Deserves to Die: Selena Alvarez/Regan Pescoli 6

  “But you’re not my husband,” she repeated. “You know you’re not my husband.”

  “Oh, yeah, that’s right. When you said ‘I do’ at that little chapel in Vegas, you were still married.”

  That much was true. “I didn’t know,” she said, but even as the words passed her lips, they sounded lame.

  “How could you not know?”

  “It was an assumption on my part. A mistake. We’ve been over this.” She felt the chill of his gaze cutting through the dark atmosphere, and for a second, she regretted what she’d done, how she’d led him on, not that she’d meant to. “You know I thought my ex had signed the papers and—”

  “He wasn’t your ex.”

  “Okay, okay. Not officially.”

  “Not legally,” Ryder bit out, irritated. “Kind of important.”

  “Oh, forget it.” She threw up her hands in surrender. “Saying I’m sorry now doesn’t cut it. I know that. I screwed up.”

  “Big time.”

  “Yes. Yes.” When he didn’t respond, she said, “I can’t believe that you hunted me down, in this . . . in this damn blizzard in Montana to steal my gun and argue about the past. You scared me.” It felt like a dream, a remnant of the terrors that had invaded her brain during the night and made her think she’d woken up when she was really still asleep, everything taking on a weird twist. But that was only wishful thinking. She was very much awake, beyond alert, and she was in the cold, dark, smelly cabin with the wild-ass cowboy she’d fallen for so hard that she, like him, had ignored the details of the law.

  “I get it that you’re pissed. You should be. But that was over a year ago and . . . and since when are you such a stickler for legalities?”

  “When it comes to my damn wife.” He strode closer to her. “You’re impossible, you know.”

  “I’m not the one pointing a gun at the person I once swore I loved.” Folding her arms over her chest, she squinted up at him, trying to see his features, read the expression in his eyes. “But why? Why go to all these lengths? I thought we understood each other.”

  He muttered furiously under his breath, but just said, “I came to get you.”

  For the briefest of instants, her heart tripped, a tiny bit of hope soared, but she tamped it down quickly. She wasn’t that foolish anymore. She didn’t trust him blindly. Nor did he trust her. And then, there was the matter of the weapon. “Well, okay, but most men who come for a woman, don’t hold her at gunpoint.”

  “It probably happens more often than you think. I never understood until now. But I didn’t come here to patch things up.”

  “You couldn’t,” she said, cringing inwardly at the bit of a lie. The truth was, she’d never completely gotten over him. Not one hundred percent. There was a part of her, a tiny very feminine part of her, that still fantasized about him, but she tamped that emotion down, wishing she could kill it.

  “Just for the record, this”—he moved his hand, displaying her pistol—“is a pathetic excuse for a gun.”

  “Thank you so much. That’s so helpful,” she shot out, then wished she’d held her tongue. That was the trouble with Ryder. Her blood ran hot around him, her emotions volatile. “It might be small, but you’re still aiming it at me.”

  “You’re lucky I don’t just pull the trigger.”

  “You didn’t come all this way just to shoot me. You could have done that and been halfway back to Louisiana by now.”

  “Well, darlin’, at least you’re starting to get it.”

  “What?”

  “It’s time to go. The reason that I’m pointing this gun at you is because I want you to grab your things and get moving. I figured you might not be all that keen on the idea, so your pistol came in handy. So, get up. Now.”

  “I’m just not buying it,” Pescoli said from her desk chair. She was still processing the information her partner had given her and trying to see a woman as their doer. “I know a lot of women who have jewelry envy. They’re all about who has the biggest rock as some kind of validation of love or something. Even my daughter went crazy over my ring when she first saw it. But I’ve never heard of one who would kill for a ring by cutting the damn finger off.”

  “Women kill,” Alvarez said. “If it isn’t for a justifiable cause like protecting their children, then it’s over a man. Usually a loser of a man.”

  “Yeah, that’s true,” Pescoli admitted.

  “You ever watch Judge Judy?”

  “No. You do? You have time for reality TV in the middle of the day?”

  “I record it.”

  That surprised Pescoli as she’d pegged Alvarez as a workaholic.

  “O’Keefe got me started on it, and once in a while I tune in. If the litigants are complaining about loans and gifts or rent and broken leases, it’s usually some woman all up in arms that her friend slept with her boyfriend or husband or whatever. The weird thing is that to a one, they blame the other woman as if it was all that woman’s fault and their poor, dumb husband couldn’t resist. That he was just the patsy in the Jezebel’s lurid, malicious trap, and that’s why he couldn’t keep it in his pants.”

  “No one on Judge Judy is a killer,” Pescoli pointed out.

  “I’m just saying it’s not impossible. We’ve run in our share of women who’ve killed. You know it.”

  “But to cut off a finger—”

  “What about those women who kill a pregnant woman and cut open her uterus because they want the baby or have somehow convinced themselves that the baby inside is really theirs?”

  “Those women are mentally deranged.” Pescoli fought an overpowering need to place her hands protectively over her own midsection and failed.

  “Sorry,” Alvarez said, pulling herself up short. “But our killer’s mentally deranged, too. Taking a finger wouldn’t be past a woman. That’s all I’m saying.”

  Pescoli glanced at the autopsy report on Calypso Pope, a copy of which lay atop another file on her desk. “A crushed hyoid bone. In both cases. That takes strength.”

  “Strength, but not necessarily size. And know-how. Maybe martial arts?”

  Pescoli tossed the remains of her banana in the trash. “So you think this Anne-Marie Calderone is our killer?”

  “That’s the avenue I’m taking.”

  “Doesn’t it seem a little too obvious? To leave a print on the one piece of evidence that’s located? There’s not a second shoe, and that’s the only print on Pope’s Mercedes. Lots of other prints all over that car,” she corrected herself. She was thinking aloud. “The Cantnor woman’s purse wasn’t located, but the second victim’s bag was found fairly easily and it had that identifying print.”

  “But any way you look at it, this woman is at the top of the suspect list. Right now, she’s all we’ve got. She’s obviously involved, we just don’t know how. I’ve got a call in to the New Orleans PD and Zoller is checking all the newspaper and police databases, looking for information about Calderone.” Sage Zoller was a junior detective with the department. Tiny and fit, she ran marathons, mentored at-risk teens and was a techno wiz kid. A dynamo. “She’ll report back to us.”

  “Good.”

  At that moment, Alvarez’s cell phone rang. She answered, “Detective Alvarez,” then held up a finger. “Thanks for calling back, Detective Montoya. We’ve got a situation up here—a couple homicides—and we found the same fingerprint at both scenes. Looks like it belongs to Anne-Marie Calderone. I was hoping you could supply me with a little more information about her as she’s just become a person of interest up here.”

  She nodded at Pescoli and headed out of the office.

  Pescoli rolled her chair closer to the desk, where she brought up the basic information on Anne-Marie Favier Calderone from New Orleans. The woman’s driver’s license picture and information appeared on the screen and though, more often than not, the photo taken at the DMV was usually pretty damn bad, this woman was stunning with her large eyes, easy smile, and oval face. Her hair was a deep brow
n with red highlights, shoulder-length and thick, her height and weight consistent with someone who kept herself in shape.

  Pescoli stared long and hard at the photo. Was she looking into the face of a cold-blooded killer? A woman who took satisfaction, even joy, in cutting off fingers and diamonds?

  She found herself playing with her own ring and stopped. This was insane. Or was it?

  “No way,” she said aloud, but, of course, she couldn’t argue the facts. Anne-Marie Calderone was connected to the dead women. Pescoli just had to figure out how.

  Chapter 24

  Shivering, the cold of the morning seeping into her bones, Anne-Marie said, “I’m not going back to New Orleans.” She stared pointedly at the man in shadow. “Gun or no gun.” But she did climb off the couch, her bare feet touching the floor. “Come on in. You don’t have to guard the damn door. Where do you think I’m going in this?”

  As if to add emphasis to her words, the wind squealed around the house and the damn limb started banging against the exterior wall again. Ignoring him, she walked the few steps to the fireplace and went to work, grabbing chunks of split wood she’d hauled inside the night before, prodding at the charred logs with the poker, searching for an ember glowing red beneath the ash. When she had success, she blew on the coals so that they burned brighter, a flame sparking against the moss and dry hemlock as the wood caught fire.

  Settling back on her heels, she watched as the flames began to grow, crackling as they devoured the fuel. Her fingers tightened over the poker still in her right hand. She didn’t want to harm Ryder, but she wasn’t going back to Louisiana with him. No way. She never wanted to see her family again and there was a chance that he would find her there. Now that she felt a new security, that she realized it was Ryder who had been following her rather than the monster who had tossed her into the Mississippi, she could finally feel some sort of relief and believe that she did have a chance for a new life for herself. A life without any ties to the past and that included Troy Ryder.

  “Drop it,” he ordered.

  Still crouching near the grate, she looked over her shoulder to see that he still had the gun pointed at her. For the love of God, did he really think she believed for a second that he would shoot her? She didn’t let go of the poker, but stared at him over her shoulder. He was still near the door, about eight feet from her. If she sprang and swung, she might be able to hit him hard. She needed to take his advantage away and somehow, remove his gun. She had the poker, and her little switchblade was hidden in the folds of the clothes she’d piled near the couch.

  Maybe there was some way to disarm him, gain the upper hand. As the fire burned brighter and hotter, the room lightened. Finally she saw his face, no longer in complete shadow and her heart twisted again. His was a rugged visage. His features were oversized—his jaw strong, big eyes deep in his sockets, a nose that had been broken a couple times, a hard line of a mouth, and a square jaw covered in a couple of days’ worth of stubble.

  “I said, ‘drop it,’ Anne-Marie. Don’t even think about it.”

  Her grip tightened.

  “Jesus, are you serious? You think you’re going to get the better of me with a poker?”

  “You won’t shoot me. I’m not going back to New Orleans. Not ever.” The fire popped then and her muscles jumped. Then, as if he’d been reading her thoughts all along, she saw him reach into his pocket with his free hand only to withdraw a stick of some kind . . .

  Click! Her switchblade snapped open in his hand, its spring-loaded blade suddenly reflecting the shifting light from the fire.

  “How—?” Inadvertently, her gaze slid to the stack of folded clothes where she was certain she’d hidden the deadly knife. She didn’t finish the sentence. Her mind spinning, she wondered how the hell he’d known she had it, how he’d found it as well as the gun. She’d assumed he’d guessed she had hidden a weapon under her pillow, but the knife from her clothes? Had he rifled through her things while looking for the pistol and found the switchblade first, then continued his stealthy search while she’d been restlessly sleeping unaware or had he . . .

  “You spied on me?” she charged, astounded, her mind taking hold of the idea and churning wildly. “You were in here before and planted devices and spied on me?” That was a big leap, a major vault, but he didn’t immediately deny it. She remembered feeling as if she were being watched, that though the shades had been drawn, the doors locked tightly, that there had been hidden eyes following her every move. “What is wrong with you?”

  “I had to make certain that Jessica Williams was really Anne-Marie Calderone. And that my leads were right, that Jessica was also the same person as Stacey Donahue in Denver and Heather Brown earlier on.”

  Dear God, how long had he been following her? He knew all of it.

  “I wasn’t going to barge in on the wrong person, so I had to make sure.”

  She shook her head, disbelieving, not even understanding how he, a damn half-broke rodeo rider, could understand about high tech electronics. It suddenly occurred to her that because their romance had been so white-hot and rushed and she’d decided to marry him after knowing him only a few weeks, there was much more to the cowboy from somewhere in West Texas than met the eye. She hadn’t known him and his secrets any better than he’d known her and the lies that were the bones of her past.

  But now she wanted to.

  “Who are you?”

  After hanging up from Detective Montoya, Alvarez coordinated the information he’d given her with what was known about the crimes in Montana. Zoller had e-mailed some information on Anne-Marie Calderone and was checking to see if there had been any similar killings in the last year in other parts of the country. So far, the department hadn’t heard of women who had been murdered, the ring fingers of their left hands severed, nor had they found any other crimes where the Calderone woman’s fingerprints had shown up.

  But, she told herself, it is still early.

  The Pinewood Sheriff’s Department might be on the track of one of the most deadly female serial killers in history.

  I’m getting ahead of myself, she thought, leaning back in her desk chair and taking a sip of her tea that she’d gotten from the break room. It was stone-cold, the tea bag still steeping in it, the orange-spice so strong she nearly gagged. Setting her cup aside, she concentrated on her computer screen, reminding herself that most likely there were no other identical crimes anywhere close by or she would have already found mention of it. Because of computers and communication systems, like crimes were more quickly identified.

  She glanced at her e-mail, searching for more reports and heard a text come into her cell phone. One look and she smiled.

  The short missive was from Gabriel, her biological son with whom she’d recently reconnected. No school!!! Along with the two words he’d attached a winking smiley face.

  She quickly texted back, Have fun. See you soon.

  Her heart swelled at the thought of him, the teenager who’d been raised by Aggie and Dave Reeve. Aggie was Dylan O’Keefe’s cousin and not all that happy that her son had discovered his birth mother, but the two women were working things out. Alvarez kept her distance as she didn’t want to intimidate the woman who had spent all of Gabe’s life caring for him, raising him, teaching him right from wrong.

  She added a smiley face to her text despite the fact that she loathed all the emoticons. But when in teenaged Rome . . . She hit SEND.

  She turned her attention back to the matter at hand—running Anne-Marie Calderone to the ground. Whether the woman who’d left her fingerprint on the belongings recovered from the victims was the actual killer or an accessory, or something else, she had some explaining to do. Some serious explaining.

  Taking a swing at him wouldn’t help, so Anne-Marie let loose of the poker, stood, and dusted her hands.

  “Who am I?” Ryder repeated. “I’m not the one with myriad disguises, a series of fake IDs, and multiple aliases.”

  “But you wer
e spying on me. I don’t remember you being some kind of techno geek who could bug rooms. Where the hell are they?” she demanded and turned around in a tight circle, searching in the dark corners, the lamps, wherever.

  “You never bothered to find out that I was in the Special Forces and specialized in communications, did you?” When she looked at him as if he were mad, he admitted, “Afghanistan. Nothing I really want to dwell on.”

  “Was this pre- or post-cowboy?”

  “Between,” he admitted, snapping the switchblade closed and putting it, along with her gun, into a pocket.

  Now that it was light, she could see that pocket was already bulging. “Wait a minute. You have your own damn gun?”

  He smiled then. That reckless, roguish smile she’d found so irresistible. “You didn’t think I’d come in here unarmed.”

  “But you stole my gun.”

  “Didn’t feel like having you use it on me.”

  “I wouldn’t have . . . well, if I’d known it was you, anyway.”

  Apparently satisfied that she wasn’t going to flee or attack him, he started stripping small microphones and cameras from the tiniest of places around the room—a crack in the fireplace, a dark corner of the bookcase, even the damn wood box.

  “Really?” she said, watching in disbelief and suddenly

  feeling bare and vulnerable, all of her worst fears coming to the fore. He’d been observing her every move, whether she’d been awake or asleep. He’d seen her break down or flop in despair or rail at the heavens. “I can’t believe you would do all this—”

  “Believe,” he said without emotion.

  She was trying to make sense of it all but couldn’t. She’d thought, once they’d broken up, she would never see him again. He’d been so furious with her that she’d thought he might strangle her. He’d said as much. “Go to hell, Anne-Marie,” he’d said, “and don’t look over your shoulder.”

  So, why would he be there now, dissecting her life . . . no, injecting himself back into it . . . trying to force her to retrace her steps and return to a city she’d sworn she’d never set foot in again?