Afraid to Die (Alvarez & Pescoli)

“Hey! Take it easy! Keep your fuckin’ hands off me!” the suspect, skinny as a rail, his jeans about to slip off his butt, grumbled. His sweatshirt was wet from melting snow, the hood falling off to expose a shaved head covered with tattoos.

“Come on, Reggie,” the deputy ordered, leading the offender, a perpetual car thief with a particular interest in imports, down the hall just as Pescoli’s phone rang. She answered, waved at Alvarez, and with the phone pressed to her ear, took off toward her own office.

Good. Grateful not to have to answer any more questions about O’Keefe, Alvarez turned back to her desk. How could she possibly respond to her partner’s insinuations and speculation and flat-out curiosity when she couldn’t answer her own?

Once she was alone in her office again and the noise of the station seemed to retreat a bit, Alvarez glanced at her computer screen. Lissa Parsons’s autopsy report had come in and she compared it to that of Lara Sue Gilfry. Nothing out of the ordinary, no bruises or marks, cause of death hypothermia.

Her jaw clenched and she thought about how many others there could possibly be. God, they had to find this guy and fast.

She was about to go home when she caught a notation on the first victim’s report. That she’d had a tongue stud and the area around the piercing was a little raw, as if it had been recent. Pulling up the file, she flipped through to the missing persons report and scanned the page. In the area where there was mention of identifying marks, her scar and tattoo were listed.

No mention of a tongue stud.

Maybe whoever filed the report didn’t know.

Maybe it was too new.

“And maybe it’s nothing,” she said as she flipped through the images on the computer of Lara, her identifying marks and eventually the tongue stud. As she stared at the image, she realized it didn’t look like any of the studs she’d seen before and yet, it was familiar.

No.

It couldn’t be.

Her stomach dropped and she told herself that she was leaping to all the wrong conclusions. But a sick sensation took hold of her as she remembered her hoop earring used as a nipple ring on Lissa Parsons.

Was it possible? A whisper of dread skittered along the base of her skull.

Had the lunatic stolen the silver stud in the picture from her own home and then used it to make a statement on Lara Sue Gilfry?

“No way,” she whispered, but even as the words left her mouth, she was out of her chair, on her way to the evidence room, and knew in her heart the piece of jewelry was hers, stolen from her home, then stuck into the naked victim and left for her to find.

Somehow, some way, the sick son of a bitch had broken into her place and now was mocking her.

And he wanted her to know about it.

Chapter 23

“Look, I really don’t have time for this,” O’Keefe insisted. Sitting on one of the molded plastic chairs in an interview room, he was slowly going out of his mind.

With concrete walls painted a nondescript green and a tiled floor circa 1962 that showed wear near the door, the room had a mirror on one wall that was, undoubtedly, a window to a darkened room on the other side, where interviews could be observed in private, not that the glass fooled anyone.

O’Keefe had been interviewed by Agents Chandler and Halden for the past two hours and they were getting nowhere fast. “I’ve told you all I know about Gabriel Reeve and how I tracked him here.” They’d gone over it several times, as if they thought his story would change if he told it often enough. He’d explained how he’d tracked down every lead, looked into any acquaintances Reeve might have in the area, checked cell phone and computer records, talked with people on the street, searched all the areas he thought a kid might go if he was hiding and scared.

“Don’t you think it was odd that he ended up in Detective Alvarez’s home and later she discovers jewelry missing that ended up on one of the victims?”

“Of course.” He’d answered that one before, too. The agents finally seemed satisfied that he was telling it to them straight, then Chandler brought up the past.

“You and Detective Alvarez, you worked together in San Bernardino, right?”

Here we go, he thought. “That’s right, and we were involved. Romantically. Look, I’m telling you this so we can cut to the chase, okay? You have a killer to catch and I have a suspect to run down.”

“We’re working on that, too. Confirmed with the Helena Police Department. Detective Trey Williams. He said you were a deputy of the department, but just for this case.” She waved her fingers as if that information was insignificant. “I’m not exactly sure how that works. It’s a little loosey-goosey for me. Not exactly by the book.”

“Not exactly,” O’Keefe allowed.

“And there is that problem in San Bernardino.”

“No problem. My record’s clean.”