Chosen To Die (Alvarez & Pescoli)

127

“Yep. No response yet.”

“They won’t find her,” Alvarez predicted as she unwillingly stuck a pin into the map, indicating the location of Pescoli’s Jeep. “It’s not time. The son of a bitch waits. Helps them heal before . . .”

“Yeah, I know.” Zoller was nodding, her mop of dark curls shining under the fluorescent tubes mounted in the ceiling.

Selena eyed the map critically, trying to come up with something, an area they’d overlooked where the bastard could be holed up, a spot where they would likely find his next victim.

She glanced to the blown-up copies of the notes found nailed to the trunks of the trees over the victims’ heads. They were similar with their star pattern, each just slightly different. Star-Crossed was trying to tell them something, but what?

“Has anyone called O’Leary’s parents?” she asked Zoller.

“Not yet.”

“Let’s hold off on that until we look through the car.”

Disturbed, feeling as if she were missing something, Alvarez headed back to her desk and scanned the missing persons report again. In his statement, the father, Brian, swore that no one on earth would want to harm his child, except for her boyfriend, Cesar Pelton, a divorced father of two and “hoodlum who couldn’t hold a job.” Pelton, according to Elyssa’s father, had “knocked her around” a couple of times, though no police reports had ever been filed. Elyssa’s mother, a meek woman, had stayed silent, neither agreeing or disagreeing with her husband. 128

Lisa Jackson

The nightmare just kept getting worse, Alvarez thought as she glanced outside and noticed the first few flakes of snow beginning to fall.

Dr. Jalicia Ramsby had seen it all in her fifteen years of practice: A full spectrum of psychological diseases. Everything from clinical depression to bipolar disorder to schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder, more commonly known as multiple personality disorder, and post-traumatic stress syndrome, to name a few. She’d tried to help patients who were alcoholic, suicidal, manic depressive, autistic, you name it. She’d worked in clinics, in hospitals, in shelters, even in a prison. And she could readily spot a fake.

Or so she thought.

However, the patient in room 126 gave her pause.

As she sat in her new office at Mountain View Hospital, a bright room with a breathtaking view of the Olympic Mountains in west Seattle, she drummed her fingers on her desk and ignored an unopened bottle of Diet Pepsi, her usual jolt of caffeine in the morning. Something was off. Something she couldn’t quite define. Yet. She glanced at her tidy desk. Aside from the bottle of soda sitting on a woven coaster, there was a glass half filled with ice, a picture of her daughter at her eighth-grade graduation, a bud vase with a single white rose, and the open file. Fifteen years of notes, diagnoses, pictures, medical reports, and interviews.

Jalicia had read them over twice, trying to get a handle on Padgett Renee Long, and couldn’t. The other patients in her care she understood. They didn’t

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necessarily fit into neat little psychiatric boxes, but at least their conditions were consistent with other cases and gave her a frame of reference from which she could work.

Padgett was different.

She twirled her desk chair around and searched the bookcase, a virtual wall of tomes on every subject she’d found interesting. As she scanned the familiar titles, she thought of the quiet woman in 126. Not a word uttered other than prayers.

For fifteen years.

And yet there was intelligence behind Padgett’s cornflower blue eyes; Jalicia sensed it. Not finding a title that would help, she turned back to her desk, cracked open the soft drink, poured it carefully into a glass with ice cubes, and watched the foam rise then fall, little bubbles bursting and creating a soft, tiny spray. She carried her drink to the window and stared outside.

Rain was spitting from the gray sky, clouds obscuring her view. Christmas lights twinkled in the row of fir trees lining the drive, a cheery reminder that the holidays were near.

Sipping her soda, Jalicia watched a sedan roll up the drive and take a parking spot marked for handicapped drivers. A man in a thick coat and fedora climbed out of the car, stopped at the trunk, and pulled out a wheelchair. He opened the chair and eased it close to the passenger side, then helped a portly woman into it.

Jalicia’s desk phone rang and she turned away from the window. “Dr. Ramsby,” she said, glancing at the file, then the clock. One of her men’s groups was scheduled to meet in ten minutes.

“Yes, Doctor, I just wanted to alert you that a 130

Lisa Jackson

Mr. Barton Tinneman has been calling. He’s the lawyer for Padgett Long.”