Afraid to Die (Alvarez & Pescoli)

“I know.”

“Something just doesn’t quite fit. What about the Parsons missing persons case?” Pescoli asked.

“Not yet.”

“Hell.” Pescoli took a sip from her coffee. “Hard to say what’s going on there,” she thought aloud. “Just a flighty girl who got a wild hair and took off for a while, or something else?” Obviously not liking that idea, she frowned even deeper. “Still nothing on her car?”

“Don’t think so. I was going to walk down to Missing Persons and talk to Taj, see what she has to say.”

“Let me know.” Pescoli patted the doorway and started to leave when the familiar click, click, click of high heels caught her attention.

“Toot, toot! Coming through!” Joelle warned in her little-girl voice as Alvarez caught a glimpse of the tiny receptionist, her beehive of platinum hair sprayed with red and green glitter, her snowman earrings catching in the fluorescent light as she hauled several stacked plastic tubs toward the lunchroom.

“Breakfast,” Pescoli said. “Come on, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

Together they followed the bustling dynamo who never seemed happy until every square inch of the station was decorated for the holidays. Paper snowflakes sprayed with silver glitter hung from the ceiling, garlands of fake greenery swagged through the hallways, a revolving Christmas tree was twirling in the reception area and even the copy machine had a red pseudo-velvet bow with a sprig of mistletoe taped to the wall behind it. Like, sure—someone would try to steal a kiss while making copies of arrest reports. Nothing more romantic than a smooch over the hum and click of office machinery, Alvarez thought cynically.

“Here we go!” Joelle dropped the plastic tubs onto one round table and paused only to unwrap a plaid scarf of green and red before opening the first tub. “Voila!”

Inside were cupcakes lined up neatly, each decorated with Santa faces or snowmen faces or even reindeer faces. “I picked these up at the bakery,” she announced as if it were a sin, “but I did bake my famous Christmas macaroons and Russian tea cakes.” Another bin was opened to display the cookies. “And the pièce de résistance,” she teased, while opening the third bin, “Grandma Maxie’s divinity! Mmm.” She hurried to the cupboard where she’d stashed several trays earlier in the week, and satisfied that they were still sparkling clean, started arranging her favorite delicacies.

“I’m getting a sugar high just looking at these,” Pescoli said.

Pleased, Joelle let out a little-girl giggle. Though she was over sixty, she looked a good ten years younger than her age and her energy seemed boundless—at least at this time of the year. “Well, help yourselves!” Once the trays were perfect, she scooped up the bins and hurried down the hallway to her desk at the front of the station house. “And remember, the drawing for the Secret Santa is at four!” she called over her shoulder. “Detective Pescoli, I expect you to participate!”

Pescoli had already bitten into a cookie and almost moaned in ecstasy. Under her breath she said to Alvarez, “The woman drives me nuts with all this holiday stuff, but I gotta say, she does bake a mean macaroon!”

Chapter 2

Detective Taj Nayak didn’t have any good news. “It’s a mystery,” she said as Alvarez cruised by her office later in the day. “It’s like the woman just disappeared into thin air. She left work at her usual time, a little after five, and just never made it home.

“We know she stopped by the gas station, where she bought a full tank, a pack of cigarettes—Marlboro menthols, if that means anything—a sixteen-ounce Diet Coke and a Twix bar, all put on her debit card. Here, you can view it yourself.” Taj typed into her keyboard and pulled up a black-and-white film, which began to play on her computer monitor. “So here you go. See—” She pointed at the screen where a woman who looked like Lissa was at the counter of the convenience mart. “So here she is paying for the items, then walking back to her car.” The screen flipped from the image of the cash register and attendant to the canopied area where up to eight cars could pull into the pumps. “It’s hard to make out too much,” Taj said, “other than that she takes off out of the gas station and heads north when her apartment is south.” Sure enough, on the screen, just visible in the upper corner, Lissa’s little Chevy Impala turned right. The film continued to roll. “Here’s the SUV that followed her out of the station, but we checked; it was driven by a teenager on her way to basketball practice. Two other girls in the car, all confirmed; a Toyota 4Runner, owned by an insurance salesman in town. It’s his daughter’s car, and when we talked to the daughter and her friends, none of them even remember following Lissa’s Impala.” The tape stopped suddenly. “Search parties have fo

und nothing. So either she disappeared because she wanted to, somehow ditched her credit and debit cards and we’ll locate her car, or ...”

“... She’s dead.”

Taj nodded as her phone rang and she reached for it. “Then she’ll be your problem, I guess.”

“Hope not.” Alvarez meant it. However, the woman had been missing for nearly two weeks. What were the chances that she was still alive?

If she’d been in a bad mood in the morning, the news that Lissa Parsons was still missing only brought her down even further. It didn’t help that on the way back to her desk she ran into the sheriff.

A tall, rangy cowboy type, Dan Grayson was one of the best lawmen in the state and had been sheriff for years. Divorced, he’d invited her over to Thanksgiving last year and she’d made a fool of herself by showing up to his place for what turned out to be a family Thanksgiving, complete with Hattie, his very single ex-sister-in-law or some such thing, and her adorable twin girls. She’d come expecting a romantic evening that hadn’t developed, and until the moment that she’d met Hattie, Alvarez had actually harbored some ridiculous fantasies about the man, despite their age differences—fantasies that, no doubt, Grayson and his ex-sister-in-law had witnessed. It probably wasn’t as big a deal as she’d made it in her mind, but since then, she’d backed off and reminded herself that he was her boss. Nothing more. NOTHING more.

“Mornin’,” the sheriff drawled as he met her, his eyes kind, his smile sincere. If he’d felt any awkwardness about the situation last year, he’d been man enough not to show it, and over the months her humiliation had dissipated. He’d even invited her over to Thanksgiving again this year, but she’d worked the holiday instead, preferring to avoid any new, embarrassing scenes.

“Morning. Hey, Sturgis,” she said to his dog, a black lab who followed him everywhere and wagged his tail at the sight of her. She patted his broad head and he yawned, showing off his long teeth and spotted tongue.

“Joelle brought cookies and cupcakes and God only knows what else.”

“Already sampled; got my sugar rush for the morning.”

His lips twisted beneath his moustache. “If she had her way, everyone here would be hopped up for the entire month of December.”

“And twenty pounds heavier.” She made the joke, noticed that his eyes twinkled in that sexy way that always got to her, then made her way back to her desk without veering off to the lunchroom.

She had plenty of work to do and didn’t need to think about Dan Grayson.