Willing to Die (Alvarez & Pescoli)

“Where’s Tucker?”

“Sleeping. In his crib. I just put him down.”

“Good. He was fussy all the way from the airport.”

“Maybe he’ll sleep through the night,” Santana said.

“From your lips to God’s ears.”

“That’s the way it usually works.”

She chuckled.

“Okay.” And he grabbed the edge of the towel, stripped it away from her, and swept her off her feet.

“No, no! Put me down,” she ordered, but was laughing as he carried her into the bedroom and kicked the door shut. “Oh, for the love of God, Santana, we’re not a couple of horny teenagers.”

“Since when?”

“We don’t have time for this.”

“No?”

“No . . . no . . .” But her protests were slowing down. They looked at each other and then he rolled with her onto the bed and kissed her hard, in a way that turned her insides to molten lava. She wanted to feel his naked body against hers, wanted him deep inside her.

“Okay . . . yes . . .” she said breathlessly.

Chapter 14

Chilcoate was as good as his word. While the baby napped, Pescoli sat at the kitchen table where she pored over phone records and bank statements, insurance information, and e-mails. She’d printed out most of the data Chilcoate had sent, and was double-checking some of the information on her laptop, trying to put some of the pieces of Brindel’s last few days together. She needed to figure out what was going on in Brindel’s life as well as Paul’s and Ivy’s in the days and weeks prior to the murders.

Santana was out of the house, taking the two big dogs with him as he checked the stock at the Long Ranch where he was still manager of operations. Bianca was studying, or supposed to be, in her room, and the baby was napping, so Pescoli had a few minutes alone with a cup of real coffee, the fire crackling in the grate, snow falling lazily beyond the windows.

She considered drawing Alvarez into the case, but decided against it. She had enough roadblocks with Tanaka and didn’t need a lecture about jurisdiction, or getting personally involved as a relative of a victim, or just getting in the way of the San Francisco investigators assigned to the case.

She had no intention of compromising the investigation, of course.

But she had to do her own detective work from a distance and on the sly.

Chilcoate was right. Brindel had been siphoning off money and how Paul hadn’t noticed it surprised her.

Paul’s cell phone records indicated that he was very much in contact with a nurse in his office during the day, and during the night. Robbie Grogan. Their texts and e-mails were carefully worded, but as Pescoli read between the lines, it wasn’t too hard to imagine that if the two parties hadn’t been involved in a full-blown affair so far, they’d been on their way.

And then there was Macon, Paul’s oldest son, the kid who said he hadn’t been in contact with his parents all that much. The cell phone records indicated that he’d texted both Brindel and Paul often, including the day of their deaths.

A good sign or bad?

It could all be innocent, of course, but then why lie about it? Macon’s alibi was far from rock solid.

As to the missing Ivy, the clues were few and far between, but she, too, had some texts to Macon as well as quite a few to a number with no name or ID attached, a burner phone.

That didn’t look good at all.

With whom was she communicating?

Troy Boxer’s number had ceased to appear around the time of the holidays, but not long thereafter the unknown number had started to show up. Was it Troy’s? Or a new boyfriend’s? Or a legitimate friend? Pescoli was tempted to call the number and had even punched in the first five digits before she realized that she would be stepping over the line and stopped herself. This was information she would be forced to hand over to Paterno and Tanaka.

“Pisser,” she said under her breath.