The Alvarez & Pescoli Series. Lisa Jackson

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СКАЧАТЬ if they’d been taken by an amateur photographer using a cell phone and printed off a computer, slid onto the side table.

      Three images.

      All of the same man.

      All fuzzy and a little out of focus, as if the subject were moving, walking away, his head turned away.

      Jillian’s heart nearly stopped beating.

      Oh God, it couldn’t be!

      She switched on the lamp. Golden light poured over the pictures that she flattened so that they lay side by side, as if they were stills from a movie.

      The man was profiled in the first two shots but in the third shot, he looked back over his shoulder and faced the lens so that she could make out his features beneath his beard and aviator shades.

      “Aaron?” she said aloud, and her first husband’s name seemed to reverberate off the walls. “Dear God, Aaron?”

      Tears burned at the back of her eyes. She’d loved this man. Loved him. Lived with him. Married him. Lost him. And grieved for him. Oh Lord, how she’d grieved for him.

      And now he was alive?

      She let out a slow breath that she didn’t realize she’d been holding. The envelope, the one from which the pictures had tumbled, was clenched hard in her left hand.

      He was alive?

      Aaron Caruso, her college sweetheart, the man she’d married so naively, hadn’t died in a forest in Suriname? Had lied to her? Had wanted her to think him dead? Had heartlessly left her while absconding with investors’ funds? Hadn’t cared that she would be a suspect, too? That the police would believe she knew what had happened to him? Would he have been so cruel?

      Her knees threatened to give way and she braced herself against the table. No. This man in the hastily snapped photo wasn’t Aaron, just someone who looked like him. The beard hid his jaw. Aaron’s had been square and strong. And the sunglasses disguised the color and shape of his eyes. Aaron’s had been a deep brown and wide-set, his nose broken from an old basketball injury…She studied the pictures again and thought she saw the slight bump on his nose.

      Of course it had been over ten years since she’d seen her first husband. He, if he had lived, would have changed. Like the man in the photo, who was at least ten pounds heavier and bearded. But the hair, that light brown hair with its distinctive widow’s peak, was the same—thick and wavy.

      So distinctively Aaron.

      What did it mean if this photo was real…if Aaron was alive? He would have built some sort of life for himself. A wife and kids. A home.

      Don’t fall for this, Jillian, she warned herself, but it was too late. She was already half-buying into the fact that these photos showed her first husband, the one whom everyone, including the insurance company and the authorities, had presumed to have slid down a steep ravine to a raging river, where he’d been swept away by a swift current and drowned.

      Presumably drowned.

      The house phone rang and she nearly jumped out of her skin. Carrying the rest of the mail and the damned pictures with her, she walked through the hallway to the small family room and snapped up the receiver before the second ring. “Hello?” she said into the receiver and noted that, once again, the caller ID had been blocked.

      “He’s alive,” the disembodied voice hissed again.

      “Who is this? I’m not interested in playing any games.”

      “Check your mail and your e-mail.”

      “What do you want?”

      Click.

      “Damn it!” Jillian hung up and felt a rage so deep she could barely think. Who was doing this? Not Aaron, even if he were alive. So who? And why?

      Jillian felt as if a ghost had just brushed against the back of her neck. Either the person on the other end of the call had been teasing her, playing a sick prank on her, or the unthinkable had happened and Aaron had come back from the dead.

      Jillian closed her eyes. Ten years. A damned decade! He couldn’t be alive. That didn’t make any sense and yet…and yet…

      Go to the police her inner voice suggested as she peeled off her coat, walked to the front of the house again and hung the garment on the wrought-iron coat tree near the front door. She found her tattered umbrella, fixed the broken spokes as best she could, then shoved it into the lower part of the same tree. Taking the steps two at a time, she climbed to the second floor and made her way to her den, which, when the hide-abed was opened, became her guest room. The computer was on and waiting, a screen saver of waving palms like wistful arms beckoning her to some sunny, remote destination where the sun always shone.

      Kicking out her desk chair, Jillian sat down and clicked onto her e-mail account. She found one that had slipped through her spam filter with an attachment. When she opened it, sure enough, the same three pictures of the bearded man who was supposed to be her dead first husband appeared.

      She checked the e-mail address, pressed REPLY, but, of course, her mail bounced back at her.

      Damn.

      She clicked back to her home page and a news item caught her eye. SERIAL KILLER STRIKES MONTANA. The story mentioned two women found dead in desolate parts of the Bitterroots, but she was too distracted to read on with these photos of Aaron taunting her.

      She enhanced the pictures, enlarging them, then sharpening the images. As she worked with computer and photographic images for a living, this was a piece of cake. She’d spent the past five years creating brochures, both real and virtual, for clients ranging from universities to travel agencies and tour groups. In this room alone, the walls were covered with photographs she’d taken herself, colorful pictures of exotic locales and beautiful homes turned into inns. There were images of a brilliant sunset on the Oregon coast, the Cascade Mountains deep in snow, a fishing excursion on the Kenai River in Alaska and a hundred-and-fifty-year-old hotel situated in the rugged Columbia Gorge.

      Using programs that enhanced, enlarged, zoomed in and recolored, she played with the photographs, erasing the man’s beard and sunglasses, growing his hair a few inches, taking off ten pounds. With each change, her heart beat a little faster, her nerves tightened and anticipation coursed through her veins.

      When she was finished, the altered image was a dead ringer for her long-lost first husband.

      Anyone can make someone look different. You’ve seen countless short movies of people morphing from one person to another. You’ve seen the before and after pictures of models on the covers of magazines. You know how to make an image change shape.

      This could be an out-and-out scam.

      But why?

      And who was behind it? Mason, in Missoula?

      She shook her head at the thought. If Mason wanted to give her information, he’d just do it, call her up and give her the facts. And if he were trying to be sneaky, he’d mail the envelope from another town. He knew she wasn’t an idiot.

      But what about that new wife of his—Sherice? She always had it in for you. And СКАЧАТЬ