Afraid to Die (Alvarez & Pescoli)

Which was odd; but she had been out of sync all day.

O’Keefe said, “It seemed as if he were on some kind of mission, that he knew where he was going. He hitchhiked here from Helena. Why not keep going? Spokane? Or even farther west to Seattle, or down to Boise, some place bigger where he could get lost. If that’s what he really wanted to do.” His thick eyebrows pulled together as he worked it out. “Instead he runs directly to this complex, this damned unit.” He pointed a finger at her floor. “Then he finds his way in?”

“And takes my dog.”

“Possibly, but the dog could have gotten out.” His jaw moved to one side as he thought. “It doesn’t make a helluva lot of sense.” He leaned down, eyeing the floor as if hoping for a boot print or some other evidence, and she tried not to notice how his jacket rode up, exposing a strip of skin over the waistband of a beat-up pair of Levi’s. Then his gaze moved over the interior, as if he were the suspect and had just run inside, and all the while Alvarez’s mind was turning over the information she’d just learned: runaway boy of about sixteen. Adopted. Who had run straight here.

Once more, Grace Perchant’s weird warning sifted through her mind: Your son needs you. He’s in grave danger. . .

She swallowed hard, petted the cat without thinking. Was it possible? Could the boy be hers? She knew nothing about the son she’d given up for adoption a lifetime ago. His age was right. And he had landed here.

Was it possible?

“I need to know more about Reeve,” she heard herself saying as Jane scrambled from her hands and landed with a soft thud on the carpet.

“His rap sheet? There isn’t much of one. He’s still a juvenile.”

“Yeah, but also, I need to know more about him personally. You said he was adopted. How?”

He lifted a shoulder. “Private adoption. Through an attorney that handles that kind of thing.”

“Where?”

“Where did they find the attorney? Don’t know. Probably Helena. Or ... no. Wait!” He snapped his fingers. “They lived in Denver for a while, about the time they got Gabe and then the younger one, too.” He straightened and his eyes, a flinty gray, bored into hers. “Why?”

“Just curious. You have a picture of him?” She wasn’t going to confide in him about the baby she gave up; she could be wrong. Just because a woman who purportedly talked to ghosts warned her that her son was in danger, there was no reason to go off the deep end and divulge all of her secrets.

“Yeah.” He flipped open his phone, hit a couple of buttons, then showed her the first of several shots of a boy with dark hair and eyes, his skin tanned, his features Hispanic. In several of the pictures, he was smiling, his teeth white and straight, but his eyes definitely suspicious. “Good-lookin’ kid,” he added, then showed her a picture of the family. Mom and dad, and three kids, two boys and a girl, stepping stones with Gabriel squarely in the middle.

Alvarez’s heart beat a little faster, pounding in her ears. Could it be? There was some resemblance, right? Or was she imagining that the boy had a nose that was as straight as hers, that his eyes were as round ... “Could you e-mail these to me?” she asked, her voice a little raspier than usual. She cleared her throat. “It might help.”

“Sure.”

She rattled off her e-mail address and he typed it in.

“Done,” he said, then looked up. “You’re white as a sheet.”

“Am I?” She shrugged it off. “It’s ... it’s been a long day.” And it’s not over yet. Glancing around the apartment, the images of the boy indelibly burned in her mind, she tried to change the subject. “There’s nothing more here. I’m going to start looking for my dog. Just in case he escaped rather than was dognapped.”

“I’ll come with.”

She wasn’t certain that being around O’Keefe was a good idea, but she needed help finding Roscoe.

Together they scoured the neighborhood but found no sign of the dog. They knocked on doors and walked down alleys, eyeing carports and garbage cans, and located a raccoon on his nightly mission, his beady eyes daring Alvarez to come near the small pond where he’d broken a hole in the ice. Baring his teeth in warning, the raccoon stood his ground as she approached. Alvarez left the masked animal to its fishing and continued searching, to no avail.

They gave up an hour later and she put a call in to animal control and left a message with the local vets.

“Gabe’s got him,” O’Keefe said finally as she hung up. Once again they were standing in the front hallway at the base of the stairs, snow melting from their jackets to drip onto the tile floor. She unwound her scarf and hung it, along with her jacket, on the coat tree. “You want some coffee or something?” The last person she wanted to sit down and share a cup of joe with was Dylan O’Keefe, but the guy had just spent over an hour searching for her dog and, quite possibly, was on the trail of her runaway son, a boy she had tried for sixteen years not to think about.

He was about to decline, then thought better of it and yanked off his gloves. “Beer?”

She shook her head. “I only have coffee because it came in a Christmas basket. No wine, either. And come to think of it, I’m fresh out of hot water, but I can heat some in the microwave.”

Still surveying her living area, he said, “Coffee’s fine,” then asked, “You a teetotaler?”

She lifted a shoulder. “Just not interested.”

“Into fitness,” he observed, motioning to the free weights stacked in her bookcase along with police procedural manuals, medical texts and criminology books.