Deserves to Die (Alvarez & Pescoli)

“Of course.”

“Good.”

“No wonder you’ve been all over Blackwater.”

“What do you mean?” Pescoli bristled.

“You’re pregnant. Emotional. Grayson’s death, and Blackwater stepping in. You’re not handling it well.”

“Like you are?”

“I don’t like Blackwater, but I deal with him. He’s the boss, and unless I think he’s handling things all wrong or crooked or neglectful, I’ll keep dealing with him. Do I miss Dan Grayson? You bet. Do I wish he was still alive, still running this department? Every damn day. But that’s not the way it is, and me having my own personal snit fit about it isn’t going to change it.”

“I haven’t been having snit fits,” Pescoli snapped.

“I just gave you a pass for being pregnant. Let’s leave it at that.”

“Snit fits . . .” she muttered.

Alvarez almost laughed. “Are you going to stay on the force? You were thinking about cutting back, but now ... ?”

“I don’t know. I’m still dealing with the news,” Pescoli admitted. “I just told Santana this week, and as I said, my kids are still in the dark. Santana wants to move up the wedding to like, yesterday, but”—she turned both palms upward, toward the ceiling—“there’s a lot to figure out and it’s not like I’m not buried here.”

“You have to have a life. We both have to have lives.”

“I was going to talk my hours over with Grayson when . . .” Closing her eyes for a second, she drew in a long breath. “Well, you know. Anyway, we’ve got this case we need to figure out.”

Alvarez nodded.

“Let’s just get through today. It’s going to be a rough one, right?”

It was a rhetorical question that didn’t require an answer. A funeral was never easy. This one, not only for a fallen officer but for a mentor as well, would be especially tough. Grayson had been an officer who had epitomized everything Alvarez believed was the essence of a true lawman. He had also been the person she’d fallen for, the one who had taught her to trust again. And that was the truth of it . . . until Dylan O’Keefe had reentered her life and shown her what real love could be. Nonetheless, the service was going to be emotionally ravaging. Already, she felt that awful pang deep in her heart again, the one reserved for Sheriff Dan Grayson.

She took a deep breath and put the conversation back on track. “We should get an answer from AFIS soon about the prints, if the killer is in the system.” The Automated Fingerprint Identification System was usually fairly quick. Now that they had a full print, there might be a match in the database that held millions of prints on file.

Pescoli said, “Let’s hope.” There was a chance that the prints only matched each other, that the culprit had never been printed, and therefore couldn’t be identified. If so, they were back to square one.

“I got hold of Reggie,” Alvarez told her. “Actually Reginald Larue the Third. He lives in Spokane and admitted to dating Calypso. Nearly fell into a million pieces when I mentioned that we found a body we think could be hers. Couldn’t get off the phone fast enough and is even now on his way to ID the body. He sounded shocked and very upset. He claims both of her parents are already dead and she has no siblings. No kids, no ex-husband, at least that she told him about. As far as he knows, he’s the closest thing to family she has.”

“What about a job?”

“She was a consultant. An engineer. Worked with road crews. Again, on her own. A one woman show.”

“The Teflon woman. No one sticks to her.”

“At least according to Reggie. I checked the call log and text log on her phone. He was the last one who tried to contact her at two twenty-three in the morning. That’s when the last text was sent, all of them more and more pleading, asking her to call him and forgive him. Here they are, printed out.” Alvarez slid the pages to Pescoli. “I double-checked with his cell phone carrier. His phone was in Spokane when he sent them. I thought there was a chance he might be trying to call or text her after she was dead to throw us off, but the phone, at least, was in Spokane, or so it seems. I can’t say that he was actually there.”

“No alibi?”

“He’s got one and it’s pretty interesting. A woman.”

“Another woman was with him that night?” Pescoli asked. “As in all night?”

“So they both claim.”

“But now he’s in a million pieces about Calypso?”

“Seemed real, but I’ll find out. I’m meeting him at the morgue before the funeral. There’s enough time for questions, I think.”