Afraid to Die (Alvarez & Pescoli)

Pescoli was right, Alvarez thought as she stepped through her front door, she was a liar. Not only to her partner, but to herself.

Alvarez had been involved with O’Keefe, though not as sexually as Pescoli was intimating. And then all hell had broken loose. God, what a mess.

She remembered not being able to eat or sleep, her emotions strung like tight barbed wire, prickly and tense, and then the mistake, stepping in the line of fire, hearing her name at the last minute before a trigger was pulled and lives were changed forever.

It’s your fault. The same old accusation, one she’d tried to bury for years, rang through her mind. If only she hadn’t been so emotionally strung out, if only she’d thought before she’d reacted, if only she’d stayed in control, like she’d taught herself, maybe things would be different.

Too late! Now, her involvement with O’Keefe and the resulting debacle was going to all replay again and blow up in her face! She could feel it in her bones. Which only made a difficult situation worse. She yanked the door shut behind her and latched it. It seemed as if her entire, well-organized life was splintering into a million sharp pieces, each one determined to slice her emotions.

“Pull yourself together!” As she snapped on the hall light and shrugged out of her jacket, Jane Doe appeared, trotting to greet her, white whiskers almost comical against her black coat. “Hey, girl,” Alvarez said, picking up the cat, whose bones seemed to melt as she lifted the small, furry body. “You miss Roscoe?” Scratching the cat behind its ears, she listened to Jane’s motor start to run in a deep purr. “Yeah, me, too. Silly, isn’t it?” She’d had the exuberant puppy only a few months and yet he’d managed to burrow his way into her heart.

She checked her phone for the twentieth time, half expecting that she’d hear from someone who had found her dog and located her number on his tag, or even from O’Keefe with more information on Gabriel Reeve, but there were no messages and the rooms seemed cold and empty, even though she hit the switch for the gas fireplace and snapped on several lights.

Roscoe’s empty pen seemed to mock her and it was all she could do to pick up his water bowl, discard whatever liquid was inside and rinse it out.

He’ll be back.

She hoped.

And what about Gabriel Reeve? Her heart twisted; she’d have to find anything she could about him. Could he be her son? If so, w

hy had he run here? If not, what kind of coincidence was it that he’d broken into her home?

There had to be some kind of connection and she was damned sure she was going to find out what it was. She spent the next hour on the Internet, reading about crimes in Helena, finding one where a home had been broken into, a firearm used, one of the assailants who was underage having escaped.

It had to be Reeve.

She checked, found no other incidents and made a mental note to recheck with Helena PD in the morning.

And when you find out the truth, what then? What if Gabe is your son?

The thought of meeting the boy she’d given up, of dealing with his birth and the circumstances of his conception, caused her insides to twist, her head to pound. Old memories assailed her and she fought them back, as she had for nearly seventeen years. She couldn’t go there, wouldn’t. Not until she found out if Gabriel Reeve was really her own flesh and blood.

And what about Dylan O’Keefe?

Another wrench to her guts and she made her way to the bathroom, where she stopped at the sink and threw cold water—the only temperature she had—onto her face. “Pull yourself together,” she told the woman staring back at her, the woman whose face was pale and whose eyes were haunted by demons from her youth. “You can’t fall apart. That’s not you!” But the woman in the reflection didn’t seem convinced. “You need to be in control.” And that was it, the problem in a nutshell; Alvarez liked things neat and tidy, everything in its place, and the mess that had been her youth had no place in her life right now.

No place.

She had too much to do.

For starters, she had a case to solve. Make that three cases, because she was ninety-nine percent certain that Lara Sue Gilfry, Lissa Parsons and Brenda Sutherland had met with the same dire fate.

As she got ready for bed, yanking off her clothes and tossing them into the hamper, Alvarez forced her thoughts away from her own problems, at least for now, and thought about the women who were missing. What the hell had happened to them?

She’d concentrate on those three tonight; only later, when the moon was high in the Montana sky, would she dare let her mind wander to that dark place she’d promised herself she’d never visit again.

Despite it all, as she closed her eyes, she knew that her life was unraveling, emotional stitch by stitch.

Calvin Mullins couldn’t sleep.

The readout on Lorraine’s digital clock shined a bright hellfire three forty-seven. Too early, for even his standards. Though he prided himself on rising early, on spending an hour in prayer and another twenty minutes with his journal before finally spending another forty minutes on the elliptical machine one of the parishioners had donated to the parsonage, he tried to always stay in bed until four thirty. But in these wee morning hours, when so much was happening within his parish, he threw off the covers, slid into the slippers he kept at his bedside and walked quietly down the hallway. He’d been disturbed ever since the interview with Detective Pescoli and hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that things were going to get worse for him. Perhaps he could talk to the detective, impress upon her how his private life had to remain so ...

He’d spent hours in prayer and searching his soul, but the fear of exposure was a pawn of Lucifer, and recently, with all this trouble about Brenda Sutherland, he couldn’t find strength or serenity in his talks with God.

Perhaps today would be better. He changed out of his pajamas and into his exercise gear. He’d stretch, climb on the elliptical machine so that he could work out the kinks in Sunday’s sermon as he worked out the knots in his muscles. Perfect! The preacher never felt better than when he was multitasking, especially when part of the tasks were God’s work.

First, he’d walk to the office to pick up the pages he’d already printed and edited carefully by hand, then cleanse his mind and soul in prayer and contemplation before hopping on the machine and cranking up the resistance. Some martyrs went in for flogging or self-mutilation; Preacher Mullins figured exercise machines, if used properly, would suffice in sacrificing his flesh for the Lord. The elliptical training machine, paired with intense prayer and maybe fasting for good measure could, in these modern times, be considered a way to “sweat it out” for God, or something. He might have to do a little tongue-in-cheek sermon about what one could do in the service of the Lord; it would be a joke, of course, that could carry into the heavier text of the message.