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Authors: Lisa Jackson

BOOK: Born To Die
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Pescoli nosed her Jeep into an empty parking slot near the park as two medics loaded a woman on a stretcher into the back of a waiting ambulance. A crowd of about fifteen people had gathered, all craning their necks and talking amongst themselves beyond a police perimeter. A news van and camera crew were following the EMTs' every move as they transported the injured woman.
Pescoli flashed her badge at the town cop, who seemed to be in charge of keeping the bystanders at bay.
“What gives?” she asked Alvarez.
“She's alive, but barely. Looks like she was jogging and either tripped or slid and fell over the rail.” Alvarez indicated a spot where the snow was disturbed on the top of the crumbling guardrail, an old rock wall that had been built over a hundred years earlier and was barely two feet high.
She shined her flashlight over the broken snow and path where the woman had fallen over the cliff face. “She hit on that ledge down there and somehow didn't slide farther, into the river. It's a miracle that she's alive.” The beam of her flashlight played upon the broken ground below.
“Is she conscious?”
“No. Don't know how long she was out here or how serious her injuries are, or if she'll make it.” Frowning, Alvarez shined the light back on the path. “Too many footprints and too much snow to see if anyone was with her.”
“And no ID, no car?”
“Her run didn't start here, just ended here.”
“But you think it's more than an accident.”
“Unknown.” But Alvarez was clearly puzzled, eyeing the snow-covered path where dozens of footprints had been left. “The crime scene guys are doing what they can, separating out her prints, the ones that match her shoes, and they're looking for anything that might help, other prints.”
“Nothing on her to ID her?”
“Just a key. No cell, no iPod, or anything else.”
“She could have just tripped.”
“Yeah.” Alvarez's breath fogged in the air.
“No witnesses?”
Alvarez shook her head.
“Who found her? And please don't tell me it was Ivor Hicks or Grace Perchant,” she said, mentioning a couple of the locals who had a history of being in the middle of trouble. Ivor thought he'd been abducted by aliens years earlier, and Grace Perchant claimed to talk to ghosts. Pescoli didn't think either of them was all that reliable.
“No,” Alvarez said. “Iris Fenton was out taking a walk.” She motioned to a woman bundled in a heavy down coat, gloves, and a red stocking cap, from which silvery curls protruded. “She lives on the other side of the park with an invalid husband. Already checked her out.”
Pescoli was nodding.
Alvarez glanced to the departing ambulance. “Hopefully she'll wake up and tell us she's just a klutz.” She then eyed the embankment, the steep ravine, and the river, tumbling over the falls, the water roiling wildly far, far below. “Helluva place to slip so hard that you vault over the rail and land just where the cliff drops off, four feet from the wall, right here at the very top of the bluff. A few years ago this part of the hill fell away.” She ran her light over the outside of the rail, to make her point. In either direction the drop-off beyond the guardrail wasn't as sheer, the vegetation more viable, but the spot where the accident occurred was the most steep. “Real bad luck.”
“That why the crime scene people are here?”
She nodded. “I've already called Missing Persons. We'll see if we can find out who she is. In the meantime, I want to go to the hospital and talk to the docs who examine her, find out if her injuries are consistent with her accident.”
“Which you're not buying.”
“The jury's still out,” Alvarez said as she reached into her pocket and withdrew her keys. “You coming?”
“Meet you there.”
CHAPTER 8
E
arly the next morning Trace looked out the front window and saw snow falling steadily, only to pile up around the fence posts and drift onto the front porch.
Eli was still asleep, though he'd had a bad night, the pain in his arm and his cough waking him every few hours. In the end, around three this morning, Trace had carried the kid downstairs, and together, with Sarge curled up near the banked fire, they'd bunked on the oversized sectional. At five thirty Trace had woken, let the dog out; then, once Sarge had taken care of business and Trace had started the coffee, he'd turned on the television to catch the weather report.
The first thing he'd seen was a woman reporter on the screen, snow covering her blue hooded jacket, a microphone clutched in her gloved hands as she stood near the entrance to the park on the crest of Boxer Bluff. Rescue and police vehicles were visible behind her, lights flashing in the dark as snow continued to fall. She was speaking to the camera, but her voice was too soft to hear.
Trace scooped up his remote and upped the volume.
“. . . where an unidentified female jogger was discovered just an hour ago on a rocky ledge that juts out over the river nearly a hundred feet below street level.”
The camera panned behind the reporter, to the steep grade and an area below. A narrow shelf protruded over the roiling water, and upon it was one rescue worker in a harness, a coil of rope in his hands. The snow on the ledge had been disturbed by boot prints and what Trace assumed was the area where the jogger's body had lain before the rescue.
“You can see how lucky this unknown jogger was,” the reporter was saying. “Had she slid off the ledge, she would have fallen into the river.” The camera panned to Grizzly Falls, where white water sprayed and churned before a swift current sliced beneath a hundred-year-old bridge and past the glittering lights of the town.
The camera's eye returned to the reporter. “This is Nia Del Ray,” and she signed off to the two anchors sitting behind a joined desk. The blond female anchor clarified, “That footage was shot last night, and the latest report from the hospital is that the woman is in critical condition, but the identity of the jogger has not yet been confirmed.”
Trace stared at the set and felt that same sense of doom that had been with him when he'd visited Jocelyn's apartment. Without a thought to the time, he picked up the phone and dialed Ed Zukov's number. He'd need his neighbor's help; someone would have to look after his boy for a couple of hours. Though he didn't want to believe that Jocelyn Wallis was the unidentified jogger who'd lost her footing and nearly her life at the crest of Boxer Bluff, he had to find out.
 
 
Pescoli's cell phone rang sharply near her ear.
She groaned and rolled over to the side of the bed, scrabbled for the damned thing where it was charging on her night table and knocked her reading glasses onto the floor.
“Great,” she muttered as she flipped on the lamp, then said into the phone, “Pescoli.”
“I think you'd better come down here,” Alvarez said as Pescoli eyed the clock near her bed. The digital readout shone a bright red 5:57.
“And ‘here' is where? The station? Geez, Alvarez, it's not even six. What the hell time do you get up in the morning?” How could anyone be so alert at this god-awful time of day?
“Yeah, the station. I think we might get an ID on the Jane Doe.”
“Give me half an hour.” Pescoli rolled out of bed and stumbled into the main bath, where she yanked off her University of Montana Grizzlies football jersey and panties, then stepped under a much too cold shower spray.
Twenty-eight minutes later she was walking toward the back door of the sheriff's department. Ignoring the rumbling in her stomach and Joelle's winking snowflakes in the windows, she clomped the snow from her boots and walked inside, down a series of short hallways to Alvarez's desk, where her partner was busy talking to a tall man in an unzipped fleece jacket, faded jeans, work shirt, and sporting a dark beard stubble. He was sitting in the visitor's chair but got to his feet as she approached.
Alvarez glanced up. “This is my partner, Detective Pescoli, and he”—she hitched her chin to indicate the visitor—“is Trace O'Halleran. He thinks he knows who our Jane Doe is.”
O'Halleran's lips pinched at the corners a bit. He shook Pescoli's hand. “I just think it's an odd coincidence that a woman I know is missing about the same time. She jogs, too, and I dropped by her house yesterday because I heard she hadn't shown up for work.”
As Alvarez waved him back into his chair, she listened to O'Halleran while he explained that he and Jocelyn Wallis, a schoolteacher whom he'd met through his kid at Evergreen Elementary, had dated a few times and that the relationship had stopped before really getting started. Then, yesterday, he had gotten a call from a friend who worked at the school and was informed that the Wallis woman hadn't shown up for work. He'd noticed she had phoned him but hadn't left a message, so he'd gone to her apartment, investigated on his own by letting himself in with a hidden key he knew where to find, and subsequently discovered her missing. Her purse and car had still been at her home. As had been her phone. He'd found it odd, as it was out of character for her; to his knowledge Jocelyn Wallis had never missed a day of work.
“Then I saw this morning's news,” he said, wrapping up. “That woman was pulled from an area of the park ... one of the trails Jocelyn runs. So, I came to you.”
Pescoli watched him closely all through the recitation. He seemed earnest, intense, and worried. His hands were clasped between his knees, the thumb of his right hand working nervously. He hadn't called her family, hadn't wanted to worry them, thought maybe the school would start contacting friends and relatives, and hoped that she would show up.
He was emphatic that he and she weren't dating. There had been no big blowup; they'd just quit seeing each other. It had been O'Halleran who had cut things off.
Pescoli wanted to trust the rancher. Handsome in that rugged way she'd always found sexy, he was used to working outside and had the winter tan to prove it. His thick hair brushed the collar of his fleece jacket, and his hands were big, calloused, and had a few tiny white scars. A single father whose wife, he'd admitted, had left him, O'Halleran seemed sincere, and he had come in of his own accord, but that didn't mean a whole helluva lot.
She'd seen the most pious, timid of men turn out to be cold-blooded killers.
“So, is this Jocelyn Wallis?” Alvarez asked as she slid a couple of pictures of the battered woman to him.
O'Halleran swept in a breath. “God, I hope not,” he said fervently but studied each of the two shots. “I—I don't know. Maybe. Jesus.”
“I've got a few pictures of Jocelyn Wallis,” Alvarez said.
“From the school's Web site?” Pescoli guessed.
“Motor vehicle division.” Alvarez clicked on her keyboard, and a driver's license appeared on the screen. The woman in the picture was somewhere in her early thirties with a bright smile and long reddish brown hair.
“Could be.” Pescoli looked at O'Halleran. “Any identifying marks? Tattoos? Scars? Birthmarks?”
He lifted a shoulder. “Don't know.”
“You didn't see her naked?” Pescoli questioned. “She didn't talk about any surgeries or injuries as a kid? Or getting a tattoo?”
“We didn't get that far.”
“You didn't sleep with her?” Pescoli asked.
He hesitated and looked down at his hands before meeting her eyes again. “Once. At her place. I didn't see anything. She didn't tell me about anything like that, but she did wear earrings. Three in one ear, I think, and two in the other.”
“That's something,” Pescoli said. “So why don't you come down and see if you know her?”
“The hospital will allow it?” he asked.
“We've got friends in high places.”
He was already climbing to his full six feet two inches, and Alvarez was reaching for her jacket, purse, and sidearm. “I'll drive,” Pescoli said. She wanted to see his reaction to the injured woman, and then she'd double-check his story.
And if the woman turned out to be someone other than Jocelyn Wallis, there was still the problem that the schoolteacher was missing.
If what O'Halleran had told them was true.
 
 
“Oh, thank God, Doctor Lambert! I was so afraid.... Oh, sweet Jesus!” Rosie Alsgaard said, the fingers of one hand theatrically splayed over her chest as she hurried along the hallway of the second floor of the small hospital. Dressed in scrubs, the ear tips of the coiled stethoscope peeking out of her pocket like the tiny twin faces of a double-headed snake, the ER nurse jogged over the shiny linoleum as she met Kacey. “Oh, man, I was worried. We all were.”
“Worried? What're you talking about?”
“Because of the patient who was admitted last night, before my shift! She's a dead ringer for you, and Cleo, she was certain it was you! The Jane Doe.”
“Cleo?”
“The nurse's aide who was working ER last night. And not just her. Me, too. I saw the patient and ... and it's freaky!” Rosie was breathing hard, her words tumbling out of her mouth in no sensible order. “I mean, of course her face is swollen and bruised, her nose broken, but her hair ... and she looks like you. I was sure when I saw her this morning ... I mean, I was worried sick that you had fallen and—”
“Rosie! Slow down,” Kacey ordered, one hand up. “Let's start over.”
An aide pushing a medication cart passed by, while another nurse whipped past them and hurried toward the bank of elevators located at this end of the small building housing the newly reopened St. Bart's Hospital.
“Okay, okay!” Some of Rosie's color was coming back, and she took a long, deep breath. “Last night a patient came into the ER by ambulance. Apparently she was out jogging and fell down the ravine by the river. She didn't have any ID on her, and she was—is—in bad shape. Head trauma, broken pelvis, fractured tibia in two places, sprained wrist, two cracked ribs, ruptured spleen, and cuts and contusions. I mean, she's a mess, must've rolled down that hill, hitting rocks and roots and God knows what else. But the thing is, she does resemble you. She's got the same build, and we all know that you jog, sometimes up in the park.... We all were hoping that it wasn't you, but we were worried just the same.”
“Someone could have called.”
“Too busy last night. The police were here, too. And there were two multiple-car accidents with the snow, so there wasn't any time. Cleo and I, we figured if you didn't show up for rounds today, that we'd call the clinic.”
“Where's the Jane Doe now?”
“In ICU, but she might have to be sent to Missoula or Spokane, depending. Right now, no one wants to move her.”
“I'll check on her when my rounds are finished.”
Rosie offered a tentative smile. “I'm just glad you're okay.”
As Kacey went about her rounds, she wondered just how “okay” she was. For the second time in a week she'd heard that someone who looked like her was either dead or fighting for her life. Weird. But until she saw the woman in the ICU, she couldn't be certain that Rosie's imagination wasn't working overtime.
An hour later, after she'd finished checking on the few patients who were under her care in the hospital, she made her way to the ICU.
Anita Bellows was the nurse on duty. Barely five feet, Anita, at forty, was as lithe and agile as a woman half her age. A gymnast in college, she now ran marathons and trained year-round to keep in shape. With short brown hair, a quick smile, and large eyes surrounded by lashes caked in mascara, she had moved from Missoula when St. Bart's opened this past year, giving the aging Pinewood Community Hospital a run for its money.
Today, like Rosie Alsgaard, Anita, spying Kacey push open the door to the ICU, was visibly relieved. Anita was situated at the large circular desk from which private, curtained “rooms” radiated, much like the petals of a sunflower. “Oh, thank God,” she whispered, making a quick sign of the cross over her thin chest, where a tiny gold cross was suspended on a fragile chain. “I thought ... I mean, I was worried that . . .” She sighed and hitched her chin toward a woman lying in one of the two occupied beds. “I'm just glad she's not you.”
“She's the Jane Doe?”
“Uh-huh. Brought in last night.”
Kacey approached the private, curtained area for the patient.
The muscles in her torso tensed as she stared down at the patient's swollen face. Kacey saw the resemblance despite the contusions and probable broken nose. High cheekbones, deep-set eyes, which were now closed, a heart-shaped face, a few freckles still visible were like her own. The patient's hair was a deep auburn hue, and it fell in unruly waves to her shoulders, just as Kacey's did, even though a part of Jane's head had been shaved to allow an intracerebral pressure catheter to be inserted into her skull. The ICP monitored pressure inside the skull and drained off excess fluid.

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