Expecting to Die (Alvarez & Pescoli)

He’d looked at his wife. “A week ago last Friday. Around eight o’clock. I already put all this in the report I gave to the missing persons officer.”

“I know. Just refresh my memory.”

“It wasn’t anything unusual. Not at the onset. She’d come back from volunteering at the hospital. Northern General. She’s worked there for nearly a year. First in the cafeteria and lately in the children’s ward. You know, played with the kids, read them stories and such . . . and . . . that was, I don’t know, maybe around six, I guess, because she said she stopped off and saw a friend before driving home, so she was later than usual. Her shift is over at five. Then, after dinner, she went out for a walk. Never came back.”

“With anyone?”

“Alone.” Glenn had shaken his balding head. “Someone called and no, she didn’t say who, but I heard her phone ring and then she took off, said she’d be back in an hour or so. We didn’t think anything of it. It was still light, probably seven, seven-thirty. She did it all the time. Loved being outside in the summertime. Ever since she was a kid.” His voice had cracked. “Oh, Jesus . . .”

“Had she done this before?”

Destiny’s mother had given off a soft mewling sound.

“A couple of times. That’s why we didn’t report it until . . . until well into the next day, after we’d checked with some of her friends. No one had seen her or talked to her or texted or nothin’.”

“Did you talk to Donny?”

“He wouldn’t answer the phone,” Glenn had said bitterly. “So we filed a report.”

“My baby, my baby, my baby,” Helene had whispered brokenly, and her husband had held her for several minutes, whispering into her hair to comfort her when he, himself, was blinking back tears.

“We’re going home now,” he’d said, shepherding his wife out of the viewing room. “Come on, Helene,” he’d whispered. “It’ll be all right.” Then he’d thrown Alvarez a final dark look that said what they both knew: It would never be all right. Not ever.

Alvarez had barely been able to control her own emotions, which was unusual. She prided herself on staying calm and keeping her expression unreadable. She’d trained herself, practiced remaining emotionless for years, ever since high school, when she’d had to rein in her feelings, her anger and shame and hatred after her girlhood had been stripped from her.

She could usually pull it off—the heartless ice-princess image—but grieving parents got to her. Always had. Her heart had bled for the Montclaires.

Now, despite her lack of sleep and the fact that her eyelids felt like sandpaper scraping against her eyes, she was bound and determined to do whatever it took to find out what had happened to Destiny Rose.

Officially, the jury was still out on whether Destiny had met with foul play or suffered a fatal accident.

But Alvarez was betting on option one.

Nonetheless, she’d withhold judgment until all the facts were in. Cause of death determined. Alvarez had requested a rush on the autopsy.

She pushed her desk chair back and made her way past Blackwater’s office on her route to the lunchroom. The acting sheriff hadn’t yet arrived, but then few had at this early hour. She hesitated for a second at the closed door, one that had always been left ajar when Dan Grayson was sheriff. Her heart twisting, she remembered how she’d looked up to Grayson, even fancied herself in love with him at one time, how comforting it had been to see him at his desk, his Stetson hung on a peg, Sturgis, his black lab, curled on the dog bed near his desk. Grayson had had an easy smile and there had been kindness and intelligence lurking in the depths of his firm, uncompromising stare.

She still missed him.

And though she was now deeply involved with Dylan O’Keefe and was considering marriage to the private investigator, she would never forget Dan Grayson. She couldn’t. He still came to her in her dreams, even once when she was locked in O’Keefe’s embrace. A bit of guilt ran through her at the thought, but Grayson had been her mentor and so much more. There had never been a physical relationship between them, but there had been a connection, an unspoken meeting of the minds or souls or whatever you wanted to call it. Though rationally she couldn’t explain it, she felt that link still existed.

Which was ridiculous, of course.

And against everything she held true.

She’d always been a realist, trusted the facts, relied on science. Anything considered remotely paranormal was dismissed as just plain bunk. Reaching out to the dead or communing with spirits in a twilight world of afterlife was folly. Dreams were just dreams, misfires of neurons in her subconscious. Nothing more.

For a nanosecond, she considered Grace Perchant, a loner of a woman who lived outside of town with two hybrid dogs, each part wolf, and believed she co

mmuned with the dead and was a conduit from this world to the next, could even see the future.

Alvarez hadn’t bought any of it, though the ghostly woman with white-blond hair and pale eyes had made some predictions that had come eerily close to the truth and it had put this niggling, persistent doubt in her brain.

Was it possible that she, Selena Alvarez, could somehow communicate with Grayson?

No. Not a chance. She knew better. Dan Grayson did not “visit” her in her dreams. It was just her subconscious working its way through her grief and guilt. Nothing more.

Yet, as she stood outside his old office, she placed her hand, fingers splayed, on the solid wood frame, and whispered, “I miss you.” Then, squaring her shoulders, she forced herself to shake off her case of nostalgia and continued down the hall toward the lunchroom. Time to bury her ancient fantasies. She was now with the man who was certainly the love of her life, and the dreams she was having of Grayson were all because of her own guilt that she’d survived when an assassin had taken him down. It was still so unbelievable that no one in the department, including herself, had been able to protect the man who had helmed this office with such a fair and even hand.