Deserves to Die (Alvarez & Pescoli)

Unless she made it to her SUV.

She could drive to the sheriff’s office.... Wait! Her phone! If she could somehow get away from him and call 9-1-1, she might have a chance.

Avery slim one.

Or she could try to reason with him.

Oh, yeah. Right. Like that had ever worked.

“What are you doing here?” she finally demanded when she had her wits about her. Fear had driven any lingering vestige of sleep from her mind. As her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she tried to see him more clearly, still in the same position at the door. She tried to make out his features, to read his expression.

“Come on, Anne-Marie,” he said, his voice a little clearer, his faint Texas drawl perceptible. “Is that any way to greet your husband?”

Chapter 23

Grabbing a cup of decaf from the carafe in the lunchroom, Pescoli settled down at her desk. Though it was still early, the department was starting to come alive. Officers, talking, laughing, and shaking off the cold, were drifting into the building with the change of shifts. Phones rang and a common printer positioned off the hallway near Joelle’s desk hummed and clacked while the beast of a furnace wheezed as if it was on its last breath.

She sipped her weak-ass coffee and scanned her e-mail. Though she wouldn’t admit it to Blackwater, she’d spent a lot of her free time on Sunday going over the Bart Grayson suicide file, as much for Dan as for Hattie. She felt it was an exercise in futility, but it had seemed fitting somehow, almost cathartic. With her kids at Luke’s for the weekend, and Santana working on the new house, she’d put in some serious hours reviewing the years-old case and had tried to look at it with a new eye. But she’d found no hard evidence in the old reports that indicated Bartholomew Grayson had died by anything other than his own hand. Even though there was no suicide note left at the scene, nor message found in his belongings, nor conversation with a close friend or family member about taking his life, it still added up to the same conclusion. Friends and family alike had admitted how despondent Bart had been over the breakup of his marriage to Hattie. Apart from his widow, they, like the authorities, believed he’d ended it all. He’d died from suffocation by hanging himself in the barn, which was where his brother Cade had found him.

Bart Grayson’s death had been a tragedy, of course. Unfortunate. And probably preventable. He’d been a young, strapping man with two kids who, it seemed, had so much to live for.

Pescoli was certain everyone in the Grayson family, Dan included, had beat themselves up for not seeing the signs of Bart’s depression. No one had been aware of how deep his despair had run.

Still, the bare facts of the case all pointed to the man taking his own life.

She would have to call Hattie and tell her as much. No doubt Bart’s ex-wife still wouldn’t accept the truth. In Pescoli’s opinion, Hattie had been grappling with guilt ever since hearing the sad news about her ex and it was probably the root cause of her obsession with proving the suicide was really a murder. She fervently believed Bart would never willingly leave his daughters, that his love for them would have stopped him from taking his own life.

Pescoli wondered about the whole tangled web of Hattie Dorsey and the Grayson brothers. As rumor had it, Hattie’s love for Bart hadn’t exactly trumped her interest in the other men in his family. Then there was Cara, Dan’s first ex-wife, whom Pescoli had learned at the funeral was Hattie’s half sister. That was the family connection. It was all so intertwined, but hey, who was she to judge? Hattie had always had a fascination with all things Grayson.

Another aspect of the case was the insurance money. Bart had taken out two substantial policies with Hattie Grayson and her daughters listed as the beneficiaries. As it was, those benefits had never been paid, not because Bart had changed them, nor because he and Hattie had been divorced at the time of his death, but because Bart had taken his own life, thereby nullifying the payment. The insurance companies had been within their legal rights to refuse to pay. The upshot was that Hattie and her daughters had inherited Bart’s portion of the Grayson ranch, but they’d been cut out of several hundred thousand dollars that would have been theirs if Bart’s death was declared a murder.

Therein lay the problem. Hattie Grayson was not a rich woman and could really use the money. A single mom, she worked in her own catering business in order to support her children, no doubt struggling at times to make ends meet. She could probably sell her part of the Grayson ranch to the remaining brothers, but she hadn’t done that yet.

Money, in the form of insurance benefits, could be another reason beyond basic guilt that Bart’s ex and beneficiary was so stubbornly insistent that he hadn’t killed himself.

“The facts are the facts,” Pescoli said to herself, satisfied that Bart Grayson’s death was neither a mystery nor a homicide. The man took his own life.

She replaced the reports in the box Jeremy had brought in a few days earlier, then unzipped her bag to retrieve a banana.

God, she was hungry. Always, it seemed. So she’d eat, then, not half an hour later, puke.

Taking her first bite, she heard quick footsteps in the hallway and half-expected Joelle to appear. Instead, Alvarez nearly slid as she rounded the sharp corner into Pescoli’s office.

“Guess what?” Alvarez said.

“Not in the mood for twenty-questions.”

Alvarez actually flashed a smile, the first Pescoli had witnessed since Dan Grayson had been shot, and she was energized for the first time in weeks. “We got a hit.”

“A hit?” Pescoli repeated, and for a second or two, she forgot the hunger pangs that had been so overpowering only seconds before. “On the fingerprint?”

“Yeah.” Dark eyes sparking, Alvarez nodded. “It’s from a missing person from New Orleans.”

“New Orleans?”

“Yep. A missing heiress who was disowned by her family. They filed the report, uncertain if she were alive or dead, but, I’d say from the prints we found, she’s very much alive. And deadly. Her name is Anne-Marie Calderone.”

“How do you know this already? It’s barely eight in the damn morning.”