“No.”
“I read the report.”
Great. Alvarez felt her stomach drop. Worse yet, she nearly ran right into the sheriff as Dan Grayson rounded the corner from his office. Luckily she wasn’t carrying a cup of hot tea as she did a double step around him.
“Let me grab a cup,” he said in that drawl she’d always found fascinating. “Meet me in my office and bring me up to speed on this ice-mummy case. That’s what the press is already calling it, you know.”
Pescoli said, “Probably better than human Popsicle.”
“Just barely. And don’t mention that to Manny Douglas,” he warned, referring to a particularly nosy and irritating reporter for the Mountain Reporter, a local newspaper. “He’s gonna have a heyday with this one.” One of Grayson’s bushy eyebrows lifted and he cocked his head toward his office. “I’ll be right in.”
“Ice mummy?” Pescoli repeated as she followed Alvarez through the door of Grayson’s office and dropped into one of the desk chairs. “Not all that clever. So are you going to tell me about San Bernardino and Dylan O’Keefe, or am I going to have to make a call to my friend who works there?”
“Is it really that important?”
“Maybe not. But since a kid wanted in an armed robbery broke into your place with O’Keefe hot on his tail, yeah, maybe it is.”
There was just no getting around this. “Later,” Alvarez said, not wanting Grayson to hear more than he needed to.
“I’ll hold you to it.”
From his dog bed in the corner, Sturgis lifted his head and thumped his tail.
Alvarez’s heart twisted a little when she thought of her own dog and wondered where Roscoe could be. “Good boy,” she said automatically. Again Sturgis wagged his tail, before yawning widely, showing a pink mouth and gleaming teeth, then hearing Grayson’s boot steps in the hallway, actually standing and greeting the sheriff at the door. Grayson balanced a coffee cup in one hand and leaned over to scratch the dog’s ears with the other.
Alvarez saw that the action was automatic; Grayson probably didn’t even realize he’d given the dog attention. Just as he’d never realized how close she’d come to falling in love with him, which, in retrospect, had been foolish, a fantasy. Yes, he was an attractive man, but he was more mentor than he could ever be lover.
She glanced away then, surprised at her thoughts. Worse yet, she understood that her change in attitude had less to do with Dan Grayson and could be attributed to the fact that she’d seen Dylan O’Keefe again.
Which was just plain ludicrous. As well as disturbing. She couldn’t afford to think about either man in any kind of romantic fantasy.
From the corner of her eye, Alvarez caught Pescoli staring at her, so she forced her face to remain placid. Even so, her partner had an uncanny ability to guess what was on Alvarez’s mind. Today, that wasn’t going to happen! She’d make certain of it.
“Okay,” Grayson said as he settled into his creaking desk chair. “Give it to me, straight. Blow by blow. What the hell’s going on at the Presbyterian church?”
Chapter 11
By five o’clock that afternoon, Alvarez didn’t know much more about the ice-mummy case than she had in the predawn hours when the body had been discovered. Nor had she spent any free time with Pescoli, so she’d managed not to have to delve into the reasons she’d left California and landed here. That would change soon, because Pescoli was like a damned terrier whenever she wanted to know something; she’d ask questions until she was satisfied with the answers.
Alvarez wasn’t sure she was ready to give any.
At least, not yet.
She was still reeling from seeing O’Keefe again.
Dead tired, her nerves jangled, impatience coloring her judgment, she decided it was time for a break. She rolled her chair away from her workstation and stood, then stretched, reaching her hands high over her head and hearing her spine pop. A cold cup of tea sat on the edge of her desk, her computer screen had pictures of the victim in ice and, later, after the block was slowly melted, of her dead body, which was now on its way to be autopsied.
As her family had yet to be located, the owner of the Bull and Bear identified the dead woman as Lara Sue Gilfry and a search was under way to find anyone close to her.
The media was all over the story, and despite repeated responses from the department that the public information officer would give an interview at five thirty, stations from all over the state and as far away as Seattle and Boise had been calling.
Many times the victim of a homicide was killed by a family member or someone close. However, in this case, the killer or his accomplice had gone to so much trouble to display the body, and in a public place, obviously for atten
tion or to make some kind of statement. Going out on a limb, Alvarez thought Lara had been attacked by someone who had either come across her path and decided she would suit his needs, or had been stalking her, waiting for the right moment to strike, so that he could kidnap her and then go about his regimen of killing her, working with the ice, then exhibiting her. The sheriff ’s department had people looking into her acquaintances, members and neighbors of the church, enemies of Reverend Mullins and his family or the Presbyterian church, as well as local artists, especially those who sculpted and worked in ice. They’d contacted catering companies and hotels in the area, looking for a name of someone who could create art out of ice.
“Deranged psycho,” she said under her breath and stretched both of her arms behind her head, pulling on the shoulder joint, releasing the tension of the day. Some killers tried to hide their victims, maybe even kept them close to where the killer lived so he could revisit the act, but others, the show-offs, the deranged madmen who somehow thought they had to prove to the world how smart they were, loved to taunt and tease the police while terrorizing the public. This nut job, the one who put a dead body in ice, clearly fell into the latter category. Sick, sick, sick!
Worse yet, she’d felt the creep’s presence, though, of course, she didn’t believe in anything like “feelings” or “hunches,” but there had been a fleeting moment, early this morning, before dawn, when she’d sensed an evil presence staring at her, almost known that the malicious whacko who’d killed a woman and encased her in ice had been nearby.