Afraid to Die (Alvarez & Pescoli)

“We heard your interview and plea on television and our department, probably along with the FBI, would like to be involved. If this is a kidnapping case, you need our resources.”

“No!” He glanced over his shoulder, scowled, then slipped outside, closing the door behind him. “Look, I only did the thing with the news people for my kids, okay? They’re upset and I don’t know what to tell them. I really think their mother took off, found herself a boyfriend and just made it look like she was abducted or something. She’ll probably show up in a week or two. She just needed a break.”

Unlikely, Pescoli thought. They’d gone through Brenda Sutherland’s phone and computer records. If she had a boyfriend, the guy was buried deep; they must’ve communicated through hand signals or telepathy. Yeah, right.

“And you know this ... how?” Alvarez asked.

“I don’t ‘know’ it for sure, of course. But it seems damned lucky that it happened while I had the kids. No one was hurt right? No sign of a struggle, no blood in the car. She just took off after going to some church meeting. If you ask me, she had a thing for that preacher, what the hell was his name? Mullins, yeah. She thought he was ... What did she say? Oh, ‘understanding’ and ‘caring,’ and oh, yeah, ‘a hunk.’ Really? That pious jerk! If you ask me the guy’s a phony with a capital F.”

Alvarez said, ?

?Suppose your wife was kidnapped; you’d need us to help you get her back.”

“Ex-wife,” he reminded them, glancing from Alvarez back to Pescoli. “There’s no love lost between me and Brenda, okay? I just did this cuz my kids wanted me to.” He glanced at the front door, which was now firmly shut, then the window to the living room where the blinds moved a bit. His lips tightened in impatience. “Look, we’re done here. I said all I had to say and I’m not going to freeze my ass off arguing with you. Brenda will come home when she’s ready or, if she really was abducted, then maybe someone will call.”

“We’d like to help; monitor your phone and e-mail and—”

“Forget it.” His eyes were dark and cruel. “It would be a waste of time for all of us.” He hitched up his jeans by the belt and made his way back to the front door, then disappeared inside.

“Gee, I wonder why they’re still not married?” Pescoli said sarcastically, then let out a long breath as she considered how her last marriage had turned sour. “I feel sorry for their kids.”

“Let’s hope he’s right, that Brenda’s taking a break or having a fling or whatever, but that she comes back, and soon.”

“I don’t think it’s gonna happen,” Pescoli said as they hiked across the snowy parking lot to Alvarez’s car.

“Me neither.”

She hated to admit it, but after the discovery of Lara Sue Gilfry’s body, Pescoli was convinced that whoever had killed her wouldn’t be satisfied with just one victim. The scene had been too staged, the effort to display her body too involved for the creep to stop at just one event.

Nope. Pescoli was willing to bet a week’s pay that the killer was poised to strike again. She knew it. Felt that cold certainty deep in her bones.

Sick as it was, Pescoli feared the next body they found would be Brenda Sutherland’s.

Before heading home that day, Alvarez put in another call to the dog control center at the county as well as the local vet. But neither the officers in charge of the kennels for the county nor Jordan Eagle had any news on Roscoe. Like Gabriel Reeve, the dog appeared to have vanished. She’d checked with road deputies as well, fearing her dog may have been hit and killed in the streets, but there had been no reports of any injured or dead dogs fitting her puppy’s description.

As for Reeve, she’d checked with all the local shelters and deputies on patrol in the parks and near schools, the juvenile detention center, even the hospitals, and anywhere she could think the boy might have shown up, searching for any sign of the runaway, but she’d come up empty-handed.

O’Keefe hadn’t called her either, and she’d expected that he would, if he found the kid.

She rotated the kinks from her neck and reminded herself that the boy could be out of the area, long gone. All he had to have done was hitch a ride with a long-haul trucker. For all she knew, Gabriel Reeve might be in San Francisco or Albuquerque or Chicago or anywhere. Possibly Canada. Any damned where. There had been enough time for Reeve to have left the snows of Grizzly Falls and Montana far behind.

Funny that. The kid she’d tried so hard to forget. The one she’d thought of nearly daily, but just fleetingly, now, because he had come crashing back to her world, had become so much more real and tangible, and the old wounds in her heart, the ones she’d so carefully tried to heal, had reopened and oh, so painfully. Now, it had become her mission to find the kid.

Is that before or after you locate your killer? Hmmm?

She grabbed her coat, sidearm and laptop before heading through the lunchroom, where Joelle was packing up the few remaining cookies and brownies into a single plastic container, then swiping out the insides of the empty bins.

“Hey, get this!” Pescoli was heading through the room as well.

Joelle managed to throw her a dirty look and Pescoli caught it. “Hey, I’m sorry, okay?” she said. “I was in a bad mood and I took it out on your decorations. It was wrong.”

“Sometimes, Detective, you should think before you speak. And as for your ‘bad mood’? That seems to be a typical state for you. I think you bring your problems at home to work and it wouldn’t surprise me if you take your work home with you and dump it on your family.” Her shiny pink lips pursed a bit. “There should be room for joy, Regan. Even in this place where we deal with criminals, killers and rapists and thieves. That shouldn’t make us so jaded and hard that we don’t look for the good in the world.” She tucked the tubs under her arms and marched out of the lunchroom.

“I said I was sorry,” Pescoli said as they walked through the back door and heard it slam and lock behind them as a gust of bitter wind hit Alvarez full force. Man, it was cold. But clear. The snow had stopped for the time being, and above the humming street lamps, a few stars had already appeared.

“Sometimes an apology isn’t good enough. At least not for someone like Joelle.”

“Oh, God, don’t tell me I have to write a letter or get her some little velvety poinsettia or cute little stuffed animal to place on her desk with a sad emoticon face on a card, cuz I’m not doing it.”