It was just easier.
She locked the car, then half jogged through the falling snow to the back door of the building. Stomping the melting white fluff from her boots, she paused in the lunchroom, frowned when she saw the coffee hadn’t been made and reluctantly started a pot. Then found her favorite cup, heated water in the microwave and located the last bag of orange pekoe.
A pink box lay open on the table, a few picked-over cookies visible, but she ignored them for now. At this time of year, with Joelle in charge, there were certain to be fresh goodies arriving on the hour.
Unwrapping her scarf, she made her way to her desk, deposited her purse and sidearm, hung her jacket on a hook and started through her e-mail and messages, making sure all the reports were filed on one case, getting ready for a deposition on another and seeing if the autopsy report had come in on Len Bradshaw, a local farmer who died in a hunting accident. His friend, Martin Zwolski, had been with him, and while going through a barbed-wired fence, his weapon had gone off, shooting Len in the back and killing him dead.
Accident or premeditated?
Alvarez was buying the accident scenario. Martin had been distraught to the point of tears and beleaguered by Len’s friends and family. It all seemed to be an accident, but Alvarez wasn’t totally convinced, not until the investigation was buttoned up. There were three loose ends that kept her from totally buying Martin’s story.
First, the two men were poaching on private property, neither one with deer tags, and second, Martin and Len had been in a business together that had gone bankrupt two years earlier, largely due to the fact that Len had “loaned” himself a good portion of the company profits. Also, another little tidbit that had come to light was that Len had once been involved with Martin’s wife. Martin and Ezzie had been separated at the time, but still ... It was all just a little too messy for Alvarez.
She checked her e-mail.
No autopsy report yet.
Maybe later today. Flipping over to the missing persons information, she checked to see if Lissa Parsons had been found.
Lissa was an acquaintance, a woman Alvarez knew from a couple of classes she took at the gym. Twenty-six and single, with short, black hair and a killer body, she worked as a receptionist for a local law firm and had been reported missing a week earlier. When the detectives started asking questions, they’d deduced that Lissa had actually been missing for over a week. Her boyfriend and she had been through a rough patch and he was “giving her some space,” and her roommate had been out of town for a couple of weeks, an extended trip to Florida, only to come home to an empty apartme
nt where the organic produce in the refrigerator was beginning to rot. Lissa’s purse, cell phone, car and laptop were all missing with her, but her closet was untouched, her wardrobe neatly folded or hanging, a hamper in her bedroom filled with dirty workout clothes.
The roommate, boyfriend and an ex-boyfriend had rock-solid alibis. No sign of forced entry or a struggle at the apartment. It was as if Lissa had just left for the day, intended to return and hadn’t bothered. Her cell phone and credit card activity showed no use after the day she went missing.
Alvarez didn’t like it. Especially the fact that she’d been missing for nearly two weeks. Not good. Not good at all.
And it seemed from the most updated information that she was still missing.
No body.
No crime scene.
No damned crime.
Yet.
All of the nearby hospitals had been checked and she hadn’t been admitted, nor had there been any Jane Does brought in. Nor, of course, had Lissa been arrested by any local agency.
Just ... gone.
“Where the hell are you?” Alvarez wondered aloud as she sipped her tepid tea. She didn’t expect to see her partner for another hour or so, but Pescoli showed up before her usual time with a cup of coffee from one of the local shops in hand, snow melting in her burnished hair, her face flushed.
“What’re you doing here at this hour?” Alvarez asked, spinning her chair around as her partner stood in the doorway. “Somebody die?”
“Bad joke this early in the morning.” She took a sip from her cup. “I had to drop Bianca off at school early for dance practice.” Bianca was Pescoli’s teenage daughter, a junior now and as headstrong as she was beautiful. A dangerous combination and it didn’t help that the girl was smart enough to play each of her divorced parents against the other. It worked every time. Though Pescoli and her ex had been divorced for years, there was still a lot of animosity between them, especially when it came to their kids. Bianca and her older brother, Jeremy, an off-again college student who lived with Pescoli in between his attempts at “moving out,” worked them both.
“I thought the dance team practiced after school.”
“Limited gym space.” Pescoli glanced to the window. “Basketball, wrestling, cheerleading, dance team ... whatever, they all juggle times, though right now, basketball has priority, I think. So for the next two weeks, Bianca has to be at school at six forty-five; that means she’s got to get up around six, and believe me, it’s killing her.” Pescoli’s lips twisted into a thin smile at the thought of her teenager struggling with the early-morning routine. “And this is just day one. It’s damned hard to be a princess when you have to be up and at ’em in the friggin’ dark. What did she call it? Oh, yeah, ‘the middle of the night when no one with any brains would get out of bed.’ ” Pescoli was shaking her head. “I’m tellin’ ya, we’re raising a generation of vampires!”
“Vampires are in.”
“Go figure.” She turned serious, pointed a finger toward the computer screen on Alvarez’s desk where a picture of Lissa Parsons was visible. “The autopsy report come in on Bradshaw?”
“Not yet.”
Little lines grooved deep between Pescoli’s eyebrows. “You know I’d really like to believe Zwolski—that it was an accident—but I just can’t.”