Читать книгу The Alvarez & Pescoli Series - Lisa Jackson - Страница 12

“Rise and shine,” Regan Pescoli ordered from the open doorway of her son’s bedroom. Posters of grunge and heavy metal bands battled for space on the walls and ceiling with oversized pictures of pro basketball players. Clothes, DVDs and dishes, complete with the dried-on remains of spaghetti or pizza, littered the floor, desk and top of the small television. In a word, the ten-by-ten room in the basement was a sty.

No response from the huge lump in the middle of the futon he’d claimed as his bed.

“Hey, Jeremy, did you hear me? It’s time to get up for school.”

This time she heard a grunt.

“You know you’re not out of the woods yet. One more tardy and Mr. Quasdorff is going to—”

“I don’t give a…a rat’s ass what Quasdorff will do!” her son declared, throwing back the covers. Glaring at the ceiling, he looked so much like her first husband, Regan felt as if she’d been kicked in the gut. “He’s so damned gay!”

“I wouldn’t be spouting that off. Especially to his wife and kids.”

Jeremy rolled morosely out of bed and Cisco, their mottled terrier of some kind, hopped onto the floor. Cisco was ten and graying but still thought he was a puppy. “I could use a little privacy,” Jeremy groused, all six feet two of him. Regan sipped her coffee and didn’t move. “I get it, Mom, okay?”

“And give your sister a ride to junior high.”

“I know.” He glanced at her with eyes still filled with sleep and she saw only a glimmer of the happy-go-lucky kid he’d once been. Now, he was trying to grow a soul patch, scraggly, uneven whiskers, a darker spot on his chin, and talking about getting tattoos and piercings despite her protests that he wait at least until he was eighteen.

If only his father were still alive. If only Joe hadn’t been a hero and died in the line of duty. If only I’d been a better wife…

Jeremy nearly ran into her as he made his way up the stairs to the single bathroom and slammed the door. Through the thin panels she heard him turn on the shower, and as the water warmed, flip up the toilet seat and pee like a racehorse.

Things would have been better if Joe had lived, she thought. No, check. Change that. Things would have been different; that much she knew. Better? That was just conjecture.

She walked the few steps to the kitchen, where her daughter, perched on a bar stool, was ignoring a slice of peanut butter toast and text messaging as if she’d been born with a cell phone trapped between her slim, be-ringed fingers. With thick, near-black curls, smooth Mediterranean skin and eyes as blue as a summer’s day, Bianca was a small, feminine version of her father, Luke Pescoli.

She’d often wondered why, after carrying her children for nine months in her womb, neither had the courtesy to look like her. Jeremy was the spitting image of his father, Joe Strand, while Bianca was a miniature Luke. Sometimes Regan felt like little more than the vessel in which her husbands’ DNA had sprouted.

“Eat up,” she said, her gaze sliding through the dining area to the living room, where, beside a tired mock-leather couch, a Christmas tree festooned in a billion lights and innumerable strands of tinsel was shoved into the corner, inches from a non-working fireplace. The chipped porcelain nativity scene that had been in her family for generations was strung along the mantel, atop glittery cotton that once had resembled snow but now was tattered and torn. This would be the snow’s last year.

Bianca, fingers still flying, the phone clicking, ignored her. The toast was untouched. “Bianca, Jeremy will be ready soon and you know he won’t want to wait around. Eat your breakfast.”

Click, click, click, click. “Ugh, Mom. Gross! Don’t you know that peanut butter is just fat?”

“I believe there’s some protein in there.”

“Whatever.” Bianca didn’t bother looking up. The tiny keys kept clicking softly.

Not in the mood to argue, Regan refilled her cup from the pot warming on the coffeemaker. The kitchen was cramped, like the rest of the house—a small “starter home” that Regan worked hard to pay the mortgage on each and every month. The furnace was rumbling loudly, trying to make up for the cold air seeping through the cracks in the caulking around the windows and doors.

Cisco was whining and scratching at the slider door leading to the deck. “Need to go out?” Regan walked to the dining area and opened the door. “Hurry back,” she said as the terrier, spying a squirrel trying to break into the bird feeder on the rail, took off on all cylinders, his bark low and gruff, the hackles on the back of his neck raised at the audacity of the rodent.

“I’ll cook you an egg,” Regan said to her daughter as she closed the door.

“Are you even remotely serious? Do you want me to puke? Geez, Mom, Michelle doesn’t make me eat breakfast.”

Bully for Stepmom. Though Bianca’s father, Luke “Lucky” Pescoli, and Regan had been divorced three months before he began dating Michelle, Regan had never liked the woman, who was still in her twenties, for God’s sake, and had no business trying to be the kids’ second mother. No business! Built like a Barbie doll, if not an airhead, Michelle had the dumb-blonde routine down pat. Regan figured the ditziness was an act worthy of an Oscar. Beneath those long blonde tresses and behind the impossibly wide blue eyes, there was a cunning twenty-six-year-old who had graduated from college. Michelle knew exactly what she wanted and how to get it. She just needed enough lip gloss and stiletto heels to make it happen.

The fact that she’d wanted Lucky was a mystery, one Regan hadn’t yet been able to solve.

Not that it mattered much.

Rather than think about the twit, Regan found a glass on the counter, rinsed it out, filled it with water and poured some into the rapidly wilting speckled poinsettia on the counter, adding a few drops into the soil surrounding the Christmas cactus, which was going nuts with vibrant pink blooms.

Bianca, never one to leave an argument alone, added, “Michelle says a person should only eat when they’re hungry.”

“Does she?” Not that Regan cared.

“Uh-huh, and she never has a weight problem.”

Good for her, Regan thought as she picked up Bianca’s rejected toast and bit into it. No reason for it to go to waste. Or was that waist?

“I’ll make you some of that instant oatmeal.”

Bianca glanced up, her pretty face twisted into a knot of disbelief. “You really do want me to throw up!” Her cell phone beeped again, another text that had her absorbed as a bellow of rage echoed from the bathroom. Old pipes groaned as a faucet was slammed off.

“Shit!” Jeremy yelled loudly enough to be heard throughout the small house.

Regan sipped her coffee and nibbled on the toast. “Guess your brother is finally awake.”

The door to the bathroom opened so hard it banged against the wall. Jeremy, towel slung over his slim hips in an attempt to hide, or maybe call attention to, his nether regions stormed into the kitchen. “Who the hell used all the hot water?” he demanded, skewering his sister with an intense stare of hate that could have come straight out of a teen horror flick.

“The tank’s small.” Regan dusted her fingers of crumbs. “Want some breakfast? Peanut butter toast.”

Jeremy wasn’t about to be derailed. “So that means she has the right to hog it all? Jesus, Mom, aren’t you always preaching about consideration?” He walked to the refrigerator, pulled out a carton of orange juice and held it to his lips.

“Get a glass.”

“I’m finishing it.”

“You brought up consideration.”

He guzzled juice and left the carton on the counter next to last night’s pizza box.

“Jeremy?”

“What?” he called as he hurried down the stairs.

“We need to talk about your chores around here.”

“I thought my chore was to take the dingbat to school.”

Bianca snorted. “The dingbat who’s on the honor roll. What a creep. He hasn’t seen anything above a two-point for so long, he wouldn’t know what it was.” One eyebrow lifted in prim smugness, though the truth of the matter was that her grades had been slipping lately. Something was up.

“About those grades,” Regan said. “Yours have been—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Bianca finished her text and looked up. “I’m bringing them up. I told you Miss Lefever has it in for me.”

“Maybe it’s all the time you’re spending with Chris.”

At the mere mention of her boyfriend’s name, Bianca absolutely lit up, her bad mood disappearing for an instant. Her lips twitched into a happy little smile, which Regan found more than slightly disturbing. “Chris has nothing to do with my grades.”

“Since you started”—Regan made air quotes—“‘going with’ him, you haven’t been so interested in school.”

“Big deal.”

“Bianca—”

“Oh, what? I’ve got a boyfriend?” she mocked. “Yeah, that’s right. But he’s not affecting my grades, okay? Maybe you’re just jealous or something.”

Regan stared at her silently.

“I mean, it wouldn’t hurt you to date. You know, get a life. Then maybe you’d be off my…case.” She swept her backpack from the counter and slid off the bar stool as Jeremy’s heavy tread pounded up the stairs again.

“Gotta go,” Bianca said quickly and slid her phone into her book bag.

“We’re not finished with this discussion,” Regan warned as Jeremy appeared in an oversized sweatshirt, sweatpants and a stocking cap pulled low over his forehead. As he slipped on a pair of sunglasses, Regan thought her son was a dead ringer for the Unibomber or half a dozen other police sketches of wanted men.

Bianca had already grabbed a jacket and was out the door as Jeremy, keys jangling from one hand, followed after her.

“What about your backpack?” Regan asked, eyeing her son.

“In the car.”

“So you didn’t do your homework?”

“Oh, Mom.” One hand on the doorknob, Jeremy rolled his eyes just as Cisco shot into the house.

She fought the urge to light into her son about his schoolwork. Now wasn’t the time. “Drive carefully. Some of the roads have been closed and there’s another blizzard predicted, for this after—” The front door slammed behind them and Regan walked to the living room to stare through the window as her son dutifully turned on the old pickup’s engine, then went about scraping off the windows as the defroster heated the glass from the inside. Even inside the house she heard the heavy beat of some indefinable rock music.

“At least it’s not rap, at least it’s not rap,” she said, her mantra for the past five years. Within minutes, the windows were clear enough and he folded himself into his twenty-year-old Chevy truck.

When had it come to this? When the kids took off without saying good-bye or buzzing her cheek with a kiss? Or even listening to her?

She watched them drive away and waved, though, of course, neither of them turned to look back at the house. She felt a little like a fool. She had to do something about the kids. She knew they were both headed for trouble. Jeremy was still dealing with issues about his deceased dad and Bianca was trying to find a way to fit herself into her father’s new family.

And it didn’t help that Regan was a single mom, working with the sheriff’s department on the first serial-killer case in this part of Montana that anyone could remember. She’d spent almost every waking hour trying to figure out who the bastard was and when he would strike again.

It had been two weeks since the last body had been found. Wendy Ito had been identified by her two grief-riddled parents, the father stoic and grim while Wendy’s mother had dissolved into a rage of tears and had to be held up by her slight but rigid spouse.

It had been hell.

And all the interviewing in the world hadn’t brought the sheriff’s department, or the friggin’ FBI, for that matter, any closer to the killer. Wendy Ito’s new Prius hybrid hadn’t been located and none of the friends she’d spent the weekend with had been much help. No one, it seemed, had any idea as to the identity of the girl’s killer. Just like with Theresa Charleton and Nina Salvadore. But it wasn’t over.

“We’ll get you, you son of a bitch,” Regan said as she walked back to the kitchen and dumped the remains of her coffee into the sink. She rinsed out her cup and left it with the ever-growing stack of dishes piling on the counters. “We’ll get you.”

The trouble was, if the killer was still in his same pattern, it was about time for another “accident” where he, presumably, would stage the scene, shooting out the tire of his next victim, then showing up to “rescue” her. That’s how he did it. Shot out the goddamned tires. Bastard. Regan set her jaw.

The ME was certain that the women who had been found staked to trees in desolate parts of the mountains had spent at least a week, maybe two, healing from the injuries sustained in accidents where their vehicles had skidded off the road. The medical examiner theorized that each of the dead women had received basic first aid, or medical care, before they’d been marched naked to the place where they would be forsaken and left to die.

She wondered vaguely if there were others—victims who hadn’t survived the staged accidents, lucky ones, maybe, who hadn’t been made to suffer and die in the elements—but she dismissed the thought. No other wrecked vehicles had been discovered.

After feeding Cisco and making sure the dog had ample water for the day, she walked to her cramped bedroom to change into slacks, a red turtleneck sweater because it was the holidays damn it, her shoulder holster, a jacket and boots. She then made certain the Christmas tree lights were unplugged and the exterior doors were locked, and headed through the attached single-car garage to her Jeep.

There was a chance that today would be the day they caught the prick.

Maybe they’d get lucky.

Though a gambling woman by nature, Detective Regan Pescoli wasn’t ready to bet on it.

Not yet.

Jillian parked in her assigned spot under the carport, then made a mad dash to the front porch as raindrops assailed her from a nearly dark sky. Most of the row houses were decorated, their sparkling, colored lights tiny bright beacons in the gray drizzle that was Seattle in winter. Battling with her small umbrella at the curb where the bevy of mailboxes for her group of units was located, Jillian unlocked her box and found a large manila envelope wedged in, her name and address written in black marker and block letters that began to run in the rain.

“Great,” she muttered, a gust of wind catching in her umbrella and turning it inside out as thick raindrops pelted her face. Ducking her head and sidestepping puddles, she dashed past the front lawns of two other row houses, then hurried up her front walk. The rain, blowing sideways off Lake Washington, pummeled her as she finally unlocked her front door and scurried inside. “Honey, I’m home,” she called as she entered, pulling the door shut behind her. It was her private joke, but every once in a while, as if on cue, Marilyn would come trotting from the kitchen at the back of the house, meow and greet her expectantly. Today, she wasn’t lucky, and after tossing her keys and purse on the side table, she set about opening the mail, starting with the envelope with the postmark of Missoula, Montana.

Where Mason, her ex-husband, lived.

So what was this? Some post-divorce court order?

God, Mason could be such a bastard.

But, then, why no return address? No printer-generated label from his law firm?

Water from the hem of her coat dripping onto the hardwood floor, she tore the wet packet open without the aid of a letter opener. Several grainy photographs, the kind that looked as if they’d been taken by an amateur photographer using a cell phone and printed off a computer, slid onto the side table.

Three images.

All of the same man.

All fuzzy and a little out of focus, as if the subject were moving, walking away, his head turned away.

Jillian’s heart nearly stopped beating.

Oh God, it couldn’t be!

She switched on the lamp. Golden light poured over the pictures that she flattened so that they lay side by side, as if they were stills from a movie.

The man was profiled in the first two shots but in the third shot, he looked back over his shoulder and faced the lens so that she could make out his features beneath his beard and aviator shades.

“Aaron?” she said aloud, and her first husband’s name seemed to reverberate off the walls. “Dear God, Aaron?”

Tears burned at the back of her eyes. She’d loved this man. Loved him. Lived with him. Married him. Lost him. And grieved for him. Oh Lord, how she’d grieved for him.

And now he was alive?

She let out a slow breath that she didn’t realize she’d been holding. The envelope, the one from which the pictures had tumbled, was clenched hard in her left hand.

He was alive?

Aaron Caruso, her college sweetheart, the man she’d married so naively, hadn’t died in a forest in Suriname? Had lied to her? Had wanted her to think him dead? Had heartlessly left her while absconding with investors’ funds? Hadn’t cared that she would be a suspect, too? That the police would believe she knew what had happened to him? Would he have been so cruel?

Her knees threatened to give way and she braced herself against the table. No. This man in the hastily snapped photo wasn’t Aaron, just someone who looked like him. The beard hid his jaw. Aaron’s had been square and strong. And the sunglasses disguised the color and shape of his eyes. Aaron’s had been a deep brown and wide-set, his nose broken from an old basketball injury…She studied the pictures again and thought she saw the slight bump on his nose.

Of course it had been over ten years since she’d seen her first husband. He, if he had lived, would have changed. Like the man in the photo, who was at least ten pounds heavier and bearded. But the hair, that light brown hair with its distinctive widow’s peak, was the same—thick and wavy.

So distinctively Aaron.

What did it mean if this photo was real…if Aaron was alive? He would have built some sort of life for himself. A wife and kids. A home.

Don’t fall for this, Jillian, she warned herself, but it was too late. She was already half-buying into the fact that these photos showed her first husband, the one whom everyone, including the insurance company and the authorities, had presumed to have slid down a steep ravine to a raging river, where he’d been swept away by a swift current and drowned.

Presumably drowned.

The house phone rang and she nearly jumped out of her skin. Carrying the rest of the mail and the damned pictures with her, she walked through the hallway to the small family room and snapped up the receiver before the second ring. “Hello?” she said into the receiver and noted that, once again, the caller ID had been blocked.

“He’s alive,” the disembodied voice hissed again.

“Who is this? I’m not interested in playing any games.”

“Check your mail and your e-mail.”

“What do you want?”

Click.

“Damn it!” Jillian hung up and felt a rage so deep she could barely think. Who was doing this? Not Aaron, even if he were alive. So who? And why?

Jillian felt as if a ghost had just brushed against the back of her neck. Either the person on the other end of the call had been teasing her, playing a sick prank on her, or the unthinkable had happened and Aaron had come back from the dead.

Jillian closed her eyes. Ten years. A damned decade! He couldn’t be alive. That didn’t make any sense and yet…and yet…

Go to the police her inner voice suggested as she peeled off her coat, walked to the front of the house again and hung the garment on the wrought-iron coat tree near the front door. She found her tattered umbrella, fixed the broken spokes as best she could, then shoved it into the lower part of the same tree. Taking the steps two at a time, she climbed to the second floor and made her way to her den, which, when the hide-abed was opened, became her guest room. The computer was on and waiting, a screen saver of waving palms like wistful arms beckoning her to some sunny, remote destination where the sun always shone.

Kicking out her desk chair, Jillian sat down and clicked onto her e-mail account. She found one that had slipped through her spam filter with an attachment. When she opened it, sure enough, the same three pictures of the bearded man who was supposed to be her dead first husband appeared.

She checked the e-mail address, pressed REPLY, but, of course, her mail bounced back at her.

Damn.

She clicked back to her home page and a news item caught her eye. SERIAL KILLER STRIKES MONTANA. The story mentioned two women found dead in desolate parts of the Bitterroots, but she was too distracted to read on with these photos of Aaron taunting her.

She enhanced the pictures, enlarging them, then sharpening the images. As she worked with computer and photographic images for a living, this was a piece of cake. She’d spent the past five years creating brochures, both real and virtual, for clients ranging from universities to travel agencies and tour groups. In this room alone, the walls were covered with photographs she’d taken herself, colorful pictures of exotic locales and beautiful homes turned into inns. There were images of a brilliant sunset on the Oregon coast, the Cascade Mountains deep in snow, a fishing excursion on the Kenai River in Alaska and a hundred-and-fifty-year-old hotel situated in the rugged Columbia Gorge.

Using programs that enhanced, enlarged, zoomed in and recolored, she played with the photographs, erasing the man’s beard and sunglasses, growing his hair a few inches, taking off ten pounds. With each change, her heart beat a little faster, her nerves tightened and anticipation coursed through her veins.

When she was finished, the altered image was a dead ringer for her long-lost first husband.

Anyone can make someone look different. You’ve seen countless short movies of people morphing from one person to another. You’ve seen the before and after pictures of models on the covers of magazines. You know how to make an image change shape.

This could be an out-and-out scam.

But why?

And who was behind it? Mason, in Missoula?

She shook her head at the thought. If Mason wanted to give her information, he’d just do it, call her up and give her the facts. And if he were trying to be sneaky, he’d mail the envelope from another town. He knew she wasn’t an idiot.

But what about that new wife of his—Sherice? She always had it in for you. And his mother, Belle—that woman never did like you.

It seemed far-fetched. She and Mason rarely communicated, and though Sherice, Mason’s receptionist, had outwardly despised Jillian when Jillian and Mason were married, now, since she’d become the second much younger Mrs. Mason Rivers, Sherice’s animosity had faded. Sherice had won the great prize of becoming a trophy wife. So why try to stir up trouble now?

Jillian leaned back in her desk chair and tapped the eraser end of her pencil on the arm of the chair as she stared at the image on the computer. She heard a soft meow and then Marilyn padded through the open door and, spying Jillian’s empty lap, leaped onto it.

“Hey, sweetcakes,” Jillian said, absently rubbing the calico’s head. “What do you think?”

The cat responded by curling up in her lap while Jillian tried to figure out if her long-dead husband had suddenly resurrected and why anyone would want her to know.

“It’s a problem,” she confided to Marilyn and knew in that instant that she couldn’t leave it alone.

She had to find out the truth.

If for no other reason than to clear her name.

No matter what it entailed, how painful it happened to be.