The Alvarez & Pescoli Series. Lisa JacksonЧитать онлайн книгу.
road deputy on the road. She should beat us there and secure the scene.”
“Great,” Pescoli said, more worried than ever.
“Another victim?” Alvarez asked.
“Yeah.” Pescoli was nodding, keeping up both conversations, the one with her partner and the one over the phone.
“Is this guy escalating or what?” Alvarez asked, loud enough that Grayson heard her.
“Looks like,” he responded.
“Found by the news copter,” Pescoli clarified, shifting down.
“That’s what I said,” the sheriff said impatiently. “Film at eleven.”
MacGregor stepped into the cabin.
The interior was as still as death, the fire low, a feeling of abandonment in the air. “Jillian?” he called, looking through the few empty rooms, panic slowly inching up his spine.
She was gone.
Plain and simple.
The rifle he’d left with her was gone, and her crutch was missing.
Along with the dog.
“Harley?” His boots rang hollowly against the old floorboards as he walked through the kitchen to the back porch. The uneasy feeling that had been with him ever since hearing the rifle’s report less than an hour earlier increased. He walked to the front porch and whistled long and low, half expecting the black-and-white spaniel to come bounding through the drifts.
Nothing.
“Hell.”
Quickly, he walked through the house to the back porch and cupping his hands around his mouth, yelled, “Jillian? Harley?” His own voice echoed through the canyons and he grabbed his rifle and walked the length of the porch. A path was broken in the snow and it led toward the woods.
“Son of a bitch.” What was she thinking? Escaping on foot while she was still laid up?
Maybe she’d been forced.
That thought chilled him to the bone and he replayed the gunshot in his mind.
But the prints in the snow were only of the dog and the crutch and her good boot. No others. There was a chance the dog had taken off after MacGregor, or after a marauding racoon or deer. Jillian might have followed.
Damn, fool woman, he thought, but broke into a trot, following the trail of footsteps, leaning down beneath the overhang of branches as he flushed a rabbit through the undergrowth.
“Harley!” he yelled, whistling. Why would the dog take off?
A pitiful whine whistled through the pines and MacGregor’s blood turned to ice.
Heart thudding, he threw the bolt on his rifle, ready to shoot as he rounded a large boulder and saw his dog, lying on his side in the snow, black-and-white fur matted and stained red. Too much blood had pooled beneath him. Even so, the spaniel gazed up at him, whined and gave one feeble thump of his tail. “Hang on, buddy,” he said, stripping off his jacket and tearing out the lining. He moved the dog onto his jacket and tied the sleeve over his back leg, where a bullet hole gaped. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered through clenched teeth. “Son of a goddamned bitch.”
Kneeling beside Harley, he noticed the tracks. Not just Jillian’s but a second set, decidedly larger, heading east, in the direction of an old abandoned sawmill that was over two miles away.
There was no way Jillian could hobble that far.
He hated to abandon the dog but he had no choice.
Jillian Rivers’s life was at stake.
Rifle held in a death grip, defying the cold, following the tracks, Zane MacGregor took off at a dead run.
He only hoped he wasn’t too late.
“Jesus H. Christ!” Brewster stared at the woman who’d been lashed to the tree and looked as if he were about to throw up. Pescoli and Alvarez hurried forward. The scene was nearly identical to the last one, except the naked woman had been cut down from a solitary white pine tree in a small alpine meadow. She was lying on a jacket, her eyes glassy and vacant as they stared upward. Bruises covered her body and her lips were chapped. Deputy Trilby Van Droz worked over her, squatting in the mashed snow around the tree.
Van Droz, hearing them approach, looked up and yelled, “She’s alive. I’ve already called for an ambulance.”
“Alive,” Pescoli repeated, as overhead, marring the clear blue sky, a news-crew helicopter hovered, a cameraman hanging out a window while filming the scene.
“Damned fool idiots,” Grayson said, waving them off. “Someone call KBIT and tell them to clear the airspace in case a rescue copter has to land.”
Brewster was on his walkie-talkie, calling back to the department offices, relaying orders.
“At least they found her,” Alvarez said. “I’ll be in charge of the crime scene sheet.” The area had to be roped off and protected. Everyone who showed up here had to sign in.
Grayson scribbled his name. “Is she conscious?” he yelled.
“No. But I found a pulse and she’s breathing.” Van Droz was performing first aid, trying to keep the victim warm, just as the sound of a siren cut through the still mountain air.
Pescoli signed into the crime scene and, trying not to disturb any of the evidence, hurried to the victim’s side, where she knelt in the snow and tried to help. “Is she Jillian Rivers?”
“Don’t know.”
“No,” Watershed said from somewhere over her right shoulder. He was standing back, eyeing the message nailed to the gnarled bark of the pine. “The letters aren’t right.”
Pescoli glanced up and caught a glimpse of the weird message.
Sure enough, Jillian Rivers’s initials weren’t written down. There was the R from the last note but no J.
Now the note read:
WAR T HE SC I N
“What the hell does that mean?” Watershed whispered.
Trilby Van Droz was still on her knees at the victim’s side, Pescoli beside her. The sheriff ordered Brett Gage, the chief criminal deputy, to follow the trail broken in the snow. He, along with a deputy in charge of the dogs, took off toward the east end of the clearing.
“How the hell would someone get in here?” Grayson asked as the ambulance’s siren screamed louder.
Pescoli rubbed the woman’s wrist. “Can you hear me?” she asked. From the corner of her eyes, she saw the ambulance slide to a stop in the old, snow-covered parking lot of the dilapidated lodge. “What’s your name? Who did this to you?”
“She’s unresponsive,” Deputy Van Droz said. “I haven’t been able to get a word out of her.”
Two EMTs, carrying their equipment, hurried toward the woman lying in the snow. With one quick examination the shorter of the two rescue workers, a black woman with a no-nonsense look on her face, whipped out a two-way and called for a chopper. “We need to get her out of here,” she said, giving the helicopter directions, then hanging up. “It’ll take too long to drive her back to the hospital.” Her dark eyes moved back to the victim as she told the detectives, “Chopper on its way. Should be here in five. So all of you just back the hell up and let us work!”
The detectives and FBI agents took a few steps backward, while the woman and her partner, a tall man still in his twenties, worked quickly, monitoring the victim’s vital signs, administering oxygen, covering her and tending to her. In the distance, the sound of a helicopter’s rotors sliced through the air.
“The scene’s been destroyed,” Chandler