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“Sicko.” Selena’s jaw hardened as she glanced
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through a nearby ice-crusted window to the gloomy day beyond. Steely gray clouds huddled over the mountains, dumping snow, threatening a blizzard. Already parts of the county were experiencing downed lines and no power as the temperatures plummeted far below freezing.
“Merry Christmas,” she told herself, as the holiday was just around the corner. She tossed the picture of the first victim onto her desk with the rest and gazed at the grouping. Alvarez felt as if she knew all the victims intimately: Theresa Charleton, married, no children, a schoolteacher from Boise, Idaho, who had been visiting her parents in Whitefish, Montana. Her nude body had been found lashed to the bole of a hemlock tree, her initials and a star cut into the bark, a note nailed above her head with the same information from the killer, the man whom they suspected shot out the tire of her green Ford, then, after the car had spun out of control and been totaled, extricated Charleton from the wreckage and took her somewhere to nurture her back to health. This before cruelly and savagely hauling her to a remote spot in the forest, tying her to a tree, and leaving her to die with her initials carved into the bark of the tree. A note had been left, her initials printed in bold block letters: T C
Now Alvarez stared at the picture of Theresa’s face taken at the crime scene far from where her car had been located. The other victims had each suffered a similar fate: Nina Salvadore, a single mother from Redding, California, whose crushed red Focus had been discovered miles from her body. The note left at that scene had read: 40
Lisa Jackson
T SC N
No one, not even cryptologists nor agents with the FBI with cryptogram-busting computer programs, had understood the meaning of the notes. Afterward, in rapid succession, the bodies of Wendy Ito and Rona Anders had been located. Then Hannah Estes had been found alive near an abandoned hunting lodge by a news crew and taken to a hospital, only to die later as the disguised killer had boldly entered the hospital, yanking her life support and making certain she expired. Hannah hadn’t been able to tell what she knew, or identify her killer, nor had any of the hospital cameras taken a decent photo of his image.
Bad damned luck.
All of the women had been driving alone through this area of the Bitterroot Mountains when their cars had been assaulted and they’d been taken from the original crime scene to be nurtured, then, like Charleton and Salvadore before them, had been strapped to a tree in a remote location and left to die an icy, brutal death. The notes and carvings at the scenes had only been different because of the positions of the stars and initials, but the result had been the same: Five women dead, the final note now reading:
WAR THE SC I N
With each victim’s initials added into the text, the sheriff’s department and FBI had come up with different ideas for the meaning of the letters, thinking perhaps that they could be jumbled, or that the
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killer was just screwing with them, that there was no meaning at all.
But deep down, they all knew that the killer, a very organized and clever person, was not only trying to tell them something, he was lording it over them that he was smarter than they. If his note was to make any sense, then he’d obviously picked out his victims before they’d been put through his personal emotional gauntlet of wrecking their vehicles,
“saving” them, nursing them back to health somewhere, and then ruthlessly and cruelly leaving them to die in the wilderness.
He hadn’t sexually molested any of them. That seemed out of place.
His dominance wasn’t physical, so much as emotional. As far as they could tell, he set the women up, could just as easily have killed them, shot them in the head, or left them to die in their vehicles, but he rescued them, then abandoned them, assured they would die.
So far, he’d been right.
Except that now, if the Spokane Police and press were to be believed, the killer had supposedly been unmasked and captured . . . and he had turned out to be a she.
No way.
Alvarez took a sip of her cooling tea, then found a cough drop and sucked on it as she read over her notes for the dozenth time. As she did she was more certain than ever that Regan Pescoli was in trouble. She tried Lucky Pescoli’s house phone one more time and heard a cheery little voice, that of his wife Michelle, nearly giggling as she said, “You’ve reached 42
Lisa Jackson
Lucky and Michelle. We’re out right now, but leave a message and maybe . . . you’ll get Lucky!”
Puke. Alvarez hated those pathetically cutesy voicemail greetings. She didn’t bother leaving a message. Just sucked on her menthol drop and flipped through copies of the notes the killer had left. Craig Halden, one of the FBI field agents working the case, had carefully mapped out the stars left on the notes and chiseled into the bark of the trees where the women had been found. Using tracing paper he had overlapped the notes to show the position of the stars and in so doing decided the killer had chosen the constellation of Orion focusing on Orion’s belt. Alvarez had done her own research on the subject and found that in mythology Orion was stung by a scorpion, then flung high into the sky.
If her theory was right and the last word of the note was scorpion as in WAR OF THE SCORPION, or, the phrase she was partial to, due to the spacing of the letters: BEWARE THE SCORPION, then theoretically, Regan Pescoli, with her initials of R and P, could be i
n real trouble.
As Grace Perchant had predicted.
