Born To Die (Alvarez & Pescoli)

Kacey let him outside, then fed him near the back door before heading into the den as planned.

While Rudy and Eileen worked, Trace and Kacey turned on several televisions to mask some of the noise, then played their roles in the den.

Alvarez snapped on a pair of latex gloves, collected some of the coffee grounds, as well as the beans still in the canister and grinder, and placed them all in plastic bags. She didn’t expect to find any fingerprints from whoever had planted the bugs, but she believed in being thorough. Who knew? They might get lucky.

&nb

sp; Finding the evidence that the creep was targeting Acacia Lambert, playing with her, listening in on her life, went a long way to proving her theory that the deaths were connected. Could Acacia Lambert also be the progeny of Donor 727? Alvarez planned on asking the woman but was waiting till this debugging was over.

While Kacey and Trace played their parts at the computer in the den, the dog curled at Kacey’s feet, Alvarez scratched out a quick question on a pad, then placed it in front of the doctor:

Have you been feeling ill?

Trace O’Halleran frowned, looked from one woman to the other.

Kacey hesitated and frowned. She wrote back: Stomach.

Alvarez wrote back: Maybe poison. Arsenic found in Wallis stomach contents.

“From what?” Kacey mouthed.

Alvarez wrote: In the coffee. Most likely a small dosage.

“Damn it,” Kacey’s voice was barely discernible, probably wouldn’t be picked up on the mic. Her expression turned from concern to anger, and she wrote quickly: We need to talk.

Nodding, Alvarez scribbled back: My car. She then turned up the television to the point that nothing else could be heard and, carrying the coffee, pot, and grinder, all bagged and tagged, walked through the kitchen and outside.

The wind was blowing hard, snow slanting sideways at times, a tree branch banging against one of the gutters on the second story. She unlocked her car and climbed in. Trace and Kacey showed up a few moments later.

“Okay, it’s safe here,” Alvarez said as she turned on the engine and ignored any banter or crackling on the radio. Trace was stretched across the back; Kacey in the passenger bucket seat. Alvarez adjusted the heater, to blow out the condensation, then let the wipers swipe off an accumulation of snow. “I think you may have been poisoned, though probably not more than enough to make you sick. And the reason I think so is because we found traces of arsenic in Jocelyn’s blood. The guy was toying with her. He’d put it into her coffee somehow.”

“Sick bastard,” Trace said.

“You think he put it in my coffee, too?” Kacey asked.

“I’ll find out.”

“I think this ‘sick bastard’ could be related to me,” Kacey said slowly, picking her words.

“How so?” Alvarez asked.

Kacey then, somewhat reluctantly, launched into a story about being the love child of her mother and one Gerald Johnson, a doctor who had invented a certain type of heart stent. She told of her findings that afternoon in Missoula, at Gerald’s place of work, summing up her impressions of him and his children, then dropped the bomb that Gerald Johnson as a medical student had been a sperm donor to a now-defunct clinic.

Alvarez took a long moment, savoring the feeling of a case breaking wide open. “We were already on the sperm bank angle,” she told Kacey, surprising both her and Trace. “From Elle Alexander’s parents.” Quickly, she recapped what she’d learned, then gazed at Kacey seriously across the dark interior of the car. “But you have to cease and desist. Give me a statement back at the station, then disappear, hide out. At least until we determine if you’re a target and what the story is with Johnson and his kids.”

“One of them is like me. Robert Lindley. His mother was another of Johnson’s mistresses. And another one of his children, a girl named Kathleen, died in her twenties in a skiing accident.”

“Another accident,” Alvarez said.

“You think she was a victim?” Trace asked.

“Maybe.”

“What about his other kids?” Kacey asked. “Kathleen died years ago. And Agatha, when she was eight. The rest of them, as far as I know, haven’t had any brushes with death.”

“That’s just it. As far as you know. For now, though, you have to quit playing detective. It’s too dangerous.” Alvarez was adamant. “It’s our job. We’ll handle it from here.”

“Jesus,” Pescoli muttered, stunned as she knelt on the snow near the corpse, a cross-country skier who had apparently slammed into the snag of a pine tree perched on the banks of the icy creek. Pescoli had been on her way to the Lambert house when she’d gotten the call.