Disgusted at the turn of her thoughts, she snapped off the lights and reminded herself that even though tomorrow was Saturday, she had to go into the office.
But tonight her town house seemed empty. “Well, come on,” she said to the cat as she mounted the stairs.
O’Keefe was still good-looking, sexy in a rough-and-tumble kind of way. He was also the man to whom she’d nearly bared her soul and given her body, the one to whom she’d gotten way too close and had definitely gotten burned. Her irresponsibility in San Bernardino had nearly gotten herself and O’Keefe killed. He had the visible scars to prove it and she the night terrors. Her rashness had cost him his job.
Now, as she stripped out of her street clothes and slipped into a huge T-shirt, guilt crept through her mind like a cold, dark snake. She should have known better. She’d been foolish and reckless. If she hadn’t been involved with O’Keefe, if she hadn’t crossed that sometimes blurry line that separated business from pleasure, she wouldn’t have been so emotionally wrung out and wouldn’t have made the crucial mistake of getting into a madman’s line of fire. In so doing, she’d forced O’Keefe into shooting the suspect before he could be questioned.
O’Keefe had quit before he’d been fired, but the truth of the matter was that Alvarez had been young, dumb, green and stubborn, convinced of her own brilliance and infallibility. Though O’Keefe had been older, and theoretically wiser, he’d been sexy as all get-out and determined to get her into his bed. Theirs had been a fiery relationship and she’d gone as far with him as she’d dared, as far as her freaked-out mind had let her.
On the night of the shooting at De Maestro’s cottage, Alvarez had made a bad decision that had nearly cost lives and certainly gave De Maestro room to point his crooked finger at the department and its employees.
All in all it had ended as a lose-lose-lose situation, and after O’Keefe quit, Alvarez had eventually made the move to Grizzly Falls. Having learned her painful lesson, she’d never allowed herself to get close to anyone again, the lone exception being Pescoli, and even that relationship was primarily professional.
She clicked off the overhead light and walked to the window, where darkness was held at bay by the snow on the ground, a blue-white mantle reflecting the watery illumination of a few street lamps. It was quiet outside, snow beginning to fall again, a peaceful setting, but she sensed an evil in shadows, all the more frightening because of the serenity of the night.
Outside a killer loomed large, hiding in the shadows, ducking through the alleyways, but ever vigilant. It was almost as if he could see her here, standing on the inside of the glass. Goose bumps rose on the back of her neck as she searched the shadows. Though she usually had no faith in “feelings” or “sensations,” tonight she experienced a soul-numbing coldness that reminded her that malevolence existed in the very actions of man.
She squinted, saw a movement, a shadow sliding across the white snow, but just out of focus, the edges of whatever dark form muted by a thin veil.
I’m coming for you, she heard, ricocheting through the recesses of her mind. I’m coming for you and there is no escape.
“Hogwash,” she muttered, “Adoquin!” It was her grandmother’s favorite admonition whenever she thought one of her many grandchildren were being foolish.
Refusing to freak herself out, Alvarez snapped the blinds shut and slid into the cold sheets as Jane jumped onto the bed. The cat, already purring, made a big production of finding the right spot on the pillow where Alvarez had once thought a man might rest his head.
That fantasy seemed impossible now, though the reappearance of Dylan O’Keefe into her life had softened her perspective a little. She couldn’t help remembering how much in love with him she’d once believed herself to be.
“Adoquin,” she repeated in a whisper. Closing her eyes, she refused to think of O’Keefe and how, after all the years and heartache, she was still attracted to his slow, sensual smile and the glint of bad-boy humor in his eyes, and the way his jeans hugged his butt. He would only break her heart. Again. And he might just want a bit of revenge for what had happened in the past.
It didn’t matter anyway, she told herself as she plumped her pillow and turned over. She had a major intimacy problem. Major. Courtesy of her cousin Emilio half a lifetime ago.
Damn that darned paperboy!
He never showed up on time, at least not early enough for Mabel Enstad, who rose well before dawn, around four o’clock in the morning, and wanted to read her newspaper with her morning tea and biscotti before her husband woke up. It was going on six now and Ollie, as always this early, was still sawing logs, his snoring rippling down the hallway and sounding like a flock of agitated geese.
She peered through the curtains and noticed that it was snowing heavily again, yet there were no tracks near the mail/newspaper box indicating that the daily had been delivered.
“Lazy whelp,” she’d muttered, knowing full well that the delivery “boy” was really Arvin North, a thirty-six-year-old deadbeat father of four who fought his ex-wife for every nickel of child support she wanted. It galled Mabel to think that any of her hard-earned money went to the lazy loser, and at this time of year, when people gave a special gift to their mail and paper delivery people, Mabel sent a Christmas card and forty dollars in crisp ten-dollar bills, anonymously of course, to Roberta, the ex–Mrs. North, a lovely woman who sang in the church choir. Mabel always included a note with the money, instructing that each of Roberta’s deserving children receive one of the bills for Christmas. As she let the drapery fall, Mabel made a mental note to go to the bank later this week and pick up the new bills so she could make her donation. However, as the curtain closed, she noticed something in the side yard between her house and the Swansons’.
A snowman ... make that a large snowman, or maybe even a woman nearly anatomically correct, sat directly in front of the snowman her grandchildren had made two days ago. The “woman’s” rump was pushed right up against what would have been the groin of Frosty.
“Oh, for the love of Saint Pete,” she grumbled, knowing who the culprits were. They lived next door. Rented the old Brandt place and had been trouble ever since. Those neighbor kids, the Swanson boys, were trouble. Though she couldn’t prove it, of course, Mabel was certain the teenagers had been behind the rearrangement of her Christmas yard ornaments just last year. The lighted, grapevine deer were her pride and joy and she placed them, along with a plastic Santa and his wife, strategically in her yard. The lights she’d strung in the fir trees only added to the charm of her display.
Buck, the larger of the deer, even moved its head slowly side to side.
Last year, that randy, mind-in-the-gutter Jeb Swanson had moved the perfectly innocent deer into the most unflattering and positively disgusting position, mounting it upon its more serene and unmoving mate as if they were fornicating! In the yard. A few feet from Santa and Mrs. Claus!
Now, it seemed, they’d come up with a new, perverse prank. Nasty little hellions! Destined to become criminals if the parents didn’t take charge and quick!
And now look!
In her slippers, Mabel, muttering to herself, hurried to the back door, where she plucked her jacket off a hook and stepped into her waiting boots. She threw her knit cap onto her head and pulled on a pair of gloves before grabbing the big flashlight that Ollie kept by the back door.
Trudging toward the front of the house where four new inches had added to what was already half a foot of old snow, she made her way to the front yard, past her still intact Christmas display. So far, Santa, his wife and the deer hadn’t been touched, but in the space separating her house from that of the Swansons’, the snowman had definitely been messed with.
She had half a mind to bang on the Swansons’ door and wake up the whole darned family, dragging them out of their snug beds to take a gander at what the sons had done. “Should be enrolled in art class,” she muttered under her breath and noticed that the coal eyes of the snow woman had b
oth fallen onto the ground ... or weren’t anywhere to be seen ... No, actually, as she shined her light over the abomination, she realized that there were no finishing touches, no top hat or stick arms or carrot nose, as there were on Frosty directly behind her.
Nor was there a satisfied smile or a dangling cigarette on the snow woman’s face, the kind of thing that would be just up those little brats’ alley. To her horror, she even wondered if they’d taken Frosty’s carrot nose and placed it lower ... but, no! His nose was where it should be, thank the good Lord!
“Weird,” she said aloud, and heard the sound of a car behind her. She glanced over her shoulder and noticed the twin beams of headlights cutting through the veil of snow as a car came over the rise. Finally! That miserable paper delivery man decided to make his appearance, after six A.M., no less! Mabel told herself she needed to call the distributor of the paper and complain.
Too bad Arvin would get a view of this snow woman, a creation who definitely had curves in all the right places, even if she had no face, no scarf, no ... What the heck was that?
Mabel squinted at the foul snow sculpture.
As the headlights from the approaching car flashed over the snow woman, something glinted beneath the dusting of powder, something bright and sparkling, high on the middle “ball” of the woman’s body. Leaning over, Mabel shined her flashlight more directly on that area, a few inches below where the neck would be and, yes, there was something brilliant buried in the packed snow, something reflective.
“What the devil?”
As the beams from Arvin’s little Mazda’s headlights washed over the snowman, Mabel scowled and brushed away some of the snow that had collected as she tried to get to the glinting bit of metal ... A ring, maybe? She had to work at it, scraping away the packed snow, her fingers, deep in her gloves, feeling a hardness that was surprising until she realized that it wasn’t snow beneath the night’s dusting, but ice. Thick, solid ice.
She felt the first niggle of anxiety.
The hairs on the back of her neck raised.
Jumping Jehoshaphat! Was the ring ... was it ... oh, my God, inserted through a nipple? A real breast?
Revulsion rippled through her and a new fear clutched at her heart. Was this “snow woman” a real woman, dead and trapped in ice? “No ... oh ... no ...”
Jumping, startled as she heard the sound of her paper being slammed into its box, she brushed aside more snow, higher up, on the head of this sick creation.
Her heart was beating wildly now, panic settling in, and she wondered why she hadn’t picked up Ollie’s shotgun propped by the back door. She could have loaded that sucker before venturing out ... Oh, dear God in heaven, she remembered what she’d seen in the news about a woman frozen and left in one of the town’s church’s nativity scenes.
Surely that was an isolated incident.
This couldn’t be ...
But as she brushed away the fresh powder, her heart thundering in her ears, the sound of the delivery car’s engine revving as Arvin started to turn around and head back toward town, Mabel caught sight of something blue and ... “Holy crap ... Oh, dear God!” she cried, stepping back, her flashlight falling into the snow as the dead woman’s eye, wide open and fixed, stared unseeing through a slab of ice.
Chapter 17
“It’s Lissa Parsons,” Alvarez whispered, sick at the thought of the once-lively woman she’d seen working out at the gym. Now, as she shined her flashlight’s beam at the block of ice, light piercing the heavy, clear layer to illuminate the face of the naked woman inside, Alvarez felt a fresh rush of anger sluicing through her veins. Who the hell would do this thing? What kind of creep—
“Damn it all to hell! I knew it!” Pescoli glared at the victim. Snow was collecting on her hat and shoulders, the wind starting to pick up. “That son of a bitch is a serial! God damn, son of a bitch! I was hoping—”
“That Lara Sue Gilfry was an isolated incident and the other women weren’t in his clutches?” Alvarez finished for her. “Yeah, I know.” She glanced at the still-dark sky, felt snowflakes catch on her cheeks. “Could be a copycat.”
Pescoli snorted. “Yeah, right. Looks like we’ll be letting the FBI know we’ve got ourselves another one.”
This crime scene, a patch of lawn stretched between two houses on the outskirts of Grizzly Falls was about as remote as the first, and just as chilling. No, there were no religious overtones to the crime as there seemed to have been in the display of the first victim’s body, but once again the killer showed some macabre sense of humor as Lissa’s sculpted ice coffin had been set up against a snowman in the yard, a snowman, Mabel had raved, that had been created by her grandchildren a couple of days earlier.
What the hell was that all about?
Who was this sicko who wanted to kill women, then display them in some kind of intricately macabre ice sculpture? They’d already talked briefly to the Enstads and their neighbors and now deputies were taking more complete statements.
Alvarez, after a rotten night’s sleep, was already awake when the call had come through from dispatch. She’d phoned Pescoli’s cell, roused her groggy partner, and they’d met here, arriving within minutes of each other.
Now the snow continued to fall and the arctic blast that raged caused the beams of their flashlights to cast weird shadows over the strange ice sculpture. The area had already been roped off with crime scene tape and the owners of the property, bundled in winter jackets, hats, gloves and scarves, were huddled together on the wraparound porch. A deputy was questioning the Enstads, and though she couldn’t hear what was being said, Alvarez noticed that the woman—Mabel—was doing most of the talking. She was gesturing wildly, not only at the victim, but also to the neighboring house where a group of four had gathered on the cement steps.
A second deputy was talking to the Swansons, who were huddled together, mom, dad and two sons. The mother, Mandy, was nervously smoking a cigarette and the father had one arm around her shoulders as if to hold her upright.
Alvarez’s stomach dropped as she stared at Lissa Parsons. Though she hadn’t known her very well, they’d come across each other at the gym often enough to smile and say, “Hi.” No more. Her short, dark hair was spiked, somehow caught standing straight up in the ice, her eyes wide open as if she were staring straight ahead and she was naked except for a glistening object in the flashlight’s glare, a slim gold ring hanging from the nipple of her right breast. “It’s mine,” Alvarez said disbelieving, her stomach knotting as she stared at the gold hoop with its winking bloodred stone.
“What’s yours?” Pescoli asked. “Wait a second. The nipple ring?” Pescoli’s eyebrows lifted skeptically, as if she didn’t believe her partner for a second. “Are you kidding?”
“No, not a nipple ring ... Oh, hell, it’s the earring that went missing after the break-in. I recognize it because of the stone, it’s red glass, supposed to look like a ruby. A gift from my grandmother.”
“The earring that disappeared with the kid?” Pescoli clarified, her own beam now centered on the victim’s breast.
“Yes!” Alvarez nodded, her mind racing with the possibilities. How could Gabriel Reeve be mixed up with the whack job who had killed two women? Or, had he dropped the earring and the killer found it? Was it possible that Gabe had pawned it or sold it on the street? Or had he been with the killer when he’d broken into the house, or ... had the killer come alone and taken the earring himself?
“Jesus H. Christ. You’re sure it’s yours?”
“Of course!” she snapped, suddenly frantic, her thoughts tearing through her brain. Dear God, where the hell was Gabe? With the psycho? Held captive? Oh, God, not in league with the maniac! No, no, no ... pull it together! Think, Selena, think. Rationally. Don’t panic. Do NOT panic! She had to focus. To take her emotions out of the case. To find the sadistic madman who was killing local women and enshrouding them in ice. Somehow this lunatic was connected to her boy.
Anxiety surged through
her. “We have to locate this maniac,” she said, attempting to sound calm despite the panic that was erupting inside of her. “Soon.”
“I know.” Pescoli was looking at her as if she’d lost her mind. “Calm down.”
“I am calm!”
“Whoa!” Pescoli grabbed her by the crook of her arm. “Take yourself out of this, Alvarez. Right now! Or I’ll get someone else to help me with this one.” She was dead serious.
“No! Wait ... no, I’m ... I’ll be ... fine,” Alvarez insisted, letting out her breath in a cloud as the crime scene team arrived and took over the area. Within two minutes, not one but two news vans arrived, parking on the street, technicians and cameramen adjusting the satellites and cameras while the reporters set up shop.
Alvarez didn’t want to think for a second that the media might learn about her earring and learn that it was lost in a break-in by a runaway teenaged boy wanted for armed robbery at a judge’s house in Helena. However, the news was sure to leak.
She would become besieged. More questions would be asked ... Dios!
“Great. I think I’m going to find out what Hank Yardley and George Flanders were up to last night. Wonder if they have alibis?”
Eyeing the huge vehicles from the news stations, Alvarez let out her breath slowly. Why the media bothered her, she couldn’t say. Really, the press had helped notify the community of impending danger and had spread the word in looking for lost kids or finding suspects. She decided it wasn’t the press so much as a few reporters who really got under her skin. One of the worst of the lot was Manny Douglas of the Mountain Reporter. No doubt he would soon appear. She said, “Get ready. The media circus has already begun.”
Pescoli slashed a look at her partner. “You okay?”
“Fine,” Alvarez lied. “Let’s get to it.” She turned her attention back to the victim. Get a grip, Selena. You can do this. You have to. For Gabe. But the gold earring, with its winking, if fake, stone, seemed to mock her, and the panic that she fought so determinedly welled deep, questions echoing through her brain, plaguing her as they had no answers.