Deserves to Die (16 page)

“Let me go!” she yelled. Again her plea was only a muted mumble. Fear spurted through her. This jerk wad wasn’t giving up.
Oh, God, is he going to kill me? Shit, no!
She struggled, but his thumb pinched her nostrils together, his body pressing her flatter onto the path. Her lungs were beginning to burn. She whipped around, trying to force air through her nasal passage, but it was impossible.
No no no!

Panic took over, but she was losing strength, her flailing arms more sluggish. It occurred to her that she might actually perish in this godforsaken town with a psycho squeezing the life out of her.

She fought valiantly until the blackness pulled her deep, her arms and legs becoming sluggish and clumsy, not obeying her mind. Her eyes rolled upward and she was vaguely aware of her body growing limp, her appendages useless. The last thing she remembered was being rolled onto her back and seeing the monster above her. In one hand he held something . . . a knife? Before she could make one last attempt to struggle, he grabbed her by the throat again and slowly, deliberately squeezed and squeezed and squeezed.

“W
e might have caught a break,” Alvarez said to Pescoli the minute she walked into her office. Her hair was pulled back into a knot at her nape, gold hoops dangling from her earlobes, and she was carrying two steaming cups. “Decaf.” She set that one on the corner of Pescoli’s desk.

“Thanks. What break?”

“The autopsy report is back. You’ve got a copy in your e-mail. Strangulation. Hyoid bone crushed. Not much water or foam in the airways.” Alvarez took a sip from her cup. “She was definitely killed first, then tossed into the stream.”

Pescoli hung up her jacket and unwound the scarf at her neck. “Not a surprise. And not exactly a ‘break.’ ”

“There’s something else.”

“Yeah?” she picked up her cup, took a sip, found the coffee hot even if it didn’t have a kick.

“Half a mile downstream on the Barstow property, the farmer found a shoe nearly covered by snow. Wedged between some roots.”

“You think it’s our victim’s?”

“Woman’s red heel. Covered with prints.”

Pescoli was interested. “Sheree Cantnor’s?”

“All except one partial which has been run with no hits. But it’s something. There’s a crew out scouring the area, hoping to find the other shoe, her purse, phone.” She rolled a palm upward. “Whatever.”

“Maybe a finger and a ring.”

“Those, I think he kept.”

Pescoli agreed. “Trophies.”

“Uh-huh.”

She took another sip of the decaf and heard Blackwater walk into his office.
His
office. Not Dan Grayson’s. Funny how she’d started thinking in those terms already, funny and sad. “We got anything else?”

“Not really. I did find out that despite Doug Pollard’s insistence that he and Sheree were high school sweethearts and their life was all hearts, flowers, and romance, there was an instance where she took up with another guy for a while. She and Doug had their one breakup, I guess. Then that guy landed in prison.”

Pescoli looked up sharply, but Alvarez shook her head. “For a B and E. The guy’s still doing time in Utah. I double-checked.”

Breaking and entering was a far cry from homicide and the guy was incarcerated to boot. “So we’re back to the unknown assailant.” Pescoli sighed.

“Looks like.” Alvarez started walking out of the office but stopped short.

Blackwater filled the hallway just outside the door. His face was set and hard, lips compressed. “Got a call from a deputy at the waterfront. They’re pulling a body out of the river, just below the old bridge. A woman.” His dark gaze moved from Alvarez to Pescoli. “Looks like you two are up.”

“Suicide?” Pescoli asked. Every once in a while, someone took a leap from the bridge, in summer kids who dared each other jumped or dived into the river under the falls despite the postings, and sometimes, when someone decided to end it all, they took that same plunge.

“Unknown.” He backed up a step as Alvarez made her way into the hall. “Maybe. Units are already in place, but it sounds like we’ve already got a crowd, people stopping to rubberneck. Check it out. Report back to me.”

A phone rang nearby and Blackwater marched to his office.

“He should have a field day with this,” Pescoli said to Alvarez, who was still standing in the hall. “Big splash, you know. Pardon the pun.” Pescoli kicked out her chair and reached for her jacket again. “No rest for the wicked. Meet you at the Jeep? I’ll drive.”

“Yep.” Alvarez disappeared into her office to get her coat and within minutes they were in Pescoli’s vehicle and heading down the road that cut across the face of Boxer Bluff to the lower part of town. The snow had quit falling, but nearly ten inches had piled up overnight, so the plows were out and traffic was a snarl. They followed a school bus over the tracks before they turned onto the street that bisected the older area of Grizzly Falls. Despite the fact that she’d turned on the flashers and hit the siren, they had trouble making headway due to the traffic snarls. She pulled into the courthouse and parked in a spot reserved for a judge.

“You’re going to hear about that,” Alvarez said.

“Yeah.” They walked the three blocks and threaded their way through the crowd. A television news crew was already on the scene despite the clog of vehicles and pedestrians. Traffic was being detoured around from the old arched bridge, constructed before nineteen hundred. Access to the river’s crossing had been cordoned off, two miles farther downstream.

Alvarez showed her badge to an officer as they reached the perimeter of the area beneath the bridge and he motioned them through. Several vehicles were parked along the alley.

Probably from workers who had arrived before the police,
Pescoli thought,
or had been left overnight by someone who had consumed one or two too many at one of the nearby taverns.

There were other cars in the parking lots that serviced the rear entrances of the buildings positioned on the main street—a couple city cop cars, along with those from employees who had already started their shifts. From the back doors of those businesses a number of people were loitering, some smoking, all watching the action as it unfolded. An ambulance had gotten through and it stood by, lights flashing.

“What’ve we got?” Alvarez asked Jan Spitzer, the deputy who was obviously in charge.

Short, a little pudgy and smart as a whip, Spitzer looked tired, as if she’d put in her shift and was well into overtime. “Female. Caucasian. Already fished out. Thirty-five or so, looks like. Not long in the water. No decomp and, you know, the river’s close to freezing over, so the body would be, too, but no fish or whatever had started taking nibbles.”

Pescoli looked up to the underside of the bridge, where in warmer weather birds and bats probably roosted. “ID?”

“None on her.”

“Distinguishing marks?” Alvarez asked.

“Surgical scar on her abdomen, another on the inside of her left arm, and a couple tattoos—a tramp stamp of hearts and butterflies. You know, the usual. And some kind of tiny hummingbird on her right shoulder, but that’s not what’s interesting.” Spitzer glanced at Pescoli. “Our Jane Doe is missing a finger.”

Pescoli’s stomach dropped.

Spitzer continued. “Ring finger. Left hand. Sliced clean off.”

“Shit.” Pescoli exchanged glances with her partner. “So, it’s another psycho?”

How many could one town the size of Grizzly Falls have?

Alvarez said, “Let’s see.”

“Right this way, ladies.” Spitzer walked them over to the ME’s van where a body bag, blocked from the crowd’s view by the bulky vehicle, lay atop a gurney. As Spitzer unzipped the heavy bag, Pescoli felt her queasy stomach give a lurch and she fought a rising tide of nausea.

With a flip of the flap, the dead woman was exposed, supine, fully clothed, water collecting around her.

Pescoli forced back the urge to retch as she stared at the victim. Where there had been makeup were now only smudges. She was thin with a square face and her skin was tinged the bluish-gray hue of death. Her blue eyes were open and seeming to stare upward, her short, streaked hair wet and flattened to her head.

“Doesn’t look much like Sheree Cantnor,” Alvarez said as if she’d read Pescoli’s thoughts.

The victim’s hands were already bagged. Hopefully there had been a struggle and there was DNA evidence lodged beneath her nails.

“Any obvious areas where the attack occurred?” Pescoli asked as she looked toward the distant mountains, inhaling and exhaling slowly. Thankfully, her stomach was settling down.

“Near the bridge, it looks like. We found a couple tubes of lipstick and a case for eyeglasses by that section of fence.” She pointed to an area not quite under the bridge’s span, where snow had drifted near the tall pickets.

“Who called it in?” Pescoli asked.

“Over there.” Spitzer, whose walkie-talkie began to crackle, pointed to a sheriff’s cruiser.

For the first time, Pescoli and Alvarez saw Grace Perchant, the nutcase who claimed to talk with ghosts and predict the future among her many talents. Pale as a corpse herself, Grace was dressed in a long white coat, gloves, and tan boots. Her graying blond hair was anchored by a knit cap but whispered around her face. At her side were a pair of dogs, both half-wolf, one black, the other silvery gray. On slack leashes, each animal watched the approaching detectives with intelligent, if wary, eyes.

“Hello, Grace,” Pescoli said. “Mind if we ask you a few questions?”

“Not at all.” Grace gave some unspoken command and both dogs sat, obviously more relaxed.

“You found the body?”

“Yes. I was taking the dogs out. Sometimes we come down here, walk across the bridge. Sheena and Bane love the river, so this morning, just before dawn, I parked across the river, and we walked over the bridge. I didn’t notice anything on the way over, probably because I was on the far side of the span. Then, we walked into town and around several blocks down here.” She motioned behind her, past the buildings and their loading zones to indicate part of the city between the river and the high cliffs of Boxer Bluff.

“I wanted to take the steps up to the overlook,” she said, mentioning a concrete staircase of nearly a thousand steps that wound up the hillside to a point above the river where one could get a bird’s eye view of Grizzly Falls. “But it was so cold, we just went a few blocks down here and headed back. The dogs were a little whiny, they both kept trying to look over the railing and then I felt it. You know, a disturbance.”

“Disturbance?” Pescoli repeated.

Both detectives had dealt with Grace numerous times in the past. With her dire predictions, she was a frequent visitor to the sheriff’s department. Was she accurate in foretelling the future? Probably about fifty percent of the time. But she had made personal predictions about Pescoli and Alvarez that had been surprisingly on the mark—chillingly so. Neither detective could completely discount the self-proclaimed psychic’s abilities.

“When I was returning to the car and recrossing the bridge, I was on the other side of the road, on the falls’ side of the span. The dogs began acting up. You know, pulling at their leashes and whining, noses into the wind. Bane”—she indicated the bigger dog with the lighter coat—“was all over the railing, trying to get over. I looked then and noticed something floating down by the rocks. It wasn’t quite light yet, but I thought it was a body and called 9-1-1.” She shrugged, her pale green eyes unreadable.

There was something about the woman that made Pescoli uneasy. Maybe it was Grace’s infinite calm despite her predictions of disaster and death, or maybe the aura of peace that she insisted surrounded her. Or maybe it was the fact that she lived alone with two wolf-dogs in the middle of the forest.

You live with two dogs
, she reminded herself.
You’re often alone now that your kids are always looking for ways to escape. You live and breathe your job and are as isolated as she is in many ways. Yet, you’re not weird. Right?

“I waited,” Grace was saying, “And now, here we are.”

And where is that?
Pescoli wondered, staring at the arch of the bridge backlit by the rising sun, then watching as the body bag was loaded into the ME’s van.
Just where the hell is that?

The buzz in the diner was all about the body that had been pulled from the river this morning, customers chattering and gossiping, bits of information floating in the din of the dining room. Over the clatter of forks, rattle of ice cubes, and gurgle of the espresso machine, the conversation was centered on a second body found in so short a time.

“It just never seems to end,” Misty confided to Jessica when both were at the serving counter, picking up orders. “Hey, Armando, this omelet’s supposed to come with guac!”

“Sì, sì!”
he snapped, irritated. He found a dish of guacamole and placed it on the platter. “Where is Denise? I cannot do this by myself!”

Denise Burns was a fry cook sous-chef. And she was over an hour late.

“She called Nell. Got caught in that mess of traffic near the bridge.” Misty surveyed her two platters, then pulled them from the counter. To Jessica, she said, “We’ve already had one psycho this season and now this.”

“You think there’s a madman running around?” Jessica asked, eyeing a platter that Armando slid onto the counter. “Wheat toast,” she said to the head cook, “not sourdough.”

“Dios!
I cannot work like this!” Armando grumbled just as Denise, in a gust of cold air, walked through the back door.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry!” she said, holding up her hands as if she expected Armando to open fire. “It’s impossible to get through town right now. The damn bridge I usually use is closed and all the roads are backed up.” She was stripping off her jacket as she came inside and threw her purse, scarf, and phone into her locker. It banged shut as she reappeared, wrapping an apron around her slim waist. “Bring me up to speed,” she said to Armando as she twisted her hair into a net and began washing her hands.

After slapping a stack of wheat toast onto the counter, he began reading off the orders to her, rapid-fire.

Jessica carried her platters to a table near the windows where a mother of three kids under six was trying to convince her three-year-old daughter to eat “one more bite” of a barely touched waffle. The baby was picking at Cheerios on the high chair tray, and the third child, around five, was plucking the blueberries out of his pancakes.

“Sorry for the delay,” Jessica said, finally delivering the parents their breakfasts.

The mom said, “No problem,” though it sounded as if it really was a major inconvenience. The dad didn’t look up from his cell phone.

“Can I get you anything else?”

“Catsup,” the mother said as her husband eyed his small screen.

“The body they pulled out of the river today was a woman,” he told his wife. “There’s talk that she might’ve been murdered.”