Afraid to Die (Alvarez & Pescoli)

When she finally cornered him in the powder room, she was breathing hard and her temper had cooled a bit. “Oh, come on.” S

he didn’t have time to clean up the feathers and stuffing littering her living area, but she put him in his pen, grabbed her purse, wallet, sidearm and badge and left him standing behind the wire mesh managing to look as miserable as any dog on earth. “You’ll be fine,” she said, feeling ridiculously guilty before locking the door behind her and heading for the garage.

Though it wasn’t yet eight in the morning, she called the maintenance man for the building and asked him to check on her water heater. He was a lazy twenty-six-year-old who preferred spending nights as the bass player for his band rather than his days fixing up the property, but he was cheap and, if given enough time, was handy enough. He’d done some side jobs for Alvarez in the past and she was certain he could determine what the hell was wrong with her hot water tank. She only hoped she wouldn’t have to replace the damned thing.

At the office, she found a cup of blistering-hot coffee and tried to shake herself out of her bad mood by munching on a reindeer cupcake, eating first the sugar-coated antlers and then its whole damned head. It didn’t help.

Twenty minutes later, she was just answering some e-mail when Pescoli dropped by her desk. “Want some bad news?” she asked.

Alvarez glanced up. “You mean some more bad news?” she asked. “It hasn’t exactly been a stellar morning and so, the answer is no.”

“Yeah, well, I think you’d better hear this. Your buddy J. R. has just been released from prison. A technicality and his lawyer screamed loudly enough that it looks like there might be a whole new trial.”

“Crap.” The headache that had started early this morning and had been exacerbated by the couch pillow evisceration was really beginning to pound inside her skull. J. R. “Junior” Green, the creep of all creeps, was an ex-pro football lineman who had turned coach and pedophile. Alvarez had been instrumental in sending him up the river and he’d sworn that he’d return the favor by ruining her life. “He’s guilty!”

“As sin. We just have to prove it all over again.”

Her headache throbbed, and as Pescoli walked off, Alvarez’s cell phone rang. She checked the number, saw that it was Terry Longstrom and didn’t pick up. She couldn’t deal with him right now, at least not personally. If he needed to talk to her about business, he could leave a message; then she might call him back. Maybe.

She reached into the top drawer of her desk, found a bottle of Excedrin she used only if her periods were severe. Those times she washed the painkillers down with some kind of herbal tea. Today she popped two into her palm, tossed them into her mouth and swallowed them dry.

It wasn’t yet nine in the morning, and so far, the day was turning into a nightmare.

A couple of hours later, while Pescoli was checking with several members of the Bible study group at Brenda Sutherland’s church, the members of which were some of the people who’d last seen Brenda alive, Alvarez headed over to Missing Persons, where she made some inquiries, asking Taj about other women who may have been reported missing.

“Let me see,” Taj said, typing into her keyboard and studying her monitor.

Alvarez was antsy. She’d been waiting for hours to talk to Taj, as all night she’d tossed and turned, wondering what connection, if any, there was between Lissa Parsons and Brenda Sutherland.

She wasn’t one to believe in coincidences, and if the past few winters had taught her anything, it was to be wary. For a small town, Grizzly Falls had its share of nuts. There were the harmless ones, like Ivor Hicks, who, pushing eighty, still swore that he’d been abducted by aliens years before on Mesa Rock. He’d been brought to the mother ship and was experimented upon by a reptilian race headed by a particularly nasty general named Crytor. He’d sworn that his experience with the aliens had not been due to his intimate relationship with Jack Daniel’s. Alvarez wasn’t convinced. Then there was Grace Perchant, a woman who lived alone with not one, but now two wolf-dogs, her older female named Sheena and a newer addition, a big male that she called Bane. So now, in Alvarez’s opinion, Grace had a bona fide pack. Great. Convinced she spoke with ghosts, Grace was always making weird predictions that strangely came to be. Again, she was, at least to Alvarez’s way of thinking, for the most part, benign.

However, on the other side of the coin, Grizzly Falls had seen more than its fair share of sadistic killers recently, psychos who had terrorized this area for three years running. As Pescoli had said often enough, “It’s the cold around here; the sub-zero temperature brings out the crazies.”

Alvarez, a woman of science, couldn’t put her finger on what was the cause of the horrid phenomenon; she just didn’t like it. And now, with two women missing, she felt that little tingle at the base of her skull that warned her of bad news.

“We have quite a few missing people,” Taj said, scrolling down on her computer screen. “An elderly man wandered out of an elder facility and he’s still not been located; two potential teenaged runaways, a set of twins, probably abducted by their own father; and a baby taken out of the hospital.”

“I’m looking for another woman, somewhere between nineteen and forty, probably, but not necessarily.”

“Well, there’s Lara Sue Gilfry,” she said, her eyebrows pushing together. “She went missing about a month ago ... let’s see. Okay, here we are.” A serious picture of a redheaded woman with wide, blue eyes and tight, pale lips appeared. “She’s twenty-eight and is pretty transient. Moves around a lot. Last seen on November sixth at the Bull and Bear bed-and-breakfast, where she worked as a maid. Said to have a significant scar on her right leg, just above the knee, after a motorcycle accident when she was in her teens, and a tattoo of a butterfly on her left ankle.” Taj tilted her monitor so that Alvarez could get a better look at the missing woman. “She’s estranged from her family; her mother died when she was two, father when she was a teenager, and the stepmother has been through a series of relationships. Lara Sue kind of fell through the cracks. Been on her own since she was sixteen.”

Alvarez felt a cold drip of apprehension trickle down her spine. “What about boyfriends? Or cousins? Girlfriends?”

Taj was reading. “No serious boyfriend and she was kind of a loner, kept to herself. The owner of the Bull and Bear let her stay in an attic room as part of her compensation.”

“Did she leave with her belongings?”

“Yeah. So that’s why the case is iffy. She could be one of those people who just float from town to town.”

“What about money? Checking account? Bank card?”

Taj shook her head. “According to her employer, he’d pay her, then go to the bank with her so she could cash her check. She paid for everything with cash.”

“Great. What about a computer, a Facebook or Twitter account?”

“So far, none found.”

“All young people do the social-networking thing.”