli squinted as she guided the Jeep onto the little-used road. Sunlight was streaming through the woods now, dappling the forested terrain in beams that fractured and dazzled against the snow. “My bet is that when they dig that bullet out of Judge Samuels-Piquard’s brain, it matches the ones used on the sheriff.”

  “Looks like we’ve got a crack shot with a grudge against not only Grayson, but the judge as well.” Alvarez slid a glance at her partner. “Probably not Cara Grayson or any of the family.”

  Pescoli’s jaw tightened as she reached for a pair of sunglasses she kept on the dash. “I guess.” Slipping the shades over the bridge of her nose, she added, “At least it narrows the field.”

  “Potentially. If we cross-check violent cons Grayson sent up the river with those sentenced by the judge and find out which ones are out, we might find our killer.”

  “ ‘Might’ being the operative word.” The heater was starting to kick in, a little warm air filling the interior.

  “Here’s the turnoff,” Alvarez said, spying a barely visible sign marking Monarch Lane.

  Pescoli hit the brakes a little too hard and the Jeep slid a bit as she made the turn.

  “Fresh tracks,” Alvarez observed. “Probably from the deputies Brewster sent up here.”

  “They make a report?”

  “Just that she didn’t answer and her car was there.”

  “Did they go in?”

  “Yeah, her kid, Winston, told them where the spare key was hidden. And don’t ask; yeah, it was under the welcome mat.”

  “You talked to them?” Pescoli asked as the cabin appeared, a log structure with a sharp peaked roof nestled between thick stands of snow-flocked evergreens. The windows were dark, a holiday wreath hung near the clear glass door.

  She parked fifteen yards from the house. Several sets of footprints had broken through the snow and, true to the son’s word, a key was wedged beneath a doormat decorated with a reindeer’s head, colored lights twisted through its antlers.

  They let themselves in.

  “Nice place,” Pescoli observed, an understatement as usual. The living room stretched from the front porch to a back wall of floor-to-ceiling windows offering a peekaboo view of the lake far below. Water as blue as a summer sky shimmered between the snow-laden bows of fir and hemlock and spruce.

  Apart from Rudolph on the front porch, there were few decorations to remind the owner of the season, though candles were tucked between dozens of books that filled a bookcase, which, in turn, flanked a stone fireplace that rose to the peak of a wood-plank ceiling. A small display on the table, a glass bowl filled with red and green ornaments, was the only other bit of decor that gave a nod to the holidays.

  Neat and dust-free, the cabin was sparse, a chess set on the coffee table, a backgammon board, pegs ready, on the bookcase near a well-worn leather recliner.

  The kitchen was also uncluttered, no dishes left in the sink, nothing but a single place mat on the eating bar that separated the kitchen from another cozy space with an oversized chair and ottoman; three books and an e-reader sat on the small glass table nearby.

  Upstairs, the bedroom, a loft that held a king bed and a daybed under its sloping roof, was tidy—the bed made, the clothes in a wal
k-in closet hung with care. The judge’s medications and vitamins were arranged in a neat plastic case marked with days of the week. Judging from the contents, she’d taken her last dose on Christmas Eve.

  They walked through the house, searched the grounds, and came up with nothing other than her purse, laptop, iPad, and cell phone. A quick check of the incoming calls to her phone showed the same number dialing over and over again. Probably the judge’s son, Winston, who had called Missing Persons. The lab would go over each item, and technicians would check the data from the judge’s e-mail and social media accounts, anything she’d done online in the past few weeks and months. Maybe something would turn up, some piece of information that would link the killer to his victim.

  Outside they discovered her vehicle, a new Lexus SUV, parked in a separate garage. The keys were in the ignition, registration and insurance information in the glove box confirming that the SUV belonged to Kathryn Samuels-Piquard. Aside from the keys, a receipt for gas and an empty coffee cup in the holder, the vehicle was clean. Also, nothing seemed disturbed in the garage, though they would double-check with the judge’s family, and, of course, crime scene techs would process every inch of the house, garage, and surrounding grounds.

  Maybe they’d find something.

  Pescoli could only hope.

  “Doesn’t look like robbery was a motive,” Alvarez said as they walked along the broad porch that connected the two buildings, then wrapped around to the back of the house to the spectacular view. “So we’re back to the scumbags who are out of prison.”

  “And the family.”

  “Always the family.”

  “Kind of warms the cockles of your heart, doesn’t it?” They waited for the crime scene unit, though Pescoli wouldn’t bet on them finding much. They’d go over the place looking for trace evidence or prints on the off chance the killer had been inside; though, it seemed, from the looks of things, it was unlikely. To her practiced eye, the house and garage looked clean.