The Alvarez & Pescoli Series. Lisa Jackson

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      But then she saw him move so that he was in front of her, staring at her with his cruel, relentless gaze.

      How had she ever thought him handsome? How had she ever fantasized about him? How had she ever considered making love to him?

      Slowly he removed the knife from his belt. Its cruel metallic surface winked in the shifting gray light.

      She was doomed.

      She knew it.

      Even before he slowly, inexorably raised the blade.

      Chapter One

      “Goddamn, son of a bitch.”

      Ivor Hicks usually didn’t mind the cold, but he didn’t like the thought that he was being forced to hike in this section of the mountains after the recent blizzard. For the love of God, there could be an avalanche if he coughed too hard, and he was liable to ’cause his lungs felt heavy, as if he might be coming down with something.

      Probably from the damned aliens, he decided, though he quickly rid himself of the thought. Criminy, no one wanted to believe that he’d been abducted in the late seventies, used for an experiment that involved his lungs, blood and testicles. The blasted ETs had left his drained and exhausted body in a snowbank two miles from his mountain home. When he’d come out of the drug-induced coma, he’d found himself half frozen, lying in his jockey shorts, an empty bottle of rye whiskey on the other side of a hollowed-out log that was home to a porcupine and beetles. But not one of them damned law enforcement boys wanted to listen to him.

      At the time, the deputy he’d complained to, a smartass kid of about thirty, hadn’t even bothered to swallow his smile of disbelief. He just took a quick statement, then hauled Ivor to the local clinic for treatment of frostbite and exposure. Doc Norwood hadn’t been so outwardly disbelieving, but when he’d sent Ivor to the hospital in Missoula he’d suggested psychiatric testing.

      Damned fools.

      They’d all just played into the aliens’ hands. Crytor, the leader of the pod, who had teleported him into their mother ship, was probably still laughing at the earthlings’ simpleton explanation of alcohol, dehydration and hallucinations that the doctors were sure had been the cause of his “confusion.”

      Well, they were just dumb asses all around.

      Using a walking stick, Ivor trudged up Cross Creek Pass, his hiking boots crunching in the snow, the sky as wide and blue as an ocean, not that he’d ever really seen one, but he’d seen himself Flathead Lake, which was one big-ass lake. Must be the same, only much, much larger, if those televised fishing excursions on the Fish and Game Channel could be believed.

      Breathing heavily, he trudged up the trail, winding through an outcropping of snow-dusted boulders and ancient hemlocks with branches that appeared to scrape the sky. He stopped to catch his breath, watching it fog and cursing the aliens who had forced him up the mountain trail when his arthritis was acting up. The pain now was exacerbated, he was certain, by the experiments they’d done on him and the invisible chip they’d slipped into his body.

      “I’m goin’, I’m goin’,” he said when he felt that little pinch at his temple, the prod they used to urge him on, the one that had pushed him out of bed before the sun climbed over the mountain crest. Hell, he hadn’t even had a swallow of coffee, much less a sip of Jim Beam. Crytor, damn his orange reptilian hide, was a more intense taskmaster than Lila had been, God rest her soul. He made the sign of the cross over his chest in memory of his dead wife, though he was not a Catholic, never had been and had no intention of becoming one. It just seemed like the right, reverent thing to do.

      Even Crytor didn’t seem to mind.

      Through a stand of fir he noticed elk tracks and dung in the snow and wished he’d brought his rifle, though it wasn’t hunting season. Who would ever find out?

      Well, besides Crytor.

      Rounding a bend in the path, he caught a glimpse of the valley below.

      And he stopped short, nearly slipping.

      His seventy-six-year-old heart almost quit on him as his gaze, as good as it ever was, focused on a solitary pine tree and the naked woman lashed to the trunk.

      “Holy Mother Mary,” he whispered and headed faster down the hillside, his walking stick digging deep through the snow to the frozen ground below as he hurried downward.

      No wonder the aliens had wanted him to see this.

      They’d probably abducted her, did what they wanted and left her here in this frigid, unpopulated valley. That’s what they did, you know.

      He wished he had a cell phone, though he thought he’d heard that the damned things didn’t work up here. Too remote. No towers. He slid and caught himself, moving quickly along the familiar trail. She was probably still alive. Just stunned into submission. He could wrap her in his jacket, and hike back and get help.

      Digging his stick deep and fast into the snow, he descended rapidly, hurrying down the switchbacks to the valley floor, where a snow owl hooted softly in an otherwise eerily quiet canyon.

      “Hey!” he cried, half-running, nearly out of breath. “Hey!”

      But before he reached the woman strapped to the tree, he stopped short and froze.

      This was no return of a body from an alien ship.

      Hell no.

      This was the work of the very devil.

      The hairs on the back of his wrinkled neck lifted.

      This woman, an Asian woman, was as dead as dead can be. Her skin was blue, snow dusting her dark, shiny hair, her eyes staring without life. Blood lay on her skin, dark and frozen. A gag covered her lips. The bindings strapping her to the tree had cut deep bruises and welts into her arms and chest and waist. Not quite hog-tied. But close enough.

      Somewhere a tree branch groaned with the weight of snow and Ivor felt as if unseen eyes might be watching.

      He’d never felt more fear in his life.

      Not even as Crytor’s prisoner.

      Again, wishing he had his hunting rifle, he stepped backward slowly, easing out the way he’d come, until, at the edge of the mountain trail, he turned and started running as fast as his legs dared carry him.

      Who or whatever had done this to the woman was the purest and deadliest form of evil.

      And it lingered.

      God in heaven, it was still here.

      Detective Selena Alvarez dropped into the chair at her desk. It wasn’t yet seven, but she had piles of paperwork to sift through, and the unsolved case of the two dead women found nearly a month apart, linked by the way their bodies had been left in the snow, was uppermost in her mind.

      The images of those bodies—naked, tied to trees, gagged and left in the snow to die—chilled her to her bones. For years any dead bodies discovered in and around Pinewood County were few and far between, usually the result of hunting, fishing, СКАЧАТЬ