Patience was not a virtue. Not in a homicide investigation.
Patience allowed a lead to run cold and a case to enter deep freeze. They were on a collision course with the midnight hour, and statistically speaking, that meant their chances of finding their killer would take a nose dive. Nicole sat in the driver’s seat of the Yukon with the engine idling and steam from the exhaust billowing around the vehicle. Sometimes you had to slow down, like when a thought was bordering your awareness. Exactly what she hadn’t done in the Esparzas’ hotel room, when she should have noticed the absence of the girls’ coats in the closet Mrs. Esparza had flung wide open.
It was 5:40, and in the dead of winter that meant the sun was already hidden behind the mountains and the sky was a sketch in charcoals. The lights inside the station were a somber yellow glow that didn’t quite reach Nicole where she remained with her vehicle, her memory playing a deadly game of hide-and-seek with her consciousness.
Her conversation with MacAulay had her reaching back into that hotel room. Had her rummaging through images like they were snapshots in her hands. But which of his words had triggered that search, and what in particular was she looking for?
Strangulation is personal.
And she supposed that was true. Unarmed, an assailant could be reduced to the menial labor of murder. Some probably preferred it, got off on proximity and the power of taking life. But it wasn’t the norm. It wasn’t efficient. It wasn’t choice.
Nothing personal … Joaquin’s words tangled with MacAulay’s.
Beatrice. Nicole’s mind suddenly lit on it. There had been no outward signs of the victim’s presence in the living space the family shared, except for her journal. No snow boots at the door, sweaters thrown over the back of a chair. No books or magazines that would appeal to a teen girl. No jewelry taken off and left on the coffee table. No sign of Beatrice at all.
And yet she was remembered by hotel staff. She’d been a regular, passing through the lobby, drinking cocoa and roasting marshmallows on the patio.
Nicole needed back in that hotel room. She needed to confirm what she suspected, that when Beatrice Esparza disappeared, she’d done it fully packed and with no intention of looking back.
Nicole cut the engine and slid out of the Yukon. She walked into the squad room just as Lars was rising from his desk, cell to ear. He hung up, shrugged into his coat, and said to her, “Forty-five.”
As in percent. Their chances of apprehending their killer fell by forty-five percent once a day stood between them and the crime.
Nicole nodded in acknowledgment. “Where are you headed?” she asked.
At this time on an average day, his answer would be that he was going home. Unless his daughter had a volleyball game, but then he would be slipping into his sweat shirt, Blue Mesa High School stamped on it with the raging-bull mascot breaking through the ball, and not into his parka.
“Judge Williams signed the order,” Lars told her. “The kids will be questioned by a court-appointed child psychologist tomorrow morning.”
“And you’re going to deliver the order yourself?”
He nodded. “You want to come?”
“I was headed there anyway.”
He held her gaze as he finished buttoning his parka. “Why?”
“I didn’t see Beatrice Esparza in their hotel room,” she said. “It wasn’t just the absence of her coat, her purse. There was almost a complete absence of the girl.”
Lars thought about that, nodding slowly. “Yeah. I didn’t see anything that screamed teenage girl.”
“Except her journal.”
“You think she forgot that?”
“She could have left it on purpose. Some kind of statement. I don’t think it matters. Not as much as the fact that she packed up and left.”
“And what made her do so.”
“Exactly.” She turned and walked with him toward the door. “You drive, and I’ll tell you about what I learned from MacAulay.” They headed out of town and into the ski resort area, passing signs for Deer Run and Jagged Ridge as they waded deeper into the tourist hub. Lars already knew that King was not their killer. She had called that in. Now she told him about the suture lines and MacAulay’s discovery—the crater where a cancerous tumor had been but miraculously disappeared.
“What did Esparza say about his discovery?” Lars posed as he searched his own memory. “Something about the bad cells having a change of heart and turning into cheerleaders?”
“Champions,” Nicole corrected. “He said they championed the body.”
Nicole settled into her seat. She wondered about Esparza’s discovery. If he had found a way to turn back time and disease, certainly there would be more activity around the doctor. Protections and demands. Why wasn’t he hidden away, like Oz, behind a shroud of secrecy?
“There’s a flaw,” she decided. “In Esparza’s discovery.”
“Always,” Lars agreed. “Or getting it into clinical trials would have happened.”
“But even with its flaws, it’s big enough to stir up the pharm companies.”
“They eat guys like Esparza.”
“You think it’s happened before?”
“They like to keep the tempo steady,” he said. “When we were going through Amber’s treatment and recovery, I got the feeling that there was a measured pacing with medicine, with discoveries and allocations—who got what drug and when. There are people deciding every day who will live and who will die, and it all comes down to money. A cure for cancer—” The thought settled on Lars in a deep frown. “That would shake up the world. A way to turn every sick cell into a super cell? Pharm companies would be reduced to aspirin pushers.”
“All but the one who owned Nueva Vida.”
“Esparza’s lying,” Lars said. “About several things.” And he began to list them. “He has documentation.”
“Or he would have been taken off the board already.”
“Exactly. There’s a reason they kept him alive.”
And Nicole thought about Esparza’s single text message to his daughter: Cooperate. Maybe she hadn’t. There were rules in every game played, and maybe Beatrice hadn’t followed them.
“And King is more than we think,” Lars continued. “He’s more than an interested party, more than a father who took a step off the deep end.”
“Whatever the game is, it crushed him.”
“You heard him,” Lars said. “He lamented Beatrice’s compassion. It broke him up that she had died on the board.”
“Almost as much as it disturbed him that his own daughter wouldn’t know a cure for her disease.”
“I got that feeling, too. He was counting on Beatrice.”
“And he was grateful.”
“And saddened. He’d lost hope for his daughter, for Beatrice, and something else.”
Nicole nodded. “And that something else was the breaking point. Guilt of some kind,” Nicole posed. “But not about Nueva Vida. He felt good about what they were doing, but not how they were doing it.”
“Maybe it caught up with him. The ethics. Desperation twists a person beyond recognition sometimes.”