Deserves to Die (4 page)

His father raised one eyebrow, then gave a quick nod. “Okay, then. You ride up ahead and I’ll follow. We’ll see if there are any more breaches.”

Eli did as he was told, riding along the fence line, growing colder by the second, while his father, more thorough as he scrutinized the wire from atop his mount, lagged behind.

Sometimes being a cowboy really sucks,
Eli realized belatedly, his gaze trained on the wire mesh that cut a straight line through the thickets of hemlock, fir, and maple. The stream, nearly frozen, wandered back and forth, a thin trickle in the middle gurgling softly.

Another blast of wind rattled the branches of the surrounding trees and he shivered, tired of the adventure. He just wanted to return to the house, so he urged Jetfire forward through the icy woods. The sooner the job was done, the sooner he could go back inside.

Though he’d begged his father to let him come, Eli began to wish he’d never said a word, just stayed in his pajamas and played on his iPad until breakfast was ready, because inside the house there was a hot fire, a warm cup of hot cocoa, and Kacey, his soon-to-be stepmom. She would be getting ready to go to the clinic where she worked. But instead of being seated at the table, sipping hot chocolate and eating peanut butter toast while watching television, he was out in the cold.

Jetfire stepped quickly through the drifts and Eli swept another quick glance over his shoulder to make certain that his dad was following on the rangy bay. Sure enough, he saw Trace easing his horse through a stand of pines about twenty yards behind him. The two dogs were following, Bonzi with his head lifted as if he were testing the air, Sarge farther behind, exploring a bend in the creek.

Eli wished his dad would hurry.

Through the veil of snow, man and rider were partially obscured, blending into the wintry landscape, appearing almost ghostly. Even the dogs seemed to disappear.

Eli waved at his father, but Trace didn’t notice, his concentration and gaze steady on the fence as he appeared and disappeared in the wind-fueled flurries. It worried Eli a little that he was so far ahead of his dad, but he reminded himself to be cowboy-tough. He had a job to do. Once more, Trace and the bay vanished for a second and Eli wondered what he’d do if his father didn’t reappear, if he became lost somehow.

But that was nutty.

He knew where he was and his dad was right behind him. Squinting, Eli searched the grove. But no. He couldn’t see his father. Nor the dogs.

About to call out to him, Eli caught a glimpse of the bay stepping through the trees again, a phantom horse, barely visible just like in the cartoons he watched or the video games he played.

Feeling a little better, he leaned over the saddle horn, shifting his weight, urging Jetfire forward. Man, it was cold. Too cold. The sooner he found the dumb hole in the wire mesh, the sooner he could go back inside. Jetfire picked up the pace, threading through a copse of saplings as Eli peered through the shifting snowflakes. The fence crossed the stream again as it cut through the trees, heading in a crooked path to the river a few miles to the west.

The fence looked a little different, not as much ice building up over the wire, no snow sticking to the posts. Maybe the cattle had rubbed up against it when searching for a way through. After all, he was near a deeper part of the stream. A particularly stubborn calf with just enough curiosity and no darned brains could wade in and, if he tried hard enough, maybe duck under the wire where the fence spanned the creek. There was no guard there, no floating cattle panel that moved with the current. Squinting through the snowfall, Eli encouraged Jetfire forward, closer to the creek, but the horse snorted and balked.

“Come on,” Eli insisted, giving Jetfire a nudge with his knees, urging the gelding to walk closer to the creek.

Instead, Jetfire started backing up.

“Hey!” Eli said sharply. “Let’s go!”

But the gelding was having none of it. Tossing his head and snorting, Jet shied away from a thicket of maples.

Eli took a firmer grasp on the reins. “What’s got into you?”

From somewhere nearby, a dog growled low and warning, the sound causing the hairs on the back of Eli’s neck to lift. Jet reared up.

Eli fought the reins. “Whoa. Stop!”

Bonzi appeared, his caramel-colored coat dappled with snow, his lips snarling, showing teeth. His eyes were trained on the creek, just beyond the brush. As Jet shied, the hairs on the back of the dog’s thick neck raised. Tail stiff, he snarled and barked, his eyes focused on a bend in the creek.

What was it? A wildcat or puma? Maybe a wolf?

Shivering inwardly, Eli followed the dog’s gaze with his own.

“Trouble?” his father shouted from somewhere not far behind.

The last thing he wanted was his dad to think he couldn’t handle his horse. Eli’s gaze scoured the wintry banks of the creek, searching the exposed rocks and tangled, snow-covered roots. “No,” he said, shaking his head, “It’s just—”

His words died in his throat.

His stomach dropped.

Fear cold as an Arctic blast cut through him as he saw what the dog had sensed. Ten feet ahead in a deep pool, a woman’s arm stretched out of the water, fingers wide as if supplicating the heavens.

Eli yanked hard on the reins as he stared at the hand. Reaching upward, one finger severed, the hand seemed to be grasping into the empty air for help.

“Oh . . . Oh . . . God . . .” he whispered, horrified. The horse, feeling his fear, minced in a tight circle, tossing up snow.

Eli forced himself to look harder. There, under a thin layer of ice, lay a woman. She was staring straight up, the current below her rippling around her, feathering her long brown hair, causing her blouse to billow around her midriff. Set in a death mask, her face was a grayish hue, and beneath the glaze of ice, her eyes were wide and fixed, seeming to stare straight into his soul.

“Eli?”

His father’s voice barely registered. He felt as if he might be sick. “No . . . oh . . .” His insides turned to water. “Dad!”

Screaming before he could stop himself, Eli nearly toppled out of the saddle as Jetfire, nostrils distended, reared, then spun and took off at a full gallop, racing through the trees and across the pasture-land, his hooves throwing up clods of snow. Over the rush of wind in his ears, Eli heard his father shout and the dogs begin to howl and bark, but all he could do was hang on to the reins and saddle horn as the horse tore up the rise toward the house. The world went by in a blur of white, but all Eli saw, indelibly etched in his brain forever, was that mutilated hand reaching for the sky.

Y
ou’re a chicken.

That irritating voice inside Pescoli’s head wouldn’t leave her alone, even though she’d tried to immerse herself in the autopsy report she’d found on her desk this morning.

She’d had the perfect opportunity to tell Santana about the baby after he’d met her at the top of the stairs, kissed the damn breath from her lungs, and for the first time in their new house, made love to her right on the hard subfloor of their master bedroom. Okay, there
had
been a sleeping bag, but still.... The sex had been intense, maybe even a little rough, but filled with the passion she found exhilarating. Afterward, as she’d snuggled up against him, both their naked bodies shining with sweat, she should have screwed up her courage and let him know that he was going to be a father later this year. But she hadn’t, content to hold him tight, feel his strength, and listen to his heartbeat as she stared through the open French doors and watched the nightfall.

Every time she moved in her desk chair, her rump ached and she was reminded of Santana and how animal their union had been. Their lovemaking had always been that way—playful and utterly primal. And yet, before, during, or even after, she hadn’t uttered a word about the pregnancy.

With an effort, she focused on the autopsy of a man in his late forties, who may or may not have been the victim of a homicide. Derrick “Deeter” Clemson had died of wounds he’d received after a fall off a cliff. The question was whether he’d made a mistake and his death was accidental, if he’d leaped intentionally down nearly one hundred feet of timberland, or if he’d been helped in the fall by his bride of six months. The autopsy report didn’t give any clear answers, and she was slightly distracted by the noise filtering through her doorway, that of Blackwater on the telephone in Grayson’s office.

She hadn’t shut her door yet and could hear Blackwater. Undoubtedly at his desk down the hall, he was having a one-sided phone conversation with someone it sounded like he was trying to impress. Either someone higher in the department or a reporter, she guessed. Maybe even that cockroach Manny Douglas, of the
Mountain Reporter
or, worse yet, Nia Del Ray from KMJC in Missoula.

Blackwater was making noises as if he were about to hang up, so she rolled her desk chair to close her door. She didn’t need him poking his head in again and giving her another gung ho speech.

Her hand had just come off the knob when the door was flung open and Selena Alvarez burst in, her expression grim, her jaw set. “Let’s roll,” she said without preamble. “Looks like we’ve got a DB at the O’Halleran ranch.”

“Dead body?” Pescoli rolled her chair back to her desk, got to her feet, and reached for her jacket and sidearm. “Who?”

“Jane Doe.”

“What happened?” Sliding her arms through her jacket’s sleeves, she was on Alvarez’s heels as they walked crisply down the hall toward the doors leading to the parking lot. Blackwater, whose door was ajar, looked up as they passed, but was already punching out numbers on his phone for his next call.

“No one knows. Trace O’Halleran and his kid were checking the fence line and found her dead in a deep spot of the creek that runs through their property.”

“What is it with that place?” Pescoli asked, digging in her jacket pocket for her keys. “Don’t those people ever get a break?” She was thinking of the last shootout that had occurred on the ranch where O’Halleran and the local GP in town, Kacey Lambert, had been targets of one of the many madmen who seemed to have discovered their part of Montana. Once a sleepy little town set in the Bitterroots, Grizzly Falls seemed to attract psychos like magnets.

“I guess lightning really does strike twice,” Alvarez said as they walked through the back door.

A gust of wind hit Pescoli full in the face. Ducking her head against the weather, she touched the remote for her keyless lock and her Jeep beeped from the spot in the parking lot where she’d parked it not an hour earlier. By the time Pescoli had settled behind the steering wheel, Alvarez was buckled in and already on the phone, talking to the deputy who’d first taken the call and was on the scene. Pescoli fired the engine, snapped on the heater and backed out of the parking spot as the police band crackled. She hit the wipers and lights, then nosed her Jeep into the sludge of traffic that seemed crippled by the storm.

Lights flashing, she eased around slower vehicles, then pushed the speed limit. She was used to the storms and worsening driving conditions in winter and had little patience for those who weren’t.

As a van from a local church pulled over to let her pass, she hit the gas and sped through the outskirts of town, her Jeep whipping along a road that skimmed the edge of Boxer Bluff, which offered a view of the Grizzly River and the falls for which the town had been named.

From the corner of her eye, she saw Alvarez click off her phone, letting the edge rest against her chin for a second as if she were lost in thought. “Anything?”

“A crime scene unit is on the way, might beat us there. O’Halleran’s kid Eli was out riding the fence line with his father, as I said. They weren’t side by side and the boy saw the victim first. His horse spooked or something and he took off. O’Halleran was riding to the spot where the commotion occurred, spied the woman, and pulled her from the stream, tried to revive her, but she was dead, the body nearly frozen.”

“ID?”

“None. But she was dressed. Only mark on her is a missing ring finger. Left hand.”

“What? Missing? You mean, like a birth defect? Or?”

“Severed. Recently.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“Yeah, it doesn’t sound like she was just out walking, fell and hit her head, and drowned.”

Pescoli glared through the windshield where her wipers were doing battle with snow that had been falling for hours. “I’m amazed O’Halleran and his kid were out in this.”

“Ranchers. Just about as crazy as cops, I guess.”

Pescoli harrumphed. “They can’t let the weather beat them, either.” She turned onto the county road that cut through snowy fields where drifts piled against the fences and icicles hung from the few mailboxes that guarded long lanes leading to farmhouses surrounded by barns and outbuildings.

The O’Halleran place was no different. The big, square two-story farmhouse set upon a small rise far off the road was barely visible through the falling snow. A county-issued Jeep with its lights flashing was parked near the garage.

As Pescoli slowed at the end of the drive, they were met by a deputy for the department. Pete Watershed was tall and good-looking, something he’d never quite forgotten. She didn’t like him much. That whole lady-killer attitude rankled her, and his jokes, sometimes with a misogynist twist or teetering on bigotry, put her off. Not that she was a prude, but she could do without the slightly sexual remarks. Watershed tended to push it. If he weren’t a good cop, dedicated and all business when on duty, she would have been in his face more than she already was.

“What have we got?” she asked, the wind rushing in when she rolled down the window.

“DB found in the creek out back,” he said, pointing to the area behind the house. “You can drive down there. Just follow the tracks. I’ll come with.” Leaving his partner in the other vehicle, he climbed into the back seat and pointed out the makeshift road. “This is the lane O’Halleran uses for his tractor and hay baler and other equipment,” Watershed explained.

She drove through a series of paddocks where the gates had been left open and followed the tire tracks that wound their way onto a huge field where the pristine blanket of snow had been broken into a thick trail of tire tracks running along one fence.

“This butts up to government land,” Watershed explained. “O’Halleran and his kid were out checking for holes in the fence.” As the Jeep powered through six to eight inches of snow, he went on to tell the same story Alvarez had relayed earlier, finishing with, “So once the kid spooked and took off for the house on his horse, O’Halleran investigated and found the woman, obviously dead. Still, he pulled her from the water and checked for a pulse, listened to her lungs, but she’d been in there awhile, her body half frozen. You’ll see.”

“And the missing finger?” Alvarez asked.

“Ring finger, left hand. Not found. So far. Sliced off pretty cleanly at the first knuckle. Don’t know if it was pre- or postmortem.”

“Lovely,” Alvarez said. “A finger fetish?”

“Just a freak,” Pescoli said as they reached the end of the field near a meandering brook bordered by stands of trees. Officers were already on the job, a tarp laid out across which a partially clothed body of a woman lay. Her skin was blue, her hair wet, the finger missing, but Pescoli noted there were earrings visible in her earlobes. “O’Halleran didn’t see anything out of the ordinary?”

Watershed shook his head. “Nope. And no tracks have been found around the area. Don’t know if she was killed here, or brought here and the body dumped. Could have come from the federal land. There’s an access road about a mile west.”

Pescoli asked, “What about the neighbors?”

“Haven’t talked to them yet.”

“Let’s do it,” Pescoli said, scanning the area. “She had to get here somehow.” Squinting through the falling snow, she added, “Not much chance of finding any trace.” The frigid weather was working against them, but then it always did.

“You don’t know what we’ll find.” Alvarez was always more optimistic than she, a woman who believed that with today’s technology, anything was possible.

At the edge of the trees, parked helter-skelter, were a rescue vehicle from the fire department, another department-issued Jeep, a crime scene van and a banged-up pickup with two dogs locked in the cab, their noses pressed to the window. Officers dressed in heavy outerwear were already scouring the creek bed and surrounding area. Crime scene tape stretched from one sapling to the next, roping off the area that was to be searched.

Pescoli parked the Jeep close to the rescue van. “O’Halleran here?”

“Yeah, out talking to Cabral,” Watershed said as Pescoli cut the engine.

She noticed the rancher standing near another deputy, Rosetta Cabral, new to the force, all of twenty-four years old. Just a girl in Pescoli’s opinion, though she was a college graduate, divorced, and a single mother of a two-year-old. Cabral was blessed with the same gung ho fire as Blackwater and was currently engaging Trace O’Halleran in conversation.

“The kid?” Pescoli asked.

“In the Jeep with Beaumont.” Watershed nodded toward the other Pinewood County vehicle. “Came back down here with his mom after he ran back to the house. She’s a doctor, you know. Drove like mad down here in that truck,” he said, hitching his chin toward the beat-up Chevy. “Brought the kid with her ’cause she wasn’t sure what was going on. She thought that maybe she could save the Jane Doe, but nah, it was . . . too late.”

They climbed out and trudged between the vehicles to the tarp where a woman, maybe thirty or thirty-five, lay stretched onto a tarp, another sheet of plastic tented so that the body was protected and couldn’t be viewed from the vehicle where the O’Halleran boy was keeping warm.

“We got statements from everyone?” Pescoli asked, and Watershed nodded.

Mikhail Slatkin, a forensic scientist, was kneeling on the edge of the tarp, examining the body as they waited for someone from the coroner’s office to arrive. Over six feet and rawboned, the son of Russian immigrants, he was one of the best forensic scientists Pescoli had ever worked with.

“What happened to her?” she asked, studying the victim.

She’d been short, around five-two, Pescoli guessed, with long brownish hair on the curly side that was stiff and riddled with tiny ice crystals. The woman’s face was heart-shaped, with a straight little nose and blue eyes that were fixed, seeming to stare blindly upward. Neatly plucked eyebrows and thin cheeks lay above cold, blue lips. She was wearing a dress, gray and fitted, earrings that looked like diamond studs, and fingers and toes that were polished a matching cranberry hue. Unbroken fingernails, neatly manicured, suggested there had been no struggle. Well, except for the ring finger of her left hand, most of which was missing.

What’s up with that? The killer’s trophy? Or an accident that had sent her running here?
Pescoli regarded the wooded foothills where snow was covering the ground, boulders and snags protruding from the thick white blanket, the nearly frozen stream softly gurgling as it wound between the trees.

Slatkin glanced up, his blue eyes finding her gaze. “Don’t know yet. Maybe drowned. Or could be head trauma. Got a few bruises.” He frowned thoughtfully, eyeing the woman’s slim throat. “Possible strangulation.” His thick eyebrows drew together over his cold-reddened face. “Won’t know until the autopsy.”

Nodding, Pescoli stared down at the dead woman and wondered what had happened to her. How had she ended up in this creek? Had she made it under her own power, or had someone left her here? And why here? She glanced around the stretch of ranch land where field met forest. Why had this place been chosen as either the killing ground or dumping spot? Eyeing the creek, she saw that it was deep enough for a body to submerge, despite the encroaching ice. Where was the woman’s coat or jacket? Her shoes? Her purse and, especially, her finger?

What kind of whacked-up freak would cut off the finger?

Of course,
Pescoli reminded herself,
we don’t know one hundred percent that the woman has been murdered
.

The missing finger certainly suggested that something violent had gone down, maybe even some kind of accident. She had learned over the years not to make quick assumptions, though oftentimes her gut instinct proved right. Until all the facts were in, however, she wouldn’t make a final decision.

Once more, she looked at the left hand where a finger had been severed, the bone and flesh visible. Her stomach turned a bit and she drew her eyes away for a second, nausea building.