Willing to Die (Alvarez & Pescoli)

Pescoli’s eyes flew open. She was breathing hard, her heart racing, but she was in her own bed, her husband right next to her.

Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!

“What the hell?” Santana said, rolling out of bed and yanking on the pair of jeans he’d kicked off the night before. “It’s five in the morning.”

Pescoli was instantly awake.

It was all a dream. A horrible nightmare.

The dogs were barking loudly from the laundry room downstairs, Cisco’s gruff yips audible over the deeper growls and barks of the larger dogs. Pescoli snatched her robe from a hook on the door and threw it around her body, only pausing to check and see that both Bianca and Baby Tuck were still fast asleep in their rooms despite the cacophony rising upward from the first floor.

Thank God!

Down the stairs she flew to catch up with her husband in the lower hallway. “If Jeremy lost his keys again—”

“He wouldn’t be pounding on the door. He would’ve texted or gone through the garage.”

“And pulled down the stairs onto my Jeep? I don’t think so.”

Santana had already crossed the living area and was peering through the peephole.

“Wait!” she said. “Be careful.” Why had she left her ser

vice weapon up in the bedroom in the gun safe? No one ever showed up on their doorstep in the middle of the night.

“What the hell?” Santana threw back the dead bolt and yanked open the door to expose an ashen-faced girl with choppy hair and smeared makeup shivering on the porch. Snow had collected on the gray hood of her sweatshirt. She looked beyond Santana’s frame to Pescoli, her eyes round, blood evident on her forehead. “Aunt Regan?” she whispered, teeth chattering, snow swirling behind her.

“Let her in,” Pescoli said, stepping forward and realizing that Ivy Wilde, her missing niece, was alive, but nearly freezing to death on her doorstep.

Chapter 15

Ivy’s tale was a little hard to swallow.

But Pescoli was listening, trying to believe.

She and Santana had brought her niece into the family room, and while he quieted the dogs, allowing them inside to sniff and greet the newcomer, Pescoli had pointed Ivy to the couch and given the girl a comforter to wrap herself in. She looked awful: pale and distraught, her hair chopped off and mousy brown, her overdone makeup fading.

But then she’d been traumatized. On the run, to hear her tell it.

Santana stacked wood and kindling, then lit a fire in the hearth where flames caught and crackled. Satisfied, he made his way into the kitchen and scraped a bar stool backward. He glanced at Pescoli as he took a seat at the island, reclaiming his morning spot and coffee, glancing at his iPad where he’d been perusing online news.

Pescoli had offered breakfast to Ivy, who’d insisted she wasn’t hungry. Coffee had been declined as well, but finally she’d settled on a cup of instant hot chocolate.

With a little prodding, they’d learned that Ivy had taken a circuitous route from San Francisco via Albuquerque and Missoula, then had hitchhiked to Grizzly Falls with a nice man who’d helped her connect with people in town whereupon she’d learned Pescoli’s address. All of that information had been hair raising enough—the people of Grizzly Falls were too damn trusting by far, Pescoli thought, seeing how easy it apparently was for someone to find her address—before Ivy had launched into her tale of finding the bodies of Brindel and Paul when she came home from seeing “a friend.” She told Pescoli how she’d run through the kitchen, grabbed a kitchen knife, only to lose it while stumbling on the street near the entrance to the park. Freaked out, she’d then decided to run away. She’d taken the first bus she could find out of the Bay Area, all the while planning her trip to Grizzly Falls and connecting with her aunt “the cop.”

Now that some color had returned to her face, Pescoli asked, “Can you go over it again? I have a few questions.”

Ivy seemed to want to argue, opened her mouth, then shut it again. She bent her head to the steaming mug she was cradling and looked like she wanted to disappear completely.

“I’m just trying to put it together,” Pescoli explained. “Your friend’s name?”

“Anna. Anna Jordan.”

“What about your boyfriend?”

“I don’t have one.” Ivy’s gaze narrowed on her aunt. “I broke up with Troy.”

“I thought there was someone new.”