Born To Die (Alvarez & Pescoli)

Or been pushed.

Was the killer so anxious for her to be dead that he couldn’t wait for the poison he’d put in her coffee to work? There was a chance he might not have known about her heart condition. For that matter, even Jocelyn herself might not have realized her heart had been compromised. But the killer certainly understood that given enough time and having gone undetected, the toxins he’d laced her food with would eventually steal her life.

“Who the hell are you?” she thought aloud, her breath fogging in the air.

Drawing her gaze from the bluff, she unlocked her car. Maybe the bastard was afraid her symptoms would force her to the doctor before she died. If she’d acted quickly enough, her life might have been spared.

Was he just antsy, unwilling to wait for her death, or was there a reason he’d altered his original plan of letting her die slowly?

If Jocelyn had been pushed, Alvarez reminded herself. That important fact hadn’t been established.

“Yet,” she reminded herself as she climbed into her Jeep, flicked on the engine, and glanced once more at the crest of the ridge. She could almost picture Jocelyn Wallis tumbling over the edge, arms and legs flailing, fear and pain twisting her features. And all the while a shadowy figure had watched her fall. Gloating. Mentally praising himself for his slyness.

Her stomach turned sour.

“I’ll get you, you son of a bitch,” she vowed under her breath, even though she wasn’t even sure that he’d been on the ridge.

But she’d find out.

One way or another.

“Your mother on line two,” Heather told Kacey as she walked out of the examination room where the seventh flu case of the day had just been diagnosed. “Hey, are you okay?”

The answer was no because the truth was that she hadn’t slept more than twenty minutes at a stretch the night before. After thinking someone had been in the house, she’d woken up at every moaning joist, or branch hitting a window, or rush of the wind. She’d had dreams of the attack and woken up sweating. Twice, chiding herself for being a ninny, she’d gone downstairs and checked to see that the doors and windows had been bolted and latched. She’d even double-checked to see that her grandfather’s shotgun was where it was supposed to be, tucked in the attic space under the eves, accessed by a short door in the hallway outside her bedroom.

The night had been fitful, and when the alarm had blared at 5:00 a.m., she’d had to drag herself from the bed.

Even the two cups of coffee she’d swilled before work hadn’t given her the jolt she’d been looking for, and she’d been dragging all day. And it had been a bitch. Along with her regularly scheduled patients, there had been the seven extras squeezed into examination rooms. They’d all exhibited flu symptoms, one elderly lady sick enough that Kacey had sent her directly to the hospital.

The office had been a madhouse; the waiting room overflowing; tempers short. Added to the tension of the extra work, the computers had gone down for nearly two hours, and Martin had been held up at the hospital.

“I’m fine. Just tired,” she lied, because her stomach had been slightly sour all day. “Tell Mom I’ll call her back.”

Heather pulled a face. “I tried that. You know, ‘The doctor’s just finishing up with patients and will call you in an hour or two,’ but”—she shook her head, her straight blond hair catching in the light—“it didn’t fly.”

“I’ll take it,” Kacey said, wondering at the sudden interest from her mother. They’d seen each other just last night, and sometimes they didn’t speak for a week or two.

Once in her office, she slid into her desk chair, pushed the button on the phone of her antiquated system, and said, “Hey, Mom. Happy Black Friday.”

“As if I’d be in the malls with the rest of America today!” There wasn’t so much as a chuckle from the other end of the line. “Acacia, I’ve been thinking . . . ,” she said, and Kacey bit her tongue to keep from saying something snide about her mother’s thinking process. She could tell Maribelle wasn’t in the mood for a joke of any kind.

“About?”

“Our conversation last night.”

Kacey leaned back in her chair and stared out the window, where the snow, which had stopped earlier, was beginning to fall again, adding another frosty layer to the bushes surrounding the clinic. “What about it?” She was willing to bet it wasn’t about the Commander or, for once, Kacey’s love life. Last night Kacey had hit a nerve.

“Well, it bothered me that you seemed to think your father could have ... you know, fathered other children, or tha

t some other relative had done something similar. I didn’t get the impression that you understood how preposterous that idea was.” She was dead serious. “I know you’re all worked up about these women who died and resembled you, and so I wanted to make sure that you were all right.”

Translation: That you aren’t digging any further.

“Thanks, Mom. I’m fine.”

“So . . . everything’s back to normal?”

Nope. “As normal as it is around here.”