Afraid to Die (Alvarez & Pescoli)

“Yeah, I know. I just don’t know why.”

“Or who,” Pescoli thought aloud.

“The FBI is working on it,” Alvarez said uncomfortably. She’d never been one to like the limelight and now she was squarely in the middle of it. Because of the Christmas card with Brenda Sutherland’s photo inside, Alvarez’s life was being torn apart and examined under a microscope. Like the victims and those close to each of the women who had gone missing, Alvarez, too, was dealing with having her life studied and dissected. When pressed about the possibility of Gabriel Reeve being her son, she’d been forced to bare her soul. Emilio’s name had come up as the boy’s father. As she’d told Pescoli, everyone she’d ever dealt with had all of a sudden become potential suspects, especially anyone she’d thwarted. All the people she’d known, the men she’d dated, those criminals she’d helped convict and their families, were being stored in computer banks, cross-referenced to the known victims.

She thought now, as Pescoli wheeled into the garage where her car was parked, that it was really weird to be the subject of an investigation rather than being the detective investigating an incident. And now, she was off the case.

“So no one has a key to your place?” Pescoli asked, and Alvarez sent her an I-can’t-believe-you-asked-me-that look. “You dated a couple of guys ...”

“As I told Chandler and Halden, no. Not even the handyman who comes around and, no, I don’t keep a key hidden outside, so I don’t know how the guy got in.”

“Could one of the men you dated have ... ‘borrowed’ a key and had another one made?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted, thinking back to the few times that a man had brought her home from a date or picked up her purse at a ball game ... or ... who knew? Could one of them have taken an impression or found the spare key in the side pocket of her purse and made a duplicate only to return it? She didn’t think so, but then when she remembered the look in Grover Pankretz’s eyes when she’d broken it off with him, she’d felt a chill that ran surprisingly deep. He, though, was married now, presumably happily.

“You changed the locks when you bought the place?”

“What do you think?”

“Okay, okay. Just asking.” Pescoli drove over the tracks and pulled into a convenience store. “This’ll just take a sec. Want anything?”

“No.” She was still shaking her head as Pescoli unstrapped her seat belt and let herself out of the car. She left the engine running, the wipers still flicking away snow accumulation, the police band crackling while officers and dispatch communicated crimes in progress. Within minutes she was back, a fresh pack of cigarettes and two drinks in her hands. “Here ya go. Diet Coke,” she said as she handed one drink to Alvarez and stashed hers in a cup holder near the console.

“I don’t drink diet.”

“Then put it in your holder and I’ll take care of it.” After stashing the Marlboro Lights into the console and a second in the glove box, she put the Jeep into gear and wheeled out of the parking lot.

They drove along the river, past the falls, to an industrial section of town, where the department’s garage was located, a tall fence with razor wire surrounding the building and parking area. As they pulled into the lot, Pescoli said, “I don’t like that this psycho’s got you on his radar.”

“Neither do I.”

“Grayson will see that you’re protected,” Pescoli said, though she sounded concerned.

“I’ll be fine.”

Pescoli parked and let the Jeep idle. “For the record, I’m not crazy about working with Gage. When was the last time he actually worked a case? In the nineties?”

“Ouch! Careful. I think he’s younger than you.”

“Probably, it seems like everyone who’s hired these days is about three years older than Jeremy, and let me tell you, that’s a scary thought.”

Alvarez chuckled as she stepped out of the Jeep. “See ya tomorrow.” But it was weird to say the words knowing that Pescoli would be still knee deep in the case and she’d be relegated to something else, most likely Len Bradshaw’s death, which was about to be ruled accidental.

That, of course, was all for show.

No way would she stop investigating the ice-mummy murders. She knew it, Pescoli knew it and, of course, Dan Grayson knew it as well.

Pescoli lit up the minute she was out of the parking lot. She rolled the window down, of course, allowing the smoke to curl out the window and the frigid breath of winter into the Jeep’s interior. Who did she think she was kidding? Everyone in the department, her kids and even Santana knew in times of deep stress she had a cig or two. That was it. Then she was done until the next calamity hit, which, unfortunately at this rate, would push her back to her pack-a-day habit again.

She took a long drag, then stubbed the damned thing out. She just needed to clear her head and think, and sometimes, it seemed, nicotine helped that process along.

Okay, she knew she was kidding herself, but as she drove out of town toward her little cabin in the woods, she drove by rote, or on automatic pilot, as she referred to it to everyone but her children. To Jeremy and Bianca, she swore that she was always completely alert behind the wheel, that she never once spaced out.

Following a van from the senior center that was so slow she wanted to scream, she turned off the main road and took surface streets through the heart of town and behind the courthouse. She caught a glimpse of the First Union bank sign and felt her heart sink.

Johnna Phillips had never shown up for work, and when the deputies had checked throughout the day, they discovered she’d apparently never returned home. Just like the ex-boyfriend, Carl Anderson, had said when he’d called Pescoli’s cell.

She still was going to give Luke a very sharp piece of her mind about handing out her cell phone, but in this case, she almost understood, as Carl, the recently dumped ex, was scared out of his mind to think his girlfriend had been abducted by the sadistic killer who worked so hard to kill his victims without any marks, then display them publicly.