Читать книгу Chosen To Die - Lisa Jackson - Страница 9

Today

Where the hell is she?

As a brutal storm shrieked through the surrounding canyons, Nate Santana paced in the stable, his cell phone pressed hard to his ear, no sound emanating from the slim, useless device. “Come on, come on,” he encouraged but he knew it was no good.

Regan, damn her, was MIA.

No service appeared on the phone’s small screen.

Frustrated, Santana jammed his cell into the pocket of his worn jeans and told himself to remain calm. He was just keyed up from everything that had gone on in the sleepy town of Grizzly Falls in the last few weeks. No big deal.

And yet, he felt worry eating at his gut, reminding him that everything that had been good in his life always disappeared and that Pescoli, damned her sexy ass, was the best thing that had happened to him in a long, long while…probably since Santa Lucia…

His thoughts took a dark twist as he considered the last woman who had changed the course of his life, then pushed her beautiful image from his mind. Shannon Flannery was past history.

Right now, he had to deal with the fact that Regan was ducking his calls.

Or was she?

He shoved a hand through his hair and glared at the indoor arena where a particularly stubborn and nervous colt was staring back at him, challenging him.

Usually Santana could be easily distracted by animals. In his experience they were a helluva lot easier to deal with than people. More trustworthy. More constant. But this frigid morning, he couldn’t concentrate, his thoughts creeping ever to Regan.

Hell, he had it bad. And he hated it that she’d somehow gotten under his skin. You let her. You allowed a quick, no-strings-attached fling to develop into a full-fledged affair starting to border on a relationship.

His jaw tightened at the thought.

She was the worst woman he could have chosen to get involved with. The absolute worst!

He mentally castigated himself, calling himself a long list of names that grew progressively more derogatory. No woman in a long time had infiltrated his brain, or caused him to think about finding ways to get her into bed at all hours of the day. And Regan was a damned detective with the Pinewood County Sheriff’s Department, for crying out loud.

What did that tell you?

Avoid. Avoid. Avoid!

But he’d been drawn to her like a dying man in the desert to an oasis.

A glance through the window confirmed that the mother of a storm wasn’t letting up. Sub-zero wind howled through the deep ravines of this part of Montana. Ice glazed the outside of the panes and the snow was falling so thick and fast, he couldn’t see the lights glowing in his cabin only a hundred feet away.

Inside, the huge stable with its indoor exercise arena was warm, the heating system wheezing and stirring up the dust of last summer, while the familiar smells of saddle soap and horse dung, scents he’d known all his life, filled his nostrils. Horses shuffled in their stalls; one, the nervous mare, sent out a quiet whinny. Sounds and odors that usually calmed him. Truth be known, he felt far more akin to animals than he did to most men. Or women, for that matter.

Until damned Regan Pescoli.

With her two children.

Two finished marriages.

Their relationship, basically all sex, wasn’t the least bit romantic or conventional.

No vows.

No promises.

No strings.

No big deal.

Right?

So why was he edgy and restless? What was it to him that he couldn’t reach her? They’d gone days without speaking before, even, upon occasion, a week. Though not lately. In the past few months, they had been in contact nearly daily. Or nightly. And he wasn’t complaining.

He reminded himself that up here cell phone service was notoriously lousy, and that getting the NO SIGNAL message was nothing new. Even Brady Long, Santana’s pain-in-the-ass employer, heir to a copper fortune and not afraid to throw his money around, couldn’t get a cell tower built anywhere nearby. Which was usually just fine by Santana. A loner by nature, he didn’t have a lot of interest or faith in technology.

Except for this morning.

So what if you can’t get in touch with her? You know she’s got to be up to her eyeballs in police business. The damned Star-Crossed Killer is still on the loose and there has to be emergency after emergency in this blizzard, homes without electricity, cars sliding off the road, people freezing to death. She’s busy. That’s all. Don’t push the panic button.

Still, he felt it. That little premonition of dread that caused the hairs on the back of his neck to bristle and stomach acid to crawl up his throat whenever trouble was brewing. Not that he hadn’t caused his own share of heartache and misery, but nonetheless, he sensed bad things coming; had since he was a kid.

“It’s that damned native blood in ya,” his father had always muttered under his breath when Nate had mentioned the feeling. “On your mother’s side. Her great grandfather—or was it great-great?—was some kind of Indian shaman or some such crap. Could heal people with his touch. Cursed ’em, too. Well, according to yer mother. He was an Arapaho, I think, or was it Cheyenne? Don’t matter. He seen him a rattler or somethin’ in a dream once and that did it. He became the medicine man. Prob’ly had the same damned tingling sensation you do, boy.”

After these tarnished bits of insight, his old man had usually bitten at a plug of tobacco and chewed with great satisfaction, only to spit and wipe his mouth with the back of his sleeve. “All horseshit, in my book.”

Not that Santana had ever thought for a second his gut instincts had anything to do with his ancestry. But tonight he sensed something outside. Something dark and intimately evil. Something threatening. To Regan.

Clenching his jaw, he told himself to ignore it. He didn’t like the premonitions and didn’t admit to them, wasn’t going to take the kind of ridicule leveled at Ivor Hicks for his supposed alien abduction or Grace Perchant, a woman who bred wolf dogs and confessed to speaking with the dead, or Henry Johansen, a farmer who had fallen off his tractor fifteen years earlier, hit his head, and claimed he could “hear” other people’s thoughts. Nope, Santana would keep his mouth shut about his sensations rather than suffer the ridicule of the townspeople.

As for Regan, he’d catch up with her later, one way or another. He always did. Besides, it wasn’t as if they were married or even an item; that’s the way they both wanted it.

He walked to the indoor arena where Lucifer, still glaring at him, pawed the soft dirt. A big black colt with a crooked blaze and one white stocking, he had a nasty streak that some would call independence; others referred to it as just being ornery. Nate figured it was one and the same. Now the rangy colt’s nostrils were flared, his eyes white around the rims, a nervous sweat and flecks of lather visible on his sleek hide.

“It’s okay,” he said softly, when he knew deep in his gut it wasn’t. And the horse knew it, too. That was Santana’s talent, or “gift,” as it were. He understood animals, especially horses and dogs. He respected them for the animals they were, didn’t put any human traits on them and, from years of observation and experience, learned to work with them.

Some people called him “weird”; others compared him to a snake charmer or blamed it on his mixed heritage when the truth of the matter was he used common sense, determination, and kindness. He just knew how to work with them. Maybe it was part of the Arapaho in him, but probably not.

He grabbed the coil of rope from a hook on the wall, slipped through the gate of the arena, then walked slowly toward the beast as the gate clicked behind him. Another blast of wind shrieked through the canyons, rattling the windowpanes and causing a twitch to come alive in the big colt’s shoulder.

“Shh.” Santana kept coming. Steady. Calm. Even though deep inside he felt the same tension that the horse was exuding, a fear akin to the panic visible in Lucifer’s wild eyes. At any second the colt would bolt.

Thud!

The door to the stables banged open.

Santana froze.

And Lucifer took off like a shot. Zero to thirty in three short strides, hooves flashing and thundering, kicking up dirt as he galloped close enough to Santana that he could hear the colt’s breath, feel his heat as a gust of frigid Montana wind whistled and swirled into the room.

His dog, a large Siberian husky, sent up a howl loud enough to wake the dead in the next county, and all the horses in the stable snorted and neighed, fidgeting restlessly.

“Nakita, hush!” Santana commanded and the big dog reluctantly lay down, blue eyes still focused on Santana.

Lucifer, tail up, eyes rimmed in white, ran back and forth along the penned area. If he could have, the big colt would have jumped the top rail of the enclosure and galloped as far and fast as his strong legs would carry him, clear through the door and across Brady Long’s two thousand acres.

“Great,” Santana muttered, knowing whatever confidence he’d gained with the anxious colt had been shattered. “Just…damned great.”

He turned his attention to the open doorway, searching for whoever had been foolish enough to let the door slam. “Hey!” he called out as he climbed over the fence separating the exercise ring from the rest of the stable, vaulting the top rail and landing lightly on his booted feet.

No idiot stomping off snow and shaking away the cold appeared in the doorway. Only Nakita whining and staring outside to the dark night.

Frost-laden air screamed inside, but no one appeared.

Nate yanked the door closed, double-checked the latch as a drip of ominous worry slithered down his spine. The door had been closed tight, the latch secure. He was certain. He’d pulled it shut himself.

Or had he been so distracted by his missing woman that he had been careless and a stiff gust of wind had pushed the old door open? The latch had always been dicey. He’d been meaning to fix it; it just hadn’t been high on his priority list.

Again, he had the uncanny sensation that someone was with him; that he wasn’t alone. But all he heard was the sound of restless hooves in the surrounding stalls and the snorts of horses disturbed from their normal routines. He trained his eyes on the boxes, noting that the roan mare and bay gelding in abutting stalls were staring at the corner near the feed bins. Lucifer had stopped galloping wildly, but held his head high, his nostrils flared. As he slowed, his dark coat quivered and his gaze was centered dead-on Santana.

Nate grabbed a pitchfork from its hook on the wall and took two steps toward the shadowy corner near the oat bin.

Brrriiing!

The stable phone shrieked.

He nearly jumped from his skin.

Gloved hand holding the handle of the pitchfork in a death grip, he retraced his steps and snagged the receiver of the phone mounted near the door.

“Santana,” he barked, receiver pressed to his ear as he scoured the interior of the stable with his gaze.

“This is Detective Selena Alvarez, Pinewood County Sheriff’s Department.”

He felt every muscle in his body tense. “Yeah.”

“I’m Detective Regan Pescoli’s partner.”

He already knew that much. What he didn’t know was whether Regan had confided to Alvarez that she and he were involved.

“Uh-huh.”

“Pescoli didn’t show up for work today. I thought you might know where she is.”

So the cat was out of the bag about their affair. Good. “I haven’t seen her.”

“How about last night?”

His jaw tightened. “No.”

“Look, I know you and she have a thing going. She never really talks about it, but I pieced it together, so if you know where she is—”

“I don’t,” he cut her off. “We were together a couple of nights ago. Haven’t seen her since,” he admitted, his jaw setting. “I’ve been calling her cell and the house phone. No answer.”

“I was afraid of that.” The woman swore softly and frustration was in her voice. Santana felt a chill colder than the bowels of hell. “If you hear from her, will you have her call in?”

“Yeah.” He sensed Alvarez was about to hang up and asked, “Where do you think she is?”

“If we knew that, I wouldn’t be calling you.” She hung up and the word we reverberated through his mind. As in we: the Pinewood County Sheriff’s Department. He replaced the phone, his guts twisting, the sensation that something was wrong validated. If the damned police department didn’t know where she was, things were worse than he’d feared.

Boom!

Grace Perchant’s eyes flew open.

Although, she thought, they’d never been closed.

She blinked. Tried to clear her mind when the sound of the blast, like the clap of nearby thunder, ricocheted through her brain again.

Snow was falling around her and she was standing in the middle of the road, in boots, her flannel nightgown, and a long coat flapping around her legs, her skin ice cold. Her dog, Sheena, was nearby, ever vigilant, ever loyal. With intelligent eyes and a black coat that belied her wolf lineage, Sheena waited patiently.

As she always did.

Even when Grace suffered one of her spells.

“Lord,” Grace whispered, shivering, her fingers and toes nearly numb, her breath a cloud.

Images from her dream slid through her mind. Visceral. Raw. Real. Like shards of glass that cut through her brain.

She caught a flash, a quick, horrifying glimpse of a woman in a mangled Jeep, her body racked with pain. And a stalker. The evil one tracking her down.

Grace’s heart rate accelerated as the image changed to a vision of that same woman now laced in a straitjacket and being hauled out of a wintry canyon. By a man in white, a man with evil intent.

Quickly the scene changed and the female victim was now naked, lashed to a frozen hemlock tree, her red hair stiff with ice and snow, her gold eyes round with fear, her skin turning blue.

Regan Pescoli.

The cop.

With heart-stopping certainty Grace knew that the monster had found her. Attacked her. Planned to kill her. If he hadn’t already.

This wasn’t the first time she’d had a vision; once before she’d caught a glimpse of the monster’s innate and relentless evil purpose.

At that time, only a few days earlier, Grace had tried to warn Pescoli, had told her of her imminent danger, but the detective had dismissed her.

As they all did.

So now the visions were more graphic. Closer. She looked up at the dark sky, felt the film of icy flakes melt against her skin. Her teeth were chattering. How long had she been out here? How far had she trudged like a sleepwalker along this winding, lonely road?

“Come, Sheena,” she said, wrapping her arms around her waist as the wind keened through the hills. “Home.”

The big dog, nearly 150 pounds, started trotting briskly along the fresh tracks that were beginning to fill with snow, her own footsteps, the wolf dog’s paw prints, leading back the way from which they’d come, the way she couldn’t remember having traveled.

Had she walked a couple of a hundred miles or one mile? The landscape at night, frozen and white, looked all the same. And her mind, usually clearer than ever after waking from her visions, couldn’t discern any landmarks. But the tracks were fresh and she didn’t think she was suffering from frostbite.

But she had to be close.

She half ran to keep up with the dog.

She hated the visions, for that’s what they were, and wished they would stop, but they wouldn’t. Not until she died, she thought morosely as she held her coat tight around her, the coat she didn’t remember donning, and her boots crunched in the soft snow.

The visions had started when she was thirteen, at the time of the accident that had taken the lives of her parents and older sister, Cleo. It had been a winter night much like this one. She and Cleo had been arguing in the backseat while their father squinted into the coming blizzard. Their old Volvo was straining uphill, the four-cylinder engine humming loudly, the tires sliding a bit, the radio filled with static.

“Goddamned snow,” Father muttered. “I swear, next spring we’re moving to Florida!”

“No!” Cleo overheard this. “We can’t move! All my friends are here.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he insisted and snapped off the radio. His jaw was set, same as it always was when he’d made up his mind. Headlights from an oncoming vehicle washed his face in stark relief. From the backseat, behind Mother, Grace had thought he’d looked suddenly old, the lines in his face seeming craggy and harsh.

Cleo pouted and ordered Mother, “Tell him we can’t move!”

She turned to make eye contact with Cleo and said quietly, “Of course we won’t.”

“I’m serious.” Father squinted, the headlights looming as they approached the curving bridge that spanned Boxer Creek as it cut through the canyon some fifty feet below.

“You can’t be!” Cleo unbuckled her seat belt and leaned forward, pleading, touching his tense shoulder gently. “Don’t even joke about it. I won’t move.”

“Honey, we aren’t moving anywhere. Your father’s a foreman at the mine. Now, come on, let’s not worry about this.”

Then, “What the hell?” Panic tightened their father’s voice as the oncoming vehicle drew closer. “Dim those lights, you son of a bitch.” He flashed his own lights.

“Hank,” their mother reproved. Headlights, two blinding orbs, flooded the interior with harsh white light. “Hank! Watch out!”

Too late!

Trying to avoid the imminent collision, Father cranked on the steering wheel, and the car began to slide. Out of control. The passing truck hit their rear end and sent the Volvo spinning crazily.

Cleo screamed and was flung across Grace.

Grace’s head hit the side window. Pain exploded in her skull.

Mother was yelling, “Watch out, watch out, oh, God!” as the wagon hit the rail, bounced back onto the slick pavement, and skidded ever faster to the other side of the bridge.

The reeling Volvo crashed through the guardrail in a horrifying groan of twisting metal, popping tires, and splintering glass.

Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God…

Down the car plunged!

Cleo was screaming.

Mother prayed.

And Father cursed as Grace lost consciousness.

She didn’t feel the crash that snapped her mother’s neck and caused broken ribs to puncture her father’s lungs. She hadn’t been awake to witness Cleo being flung from the car and pinned beneath it, crushed to death.

Eighteen days later, Grace awoke in a hospital to learn that the rest of her family was gone. Dead. She’d managed to live, though she’d been half frozen in the creek waters, her body temperature dangerously low, only a few bruises from the seat belt and a concussion to indicate she’d been in the deadly wreck. No other driver or damaged vehicle had ever been located and when she was advised that her family was dead, she’d simply answered “No.”

Because she saw them.

Talked to them.

All of them: Father, Mother, and Cleo.

Even now. Forty-some years later.

Of course, the hospital staff were sure she was crazy, hallucinating, her brain conjuring up images.

If only, she thought now as the dog rounded a corner and she saw her small house, flanked by snowdrifts and dark as sin, sitting on a small hillock just off the road. Rubbing her arms, Grace picked up her pace and told herself that even if she told someone about her latest vision, she’d be disregarded. Sneered at.

Before the accident, as a child, she’d sometimes been lost in daydreams. Had been left on the playground more than once, never hearing the bell or the hoots and laughter of the other children.

Then, she’d been teased and had often run home crying, only to hear her mother say she was “special,” while Cleo cringed at “the weirdo” who was her sister. Those days her dreams had been labeled as nothing more than the fantasies of a “gifted” child. There had been no medical reason that she sometimes blanked out. And though her IQ tests and exams had placed her right in the center of normal, her mother had always whispered to her that she was smarter than the others who cruelly taunted her, that they, the ones who called her “retard,” were to be pitied.

But the playground barbs cut deep and after the accident, when Grace still spoke to her dead parents and sister on a regular basis, worrying her aunt Barbara, and after she adopted her first puppies—two wolves who had lost their mother to a poacher—her visions had increased. Become more real, more definitive.

Those school bullies were right. Her condition was weird.

Now she made her way up the path to her door and found it ajar. Inside the house was cold, the ancient furnace unable to keep up with the frigid arctic temperature swept inside by the howling wind. Locking the door behind her, she turned on the lights and kicked off her boots.

She was keyed up. Edgy. Nerves strung tight.

After hanging her coat in the closet, she found her robe and cinched it tight about her waist. She lit a fire from kindling she’d stacked near the grate, then rocked back on her heels and watched the eager flames devour the paper and dry wood. As the flames ignited, crackling and hissing, promising warmth, Sheena curled up on a thick bed that Grace had sewn.

“Good girl,” she said, warming her hands as she spied the clock on the mantel, near the fading, framed photograph of her family. It was morning, a few hours before dawn, and the images of Regan Pescoli were still with her.

The fire burned bright, golden shadows shifting through the small living area in the house where she’d resided all her life.

“An onus,” she confided in Sheena, who was lying down, great head on her paws, eyes focused on Grace. No wonder she took the heat she did.

Rod Larimer, owner of the Bull and Bear, an inn of sorts in town, had referred to her as “our resident looney.” And Bob Simms, the hunter who had killed the she-wolf twenty years earlier, had been known to say, “Crazy as a fruitcake. A real nutso. Should be locked up, if you ask me.” Manny Douglas, a writer for the Mountain Reporter, had once described her as one of “Grizzly Falls’s local color.” Manny had kindly lumped her in with the likes of Ivor Hicks, who’d thought he’d been abducted by aliens in the seventies, and Henry Johansen, a farmer who fell off his tractor and hit his head only to claim he could read other people’s minds.

Like you? she asked herself while staring at the flames.

Not all of the townspeople thought she was crazy. A few actually liked the whole clairvoyant thing, found it, and her, fascinating. Sandi Aldridge, the owner of Wild Will’s, was always kind, and Aunt Barbara, though disgruntled at having to move here to take care of her brother’s only surviving child, had always told her to accept the gift God had given her.

Hah. Now Grace grabbed a poker and jabbed at the fire, causing sparks to dance and red embers to glow a little more brightly. Going to the Pinewood County Sheriff’s Department wouldn’t be pleasant. Not at all. Sheriff Dan Grayson wasn’t a fan and Pescoli’s partner, Selena Alvarez, seemed icy and remote. But then that woman had secrets, held them close. Grace was certain of it. And she didn’t like the idea of trying to convince Grayson, or Alvarez, or anyone associated with the police about her vision. She didn’t want to suffer the ridicule that was certain to be thrust her way.

“What should I do?” she asked the dog and in that moment Grace heard her father’s voice, clear as a bell. “Be smart,” he advised gruffly. “Keep your damned mouth shut.”

But her mother, as she had in life, disagreed with her husband. “Don’t worry about what anyone says about you. A woman’s life is at stake. You owe it to her to tell what you know.”

“I don’t know anything,” Grace argued, feeling some warmth return to her toes.

“Don’t you?” Her mother seemed close enough to touch, but, of course, Grace saw no one, not even a transparent ghostly outline. Just heard voices. As ever.

Straightening, she picked up the picture from the mantel. Staring at the photograph of her family clustered on the front porch pulled at her heart-strings. But she quickly pushed aside any maudlin sense of nostalgia or self-pity.

Images of Regan Pescoli’s tortured face appeared again, and Grace drew in a deep, steadying breath. It was only a matter of time before she bucked up and faced the ridicule that was sure to be a part of confiding in the police.

“You know,” she said to the now sleeping dog, “Sometimes gift is just another word for curse.”

Strike three.

Seated at her desk in her cubicle at the department, Selena Alvarez swiped at her nose with a tissue and glowered at her computer monitor. She’d called Pescoli on her cell, gotten no response, tried to reach her partner’s ex-husband, Luke “Lucky” Pescoli, but the guy wasn’t answering. Finally, she’d dialed Nate Santana again with no luck. Though Pescoli hadn’t confided the name of her most recent in a string of loser lovers, Alvarez was certain Santana was the man she’d been seeing. The guy was just Pescoli’s type: a good-looking drifter who’d rolled into town a few years back and had recently caught Selena’s partner’s eye.

When it came to men, Pescoli never seemed to learn.

Her first husband, Joe Strand, had been a cop who had taken a bullet in the line of duty, but there had been questions about his ethics. Pescoli had admitted to Alvarez that she’d married Strand, her college sweetheart, after learning she was pregnant and that there had been cracks in their marriage, affairs when they’d separated a while. Luke Pescoli, her sexy-as-hell but useless second husband, now owed her thousands in back child support.

That was the problem with Pescoli, she picked men for their looks rather than their brains or moral character. Nate Santana was a case in point. The guy was the quiet type, with black hair, razor-sharp features, and piercing dark eyes that never reflected any of his thoughts. An athletic cowboy type with a whip-tough body and cutting sense of humor, he appeared as ready to ride a bareback bronc as he was to spend all night making love.

Good for a fling, maybe. Definitely not suitable for a husband, which Pescoli had claimed she didn’t want anyway.

Alvarez blew her nose and told herself not to worry. After all, Pescoli had called in. Again Alvarez replayed the message:

“It’s me. Hey, I’ve got a personal issue to deal with. Lucky and the kids. It might take a while, so cover for me, will ya?” Pescoli’s voice had been firm. Determined. Borderline angry.

So what else was new?

But that call had been made yesterday.

No word from her today.

Something was off. Definitely wrong. Pescoli was nothing if not a dedicated cop. Surely she would have called again, especially since there had been an arrest in the Star-Crossed Killer murders. No way would Detective Regan Pescoli have missed out on the action, not after months of trying to track down the whack job.

Sniffing, Alvarez tossed the tissue into her overflowing trash basket tucked under her desk. This cold—flu—she’d contracted was starting to really piss her off.

She doubted that she was overreacting. Even though Pescoli had indicated whatever issue she was dealing with would take some time, this was all wrong.

Alvarez glanced at the clock mounted high on the wall. Pescoli’s message had come in late yesterday afternoon and since that time the Spokane Police Department in Washington state thought they’d arrested the killer.

Alvarez wasn’t so sure.

Nothing seemed right today. But soon Sheriff Dan Grayson would be on his way to verify that the person who had been captured by the Spokane Police Department, and was now accused of being the serial killer who had terrorized this part of Montana, was their sick doer.

But Alvarez doubted the suspect arrested would prove to be the Star-Crossed Killer. The person in custody was definitely a would-be murderer, but so far, Alvarez hadn’t been able to tie the suspect to any of the previous crimes. She glanced at the pictures of the victims lying upon her desk. Five women. Different races and ages with no connection to each other. She bit her lip and tapped her fingers as she thought about how hard Regan Pescoli had worked the case.

She would have moved heaven and earth to be a part of the suspect’s arrest, no matter what her personal issues were. And she would have known about it. The stand-off and arrest had been splashed all over the news. Though most of the members of the press had swooped down on Spokane, a few reporters had stayed on in Grizzly Falls, still camped out in the surrounding streets, hoping for a new angle on the biggest story to hit Grizzly Falls since Ivor Hicks had claimed he’d been transported to a mothership by aliens.

She slid a glance to the clock on the wall. Nearly five P.M…. no way would Pescoli miss this kind of action.

Something was definitely wrong.

Alvarez scooted her chair back and tried not to think of the warning Pescoli had received from Grace Perchant, no less. Grace was an odd sort, cursed with some sort of psychic ability, if you believed her. Alvarez didn’t. All she really knew about the odd woman was that Grace raised wolf dogs and talked to ghosts and never made much trouble. But recently, while Pescoli and Alvarez were having lunch at Wild Will’s, Grace had approached the table. Her voice had been low, her pale green eyes troubled.

“He knows about you,” Grace had said to Pescoli, her gaze lost in a middle distance only she could see.

“Who?” Pescoli had asked, playing along.

“The predator.”

Alvarez had felt it then, that dip in the temperature that accompanies fear.

“The one you seek,” Grace had clarified. “The one who is evil. He’s relentless. A hunter.”

Pescoli had been angry and had taken it out on the clairvoyant, but she, too, had been scared. They’d both known that Grace was talking about the maniac the media had dubbed the Star-Crossed Killer.

He’s relentless. A hunter.

That much was true.

And an ace marksman.

He, Grace had said distinctly. Not she. Not the woman demanding to talk to her attorney in Spokane, the one everyone wanted to confront about the killings.

Sniffing some more, Alvarez leaned back in her desk chair. She wasn’t one to scare easy, but today she felt a stark fear she tried like hell to deny.

The horror was spread around her in glossy, colored photographs of the victims. Five in all. Or, she thought as she picked up a picture of Theresa Charleton, the first victim, five that they knew of.

There could be others.

Innocent women naked and bound to trees in the wilderness, abandoned to die a long and painful death in the frigid temperatures of the icy landscape.

“Sicko.” Selena’s jaw hardened as she glanced through a nearby ice-crusted window to the gloomy day beyond. Steely gray clouds huddled over the mountains, dumping snow, threatening a blizzard. Already parts of the county were experiencing downed lines and no power as the temperatures plummeted far below freezing.

“Merry Christmas,” she told herself, as the holiday was just around the corner.

She tossed the picture of the first victim onto her desk with the rest and gazed at the grouping. Alvarez felt as if she knew all the victims intimately:

Theresa Charleton, married, no children, a schoolteacher from Boise, Idaho, who had been visiting her parents in Whitefish, Montana. Her nude body had been found lashed to the bole of a hemlock tree, her initials and a star cut into the bark, a note nailed above her head with the same information from the killer, the man whom they suspected shot out the tire of her green Ford, then, after the car had spun out of control and been totaled, extricated Charleton from the wreckage and took her somewhere to nurture her back to health. This before cruelly and savagely hauling her to a remote spot in the forest, tying her to a tree, and leaving her to die with her initials carved into the bark of the tree. A note had been left, her initials printed in bold block letters: T C

Now Alvarez stared at the picture of Theresa’s face taken at the crime scene far from where her car had been located. The other victims had each suffered a similar fate: Nina Salvadore, a single mother from Redding, California, whose crushed red Focus had been discovered miles from her body. The note left at that scene had read:

TSC N

No one, not even cryptologists nor agents with the FBI with cryptogram-busting computer programs, had understood the meaning of the notes. Afterward, in rapid succession, the bodies of Wendy Ito and Rona Anders had been located. Then Hannah Estes had been found alive near an abandoned hunting lodge by a news crew and taken to a hospital, only to die later as the disguised killer had boldly entered the hospital, yanking her life support and making certain she expired. Hannah hadn’t been able to tell what she knew, or identify her killer, nor had any of the hospital cameras taken a decent photo of his image.

Bad damned luck.

All of the women had been driving alone through this area of the Bitterroot Mountains when their cars had been assaulted and they’d been taken from the original crime scene to be nurtured, then, like Charleton and Salvadore before them, had been strapped to a tree in a remote location and left to die an icy, brutal death. The notes and carvings at the scenes had only been different because of the positions of the stars and initials, but the result had been the same: Five women dead, the final note now reading:

WAR THE SC I N

With each victim’s initials added into the text, the sheriff’s department and FBI had come up with different ideas for the meaning of the letters, thinking perhaps that they could be jumbled, or that the killer was just screwing with them, that there was no meaning at all.

But deep down, they all knew that the killer, a very organized and clever person, was not only trying to tell them something, he was lording it over them that he was smarter than they. If his note was to make any sense, then he’d obviously picked out his victims before they’d been put through his personal emotional gauntlet of wrecking their vehicles, “saving” them, nursing them back to health somewhere, and then ruthlessly and cruelly leaving them to die in the wilderness.

He hadn’t sexually molested any of them.

That seemed out of place.

His dominance wasn’t physical, so much as emotional.

As far as they could tell, he set the women up, could just as easily have killed them, shot them in the head, or left them to die in their vehicles, but he rescued them, then abandoned them, assured they would die.

So far, he’d been right.

Except that now, if the Spokane Police and press were to be believed, the killer had supposedly been unmasked and captured…and he had turned out to be a she.

No way.

Alvarez took a sip of her cooling tea, then found a cough drop and sucked on it as she read over her notes for the dozenth time. As she did she was more certain than ever that Regan Pescoli was in trouble.

She tried Lucky Pescoli’s house phone one more time and heard a cheery little voice, that of his wife Michelle, nearly giggling as she said, “You’ve reached Lucky and Michelle. We’re out right now, but leave a message and maybe…you’ll get Lucky!”

Puke. Alvarez hated those pathetically cutesy voicemail greetings. She didn’t bother leaving a message. Just sucked on her menthol drop and flipped through copies of the notes the killer had left.

Craig Halden, one of the FBI field agents working the case, had carefully mapped out the stars left on the notes and chiseled into the bark of the trees where the women had been found. Using tracing paper he had overlapped the notes to show the position of the stars and in so doing decided the killer had chosen the constellation of Orion focusing on Orion’s belt. Alvarez had done her own research on the subject and found that in mythology Orion was stung by a scorpion, then flung high into the sky.

If her theory was right and the last word of the note was scorpion as in WAR OF THE SCORPION, or, the phrase she was partial to, due to the spacing of the letters: BEWARE THE SCORPION, then theoretically, Regan Pescoli, with her initials of R and P, could be in real trouble.

As Grace Perchant had predicted.

“Damn.” Selena’s heart contracted as she took one last glance at the photographs of the Star-Crossed Killer’s victims and plucked another tissue from her rapidly dwindling box.

Was Pescoli to be the next victim?

Alvarez’s eyes narrowed. If so, then her car would be disabled somewhere, a shot through a front tire, a perfect shot from an expert sniper.

And if that were the case, sooner or later, Pescoli’s Jeep would be found.

Or could she have had it out with her ex? A confrontation that had turned violent?

Either way it was bad.

She sniffed a third time and popped a couple of DayQuil tablets, hoping to hell she was wrong.