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CHOSEN TO DIE
47
Her heart jolted and she swallowed back a cry as she recognized the noise: a chair scraping back. Wood against stone. Then she heard the pad of heavy footsteps, like bare skin against rock. She could barely breathe.
Someone was coming for her.
She felt a moment’s relief and then a darker emotion filled her soul. Dread oozed through her blood. A gut instinct told her that whoever was beyond the thick oak planks of the door wasn’t her savior.
Though she didn’t know why, couldn’t remember the reason for her distrust, she sensed instinctively that the person who had brought her here wasn’t someone upon whom she could rely. He’s not your savior, but your jailor. She swallowed back her fear and tried to think. She believed that the person who had brought her here was consumed with a horrifying and malicious intent.
She braced herself.
Waited.
But the footsteps passed by her door.
For the moment, she’d gotten a reprieve. But she knew deep in her gut, it wouldn’t last long.
Then in a blinding second of realization, she remembered. Everything.
Her heart froze and she stared at the door as if her gaze could burn through the thick oak panels of an ancient, scarred door to the room beyond where the goddamned Star-Crossed Killer waited.
*
*
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48
Lisa Jackson
“You get hold of her?” the sheriff asked as he passed by Alvarez’s cubicle. Dressed in a sheepskin jacket, boots, and gloves, Grayson was headed outside, his black Lab Sturgis in tow, the brim of his battered Stetson in the fingers of one hand. He paused at Alvarez’s desk.
“Not yet.”
“Aw . . . shit.” His jaw slid to the side and his eyes sparked in frustration. She supposed that once he would have been described as tall, dark, and handsome. And probably not that long ago. But these days, with winter raging and disabling the county and a serial killer hunting on his watch, Grayson was borderline gaunt, his face craggy, his hair shot with silver, his expression hard-set and grim. And still, she thought, the most interesting man she’d met in a long, long while.
Grayson, like Alvarez, wasn’t satisfied that the woman being held in the Spokane jail really was the serial killer who had been terrorizing Grizzly Falls. Only when he and the rest of the officers of the sheriff’s department were convinced that the murderer was no longer on the loose, raining terror on the community in the middle of the worst damned blizzard Pinewood County had seen in half a century, would any of them rest easy. Especially with one of the lead detectives on the case gone missing.
“This isn’t good,” he said in his low drawl. “Try again.”
“I will, but trust me, Pescoli’s not picking up. I told you the last call I got from her she asked me to cover for her, that she had a personal issue.”
“Family problems, you said.”
“With her ex. About the kids. She didn’t elaborate.”
His eyes darkened. “That was yesterday,” he said,
CHOSEN TO DIE
49
echoing her own thoughts. “Find her. Send someone to check her place. There should be a deputy out in that direction. Rule, may
be. Or Watershed. Check with them.” Kayan Rule was a road deputy for the department who looked more like a power forward for the NBA than a cop. She had no bone to pick with him. Watershed, on the other hand, was a real pain in the ass. A good cop, but a jerk who liked crude jokes and considered himself some kind of lady killer.
