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Santana looked at the last note and in his mind he inserted Regan Pescoli’s initials into the unfinished line. “Beware the scorpion’s wrath,” he whispered faintly, feeling the blood rush from his head as he repeated Ivor Hicks’s weird phrase. He stared at the letters and the entire plot clicked together in his mind. Then he crushed the damned pages in his fist.
“Hey! What are you doing?”
“I heard that phrase just today.” His voice was flat. Dead.
“From who?” Chilcoate demanded.
“The father of the killer.” In that instant, Santana would stake his life on one clear fact: Billy Hicks was the Star-Crossed Killer. 412
Lisa Jackson
*
*
*
Alvarez still wasn’t at her desk, but Grayson knew she had come in earlier.
A dozen unanswered questions pounding through his head, he tried the task room where the temperature, like the rest of the department, was hovering high in the stratosphere. Zoller had been replaced by Scott Earhardt, another junior detective, who was now manning the desk. A window had been cracked, yet Earhardt was sweating. The big table was still littered with gum wrappers and empty cups from the earlier meeting, but so far, the searches had turned up empty.
Standing near the far wall, Alvarez was studying the map. She caught a glimpse of Grayson and her face muscles tightened. “Oh, God,” she whispered, paling slightly. “They found someone? O’Leary? Pescoli?”
“No.” He shook his head. “But I did get a call from Chandler. Hubert Long died this morning and Padgett flew the coop,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
He told her about Padgett leaving Mountain View Hospital and buying an airline ticket to San Francisco.
“I just spoke with the doctor today. She caught me when I was at the Lazy L, interviewing Clementine and Ross,” Alvarez protested.
“She left sometime after she heard about Brady’s death.”
“Left . . .” Alvarez sniffed and shook her head. “I don’t get it. You think she was faking her mental illness?”
“Seems unlikely.”
“More like unbelievable.”
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“I know.” He agreed. Had the same thoughts himself. “Fifteen years is a helluva long time.”
“You don’t think she’s—involved—in her brother’s homicide, do you?”
“How could she be?” Grayson asked, and they stared at each other.
“Well, then . . . why wait? If she knew a killer, why not hire him when she was first institutionalized?”
“Maybe she didn’t know anyone then. Maybe she met him there and he ended up here . . . Hell, I don’t know.” He mopped the sweat from his forehead. “Jesus H. Christ, it’s an oven in here.” He looked at the map. “Forget Padgett for now. What’ve you got?”
“Something’s been bothering me . . . well, not just one thing. Take a look at the map.” She pointed to each of the spots where vehicles or bodies had been located. “We’ve never found a correlation between the killing grounds and the spots where he took the women and left them. But every spot on the map is within a ten-mile radius of Cougar Basin and Mesa Rock, both of which are pretty much in the middle of all the dumping grounds.”
He was nodding. This wasn’t a news flash. “We’ve scoured that area.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
