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“Tonight.”
“One day at a time. And maybe they’ll help us.”
“Yeah, yeah.” But Pescoli couldn’t really argue. The press had come to the department’s aid in finding suspects in the past. Didn’t mean some of the members, including that worm Manny Douglas of the Mountain Reporter, didn’t bug the crap out of her. It wasn’t so much what Manny wrote, but how he handled himself, as if he were somehow more virtuous than the cops in the department, as if the Pinewood County Sheriff’s Department might be dirty.
Scumbag. But so far, he hadn’t appeared. As Clemmons headed to her vehicle, Pescoli dug into her pocket for her cell phone to call Santana and saw that he’d left a text: At the ER. Waiting. Not seen yet. Bianca in some pain, but holding up.
She wrote back: Ok. Still at the scene. Keep me posted. Home ASAP.
She didn’t mention that Bianca would be cited. After all, she had to leave some of the fun stuff for later, right? Once the whole family was back home and the trauma of the hospital was behind her, then Pescoli could lower the hammer. Oh, joy.
She clicked off and caught sight of Alvarez climbing out of her Subaru.
“Sorry I’m late,” Alvarez said. “Out of town.”
“I thought you were on vacation.”
Alvarez had been spending time with her biological son, Gabe, a teenager who lived with his adoptive parents.
“Got back a few hours ago,” she said. “The trip got cut short.”
“Why?”
“Addie,” she replied, mentioning Gabe’s adoptive mother. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay.”
Alvarez’s dark hair was slicked back into a ponytail. Like Pescoli, she hadn’t bothered with makeup, but somehow looked fresher, ready to go. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”
“The victim is up that trail.”
They headed out, Pescoli struggling to keep up with Alvarez, who was walking briskly, the beam of her flashlight bobbing along the trail ahead.
“Bianca was here?” she said. “Part of the party?”
“Yeah,” Pescoli admitted, still wondering about that. “She found the body, called it in, so the road deputies in the area got here before the kids had a chance to scatter.” There was a lot more to it than that, of course, but she’d fill in Alvarez later.
“Good.”
Selena Alvarez had been Pescoli’s partner for years, and they got along. It
had been a little rocky at first, as their backgrounds, educations, and viewpoints on life, as well as how they handled their jobs, were at odds, but they’d sorted most of that crap out. Alvarez came from a large family in Oregon somewhere, had gone to school, excelled, and worked by the book, a scientist who valued evidence far more than any gut instinct. Pescoli, on the other hand, was known to fly by the seat of her pants and relied on her own perceptions.
Even so, Pescoli had grudgingly come to respect the younger woman’s skills.
Straightforward, usually calm, Alvarez was relentless when it came to collecting evidence, checking and rechecking facts, and working a case by the book. Hers was never a forty- or even sixty-hour work week. Alvarez was a student of all things in life and she could think outside the box. She was also far more adept at today’s technology, was an Internet/social media whiz, and kept abreast of the most recent theories in psychology. However, she never wanted to bend the rules, which, in Pescoli’s mind, were meant to be pushed to the breaking point if need be. And, she found, “need be” turned out to be pretty often.
While Alvarez was calm under pressure, a cool head, Pescoli’s emotions often got the better of her.
“What’ve we got?” Alvarez asked as they walked along the dusty trail that wound along the creek.
Breathing hard, Pescoli filled her in on as much as she knew, which was, at that point, mostly what she’d learned from Bianca.
By the time they reached the spot where the victim lay in the shallows of the creek, Pescoli was sweating. Lights had been set up so they could view the scene, and insects were hovering above the stream, where a girl’s body was tangled in roots and stones. She was rapidly decomposing, her face disfigured and, in Pescoli’s estimation, unrecognizable. Techs were already combing the area around the creek while the EMTs, after confirming what was obvious, that she was deceased, were waiting for someone from the coroner’s office to arrive.
Pescoli’s stomach turned at the sight. Still, she crouched near the creek bed, shined the beam of her flashlight over the body.
The girl looked under twenty. Maybe around Bianca’s age and the age of most of the kids who were up here tonight. Had her death been an accident? Had she tripped and fallen here? Sustained head trauma? Had she been all alone in the forest or with someone? Had that someone killed her? Or harmed her and left her here to die? Could she have come out here to be alone in nature to take her own young life? If so, why?
