The Alvarez & Pescoli Series. Lisa Jackson

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СКАЧАТЬ her eyes already taking in the single-car accident as she scribbled her name on the sheet. “Same damned thing,” she said, heading toward Alvarez. “Same bloody damned thing.”

      She smelled of cigarette smoke and looked like hell, but then, no one was their best at this hour of the morning, bundled in outdoor gear.

      “So what’ve we got?”

      “Nothing new. Take a look.” Alvarez walked her partner through the trod-on snow to the car.

      “Wendy Ito’s?”

      “Nope. Washington plates, but this is an older-model Subaru Outback. Ito drove a newer Toyota with vanity plates.”

      “A Prius. I remember.” Pescoli’s jaw tightened as she bent down to peer into the twisted wreckage. “So we’ve got another one.”

      “Looks like.”

      “Hell.” She sighed as she straightened, her eyes, usually a gold color, darkening. “Driver’s door jimmied open? Tire shot? No ID, no personal effects like a wallet or purse?”

      Alvarez nodded, snowflakes drifting from the steely heavens. “Same as before.”

      “But no body found?”

      “Not yet.”

      Alvarez walked Pescoli around what was left of the silver Subaru and gave Pescoli a rundown of what they’d found. She had to shout, as the wind began to shriek down the canyon again, tearing through the trees, rattling bare branches and blowing tiny sharp flakes of snow against Alvarez’s skin.

      “Just like the others,” Pescoli observed, her full lips pulled into a frustrated scowl. “What the hell is the bastard up to?”

      A moot question.

      Pescoli squinted upward, toward the ridge, suspecting that this car, like the others, had been forced off the road, then plunged and careened down the canyon wall to land at the bottom of the canyon floor, in this frozen creek bed.

      Alvarez followed her gaze and knew what her partner was thinking. It was a wonder anyone survived the crash.

      But then, they weren’t certain anyone had. Just that the driver had been removed. Damn.

      “We know when this happened?” Pescoli asked.

      Alvarez tugged her gloves on tighter. “It could’ve been as early as yesterday afternoon, judging by the snowfall.”

      “Then the victim’s probably still alive.” Pescoli glanced around the bleak ravine with sheer walls of ice and rock. “The son of a bitch tends to them, nurses them like some damned Florence Nightingale, then ties ’em to a tree and leaves ’em to freeze to death. Sick bastard.”

      Amen to that.

      “Who found the car and called it in?” Pescoli asked.

      Beneath the brim of his wool hat, Pete Watershed winced.

      Pescoli wasn’t about to be coddled. “Tell me.”

      “Grace Perchant. Walking her dog.”

      “Walking her dog? When it’s ten degrees below freezing? Down here? Why the hell was she doing that?”

      “Why does Grace do anything?” Watershed asked with a lift of one shoulder.

      Good question. Grace Perchant was another one of the town’s oddities. Alvarez reminded her partner, “Grace claims to see ghosts, too, and talk with the friggin’ dead, for crying out loud. And that dog of hers is half-wolf.”

      “Three quarters,” Mikhail cut in, looking up with a knowing smile.

      “You know this how?” Alvarez wasn’t certain she really wanted to hear the answer.

      “I’m interested in a pup.”

      “Oh, for the love of God! You know that Grace’s dog is practically a wild animal! She probably wasn’t walking it; the damned thing was walking her.”

      “She’s right,” Pescoli said. “We’ve had complaints about the wolf-dog more than once.”

      “It bit someone?”

      “Nah. Howled. Kept the neighbors awake.” Pescoli tucked a stray strand of hair beneath her cap.

      “That’s ridiculous,” Alvarez cut in. “I mean, if the dog needs to relieve himself, why not just let him go outside? Why walk during a damned blizzard?”

      “It’s Grace,” Watershed said, as if that explained it all.

      Frustrated, her cheeks red with the cold, Pescoli looked around the scene, her gaze inching over the snowy terrain. “Damn it, where did he take her?”

      Selena Alvarez shook her head. Deep inside, she experienced a chill, a frigid drip of dread sliding through her gut. She knew the woman inside the car was already doomed and eventually they would find her, just as they’d found the others. As the wind keened and the blizzard started ripping through this ridge of mountains, she and Pescoli walked back to the spot where Slatkin was taking samples of the frozen blood. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and the son of a bitch cut himself. It could be his blood.”

      “Let’s not count on luck.” Another male voice broke in and Alvarez looked over her shoulder to spy the sheriff walking toward them from the direction of the forest service road. His big boots crunched in the snow and his expression said it all: repressed anger, and maybe even a touch of defeat. The wind had been so damned fierce, she hadn’t even heard his rig arrive.

      Alvarez nodded. “You’re right, we won’t.”

      “A little luck wouldn’t hurt,” Pescoli observed. “Personally, I’ll take all we can get.”

      A bit of a smile cracked across Grayson’s face. “Fair enough.” A tall, strapping man with a thick, graying moustache and dark, deep-set eyes, Grayson was recently elected and recently divorced—the two, it seemed, had gone hand in hand. At least it seemed that way to Alvarez. “Tell me that Ivor Hicks didn’t call this in.”

      “Not this time,” Alvarez assured him.

      “Nope.” Pescoli shoved her hands deep into her coat pockets. “This time our witness is Grace Perchant.”

      “Oh for the love of God. Another nutcase.” Grayson scowled. “First Ivor, now Grace. The next thing you know, we’ll be getting tips from Henry Johansen.”

      Though Henry, a local farmer, hadn’t claimed to have been abducted by aliens like Ivor, nor did he commune with the dead, which was Grace’s specialty, he had fallen off his tractor twenty years earlier and suffered an injury that had caused him to claim he could read people’s minds. There had been no proof of this phenomenon, and yet Henry was convinced that the voices he heard were the random thoughts of people he’d met. He was a regular visitor at the sheriff’s department, always insisting he had the inside track on some local crime.

      “God help us,” Watershed said.

      As СКАЧАТЬ