Chosen To Die (Alvarez & Pescoli)

“What are you getting at?”

“If you start here at Horsebrier Ridge, where we located Pescoli’s Jeep,” she said, pointing to a dot marked on the map and the pushpin stuck into it,

“and head due north, you cross Mesa Rock, where good old Ivor claimed the Reptilians found him. Go on through and you end up at Wildfire Canyon, where Wendy Ito’s body was discovered. And her Prius was located here.” She moved her finger over 414

Lisa Jackson

the map to the spot where another pin was located.

“Over here we have Nina Salvadore.” Alvarez pointed to the area where Salvadore’s body had been discovered.

Sweating, feeling like she was going over old ground, Grayson said, “So it’s all near Mesa Rock where Ivor claimed the damned aliens took him. You trying to link them to Ivor Hick’s ‘abduction’?” He aimed for levity but heard the impatience in his own voice. “You don’t think Ivor’s involved. The man is generally drunk as a skunk. Incapable. Couldn’t pull off the planning.”

“I don’t think it’s Ivor,” Alvarez assured him. “He is always drunk. We’ve taken him in so often he refuses to let us call his son to pick him up. But he isn’t just an old man who hallucinates. Now he’s the only person to have been on the scene where two of the bodies, Wendy Ito’s and Brady Long’s, were discovered.”

“Nate Santana found Long.”

“But Ivor was there,” she said, pointing again to the map. “Mesa Rock abuts the Long property, right?”

Grayson gazed harder at the map and said slowly,

“Yeah. There was a time when Hubert Sr., Brady’s grandfather, tried to buy more land in the area. Mesa Rock is on government land, but there’s an old mine of some sort there. Not copper, gold, I think, or silver, but the owner wouldn’t sell.”

“Who’s the owner?”

“I’m not sure any longer.” Grayson’s eyes narrowed. “I think it was handed down through the Kress family. That’s what it was called a hundred and fifty years ago or so. Silver. The Kress Silver

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Mine.” He met her gaze. “Ivor Hicks was married to Lila Kress.”

“And still lives up on the property,” she said.

“What are you thinking?”

“What about Ivor’s son?” she asked.

Billy Hicks?

“No . . .” Grayson slowly wagged his head from side to side.

“Doesn’t Billy own a place nearby, on the same tract of land? Didn’t he know Padgett and Brady Long? Doesn’t he work his own hours and volunteer at the Fire Hall? Maybe he used their computer to access ours. We’re all tied in together. If he was smart enough, he might have been able to follow our investigation from the beginning.”

“Billy Hicks isn’t some stranger,” Grayson argued. “He’s lived here all his life!” But it was making a horrifying kind of sense, and

the light in Selena’s dark eyes, the tightness pulling at the corners of her lips, told him she already believed Billy Hicks was the killer.

“Just because a father isn’t the brightest bulb in the strand doesn’t mean that the son isn’t smart.”

“He’s smart all right. I saw it on his application when he wanted a job.” He rubbed a hand over his jaw.

“And you turned him down?”

“We weren’t hiring. There was a freeze. Besides, Hicks had gotten into a couple of fights . . . God almighty . . .”

“We’ve got to pick him up,” she said urgently.