The Alvarez & Pescoli Series. Lisa Jackson
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Название: The Alvarez & Pescoli Series
Автор: Lisa Jackson
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Ужасы и Мистика
Серия: An Alvarez & Pescoli Novel
isbn: 9781420150322
isbn:
But one was here.
She had only to look on her computer screen and see the dead bodies of Theresa Charleton and Nina Salvadore, two women with little in common, to know that a psychopath was either nearby or had passed through.
She clicked her mouse and the dead body of the first victim, Theresa Charleton, came into view on her monitor. A few more clicks and she split the screen with several images: the woman’s driver’s license picture, procured from the Idaho DMV; a photo of the wrecked green Ford Eclipse, labeled Crime Scene One; and another shot of a lonely hemlock tree in a snowy valley with the woman lashed to the trunk, tagged as Crime Scene Two. The final image was of the note left nailed above the woman’s head: her initials, T C, in block letters, written below a star that had been not only drawn on the white paper but also carved into the bole of the tree about five inches above her head. The lab had found traces of blood in the carving, blood belonging to the victim.
Alvarez’s jaw tightened as she stared at what had been left of the schoolteacher from Boise. She’d had no known enemies. Married for two years, no children, the husband devastated. He’d claimed she’d been visiting her parents in Whitefish and his story had checked out. The victim’s parents and brother were beside themselves with grief and anger. Her brother had insisted the police “find the monster who did this!”
“We’re working on it,” Alvarez said to herself as she opened a file and saw a copy of the note.
The star, similar to the one cut into the tree over the victim’s head, had been drawn high over the letters:
T C
Why? Alvarez wondered. What did it mean to the killer? The sheriff’s department had checked on the people who had seen her last and come up with nothing so far. They’d thought the incident was a single murder—until the next victim had been found in an identical situation.
Again Alvarez clicked her mouse and another image, so similar to the first that it turned her blood to ice, flickered onto the screen. A naked woman with long dark hair was bound to the trunk of a fir tree. Different location, but eerily similar.
Victim number two was Nina Salvadore, a single mother and computer programmer from Redding, California. She, too, had been found tied to a tree in a tiny valley within the wilds of the Bitterroots. Her body had been two miles from her vehicle, a Ford Focus wrecked into a nearly unidentifiable crush of red paint, metal and plastic, found several weeks earlier.
The star cut into the tree over Salvadore’s body was located in a slightly different position in relation to her body, and the note that had been left at the scene was slightly different as well. This time, though the star had been drawn on a standard-size piece of printer paper, new letters had been written on it. It appeared that both sets of the victims’ initials had been interwoven:
T SC N
Was the killer playing with them? Trying to communicate? If he wanted credit for both killings, why not write T C N S, the order of the women’s first and last names? Why mix the initials up?
Alvarez narrowed her eyes. She was a computer wizard and had run several programs trying to find out if the four letters meant anything. So far, she’d come up dry.
“Bastard,” she muttered, trying to imagine what kind of monster would do something so brutal and cruel as to leave a woman to freeze in the wilds of Montana in the winter.
Interviews with those closest to Nina Salvadore had provided no additional clues. She’d been on her way back to California, though she’d planned to meet up with friends in Oregon first, and had driven from Helena, Montana, where she’d been visiting her sister. The missing persons report had been filed in Oregon first, when she hadn’t arrived in the small town of Seaside and had been missing for twenty-four hours. In Helena, Nina’s sister had filed a similar report that same day.
Despite combing the crime scenes, bodies and wrecked cars, and working with police in the hometowns where the women had lived, the department had no suspects.
Random killings?
Or victims who had been targeted and stalked?
Alvarez bit her lip and found no answers.
After staring at the screen for a few minutes, she gave up, left her cubicle and made her way down a long hallway. She veered to the left and through a doorway to the lunchroom, a windowless area complete with small kitchen and a few scattered tables.
A glass pot of congealing coffee sat on a warmer. Left over from the night shift. Selena dumped the dark liquid and the pre-measured packet of grounds and started over, rinsing the pot, filling the reservoir with water and finding a fresh package of dark roast in a drawer.
All the while the coffee machine sputtered, dripped and brewed, she considered the bizarre killings. The lab had found traces of bark in both victims’ hair. The wood splinters matched those of the trees to which they had been lashed. The bruises and contusions on their bodies had been consistent with being tethered to the trees, and they each had a cut or two from a knife, nothing deep, just a quick little slice, or prick, as if whoever had been urging them to their ultimate place of death had prodded them along.
But other wounds had begun to heal, according to the autopsies. Injuries consistent with what had been sustained in their car wrecks had begun to heal: broken metacarpals, cracked ribs and a fractured radius in Theresa Charleton’s case; a broken clavicle and dislocated knee for Nina Salvadore. Each woman’s bones appeared to have been set, her abrasions tended to. Salvadore even appeared to have had recent stitches on her right cheek and an area of scalp where some hair had been shaved away.
Where had he kept them?
And why?
Why bring them somewhat back to health only to leave their naked bodies out in the weather? Why heal them only to let them die?
According to the ME, neither woman had been sexually molested.
The case was odd. Nerve-wracking. And Alvarez had spent dozens of hours of overtime trying to get into the killer’s head. To no avail.
The FBI was being consulted. Field agents from Salt Lake City had come and left again.
On the kitchen counter the coffee machine gurgled and sputtered its last drops just about the same time Joelle Fisher, secretary and receptionist for the department, breezed in.
“Oh, you already made the coffee. That’s my job, you know,” she said with one of her ever-present smiles. Nearing sixty, Joelle looked ten years younger except for the fact that she insisted upon wearing her platinum hair in some kind of teased hairdo reminiscent of the fifties screen sirens Alvarez remembered from watching old movies with her mother.
“Yeah, I know.”
Joelle’s pretty face squinched up as she quickly picked up some old napkins and stir sticks left on one of the tables, then wiped the surface. “You’ll get me in trouble with the sheriff.”
Pouring herself a cup, Selena didn’t think Dan Grayson gave a flying fig about who made the coffee, but СКАЧАТЬ