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“That’s the avenue I’m taking.”
“Doesn’t it seem a little too obvious? To leave a print on the one piece of evidence that’s located? There’s not a second shoe, and that’s the only print on Pope’s Mercedes. Lots of other prints all over that car,” she corrected herself. She was thinking aloud. “The Cantnor woman’s purse wasn’t located, but the second victim’s bag was found fairly easily and it had that identifying print.”
“But any way you look at it, this woman is at the top of the suspect list. Right now, she’s all we’ve got. She’s obviously involved, we just don’t know how. I’ve got a call in to the New Orleans PD and Zoller is checking all the newspaper and police databases, looking for information about Calderone.” Sage Zoller was a junior detective with the department. Tiny and fit, she ran marathons, mentored at-risk teens and was a techno wiz kid. A dynamo. “She’ll report back to us.”
“Good.”
At that moment, Alvarez’s cell phone rang. She answered, “Detective Alvarez,” then held up a finger. “Thanks for calling back, Detective Montoya. We’ve got a situation up here—a couple homicides—and we found the same fingerprint at both scenes. Looks like it belongs to Anne-Marie Calderone. I was hoping you could supply me with a little more information about her as she’s just become a person of interest up here.”
She nodded at Pescoli and headed out of the office.
Pescoli rolled her chair closer to the desk, where she brought up the basic information on Anne-Marie Favier Calderone from New Orleans. The woman’s driver’s license picture and information appeared on the screen and though, more often than not, the photo taken at the DMV was usually pretty damn bad, this woman was stunning with her large eyes, easy smile, and oval face. Her hair was a deep brow
n with red highlights, shoulder-length and thick, her height and weight consistent with someone who kept herself in shape.
Pescoli stared long and hard at the photo. Was she looking into the face of a cold-blooded killer? A woman who took satisfaction, even joy, in cutting off fingers and diamonds?
She found herself playing with her own ring and stopped. This was insane. Or was it?
“No way,” she said aloud, but, of course, she couldn’t argue the facts. Anne-Marie Calderone was connected to the dead women. Pescoli just had to figure out how.
Chapter 24
Shivering, the cold of the morning seeping into her bones, Anne-Marie said, “I’m not going back to New Orleans.” She stared pointedly at the man in shadow. “Gun or no gun.” But she did climb off the couch, her bare feet touching the floor. “Come on in. You don’t have to guard the damn door. Where do you think I’m going in this?”
As if to add emphasis to her words, the wind squealed around the house and the damn limb started banging against the exterior wall again. Ignoring him, she walked the few steps to the fireplace and went to work, grabbing chunks of split wood she’d hauled inside the night before, prodding at the charred logs with the poker, searching for an ember glowing red beneath the ash. When she had success, she blew on the coals so that they burned brighter, a flame sparking against the moss and dry hemlock as the wood caught fire.
Settling back on her heels, she watched as the flames began to grow, crackling as they devoured the fuel. Her fingers tightened over the poker still in her right hand. She didn’t want to harm Ryder, but she wasn’t going back to Louisiana with him. No way. She never wanted to see her family again and there was a chance that he would find her there. Now that she felt a new security, that she realized it was Ryder who had been following her rather than the monster who had tossed her into the Mississippi, she could finally feel some sort of relief and believe that she did have a chance for a new life for herself. A life without any ties to the past and that included Troy Ryder.
“Drop it,” he ordered.
Still crouching near the grate, she looked over her shoulder to see that he still had the gun pointed at her. For the love of God, did he really think she believed for a second that he would shoot her? She didn’t let go of the poker, but stared at him over her shoulder. He was still near the door, about eight feet from her. If she sprang and swung, she might be able to hit him hard. She needed to take his advantage away and somehow, remove his gun. She had the poker, and her little switchblade was hidden in the folds of the clothes she’d piled near the couch.
Maybe there was some way to disarm him, gain the upper hand. As the fire burned brighter and hotter, the room lightened. Finally she saw his face, no longer in complete shadow and her heart twisted again. His was a rugged visage. His features were oversized—his jaw strong, big eyes deep in his sockets, a nose that had been broken a couple times, a hard line of a mouth, and a square jaw covered in a couple of days’ worth of stubble.
“I said, ‘drop it,’ Anne-Marie. Don’t even think about it.”
Her grip tightened.
“Jesus, are you serious? You think you’re going to get the better of me with a poker?”
“You won’t shoot me. I’m not going back to New Orleans. Not ever.” The fire popped then and her muscles jumped. Then, as if he’d been reading her thoughts all along, she saw him reach into his pocket with his free hand only to withdraw a stick of some kind . . .
Click! Her switchblade snapped open in his hand, its spring-loaded blade suddenly reflecting the shifting light from the fire.
“How—?” Inadvertently, her gaze slid to the stack of folded clothes where she was certain she’d hidden the deadly knife. She didn’t finish the sentence. Her mind spinning, she wondered how the hell he’d known she had it, how he’d found it as well as the gun. She’d assumed he’d guessed she had hidden a weapon under her pillow, but the knife from her clothes? Had he rifled through her things while looking for the pistol and found the switchblade first, then continued his stealthy search while she’d been restlessly sleeping unaware or had he . . .
“You spied on me?” she charged, astounded, her mind taking hold of the idea and churning wildly. “You were in here before and planted devices and spied on me?” That was a big leap, a major vault, but he didn’t immediately deny it. She remembered feeling as if she were being watched, that though the shades had been drawn, the doors locked tightly, that there had been hidden eyes following her every move. “What is wrong with you?”
“I had to make certain that Jessica Williams was really Anne-Marie Calderone. And that my leads were right, that Jessica was also the same person as Stacey Donahue in Denver and Heather Brown earlier on.”
Dear God, how long had he been following her? He knew all of it.
“I wasn’t going to barge in on the wrong person, so I had to make sure.”
She shook her head, disbelieving, not even understanding how he, a damn half-broke rodeo rider, could understand about high tech electronics. It suddenly occurred to her that because their romance had been so white-hot and rushed and she’d decided to marry him after knowing him only a few weeks, there was much more to the cowboy from somewhere in West Texas than met the eye. She hadn’t known him and his secrets any better than he’d known her and the lies that were the bones of her past.
But now she wanted to.
