Left To Die (8 page)

Her voice was hoarse and faint against the wind.

Where had she been going on this stormy night? Why the hell was she in these mountains?

Why was she alone?

At that thought she froze.

Maybe she hadn’t been traveling by herself. Maybe someone had been with her! She slid a glance to the side, but the passenger seat was empty. Ignoring the pain, she twisted her neck and glanced into the torn and buckled area that had been the backseat. Fabric was ripped, padding exposed, her suitcase wedged between the front seat and what was left of the backseat. But there wasn’t any evidence of anyone caught in the mangled metal and plastic and shards of glass. No bloody arm peeked out of the torn cushions; no terrified face of a dead person stared at her through glassy, sightless eyes.

Shivering, she pulled at a blanket she always kept in the car and yanked hard, as it was caught in the folds of wrenched metal and plastic. The pain in her rib cage was excruciating but she didn’t give up. “Come on, come on,” she muttered, yanking hard on the damned piece of quilt her grandmother had made fifty years earlier. She heard it rend, old stitches giving way, but she managed to tear off most of it and wrap it around her as her damned ankle continued to pound and her head ached, the cuts on her face burning.

She yelled again and pounded on the horn. It gave out a sharp blast. Again she hit the damned thing, yelling, hoping beyond hope that someone would hear her.

What had she been doing driving in what appeared to be steep mountains with sharp ridges and sheer canyons? And where the hell were these damned mountains located? The Cascade Range in Western Washington? The Canadian Rockies? The Tetons? Or some other craggy range?

Montana
, she thought dimly.
You were driving to Montana.

Surely someone would be missing her soon when she didn’t arrive at her destination, wherever in Montana that was. And then, of course, a search party would be sent.

Unless this trip of yours was secret. Clandestine.

She had the uneasy feeling that no one knew where she was, though she wasn’t clear about where she was going. It had something to do with Montana and her ex-husband, something secret…what was it? If she could only recall.

“For the love of God,” she muttered and shook her head, only to wince at the pain. She didn’t remember everything about herself, but she knew she wasn’t some sort of spy and she wasn’t one to keep secrets and she never really cared to keep anything on the “down low.”

And yet…

A dark fear that she was completely alone snaked around her heart.

“Don’t even think it,” she told herself. Someone somewhere was missing her, looking for her. It was only a matter of time before she’d be found. She just had to stay alive long enough for the rescue.

Head throbbing, she glanced up again, searching for the road that had to be high overhead. All she saw was a sheer wall of snow and ice. There were trees in this grim crevice, a few foreboding sentinels covered in snow, but not much else. Obviously her car had slid down the steep embankment and landed in what appeared to be a frozen creek bed. Had she swerved to avoid hitting another vehicle? A deer? Someone on foot? Or had she just taken a corner too fast and hit ice, only to go careening over the ledge?

Try as she might, she couldn’t remember. Yes, there were fleeting thoughts of packing the car, of planning a quick trip…a long trip, from Seattle, where she lived. She had a quick memory of checking a road map and heading east, out of the snarl of traffic of the U District and her row house near the campus of the University of Washington. She’d nosed her Outback across the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge, which straddled a narrow point in Lake Washington, and then drove on the freeway past Bellevue and further east…and then…nothing. She had an inkling that she’d been determined. Maybe even angry. Which wasn’t a surprise if it had anything to do with her ex.

“Terrific,” she muttered under her breath, unable to call up any memory more tangible. Not that it really mattered. Why she was on her hastily planned trip and even where she was going weren’t of vital consequence. Getting out of the canyon and to safety was.

“Damn it all,” she whispered, frustrated and shivering, her breath fogging in the freezing air.

Still staring upward, she swallowed back a new surge of despair.

The sheer face of the cliff was daunting. If the road was up there, high over this frozen creek bed, how would she ever be able to climb up the steep, frigid wall of rock and ice? Even if she weren’t injured, if she were healthy, dressed for the arctic, with rock-climbing gear, she doubted she could scale the mountain.

Think, Jillian.
Think!
There must be another way out of here!

Holding the blanket tight, she slowly surveyed the creek bed. Was there a path or road, some other means, away from this ravine, toward civilization? Maybe she could follow the stream downhill.

Oh yeah right, Einstein. With an ankle that might be broken? A leg that moved so much as an inch causes you to howl in agony? Face it, you can’t get out of here without help.

“Hell.” She banged on the horn again. Urgently. Frantically. Desperately. Sending the sharp blasts ricocheting through the snowy gorge.

But it was useless; she knew it. To her own ears the wild honking sounded like the forlorn bleating of a frightened sheep.

Pathetic.

But it was all she could do.

Still pounding on the horn, she yelled again until her throat was raw, hoping her pathetic din and the fading headlights would draw some attention. But no sound of a car’s engine answered, no jumbled shouts of rescuers could be heard, no
whop, whop, whop
of a helicopter’s rotors sounded over the sigh of the wind.

No…she was alone.

In this godforsaken wilderness, with the freezing night slipping ever closer, she was totally and frighteningly alone.

Chapter Five

“You suck!” Bianca grumbled under her breath as Jeremy lay on the couch watching MTV.

“You suck!” he threw back and tossed another handful of some trail mix into his mouth.

“Right now, I think you both suck,” Regan broke in from the kitchen. “And for the record, I hate that word. Can’t you come up with some other insult? Something a little more clever.”

“Oh, Mom, don’t be such a nerd.” Bianca flopped into a side chair, red-blonde curls flouncing around her small face. A few freckles she tried desperately to hide with makeup bridged her nose and her big hazel eyes were rimmed with thick, dark lashes. Just like her damned father.

Cisco hopped into Bianca’s lap. She usually adored and indulged the dog, but she was in one of her foul moods right now and, frowning, pushed Cisco onto the floor. He sat on the worn carpet and cocked his head from one side to the other, as if trying to understand the girl who had, before falling in love, lavished all her attention upon him.

“Can’t help it, Bianca, I’m a nerd by nature. It’s genetic, and as such, you, too, have the nerd gene.” Regan plucked off a prematurely dying bloom from the Christmas cactus in the garden window.

Bianca rolled her eyes as if her mother were the most stupid woman on the planet. “I just want to go over to Chris’s for a while. I don’t think it’s that big of a deal.”

“It’s a blizzard outside, if you haven’t noticed. The only reason I’m going out is because I have to.” Regan was bundling up in enough outer gear to battle the elements. She grabbed her stocking cap and gloves off the table, where the mail had been stacked and unattended for days. “I don’t want either of you driving.”

Again, Bianca rolled those huge Pescoli eyes.

Which ticked Regan off.

“And not only are you to have your homework done by the time I get home, I want the dishwasher unloaded and all the dishes in the sink washed.”

Neither of her children responded.

“Jer, I’m talkin’ to you, too,” she said a little louder. He was glued to the set, didn’t so much as look over his shoulder. “Jeremy!” She walked into the living room before realizing he was wearing earbuds buried deep in his ears so that he could blast his brain with music from his iPod while watching some reality show with what he called “hot whiny chicks.”

“Jeremy!” she yelled, tapping him on the shoulder.

“Wha—?” He looked up and, when he saw her stern expression, said again, “What?”

She yanked out one of the earbuds. “You feed the dog and unload the dishwasher, then do the dishes. It’s your week.”

“But Bianca—”

“Did them last week. You’re on, bud.”

“Yeah, right,” he groused, his gaze wandering back to the television.

“I mean it. And this mess”—she motioned to the paper plates and glasses stacked on the coffee table within easy reach of his highness—“needs to be picked up.”

“I’ll do ’em. Okay? Geez…”

“Good. I’ve got a witness.”

Bianca, too burned that she wasn’t being allowed to leave, didn’t even show any of her usual smugness or pleasure that Jeremy was being reamed. She was too busy texting what were probably notes of undying love to the man of her dreams, Chris, a lanky, dull-appearing boy who spoke in monosyllables and, unless Regan missed her guess, was a habitual marijuana smoker.

Which scared her to death.

Not that she hadn’t done her share of weed back in the day, when she’d been a little older than Bianca, but she’d had the good sense to leave it at that. Nothing stronger. Ever. And she’d left pot alone with her first pregnancy and had never looked back.

But these days, kids were different. Weed was different.

“You, get your homework done, too,” she said to her sullen, beautiful daughter. “And clean your room. It’s a mess.”

“It’s better than
his
,” she sneered, arching an eyebrow toward the couch while her fingers flew over the buttons of her cell phone.

“Yeah, I know, but he did make an effort last weekend. Believe me, he’s not off the hook; I’m just prioritizing. Living room and kitchen first, then I’ll tackle the mess in the dungeon.”

If Jeremy heard her, which she doubted, he had the good sense to ignore the jabs about his living area. “Okay, Bianca,” Regan said, “I’m serious about the room and homework. You’re going to go to your dad’s this weekend, so everything needs to get done before you leave.”

Bianca let out a long, put-upon sigh as Regan petted Cisco, then walked through the back door to the garage, where the temperature dropped decidedly.

Usually when the kids took off for the weekend, she spent at least one night out, sometimes both. Being home alone wore thin quickly and she figured it was her time for a little fun. But all her plans for this weekend had been put on hold so she could be ready to report in. It was near the middle of the month, the time the psycho struck. Though the victims had always been found later, the ME and forensic techs thought that the killer’s pattern suggested that he hunted his victims a week or so before the end of the month.

Which would be soon.

Everyone in the department was nervous, expecting to hear a call about an abandoned car or a dead woman tied to some lone tree somewhere in the mountains.

She wondered how many victims there might already be, women whose wrecked cars or frozen dead bodies, now probably picked at by animals, existed in the woods outside the small town where she’d lived most of her life.

“Don’t go there,” she told herself as she backed out of the garage, barely avoiding Jeremy’s truck, then turned around and drove carefully down the lane. Her access street wound between several trees before meeting the main road, but the snow was dry, not much ice beneath, and her tires got plenty of traction.

She and the kids lived five miles out of town, in the hills surrounding Grizzly Falls, and there was little traffic. She passed a snowplow scraping snow to the side of the road and one abandoned vehicle. She stopped to make sure no one was inside, then called it in and returned to her Jeep. With snow melting on her shoulders, she took the main road into town. The amount of vehicles increased as the road split and she headed to the part of the city located on the ridge overlooking the river. Ice had collected along the banks and the water was the color of steel as it cascaded over the steep rocks that defined the falls.

Parking in the outside lot, she walked briskly inside, her breath misting around her, the cold air slapping her cheeks as she pushed through the glass doors, signed in, then headed toward a back hallway and the rabbit warren of cubicles and offices of the department.

She dropped her things in her locker, grabbed a cup of coffee, made a little small talk with Trilby Van Droz, a road deputy and single mother whose only daughter was one year younger than Bianca. Trilby’s ex was worse than Lucky, skipping the state and paying child support just sporadically enough to irritate the hell out of her but keep her from running back to her attorney.

A few minutes later, she found Alvarez at her desk on the phone, her computer screen filled with images of the victims of the first serial killer in the history of Grizzly Falls.

“Brought you coffee,” Pescoli said, knowing that Alvarez was forever pouring herself a cup and letting it cool untouched on her desk.

“Thanks.” She took the cup and sipped without looking up.

“Anything new?”

“Nah. Not yet.”

“Still haven’t located Wendy Ito’s vehicle?”

Alvarez glanced her way. Her dark hair was pulled back neat and tight while Regan’s reddish curls were waiting to spring free of their clip. “I’ve been working on the notes,” she said, pulling a spiral notebook to the front of the desk. On the lined pages were the initials of the victims’ names, laid out in the order in which they had been printed in dark block letters, and between those letters Alvarez had filled in the blanks:

W      T      SC   I N

“Come up with anything?”

“Nothing that makes any sense. If it’s a message, the first word could be ‘what’ or maybe ‘wait,’ or the T might be the start of the next word. It looks like the S and C are supposed to be linked. For a word like ‘scene,’ or ‘school,’ or ‘scent’ or who knows? The N might go with it or not. Or it could be one long word, a warning, or—”