Expecting to Die (Alvarez & Pescoli)

“Big Foot,” she muttered under her breath and wondered why those two words sounded like an omen.

Pescoli headed downhill and met up with her partner; then, seeing that Alvarez was dealing with the coroner, she made her way back into the graveled area where the kids were being detained. By now, parents were at their children’s sides.

Wiping the perspiration from her forehead, she observed the little groups of parents, kids, and cops standing between the parked cars of the teenagers. The interviews were progressing.

The thing of it was, Pescoli knew most of the teens, as well as a good many of the adults. She’d met several sets of parents, or the single parents, over the years that Bianca had been in school, some of them as far back as preschool, over a dozen years earlier.

Interviewing them would be a trip down memory lane—make that a bad trip, considering the situation.

Reading their faces in the strobing lights from the department-issued cruisers, she noted that a good percentage of the parents were horrified, as would be expected, a few seemed angry and nervous, and a few others refused to have their children talk to the cops at all, as if the kids, or maybe the parents themselves, had something to hide, or because they’d been down this road before and decided to say nothing until they lawyered up.

Too bad. The way Pescoli figured it, every last one of them, including herself, should be relieved that it wasn’t their child being hauled out of the woods in a body bag sometime this morning.

The interviews weren’t going to be fun. That much was certain. She headed to a clutch of women she recognized, all of whom had aged in the dozen or so years that had passed since she’d seen them every morning as she’d dropped off or picked up Bianca from preschool. At this time of night—make that morning—being pulled out of sleep to come and get their kids at a wild-ass party where a body had been found—yeah, it didn’t look good on anyone. Except maybe for Mary-Beth Delaney, who was as trim as ever, her auburn hair without any gray, no lines marring a face with high cheekbones, pointed chin, and wide eyes. She was dressed in a jogging suit, her hair drawn up in a messy bun, hooped earrings glinting in the harsh lights from the cruisers, not a smudge of makeup out of place.

She smiled at Regan, though her gaze did flick down Pescoli’s body for a quick, judgmental second.

Never had Pescoli felt so hugely pregnant.

“This is so awful. So awful. Can we just get out of here?” Mary-Beth asked anxiously, as if she and Pescoli were ti

ght, had been friends for years, though they hadn’t seen each other for a decade. Pescoli remembered Mary-Beth as being a pushy mom in preschool, already insisting her little Simone excel at letters and numbers or whatever it was the kids did then. While Bianca was coloring butterflies outside the lines and drawing some additional free-form insects on the page, Simone had been encouraged to keep her work neat, the coloring shaded, the hues blended, each stroke of the crayon smooth. Like the little toddler was going to become some female, twenty-first-century Michelangelo or something.

And yet both of their daughters had ended up here, in the forest, in the dark of the night, where a classmate had apparently died.

“You can go soon. I just have a few more questions for Simone,” Pescoli said, turning toward Mary-Beth’s daughter. She forced a smile as Mary-Beth flicked another glance at her protruding waistline.

“Bianca left,” Simone asserted. Challenging. Defiant.

“Yes, she did,” Pescoli agreed.

“I don’t see why she got to leave, and I have to stay.” She flipped her hair off her face, her eyes narrowed, her lips in a flat angry line.

“It’s not fair,” Lindsay Cronin chimed in petulantly. In a quicksilver moment, Pescoli remembered Lindsay as a preschooler, chubby arms crossed over her chest, chin pointed out, lips turned down, spouting the same words, “It’s not fair,” over some minor infraction at the school. Then, as apparently now, Lindsay felt the need to point out when things didn’t go as she liked.

“She gave her statement. I already spoke with her,” Pescoli said.

That was too much for Mary-Beth. “They let you interrogate your own daughter?” One manicured hand flipped skyward in an expression of disbelief. “Isn’t that like a major conflict of interest?”

Well, yeah. “Not interrogate. We’re interviewing. Asking a few questions. That’s all. Someone else from the department will talk with Bianca again. Of course.”

Mary-Beth silently accused her of lying.

“It’s so unfair!” Simone crossed her arms over her chest. Her pouting was nearly palpable.

A step behind her daughter, Mary-Beth was nodding.

Pescoli agreed. “You’re right. It’s not. Fair, that is. But then nothing is.” She eyed the girl, who was wearing enough makeup to look like she was trying out for a reality show. Simone’s eyeliner and mascara were applied nearly as thickly as her haughty expression.

“And I heard Bianca thinks she saw a monster, some kind of big hairy ape thing in the woods.” Simone’s chin inched up a fraction.

“You heard that?” Pescoli really wanted to downplay any talk of a monster. Finding the dead girl up here would create enough of a media frenzy as it was.

“Everybody heard it. Rod Devlin said she was raving like a lunatic. Emmett Tufts says he was walking back to base camp, and Bianca came racing down the hill and nearly knocked him over, she was so out of it.”

Pescoli caught a glimpse of Emmett and his brother, Preston, standing next to a pickup with a king cab. Between them was their mother, Terri. The boys had gotten their height from their mother, as she nearly looked eye-to-eye with her sons, both of whom were over six feet and had played basketball for the high school. Terri, she’d heard, had played college ball. As had she. Terri had been a center, Pescoli a guard.

“Everyone knows about the Big Foot,” Simone said, and Lindsay nodded vehemently.