Deserves to Die (Alvarez & Pescoli)

Alvarez gave her a long look. “What’s going on with you?”

Oh, shit. She’d hoped that since the conversation had turned to the case at hand it wouldn’t circle back to her. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t play dumb. You’re even more out of sorts than usual.”

“Nice,” she said, gripping the wheel more tightly as the farmland gave way to the outskirts of Mi

ssoula, but she silently admitted Alvarez had a point. Pescoli’s emotions were all over the place. Since there wasn’t much she could do about them, she shut up. Alvarez again buried herself in the information flowing through her phone and they drove the short distance to the hospital in uncomfortable silence.

Each lost in her own thoughts, they parked, hurried inside, and took the elevator down to the morgue. Pescoli tried not to dwell on the fact that Dan Grayson had given up his tenuous grip on the world, because, like it or not, that part of her life was over.

Ryder’s breakfast consisted of black coffee from the machine in the motel’s lobby and a burrito of sorts from a vending machine in the mini-mart located at the intersection half a block from the River View’s front entrance. Even with the addition of hot sauce from a couple free packets he’d gotten at the store, the meal was tasteless, but he didn’t much care. Along with the burrito, he’d picked up a newspaper, a bag of chips, a packet of jerky, and a six-pack of Bud, which he’d tucked into the tiny insulated cabinet the River View’s management had optimistically dubbed a refrigerator.

Despite the fact that the bed had sloped decidedly toward the center of a sagging mattress, he’d slept like a rock. “The sleep of innocents,” his grandmother had said, though, in his case, that assessment was far from the truth. He’d learned to catch his winks wherever he could, whether it be wrapped in a thin sleeping bag on some ridge under the stars, or in his truck in broad daylight, after he’d spent a night huddled in his pick-up on a stakeout swilling strong coffee and holding his bladder until it felt like it would burst. Either way, he’d learned to drop off and catch whatever sleep he could. So the River View’s sagging mattress hadn’t bothered him any more than the meal of processed mystery meat—beef, if the label on the plastic-wrapped burrito was to be believed—trapped inside a tortilla that was probably several weeks past its pull date.

“So where are you?” he asked aloud as he pulled several ziplock bags from his duffel and laid them on the table that sufficed as a desk in the room. From each bag, he pulled out pictures, eight by tens, all in black and white, which had been taken of different-looking women, but whom, he believed, all were one and the same: Anne-Marie Calderone, the object of his search.

If he was right, and he’d bet his truck that he was on the money, she’d taken a crooked path from New Orleans to Grizzly Falls, Montana.

She’d become a master of disguise. Each photo was different; her style of dress, her hair color and cut, the shape of her body, whether she wore glasses or not, the curve and thickness of her eyebrows and lips. In one case where he thought she was wearing a short blond wig, she appeared seven months pregnant. In another, her bare leg was exposed by a short skirt and a tattoo was visible on her calf. In still another, her eyes appeared dark, almost black, though through the gray filter it was hard to determine the shade. Makeup accentuated her high cheekbones, or an appliance stuffed beneath her cheeks sometimes stole them from her. Her teeth were never the same, sometimes crooked, sometimes straight, but always longer or wider or with odd, gaze-catching overlaps than usually graced her smile. He found one where she’d placed a mole above her lip, and another where her fingernails were impossibly long, still another where her hair was stringy and dull. There were all kinds of distractions to catch the eye so that the viewer wouldn’t take in the whole picture of her face and be able to say for certain that she was the woman in the first photograph, the one in color, of the real woman.

Picking up that photo, he studied the details of Anne-Marie’s oval face—straight, aquiline nose dusted with fine freckles, naturally arched eyebrows, wide gold eyes, and full lips that, he remembered, stretched into a sexy and secretive smile. Her teeth were straight, incisors a little longer than the others, and the glint in those incredible eyes had caused more than one male heart to beat a little faster. A natural athlete, her hips were slim, her breasts small, her legs long. She was far more clever than he’d given her credit for. Twice, he’d nearly caught her and just as many times she’d given him the slip.

“No more,” he vowed as he found his iPad where he’d stored most of his notes on her. The pictures were on the device as well as his phone, but he liked the photographs as they were easier to pocket and pull out when necessary if he came across someone who might have run into her. They were easier to give to the person rather than let anyone handle his phone with all of its stored data.

Also, it seemed more likely to him that if he were “her brother,” or “her cousin” or “a friend,” all claims he’d made while tracking her down, that he would have an old photo. Bringing out a gallery of different shots stored on a computer file might be off-putting.

He checked his notes again. Her connection to Grizzly Falls was frail at best. Then again, when it came to the chameleon that was Anne-Marie Calderone, what he knew about her was about as solid as quicksand, the lies soft and shifting, hiding the solid footing of the truth.

His jaw grew tense at the thought of how she’d duped him.

All too easily.

Because he hadn’t been thinking with his head when he was around her.

He felt the same cold fire burn through him as he gathered up her pictures and stuffed them back into the plastic bags.

Time to get moving.

He didn’t know where she was. But he knew where to start looking for her.

Cade Grayson.

He shouldn’t be too hard to find. Grayson was an ex-rodeo rider. Hard drinking. Womanizing. Trouble. The kind of man Anne-Marie had found irresistible. So of course, she’d come to seek him out.

From what Ryder had read in the local newspaper, Cade was one of two surviving brothers of Dan Grayson, recent sheriff of Pinewood County and the victim of a homicide. Cade and Zedediah still owned and maintained the Grayson ranch outside town, the place their ancestors had claimed as a homestead.

It seemed the likely place for Anne-Marie to show up. Ryder grabbed his heavy jacket and tucked his pistol and knife within. In a small case, he put the iPad, night-vision goggles, some various spy equipment, and his camera with all of its lenses.

After double-checking that everything, including the packs of chips and jerky, were in place, he zipped up the case and tossed on his jacket.

As he locked the door of the shabby room behind him, he thought of her again. How she’d once been. Without the makeup and disguises. Stripped bare. A natural beauty, a woman of privilege, smarter than most people knew.

He threw open the door of his truck, tossed in his gear, climbed inside, and fired the engine, her visage with him still. He’d trained himself not to think too much about her but sometimes he couldn’t help himself. All his practiced self-control slid away and the door of his memories cracked open. When that happened, as it did as he backed out of the icy parking spot, he couldn’t help but remember her naked body, shining with perspiration, flesh warm and smooth, eyes a smoldering shade as she stared up at him, almost daring him to give in to her.

She had been as erotically sensual and emotionally dangerous a woman as he’d ever met; a deadly combination he’d been unable to resist.

It wasn’t a big surprise that he’d decided to hunt her down, he thought, driving out of the lot and joining a slim stream of traffic heading toward the town of Grizzly Falls.