Ready to Die (Alvarez & Pescoli)

“Yeah, they admitted it.” Darville lifted a shoulder. “Just trying to help.”

“I’d better talk to them,” Alvarez said, and started trudging through the calf-deep snow toward the small group. One of Liam Maxwell’s arms was wrapped protectively around his girlfriend’s slim shoulders. Even so, she appeared to be shaking, either from the cold or the horror of what they’d discovered, or, more probably, a little of each.

“. . . it’s just awful,” the girl, Raney, was saying as Alvarez approached, her eyes round, her nose red and running. Strands of brown hair poked from beneath a heavy, Nordic-looking stocking cap with long, braid-like ties hanging by her ears.

“It’ll be okay,” her boyfriend said, giving her a hug, but no smile reached his eyes. He appeared as upset as Raney but was trying to hide it. A reddish, scraggly beard covered the lower half of his face while shaded ski goggles obscured his eyes.

“I know this is rough,” Alvarez said, “but can you tell me what happened? How you got here? What you saw?”

“Again?” Raney swiped at her nose with the back of her gloved hand.

“Please. Everything.”

“That’s just it,” the girl said. “There’s not much to say. We were just trying out our new gear and . . .” Her gaze slid to the frozen body of the judge and she visibly shivered.

Maxwell finished her thoughts. “And we saw something that didn’t look right, y’know, a flash of red on the ground. So we checked it out and saw that it was the judge. The red was her jacket.”

“How did you know who she was?” Alvarez asked.

“Her picture’s been all over the news,” he answered. “We saw a report about her on TV just last night.” He glanced at Raney, whose head was already bobbing up and down in agreement, the long braid-like ties of her stocking cap dancing weirdly around her chin.

“I . . . uh, I just never thought we would, you know, find her,” the girl said, her chin wobbling a little. “Can we go now?”

“Just a few more questions and then, sure,” Alvarez said, learning that they’d been staying in her grandparent’s cabin since winter break began, about three miles north. They’d started today’s hike from that cabin, had seen no other tracks, and their car had been parked in the lean-to garage ever since they’d first arrived.

Which meant all the tracks in the snow now belonged to the police or, maybe, the killer’s vehicle,

assuming he had one. First, of course, they had to locate those tracks and hope no one else had traveled the surrounding, little-used roads over the past couple of days.

“Did you hear or see anything or anyone up here during your visit?” Alvarez asked.

“Nuh-uh,” the girl said, shaking her head vigorously.

Maxwell added, “Not even a mailman or neighbor or paper delivery guy.”

“That’s why we came here, to be alone,” his girlfriend said. “It’s way different at U-Dub. People are out all day and night. We . . . we just wanted to do something together. By ourselves.” She linked her gloved hand with her boyfriend’s and bit her lip.

“No one out in the woods, skiing or sledding or anything? Maybe you heard the sound of a snowmobile or truck’s engine?” Alvarez suggested.

“Uh-uh. Nothing. Until today. When we found”—Raney glanced at the corpse again and her face crumpled in on itself. “Could it have been a hunter?”

“Maybe,” Alvarez said, knowing that it was legal to hunt some species at this time of year. Mountain lions and wolves came to mind. “But it’s unlikely. He’d have to have been blind not to recognize a human, and I think a hunter would have reported this kind of accident.”

“Unless he didn’t want to get in trouble,” Maxwell pointed out. “People are such cowards.” His arm tightened over his girlfriend’s shoulders.

“No reason to speculate.” This was getting her nowhere and Alvarez felt time slipping away. “Just tell me what you do know,” she suggested. “Go over your last few days.”

“Well . . .” Raney began, then went on to say that she and Liam had left Seattle on Christmas Day. Only stopping for gas and food, they’d driven directly to the cabin where they’d built a fire, hung out, cooked over the hearth, and played cards and checkers on the board her grandfather had painted half a century earlier.

They’d seen no one and nothing, aside from three deer peering through the leafless trees the day before.

They claimed they couldn’t tell the police anything else, and though they dutifully answered any and all questions Alvarez could think to throw at them, they didn’t offer anything further. Nothing new came to light. They simply didn’t have any more information that would help the investigation.

Alvarez let them go and returned to the body just as Pescoli returned from her reconnoiter. She said she’d found several spots where the assassin could have lain in wait for his victim, but the landscape hadn’t been disturbed, and enough snow had fallen that it would have obliterated the evidence if the judge had been dead for several days, which seemed highly likely by the state of the body.

By the time the coroner showed up and the witnesses had snowshoed away, back toward their cabin, Alvarez and Pescoli decided they’d seen what they could. They trekked back to Pescoli’s Jeep, where the windows were fogged and the interior was ice cold. “Maybe we’ll find something at the judge’s cabin,” Alvarez said, clicking her seat belt into place.

“I’d kill for a cup of coffee.” Pescoli fired the engine and backed around the coroner’s wagon, then slid her partner a glance. “What’re the odds of finding a java kiosk up here?”