Deserves to Die (Alvarez & Pescoli)

“It’s earlier in New Orleans, so I’ve been in contact with them already. Been here since five.”

“Good God,” Pescoli said, aghast.

“Look, I couldn’t sleep. O’Keefe’s not here. The animals wanted to get up early, so the dog and I tried to go for a run, but it was too nasty. Nearly impossible, so I gave it up. Anyway, I had too much on my mind to sleep in,” she admitted. “Like you, right? You’re in earlier than usual.”

“Not at five friggin’ a.m.”

Alvarez’s smile faded a bit, and she glanced over her shoulder to the open doorway as if she thought someone might overhear. “It’s weird, you know,” she admitted over the rumbling of the furnace and the hard tread in the hallway as two deputies passed by the open door. “I thought that after the funeral, I’d be able to put everything in perspective. Get back to business here and make sure my personal life was on track, kind of sort things out, but . . .” She shrugged, her black hair shining nearly blue under the fluorescent fixtures on the ceiling.

Pescoli nodded. Sometimes it was eerie how Alvarez’s thoughts echoed her own feelings. “At least we have a lead now. Though, I gotta admit

, I didn’t figure the killer for a woman. The strangulation and then the pre- or postmortem mutilation? It just seems too brutal, too physical.”

“Women can be violent,” Alvarez countered, though she, too, sounded a little dubious.

“I know, I know, but . . . it’s hard for me to get my head around it.”

“Well, that’s the way it’s looking.”

“How was she careless enough to leave a print at each crime scene? Who the hell is Anne-Marie Calderone?”

“You’re not my husband,” Anne-Marie said, her fear bleeding into anger at the realization that the man standing in front of her had the nerve, the unmitigated gall to hold her at gunpoint and say he was her husband when they both knew it wasn’t true. He wasn’t the maniac she’d expected, the butcher from whom she’d been running. The man by the door was Troy-damn-Ryder.

“And whose fault is that?” he drawled in the damnably sexy West Texas drawl she’d once found so intriguing.

She decided to duck that particular, painful question. “What the hell are you doing here?” she demanded, her heart trip-hammering. A million emotions, none of them good, swirled inside her.

Troy was no killer. Or not that she knew of. Okay, he was rough around the edges and the law had never been something he’d worried about too much, but he wasn’t the brutal psychopath she’d thought was chasing her down, the person she’d thought had killed at least two women as some kind of warning to her. How could she have been so foolish to think those poor women who had been murdered had anything to do with her? Was she that much of an egomaniac? If she could jump to such conclusions, maybe she really was ready for the loony bin again, just as her husband had claimed.

And this damn cowboy in front of her, the one she’d tried, and failed, to marry . . . what is he doing here?

In the shadowy interior of her cabin, she struggled to see his features, to read his expression, but failed.

“Isn’t that what husbands do when their wives just take off? Track them down?”

“But you’re not my husband,” she repeated. “You know you’re not my husband.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s right. When you said ‘I do’ at that little chapel in Vegas, you were still married.”

That much was true. “I didn’t know,” she said, but even as the words passed her lips, they sounded lame.

“How could you not know?”

“It was an assumption on my part. A mistake. We’ve been over this.” She felt the chill of his gaze cutting through the dark atmosphere, and for a second, she regretted what she’d done, how she’d led him on, not that she’d meant to. “You know I thought my ex had signed the papers and—”

“He wasn’t your ex.”

“Okay, okay. Not officially.”

“Not legally,” Ryder bit out, irritated. “Kind of important.”

“Oh, forget it.” She threw up her hands in surrender. “Saying I’m sorry now doesn’t cut it. I know that. I screwed up.”

“Big time.”

“Yes. Yes.” When he didn’t respond, she said, “I can’t believe that you hunted me down, in this . . . in this damn blizzard in Montana to steal my gun and argue about the past. You scared me.” It felt like a dream, a remnant of the terrors that had invaded her brain during the night and made her think she’d woken up when she was really still asleep, everything taking on a weird twist. But that was only wishful thinking. She was very much awake, beyond alert, and she was in the cold, dark, smelly cabin with the wild-ass cowboy she’d fallen for so hard that she, like him, had ignored the details of the law.

“I get it that you’re pissed. You should be. But that was over a year ago and . . . and since when are you such a stickler for legalities?”