Born To Die (Alvarez & Pescoli)

He didn’t have time for holidays or nonsense.

The radio was playing some insipid Christmas carol, and he snapped it off, his eyes trained on the road ahead and the twin beams of his headlights cutting through the storm. The miles rolled too slowly under his tires.

He couldn’t waste any time.

He had too much to do.

The ingrates that were his family just didn’t know it. Couldn’t. Not ever.

CHAPTER 13

“ So that’s it,” Alvarez said as she and Slatkin and an assistant, Ashley Tang, packed up the contents from Jocelyn Wallis’s apartment and carried the bags to the waiting van from the state crime lab. The evidence had been photographed, bagged and tagged, then initialed before they hauled the bags along the path broken in the snow to the crime lab van.

Mikhail Slatkin, not yet thirty, was tall and rawboned, with a keen intelligence and guarded demeanor, and was physically the diametric opposite of the woman who worked with him. Petite and Asian, Tang was a woman who, Alvarez guessed, barely tipped the scales at a hundred pounds even in boots and insulated ski suit. Rumored to have graduated from Stanford before she was twenty-one, Tang, at twenty-eight, was sharp and intense, qualities Alvarez understood only too well.

Together they’d gone through the unit, gathering evidence that might have been overlooked before anyone realized that the victim had been poisoned, most likely, in Alvarez’s opinion, murdered, though she didn’t quite understand how the homicide had taken place.

True, there were traces of poison in the woman’s system, but she’d died from the result of wounds from her fall. Had she been delirious and taken a fateful misstep, or had the killer been nearby and, rather than wait for the poison levels in her body to become deadly, given her a little push?

Slatkin unlocked the white van with its shadow of grime where someone had scrawled “WASH ME.”

“I’ll need this ASAP,” Alvarez said as Slatkin arranged the evidence bags to his liking in the back of the van.

Slatkin slammed the back door closed. “Big surprise.”

Tang, her breath fogging in the frigid air as she climbed into the passenger side of the van, assured Alvarez, “We’ll be on it.”

Alvarez made her way to her Jeep just as a blue older model Plymouth rolled into a covered spot and a woman, somewhere in her upper seventies, climbed out. She was bundled in an oversized coat. The second her booted feet hit the cement under her covered parking area, a wildly enthusiastic dachshund in a ridiculous red sweater that matched his owner’s scarf and hat hopped from the car to twirl on his leash. Barking madly, wrapping the leash around his owner’s legs, the dog took one look at Alvarez and stopped dead in its tracks.

Dark eyes assessed the newcomer with undisguised suspicion. “That’s a good boy, Kaiser,” the woman cooed as she opened the trunk and hoisted a sack of groceries from within.

Kaiser growled at Alvarez, and his owner, looking over the tops of her glasses, chuckled. “Don’t mind him,” she said. “He’s all bark and no bite.” Slamming the trunk closed, she whistled softly. “Come along, Kaiser.”

“Excuse me, do you live here?”

“Yes. One-C.” She nodded toward her unit, right next door to Jocelyn Wallis’s apartment.

“You’re neighbors with Jocelyn Wallis.”

Her lips drew into a sad frown, and her eyebrows slammed together above the dark rims of her lenses. “Yes. Poor thing. I heard about what happened to her, on the news. I was out of town, you know, visiting Frannie. God, she’s an awful cook. She’s my sister and I love her, but do you think she ever cracks a cookbook or looks up a recipe online? No. Just roasts a turkey the same old way she always does and cooks it until it’s dry as the Sahara, but not her stuffing. Lord, how do you cook a dry turkey and still end up with wet, slimy dressing?” Then, as if she realized she’d been rambling, she said, “It’s too bad about Jocelyn, really. She was a nice enough girl, well, woman, just a little . . .” As if she thought better of what she had intended to say, she lifted her shoulders, tugged on the leash, and half dragged Kaiser toward her front door.

“Excuse me, ma’am.” Alvarez pulled out her badge and introduced herself. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to talk to you about Ms. Wallis.” The truth was that few of her neighbors had been interviewed as her death had been deemed an accident.

“Surely,” the woman said after studying Alvarez’s badge. “I’m Lois Emmerson. . . . But, please come inside, where it’s warm.” Shifting her groceries to her other arm, she walked to the front door of the unit abutting Jocelyn Wallis’s and let Alvarez into an apartment that was neat and tidy.

After setting the sack on a counter that separated the kitchen from the living area, she unsnapped Kaiser’s leash, hung it up, and took off her coat, gloves, scarf, and hat. Beneath the outer layer was a red sweater with white dots ... just like the dog’s.

“You knit,” Alvarez observed.

“Voraciously! Never met a skein of mohair that I didn’t love!” The dog’s nose was at the crack of the pantry door, so she gave him half a doggy biscuit and said, “I’ll put on some tea.”

Alvarez tried to decline, but it was of no use. Lois Emmerson declared they both needed to be “warmed up,” and it became increasingly evident that the older woman, as she heated water in the microwave, was lonely. Single. No children. Just Kaiser for company and the poor excuse of a cook, Frannie, as family. It appeared as if she wanted to talk, so Alvarez took off her coat and tossed it on an empty bar stool.

“You were saying that there was something about Jocelyn Wallis that bothered you.”

“No, I don’t think so.” The microwave dinged, and Lois was on it like a flea on a dog, quickly sliding the glass measuring pitcher out of the microwave. Deftly, as if she’d done it a million times, she began pouring steaming water from the pitcher into twin porcelain cups that bore the stains of countless uses. She plopped a used tea bag into her cup, then asked, “Orange pekoe or English breakfast?”

“Pekoe,” Alvarez said, just to keep the conversation flowing. She was standing in the dining area, the kitchen counter separating them, and watched as Lois found some loose tea and dropped a spoonful into the second cup.