Expecting to Die (Alvarez & Pescoli)

“You’d better be straight with me, Preston,” she warned him. “Because it will be pretty easy to link the person inside the suit to the murders and whoever chased Bianca Pescoli the night Destiny Rose Montclaire was found.”

“Wait a second! What does one thing have to do with the other?” he asked, and his eyes had rounded, a newfound fear evident. “I mean . . . Jesus.” His shoulders slumped. He bit his lower lip. “I think I need a lawyer.”

Damn!

She’d known it would come down to this, the lawyer request, of course, and she’d gotten more from him than she’d expected, but she’d hoped he’d open up. For now, the interview was over. “Okay, we’ll call one for you or if you don’t have one—”

He closed his eyes and dropped his face into his hands. “I am so fucked!” he said into his palms. “So damned fucked.”

She didn’t wait, but there, on the spot, with the cameras rolling, read him his rights, the Miranda warning. “Now, you’ll need to stay here until your lawyer arrives. But if there’s anything you want to tell me, I promise I’ll try to get a deal for you.”

He hesitated, then lifted his face. It was wet. Tears shined in his eyes. “I didn’t mean to kill her,” he said, and she froze in her chair. “I didn’t mean to kill Marjory, but she was banging my dad and he would find out, especially with all the DNA samples you took. My mom told me a long time ago that Dad . . . well, his sperm wasn’t viable, and that she’d gone to a sperm bank.” At her expression, he nodded, his lips pulling into a frown, the dam of silence t

hat he’d built suddenly broken, the flood waters of guilt rushing through.

“Yeah, how do you think that feels, huh?” Preston demanded. “Dad, he doesn’t even know. She did it behind his back, only told me because I had to go to the hospital, got in a car wreck and might need a transfusion, and she was afraid it would all come out. That somehow the blood type would show up wrong and . . . But it didn’t matter cuz he left her for Marjory. You know the end of that story, that she was originally Emmett’s girlfriend and so, once they were married, she and Emmett got back to it. And crap, she gets pregnant?

“How stupid is she?” He was unloading now, still fighting tears but seeming to want to unburden himself. Sniffing, he said, “It was an accident, really. Marjory and Dad had gotten into another one of their fights—rip roarers—and this time Emmett, he thinks he’s going to take Dad on. Which is just stupid, so I talk him down, say I’ll handle it and you know, talk some sense into Marjory.

“Like that was going to happen. Anyway, I met up with Marjory in town before she got to the hotel where she was going to stay after her fight with Dad. We drove around and stopped the car, up near Cougar Pass, and you know what? She not only doesn’t listen to me, she actually comes on to me. Like kissing me and touching me and . . . and I start to go for it, y’know?” He was staring at Alvarez, hoping she understood.

“Of course,” she forced out.

“I mean she’s hot and I’m always horny, and we start going at it. I mean, big time.”

“You had sex.”

“Yeah, yeah, in the car, and then, when it’s all over, she kind of freaks out, and not just a little bit, not like she feels a little guilty. Nuh-uh, she fuckin’ goes psycho on me and starts to try to kill me and screaming that I took advantage of her, that I raped her when she was all over me—all over me. She was, like, all of a sudden fuckin’ nuts!”

“So what did you do?”

“I tried to shut her up. That’s all.” His hands flew to the side of his head, palms out, as if he were trying, in his mind, to back away from an impossible situation. “When she comes at me, hitting me and trying to bite me, I just try to shut her up, y’know. So I put my hands around her neck and squeezed until she quit attacking me and . . . and I guess . . . I guess I didn’t stop. Not when I should have. I was kind of like in a different dimension, you know?”

She didn’t.

“It was like almost an out-of-body experience. And when it was over and I knew she was dead and the baby was dead too”—fresh tears erupted from his eyes—“I just panicked and thought, maybe I could leave her in the woods, somewhere close to Reservoir Point and . . . and maybe everyone would think that a Big Foot or whoever killed Destiny Rose had done it.” He let out a long, shuddering breath.

“What about Destiny Rose?”

“I don’t know. I had nothin’ to do with that. Nothin’, I swear!” He ran an arm under his nose and sniffed loudly.

“And the ape suit?”

“Shit. How the fuck did that get in there? I have no idea.” He looked at her so ingenuously she almost believed him. Almost.

“You didn’t kill Destiny Rose Montclaire?”

“No.”

“Or Lindsay Cronin?”

“For fuck’s sake, didn’t you hear me? I said no! I don’t know what happened to them.” He shoved the fingers of both hands through his hair. “For the love of Christ, Detective, can I please have a cigarette now? And would you call my fuckin’ lawyer?”

* * *

Where the hell were they taking her? Two men had abducted Bianca. She knew that now. They’d tied her hands quickly, stuffed a rag into her mouth so she couldn’t scream, then thrown her into the back of a pickup and driven wildly through the night, the huge truck bouncing and grinding over the old road at Reservoir Point to the country road where the engine had roared smoothly, the tires humming over smooth asphalt, hip-hop music blasting through the open windows.

This she only knew partially, as her rattled brain was trying to make sense of what had happened and regain control of her body again. But it had been impossible, and as she’d stared upward, seeing a wide night sky filled with thousands of twinkling stars and feeling the rush of the wind as the truck sped down the road, she could do nothing but wait and see what fate they had in store for her.