Deserves to Die (19 page)

Think, Jessica, think. You know this place. You know
him!
You can escape.

She started moving, inching backward, afraid that at any second she might stumble and fall, and he would pounce on her.

Her throat was dry as dust in fear. The night, so black and cold, seemed to wrap around her, its talons piercing her skin, an icy fear infusing her blood.

There was no way out. No walls, no windows, no doorway that she could sense. Backward, step by step, bracing herself for the inevitable—

Bam!

The gun went off though no flash of light burst from its muzzle. Anne-Marie stumbled backward, farther into the darkness.

Bang!
Another hit! She felt no pain, but when she clutched her stomach, then lifted her hand, she saw the blood. Dark red stains running down her palm.

Why?
she mouthed, staring at her attacker.
Why?

“Because you deserve it,” he sneered, his voice deep and accusing. “Because of what you did.”

“I’m sorry!” she cried, staring into the void.

“I loved you, Stacey. That’s what you go by now, isn’t it? Stacey Donahue.”

“Y-yes, I’m Stacey,” she admitted, though that didn’t sound right.
No, wait!
“You’ve got the wrong person,” she said desperately. “I’m Jessica. Jessica Williams. Yes, Jessica Williams!”

“Are you?” he said, toying with her. “Last I heard you were Stacey Donahue.”

“No! You’re wrong.”

“While you were in Colorado,” he reminded her. “Denver.”

She was confused, still stumbling backward, her skin crawling as she felt him getting closer. “I’m . . . I’m from Louisiana,” she said, then realized her mistake. “I mean Nebraska!” Oh, God, was that right? She couldn’t remember.

“Anne-Marie is from New Orleans.” His voice was cold. Empty. And he was getting closer. Squinting, she tried to see him, even just a glimmer of his shadow, or the glow of his eyes, or
any
thing, but she saw nothing but blackness.

“I’m Jessica. Jessica Williams. I live in Montana. Yes. That’s right. I’m Jessica and I live in Montana—”

“Not for long.”

Oh, God, he was going to kill her!

The bullet into her gut wasn’t enough. And then she saw it. Rising silver in a slow arc, a knife with a glinting blade.

“No!”

Recoiling, she stumbled and fell backward, tumbling and flailing. Trying to get her grip, she descended into the darkness. Downward, farther and farther until she splashed into the water, piercing the surface of a slow moving river. The water covered her and she began kicking, trying to swim to the surface, but the harder she struggled, the farther down she slid, the water sucking her into a slow-turning but deadly whirlpool. Downward she spun, trying to scream, to breathe, as the vicious eddy funneled far from the surface. In the darkness, she spied a plume, blood red and swirling around her, enveloping. Thrashing, she tried to breathe, couldn’t suck in any air, gasped wildly. Desperately she fought.

Bang!

She shot upward, throwing off her pillow and sitting straight up in bed. Her tiny pistol tumbled to the floor and landed with a sharp thud. For a second, she didn’t know where she was, couldn’t find her bearings. Her heart was drumming and she was breathing hard from the feeling of suffocation, her own damn pillow having covered her face.

Oh, Lord.
She dropped her face into her hands and tried to cast off the dream, the fear, the feeling of desperation.

It had been so real. No, so surreal, but she was still cold, the flesh on her arms rising in tiny goose pimples despite her sweatshirt. She pulled the sleeping bag over her shoulders for warmth.

Bang!

She nearly shrieked, scrambled on the floor for her gun, then realized the noise was the wind buffeting the cabin, its gusts causing something, probably a tree limb, to pound against the roof. In her dream, the rush of the wind whistling down the chimney had been the sound of the river and the thud of that branch had become the report of a gun, nothing more.

She let out her breath slowly, then threw off the covers and walked to the window where she peered outside to the darkness beyond.

Is this how you want to live the rest of your life?

Alone?

Isolated ?

In fear?

Always looking over your shoulder?

Forever thinking you’re being chased?

Almost believing that others are harmed because of your damn sins?

“No,” she said aloud, squinting through the dirty glass. Outside, the snow-laden branches were moving with the stiff breeze, the whiteness of the ground in stark contrast to the black, unforgiving sky.

It had to end.

She could no longer live in fear.

With a shiver, she remembered the fights, the shattered dishes, the balled fists, the pain she’d endured far too long. Trusting that he would be able to control his temper, that he loved her, that he truly was sorry after each of their fights, she’d stayed with him, never reporting what had happened. Because of the shame. Because she’d stupidly believed that no one would believe her. Who would take
her
word—a spoiled woman who had her own emotional issues—against a man well regarded in the community, a smooth talker and outwardly, a do-gooder whose rage few had witnessed? Outwardly cool and in control, his demeanor had changed behind closed doors, just little things at first and then . . . oh, God, and then . . .

If I could only go home,
she thought for the millionth time.

But she’d burned those bridges long ago. For all intents and purposes, she was dead to Talbert and Jeanette Favier, all because of
him.

Well, not entirely,
her wayward mind reminded her
. You carry your own burden here. You are far from blameless. Cade Grayson is proof enough of that. And he’s not the only one. Some of your heartache and your fear can be placed on your own damn shoulders.

With no one to turn to and no one to trust, she’d run.

Away from her home. Away from wealth. Away from privilege.

Her family didn’t believe her then; they wouldn’t now.

She was painfully aware of that horrid little fact.

Nonetheless, the running, which had seemed her only option a few months back, had to stop.

“Tomorrow,” she whispered. After her morning shift. Then she realized that it would be Friday come morning and she’d be working most of the day. No, she needed a clear head to come clean with the police.

Saturday was the funeral for Dan Grayson.

Sunday was another full day at work and she didn’t want to try and track down the sheriff or the appropriate detective over the weekend.

Excuses, excuses,
her mind chided and she wondered if she’d chicken out altogether. Cade’s assessment of her hadn’t been that far off. But he was right. If innocent women were dying because of her, then she had to go to the police.

If not, she still needed help in straightening out the whole mess. Just because the cops in New Orleans were dirty didn’t mean the same held true in this little town. Most officers of the law were heroes and worked for the common good: To protect and serve. Just because Dan Grayson was no longer the sheriff didn’t mean that the man who’d taken his place wouldn’t be just as good, nor that he wouldn’t uphold the law.

And therein lies the problem, yes? Because you are guilty, aren’t you? It’s not as if you’re pure as the driven snow.

She felt that same sense of doom nip at her heels again, the one that had been chasing her since leaving Louisiana. God, she’d made a mess of things.

No matter what the consequences, she would try to face the music and right her wrongs, if possible.

On Monday.

Come hell or high water, she’d march into the Pinewood Sheriff’s Department and tell her story.

If she didn’t turn tail and run again. Crossing her fingers, she told herself she needed to do it. Before anyone else ended up dead.

A
lvarez stood and stretched, using her desk chair for support. She hadn’t been to the gym for the better part of a week, nor had she had time for her usual daily run. That would have to change as all of her muscles were tight and her brain was clogged with dozens of questions about the murdered women. Fortunately, the other active cases had been closed.

Ralph Haskins had taken his life. He’d left a good-bye note blaming his mother for his depression and his wife for their bankruptcy. The position of his Magnum as it had fallen from his hand as he’d collapsed after putting a bullet in his brain, and the fact that gunshot residue was all over his hands, had made the case pretty cut and dried. End of story.

She raised an arm over her head and stretched as if she were reaching for the overhead light fixture. Then she did the same with her other arm before rotating her neck and finally, leaning over from her hips, allowing her arms to fall free.

The latest domestic abuse accusation in a long series had been dropped. Again. Jimbo Amstead’s wife, Gail, had changed her mind for the fourth time in half as many years. Though the DA wanted to prosecute the bastard for “slapping the bitch around” as he’d told a friend, bragging after a few too many at the Black Horse Saloon, that good ol’ boy refused to testify, said he’d probably been mistaken, heard wrong in the loud bar. Besides, he’d been drunk at the time. Since Gail Amstead refused to speak ill of her husband, even though she was recovering from her sixth black eye in three years, the DA was powerless to prosecute. Gail swore she’d been mistaken about the fight and had run into a door once again.

“You know how many times I’ve ‘run into a door’ in my lifetime?” Pescoli had asked Alvarez when they’d heard the decision. “Exactly zero.” She’d slid her partner a look. “How about you?”

“The same.”

“So in our combined seventy plus years, not one door and yet Gail, who’s not quite fifty, has done it three times that she’s reported. In the last couple years or so. Either she’s a damn klutz, or lives in a house with attacking woodwork, or . . . she’s a liar and lives with a bastard who beats the shit out of her. Take your pick.”

Alvarez’s mouth had been a thin line. She had so wanted to nail Jimbo to the wall. Big, with a swagger and yellowed teeth from too many years of chewing tobacco, the guy leered at every woman he passed, then beat the one woman who had agreed to be his wife.

Alvarez would have loved to see him wearing a prison suit for the rest of his life.

She finished stretching, checked her e-mail and concentrated on the most pressing case, that of the homicide victims who had been strangled, then mutilated. The autopsy on Calypso Pope had been given top priority, and damn if she hadn’t died the same way Sheree Cantnor had. Strangled, then tossed into a body of water, though it seemed Sheree had been strangled somewhere else, probably snagged while walking home for lunch or dinner, and left in the creek that wound through the O’Halleran property. They had come up with no further evidence after the one shoe. Odd that. What had happened to the other?

She was about to walk to Pescoli’s office when Joelle, clicking briskly down the hall, showed a middle-aged woman into the room. In one arm, the woman clutched her purse so close against her body it seemed as if she expected it to be snatched out of her arms right there in the station. The fingers of her other hand were curled around the upper arm of a pimply-faced boy of about fourteen. Grasping his arm so tightly as to crush the fabric of his ski jacket in her iron grip, she looked as if she could spit nails.

“Detective Alvarez?” Joelle said, silver crosses swinging from her earlobes. “This is Mrs. Bender and her son, Lars. They would like to speak to you if you have the time.”

“Lars Bender?” Alvarez said, recognizing the name of the kid who’d located Calypso Pope’s purse on the rocks below Grizzly Falls. As Joelle made her way out of the tight office, Alvarez asked the boy, “You found the purse belonging to Ms. Pope?”

Scrawny in his oversized jacket, the kid didn’t meet her eyes but gave a short nod.

“Answer her. Where are your manners?” his mother asked impatiently. “I’m Elaine, by the way,” she said, extending her hand across the desk, then retrieving it quickly.

“Please, have a seat.” Alvarez settled back into her chair as mother and son sat down across from her.

“Lars has something to tell you.” The severity of Elaine’s expression was matched by the harsh lines of her haircut, which probably was supposed to bring a youthful hipness to dull brown locks that were beginning to gray. Stick-straight, her hair was whacked sharply at the point of her chin. Straight cut bangs ended nearly an inch above round owlish glasses that only emphasized the sharp angles of a face that looked as if it was fixed in a perpetual state of being perturbed.

“What is it, Lars?” Alvarez asked.

“Go on. Tell her!” Elaine said as she dug into the prized purse and came out with a ziplock bag holding a cell phone.

“I found it,” the boy said.

“Where?” the mother prodded, handing the bag over to Alvarez as if it might burn her fingers. “Where did you find it, Lars?”

“In the bag,” the kid mumbled, looking down at his hands.

“The purse we turned in earlier, the one from that woman who was killed,” Elaine explained in clipped words. “That’s the bag he was talking about. I didn’t find anything else, but he found it and went through it first and he kept that phone.” She jabbed a long, accusing finger at the smartphone. “He was going to sell it or something. Lars is acting out, you know. Because his dad and I split up, like it was my fault.” Lips pursed even further, she added, “Jeff, that’s his father, had an affair. Wants to marry this . . . this
woman
. Met her in the church where he’s a part-time youth minister. It’s no wonder that Lars is on the wrong path.”

She sent a pointed look to her son. “What kind of an example is that? A youth minister!” She let out a shaky breath and shivered, her severely chopped hair shaking in her rage. “I don’t know if Lars took anything else. He says not. But he came up with a new video game this morning,” She flung her son another condemning glare. “How’d you pay for that, huh?”

He shrugged.

“Answer me, Lars!”

“Money from Christmas!” he spat out. “From
Dad!
Geez.”

Mrs. Bender rolled her eyes and looked across the desk to Alvarez as if silently saying,
Do you see what I have to deal with?

Alvarez focused on the son. “Okay. Lars, why don’t you tell me everything about finding the purse? Was there anything else in it or around it?”

“No.” He caught a warning glance from his mother. “No.”

“God hears everything,” she reminded him. “He sees
every
thing.”

Lars swallowed, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing nervously. “Okay, maybe there were a couple bucks inside.” His head actually seemed to shrink into his neck.

“A couple?” his mother sneered. “How much is a couple?”

“I dunno. Sixty . . . maybe eighty.”

“Oh my God!” His mother’s hands fell onto her lap. To Alvarez, she said, “Can you believe it?” Before Alvarez could answer, Elaine turned on her son again. “So, what was it, Lars? How much did you steal? And from a dead woman!”

Lars’s head snapped up. “I didn’t know she was dead! Not then!”

She wasn’t derailed. “So, was it sixty or eighty, or maybe a hundred?”

“Eighty,” the kid answered quickly.

Alvarez suspected he’d shaved the amount and that Lars was smart enough to hide the extent of his theft, giving his mother a large enough amount to make it believable, but less than what he’d really pocketed.

“You’ll have to tell your father and work off the debt. You’ll pay the family back or if they don’t want it, give it to the church, after you tell Preacher Miller what you’ve done. You can start by shoveling the snow off the walkway, which you should do for free anyway!” She folded her hands over the long skirt that covered her legs. “There are lots of projects Lars can tackle. We can’t stay in the house, anyway. It’s much too expensive now that I’m a single mother.”

Before Mrs. Bender could launch into another diatribe about the sins of her ex, Alvarez cut her off. “Let me ask Lars a few questions,” she suggested, then turned to the boy. “Tell me about finding the purse and this phone. Other than picking it up, did you touch it? Use it?”

He looked absolutely miserable. “Maybe.”

“Answer her with the truth!” his mother almost screeched.

Alvarez held up a hand. “Please, Mrs. Bender.”

The detective had a teenaged son who lived with his adoptive parents. Even though she’d just recently reconnected with Gabe, she understood that the boy was far from perfect and had already had a brush or two with the law. The same, it seemed, held true for Lars, but thoughtless teenaged stunts were not always a precursor to a life of crime.

“Let Lars speak.”

The kid did. The fingers of one hand working over the fist of another, he answered her questions one by one. She found out that he’d swiped the phone and the cash out of the purse. He’d found nothing else inside or around the bag and seen nothing that would help. Yes, he’d made a call or two on the phone, tried to download an app, but was unable without Calypso Pope’s user ID and password, and he’d gone on the Internet where he’d entered some chat rooms and surfed a bit.

By the time his mother had marshaled him out of the office, Alvarez had learned little, but since she knew the approximate time of death, and when the purse had presumably been lost, she would be able to figure out who was the last person Calypso called or texted.

Grabbing her jacket, she walked to Pescoli’s office where she found her partner at her desk reading an old case file, the box on the floor open, the lid propped against the wall.

“What’s that?”

“I told you about Hattie Grayson and her insistence that Bart’s death wasn’t a suicide.”

Alvarez asked, “Don’t you have enough to do?”

Pescoli snorted. “I should have never told Hattie I’d look into it, but I did, and now I can’t just ignore the file or she’ll be calling every day.” She set the file on her messy desk.

How Pescoli could ever find anything on a work surface cluttered with notes, cups, pens, and papers Alvarez didn’t understand.

“I imagine I’ll run into Hattie at the funeral on Saturday, and she’ll be asking me about Bart’s suicide and make some ridiculous connection to Dan’s murder. I thought I’d better read over the old reports, you know, get my ducks in a row.” Pescoli rolled back her chair. “Anything new?”

Alvarez held up the cell phone in its plastic bag. “The kid who found it seems to have a little bit of larceny in his blood and his God-fearing mother is having nothing of it.”

“Good thing,” Pescoli said.

“Yeah, I’m glad to have the phone, but the mother—”Alvarez shook her head. “Let’s just call Elaine Bender a piece of work and leave it at that.” She brought her partner up to speed as Pescoli donned a pair of gloves and took out the phone.

She looked into the recent activity, the calls and texts and e-mail connections that had gone in and out, and said, “Looks like we’d better check out someone named Reggie.”

Jessica’s shift was over at nine that night. Dead tired, her lower back aching from hours on her feet, her brain was exhausted from the mental strain of a double-shift and not sleeping due to her wild dreams. She’d been dragging all day.

Misty had even seen fit to comment, “Not our usual Miss Merry Sunshine today, are we?”

Jessica had wanted to tell her to shove it, but had held her tongue.

She was tired, cranky, and hungry. She hadn’t been able to choke down any of the leftovers that had been congealing on the counter for the better part of the evening. They’d consisted of an order of fries proclaimed “too salty” by a customer, and a wilted salad that had been topped by French dressing when the patron had insisted she’d said, “dressing on the side.” As was the custom at the Midway Diner, orders that were returned to the kitchen weren’t immediately thrown out, but left for the staff, should they be interested, before they were tossed into the trash.

“Waste not, want not,” Nell had professed to them enough times that it had become a standing joke behind the boss’s back. The trouble was that Marlon took Nell’s suggestion to heart and somehow, in between clearing and resetting tables, washing dishes, and even swabbing the floors for spills, he was able to inhale anything that was placed in the return area of the counter. Hamburgers, chicken strips, Diet Cokes that were supposed to have been the real thing and desserts that were just “too rich” or “not what I thought” or “really, I said coconut cream, not banana,” somehow got gobbled up while he was on the job. So all that was left were the unappealing cold fries and wilted lettuce.

She didn’t waste any time leaving and was glad Misty and Marlon were handling the few stragglers who might wander in. She just wanted to get home.

As if that cold, dark cabin could ever be considered anything close to what she would think of as her home.

Inside the Tahoe, she flipped on the engine and the wipers as desultory flakes of snow were drifting from the heavens. Her stomach rumbled and though it seemed ridiculous after working around food in a diner for most of the day, she decided to stop at the local pizza parlor that she’d spied earlier in the week.

Within ten minutes, she was pulling into a parking spot on the street one block away from Dino’s Italian Pizzeria. She hurried inside and the sharp smells of tomato sauce and oregano hit her in a warm, welcoming wave. The crowd was thinning out, and it didn’t take long to reach the counter and order a small pizza to go. As she waited, she sat at a table in the corner and watched people coming and going, attacked by more than one pang of desperation. Here were people, all involved in their personal lives—teenagers goofing around with friends, even blowing the papers off straws at each other; a frazzled mother trying to corral three stair-step toddlers, all of whom made a beeline to the ice cream counter; other tweens playing video games in an arcade; a twentysomething couple who held hands as they decided on what kind of pizza to order. Everyday people. Ordinary lives. With the common stresses and worries of normal living.