Left To Die (37 page)

They were both in lousy moods, disgusted that they were back at square one on the case, and Pescoli was looking for comfort food. She’d forgo the booze for the night, because, though officially she was off duty, she was still working the case. Everyone was. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t have fried food and calories galore.

They had found nothing in MacGregor’s cabin to indicate he’d held any of the victims captive. Aside from the fact that he’d “rescued” Jillian Rivers and kept her with him during the storms, the only other evidence against him—and it wasn’t anything worthwhile—was the fact that he had some maps of the area as well as a collection of astrology books.

It did seem as if he hadn’t intended to harm Jillian Rivers, that he had in fact pulled her from harm, not once, but twice.

Which only made their job harder.

Stomach rumbling, Pescoli glanced over the menu she’d read weekly ever since the place opened and settled on a Reuben sandwich. Tonight she needed comfort food, so she changed from her usual side salad to fries, and traded her default drink of Diet Coke for a “Shorty’s famous” black-and-white milkshake, which was a decadent confection of hot fudge, chocolate syrup, vanilla ice cream and crushed Oreo cookies. As the waitress Lillian had always said, “Only one way to describe the black-and-white: to die for.”

Which was probably true considering the amounts of sugar, fat, and every other edible sin imaginable chocked into it.

To hell with it.

Tonight she didn’t care.

Lillian appeared without a notepad. In her seventies, she was as sharp as she had been fifty years earlier, never so much as writing an order down, never making a mistake.

“You two are in here late,” she observed.

Regan made a face. “Long day.”

“Yeah. It was all over the TV and we had some news guys from outta town. Big van with a satellite dish, parked right over there near the Bull and Bear, just off main street.”

“I know where it is,” Pescoli said. She knew Rod Larimer, the B&B’s innkeeper. A guy who looked like he enjoyed the breakfast part of the B&B too much, Rod loved any publicity the town could garner, was all for developing the hell out of Grizzly Falls.

“Man alive, what a day!” Lillian said, then asked slyly, “you any closer to getting that guy?”

“All the time,” Pescoli said breezily, and Alvarez almost smiled.

“Three women in one day! Scares the living crap outta me, let me tell you. And I ain’t the only one. I hear the customers talking, don’t ya know, and everyone’s pretty wigged out. We’re all counting on you to kill that son of a bitch or lock him up and cut off his balls.”

Lillian was nothing if not opinionated.

“I think they outlawed castration a few years back,” Alvarez said dryly.

“Big mistake, if ya ask me. That’s the trouble, ain’t it? No one asks. Now, what can I getcha?”

Alvarez ordered a cup of lentil soup, a lettuce-wedge salad with lite bleu cheese dressing and an iced tea with extra lemon.

Was she kidding?

After a day like today?

Pescoli didn’t understand it, but Alvarez never seemed to give in to pressure. She didn’t smoke, barely drank, stayed clear of most men and stuck to her damned diet and exercise regimen like Super Glue.

Well, Pescoli wasn’t bashful. She ordered up a heart attack and sent Lillian off grinning.

“It’s worse than just MacGregor not being the doer,” Alvarez said once the drinks had been delivered and Lillian had disappeared behind the swinging doors to the kitchen. They were alone in the restaurant aside from a single guy reading the paper in the far corner and some antsy teenagers sucking down sodas, eating fries and blowing straw wrappers at each other.

Thankfully the background music wasn’t, for once, Christmas carols. Instead the strains of “Hotel California” could be heard over the fan of the furnace and the clink of dishes from the kitchen.

Alvarez swirled her tea with a long-handled spoon while watching the lemon slices dance around the ice cubes in her drink. “I hate to say it, but I think we’ve got a copycat.”

Damn it all to hell.
Pescoli had come up with the same irritating conclusion on her own, but she’d tried to talk herself out of it. Didn’t want to believe it. “I’m listening. Why?”

“First of all, there was no note left at the scene where Jillian Rivers was found. I thought maybe MacGregor had second thoughts about killing her and had somehow destroyed the note when he went back for her, but that just doesn’t work.” Alvarez tested the drink, sipping through a plastic straw. “The star carved into the tree was different. Six-pointed, not five.”

Pescoli decided to play devil’s advocate. She plucked the cherry from her milkshake. “So maybe he was interrupted. Didn’t have time to post the note.”

“Still doesn’t explain the star. Huh-uh. Something’s up.”

“It could be he’s evolving. They do that.” She dropped the red maraschino into her mouth.

Alvarez lifted a shoulder. “He’s escalating. That much is given. But evolving?” She shook her head.

“Well, then he’s panicking. That’s why he’s dumping the girls so fast. He’s scared.”

“Why?”

“Maybe we’re closer than we think.” Pescoli took a long swallow of the sweet drink and nearly gave herself an ice-cream headache.

Alvarez snorted. “We’re close to nothing. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Zilch.”

“Could be he doesn’t know that.”

“Still…three in one day, after a pattern of one a month?” Lines of frustration showing around her lips, Alvarez shook her head and took a sip of her tea. “Nope, I’m not buying it. What does he think we know? What would it be that scares him? How could we be closer?”

Pescoli grunted. “Does the guy have a damned harem, or what? Three women, well, maybe two, if Jillian Rivers is out of the mix, both of whom we think were held hostage for a while before being dumped in the forest. How many more does he have stashed away?”

Alvarez looked up at her with horror. “Oh God…you think he’s got others?”

“I hope not. God, I hope not.”

Lillian swept through the doors from the kitchen about the same time one of the teenagers was opening his table’s saltshaker. “Hey, there! Cut that out.” The boy, a pimple-faced kid in a stocking cap pulled low over his eyes, froze. “I mean it.” Lillian’s thin lips were pursed in anger and her eyes flashed fire from behind eyeglasses rimmed in tiger stripes. The kid, flushing so that his acne was even redder than before, dropped the saltshaker, and it fell, spilling its contents across the table.

“Sorry,” he muttered with a look to his friends. They all scrambled out of the booth and into the night.

“Little twerps.” Lillian deposited Regan’s and Selena’s food on the table. “Who needs ’em? I’ll clean that up and be back, if you need anything. Darn fool kids probably didn’t even leave a tip!”

The man reading the paper held up his cup for another shot of coffee, and Lillian, in her ire, swept past. “Be right with ya,” she said, intent on cleaning up the spilled salt.

Alvarez cautiously spread a little dressing onto her lettuce wedge. “I guess we’ll know more when we ID the victims.”

Pescoli nibbled a crispy, thick fry. Fried heaven. “Missing Persons is working on that.”

“Yeah, along with the FBI and agencies in the surrounding states.”

“You’d think we’d find their cars.” She snagged a catsup bottle from the end of the table and squirted a large pool on one side of her plate.

“Maybe they were grabbed another way.”

“Doubt it.” Pescoli took a long drink from her milkshake. “At least now we have two witnesses, though Jillian Rivers can’t remember anything about the guy. Maybe when EH or HE wakes up she can ID him.”

“
If
she wakes up.”

“Oh hell, she’d better. She’s our only witness. So far, since Ms. Rivers thinks Zane MacGregor is her knight in shining armor—”

“Face it, Pescoli, he might just be. Not all men are losers,” Alvarez said, blowing over her steaming cup of soup, sending the scent of warm spices drifting across the table.

Though Alvarez hadn’t mentioned Regan’s love life specifically, it felt like a barb. Alvarez had made no bones about the fact that she thought Pescoli wasn’t particular enough in her choices in men. Well, hell, she was probably right. Not that it was any of her damned business.

“MacGregor might have saved her,” Alvarez said.

“But from whom?”

“That’s the million-dollar question.”

“Only part of the question.” As she was picking up half her grilled sandwich, some of the sauerkraut fell onto her plate where the sauce was already dripping. She didn’t care. “The other part is, who’s the original killer, the guy with all the notches on his grisly belt?” Taking a large bite, she barely tasted the blend of corned beef, Swiss cheese, kraut and secret sauce the chef piled on rye bread. Instead, she felt that old rage, the anger she tried to keep tamped down in order to maintain her perspective, her cool. Tonight, considering the number of terrorized and murdered women piling up, it just wasn’t happening. Her brain was moving too quickly and she was scared to death that the surviving victim found up at the abandoned lodge might die before she could identify her attacker.

Pescoli worked through her sandwich half, then munched on the pickle that came with the meal. There were just too many inconsistencies in this case. For one thing, the ropes were all wrong. All of them had been twisted-fiber rope—but the one used for Jillian Rivers was nylon and braided. “Unless our guy’s run out of sisal, or he’s trying to throw us off or just screwing with us, you’re right, we’ve got ourselves a bonafide nutcase of a copycat. Who would want to do that?” She stared for a second at an aluminum tree spinning under a pink spotlight, moving in the opposite direction of the refrigerated pie case revolving on the counter. “And why Jillian Rivers? Simple bad luck? She was the next car through and he wanted to jump in on the action?”

“Or was she selected by the copycat for some reason?”

“A lot of questions with no answers.”

Alvarez sighed and said, “I hate to admit it, but I’m with Chandler on this one. I peg the first killer as someone who likes to toy with us, show us how much smarter he is. He keeps things the same so we
know
it’s him. Jillian Rivers is an anomaly. It’s not just the rope that makes her a different kind of victim. No one else was ever drugged with ether, right? Or carried to the killing ground?” She stirred her soup. “Uh-uh. They were all marched naked to the place where they were killed, urged along with a knife or some other weapon sharp enough to make razor-like slits in their skin. And the footprints in the snow show only one set going in and out at the spot we found Jillian Rivers. Her footprints weren’t there.”

“She said she was carried. And there were MacGregor’s prints.”

“Aside from his. The other prints were smaller than his size twelves and the first killer’s elevens. These are more like eights or nines, not a huge guy.”

“One with a hard-on for Jillian Rivers.”

“Right. Another woman with no known enemies.”

“Oh, she’s got enemies, at least one, maybe two.”

“Who?” Alvarez asked, eyebrows lifting in interest.

“She’s divorced, isn’t she? Believe me. She’s got enemies.”

“Some divorces are amicable.”

Pescoli snorted before taking another bite. “Spoken like a woman who’s never been married. And here’s the thing. I don’t like her ex. I talked to Mason Rivers. He’s just a little too slick for me.” She dug into the rest of her sandwich and Alvarez polished off most of her soup as they lapsed into silence.

Pescoli couldn’t help thinking of the woman lying comatose in a hospital bed in Missoula. That victim, identified with the initials E and H, was key to the case, so important she was under round-the-clock police guard, even in the hospital. Jillian Rivers, too, had a guard in the hospital, though Pescoli begrudgingly believed Alvarez’s theory, that Ms. Rivers was the victim of a very determined copycat killer. A nutcase? One seeking his own sick notoriety, or something else, something more personal?

Pushing her half-eaten salad aside, Alvarez voiced her own concerns. “It doesn’t look good for the woman we found at Broken Pine. The doctors don’t have a lot of hope.”

“I know,” Pescoli said. She left a quarter of her sandwich, but polished off her milkshake as a middle-aged couple walked into the restaurant and found a private booth. They looked like they’d been married for twenty years and were still in love. Hard to believe. She tossed her napkin onto her plate and set the empty milkshake glass near the edge of the table.

“It’s not like we’re going to learn anything new from the dead one we found up at Cougar Pass,” Pescoli said. “I’d bet dollars to donuts that we’ll get the same information we did off the other victims: no epithelial transfer from the killer, nothing under the vic’s fingernails, no sign of sexual attack or semen.”

“Don’t be so optimistic.”

“She’ll probably have a few broken bones courtesy of the car ‘accident.’” Pescoli made air quotes as she reached for her wallet. “There will also be some bruising and contusions consistent with the accident, and evidence that she was prodded with a knife, along with burns from the ropes that bound her.”

Lillian appeared. “Anything else? We’ve got a killer coconut creme pie tonight, only a couple pieces left. Oops. Did I say that?
Killer
creme pie? No pun intended.”

“Think I’ll pass,” Pescoli said, and Alvarez, true to her nature and her damned diet regimen, shook her head. Just once Pescoli would love to see her partner cut loose. Have a Long Island iced tea or give in to the urge for a donut or brownie left by Joelle in the break room at the office. Or, better yet, start dating.

They squared up, each paying for her share of the meal and leaving Lillian a decent tip, before donning jackets, hats and gloves again as notes from an old Gordon Lightfoot tune swirled around them.

Outside it was cold and dark, the snow coming down fast enough that half an inch had piled on the Jeep. Pescoli felt the urge for a cigarette but pushed it aside as she squeezed into her side of the rig and noted that the King Cab truck hadn’t moved. So it didn’t belong to the teenagers. Nor the couple that had shown up. Maybe the guy reading the paper in the corner?