Chosen To Die (Alvarez & Pescoli)

“We’ll go to his cabin. Interview him. Get evidence,” Grayson warned. “ ’Cause if you’re wrong . . .”

“I’m not! He’s got Regan.”

416

Lisa Jackson

“Shit,” Grayson muttered, and they headed toward the door as one. His cell phone rang before he’d taken three steps. Glancing down, he said, “It’s Kayan,” then clicked on. “Grayson.”

“Looks like we’ve got ourselves another one, Sheriff,” Kyan Rule said without much emotion.

“Another one?” He and Alvarez exchanged tense glances. “Where?”

“In North Star Gulch. Tied to a tree. According to dispatch, a couple of kids out sledding in this mess found her.”

“You make an ID?”

“No, sir, but it’s not Pescoli, if that’s what you’re asking.”

He was. He hadn’t known it, but a guilty sense of relief slid through him. “Give me the exact location,” Grayson commanded. “We’re on our way.”

“It’s not . . .” Alvarez started.

“No. Not Pescoli.”

Not yet.

Chapter Thirty

Frantic, his heart pounding, Santana left Chilcoate and ran to his truck. He punched out the numbers of Alvarez’s cell phone and started the engine.

“Come on, come on,” he muttered, throwing his truck into reverse, backing up, then jamming the gears into drive and hitting the gas.

His call was sent straight to voicemail.

“Shit!” He left a quick message: “This is Nate Santana. Call me! I think the killer is up at the Kress Silver Mine. I think that’s where he’s got Regan!”

Driving like a madman down the long, twisting road to Chilcoate’s house, he turned north.

Ivor Hicks, that old nutcase, had spilled the beans. But he wasn’t the culprit, he wasn’t the one who had to fear the damned “scorpion’s wrath.” It was his son.

Hard to believe.

Billy Hicks was the killer?

It had to be! Had to!

418

Lisa Jackson

“Damn, damn . . . damn,” Santana said as the snow and gravel crunched beneath his tires as he wound through the thickets of drooping fir and stark, skeletal birch trees.

In his mind, over the ever-increasing frantic feeling of panic for Regan, he tried to roll back the years to when they were all kids—he and Billy, Padgett and Brady. He flipped on the wipers and damned the falling snow, though patches of blue hinted that the storm was nearly over.

It had been true that Billy Hicks had felt proprietary toward Padgett Long, back in the day, like a number of others, as well. Santana had witnessed that need to possess her himself. All the horny high school boys had been hanging around her back then. She was beautiful, smart, and different from the girls they went to school with. Rich, sophisticated, and slightly naughty, Padgett only came around in the summer or at Christmas break.

“Fresh meat,” one of the kids, Gerald Cartwright, had said, ribbing Billy once. “And, hell, in my book, she’s USDA prime!”