The resorts were northwest of town, many of them in the foothills of Glacier National Park. Part of the allure of Montana, especially this far north, was its rugged, secluded landscape, and Big Business knew this. The consortiums that came in and bought large tracks of land left as many trees standing as they could. The Huntington Spa was set back from the road and was perched on a small rise nestled between mature aspen and evergreen. On its list of amenities were snowshoeing, tobogganing, and tubing, and the place was classy enough not to charge an additional fee for the fun.
Nicole turned into the sweeping driveway and followed the blacktop to the front doors. The place was big, accommodating a maximum of 433 guests. A wall of paned glass let the ambient glow from the lobby seep into the parking lot. Christmas lights were strung from the eaves, red and green, yellow and blue, twinkling to the tune “Silver Bells.” A twenty-foot noble fir stood in the center of the lobby, lighted and tinseled. Beneath it were an assortment of boxes wrapped in bright paper. She parked and climbed out of the department Yukon, then looked back the way she’d come. Lake Maria, the site of their crime scene, was less than three miles southeast. How had their vic gotten there? Despite her time in the elements, Beatrice Esparza hadn’t looked chapped by the wind, and she’d died before frostbite could set in. There’d been no gray patches of skin nor missing fingers or toes, which were a common find in people exposed to the cold.
And somewhere along the way she’d taken off her coat, hat, scarf, and gloves. Had she bolted from a car, stopped along the Lake Road, suddenly fearful for her life? Or from a nearby home, chased by malignant intent?
They knew what their killer had wanted, but what about the soft-soled pursuer?
Nicole walked through the glass doors and stood with her hands on her hips as the warm air pressed against her skin. She turned and looked through the windows toward the horizon. Nothing yet. Sunrise was still a few hours away, but when it touched the sky and warmed the air, snow would fall from the banked clouds.
Her team was scrambling over the ice, preserving evidence. Still, much would be lost, destroyed by the weather. And there was nothing they could do about that. She had depleted her department of manpower and borrowed from MHP. Even Border Patrol had sent over dogs. She looked at her watch. They’d have arrived by now. A handful of German shepherds and their handlers prancing through the snowy woods. They would scent off the gloves easily. Where would it lead them?
The rapist-turned-murderer and the watcher.
Who was Beatrice Esparza? Why had she caught the attention of two predators?
Nicole approached reception and smiled at Daisy Le Duce. The woman had worked at the Huntington as long as Nicole had been in Toole County, but she was also the matron of the arts for the Summer Sunlit Festival and volunteered one evening each month at the lockup. She read Bible verses or recipes from the Betty Crocker All-American Cookbook—the only reading material currently allowed at the jail.
“The Esparza family,” Nicole said. “What room are they in, Daisy?”
The older woman was slow to move. The papery skin around her eyes crinkled and she leaned against the counter, closer to Nicole’s words. “She never came back, did she?” Daisy asked.
“Who?”
“The girl. Beatrice.”
Nicole removed her gloves and tucked them into her coat pockets. Then she leaned against the counter and studied Daisy’s open face. She was solid. She fussed some but stepped up more. “You saw her leave?”
“Yes. And I haven’t seen her since.”
“When was that?”
“Yesterday, around four, I think. When the family left for Christmas dinner.”
Twelve hours had passed. “And she didn’t return with the family?”
“No. I asked Dr. Esparza about her. Beatrice was a talker. Real friendly. She would have stopped by to say good-night.”
“But not yesterday?”
“No.”
“And you’ve been on shift?”
She nodded. “A double or swing every day this week and next—for the families, you know.”
Daisy’s husband had passed away two years ago and her children lived out of state. She visited them every spring, but they seldom came north to see their mother. Daisy filled in so others could spend time with their families over the holidays.
“Dr. Esparza? That’s Beatrice’s father?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say when you questioned him?”
“He said that Beatrice was tired,” Daisy informed her. “That she’d been on the slopes, in the hot tub, that the whole family had gotten up early to open presents, so a long day.”
Plausible. But it was 4:00 AM. The parents had to know their child was missing, and yet they hadn’t called the police. That was like waving a red flag in front of a bull.
“When did the Esparzas check in?”
“December twenty-first. They’re staying through the New Year.”
Nicole nodded. “Call their room.”
Daisy dialed and handed the phone to Nicole. It rang only twice before it was picked up, and the male voice on the other end was crisp, clear, and bore no evidence of sleep.
“Dr. Esparza?”
A long pause, and then the single word—“Yes”—wavered in the thick, slightly accented voice.
“My name is Nicole Cobain, sheriff of Toole County.” She waited. She let the moment draw out a full thirty seconds without a response and felt the tension gather on the other end of the line. She heard the exhale of breath, a steady, almost measured movement. She heard a voice behind him, in the room—muffled, rapid speech. “Sir?” she prompted.
“Yes, Sheriff?”
He put weight on her title, spoke louder than he had before. The changes weren’t subtle. He was sending someone in the room a message: police.
This wasn’t a first-time experience for Nicole. A call from the police made a person edgy. In the early-morning hours it intensified fear, narrowed purpose. Something was wrong, and it would be life changing.
“I’m on my way up, sir,” Nicole informed him. “Could you wake your wife, please?”
“She is awake,” he assured her.
Nicole took the elevator to the third floor and, following Daisy’s directions, turned right into a corridor that was more window than plaster. Outside, scattered light poles pressed back the shadows of evergreen trees. The courtyard had been shoveled, and the stone tables and benches were ready for seating around fire pits that were ignited at dawn and extinguished at 10:00 PM. Inside, the walls were covered in local art. Mostly landscapes, but there were a few canvas portraits. Nicole recognized Standing Bull and Asiniiwin, the Chippewa leader who had managed, through much strife, to keep peace during the Land Act years. Artifacts from the cowboy life were mounted on the walls—a frayed and obviously used lasso; a collection of spurs dating back, according to one placket, 118 years; and a series of shots of the once-famous Jim Shoulders, the sixteen-time pro-rodeo world champion, in full motion atop a Brahman bull.
The Wild West was a best seller.
She found the room and knocked on the door. She let a moment pass and then identified herself through the solid wood, keeping her tone even. She was aware of three things: their daughter was dead; if Beatrice Esparza had gone missing, the family had neglected to alert police; and Dr. Esparza was a careful man.
He answered the door wearing flannel pajama bottoms and a hooded sweat shirt. He stood an inch or two shorter than Nicole and was slim and graying. A small dagger of hair grew under his bottom lip.
“Come in.” He stepped back and allowed Nicole into the suite.
Mrs. Esparza sat on the couch, perched on the very edge of it, with her hands clasped between her knees. She was wrapped in a fleece robe but hadn’t removed her makeup. Their son, whom Dr. Esparza introduced as Joaquin, slouched in the doorway of one of the bedrooms. His long hair was pulled back in a ponytail.
None of them looked like they had slept.
The tension in the room vibrated with a frequency Nicole wasn’t able to tap into. It was more than the arrival of bad news. This family had been awake and alert long before Nicole arrived. If the exhaustion around their eyes and the tightness of their shoulders and limbs were anything to go by, they’d been waiting for Nicole about as long as they’d been waiting for Beatrice.
“You have a daughter,” Nicole began.
“Yes, Beatrice,” the mother said. She leaned forward, and Nicole recognized the look of hope in the woman’s eyes, the defeat in her flat mouth. And Nicole felt a tremor in her own limbs, an unsteady connection to this woman, this mother, who was not unlike Nicole herself, whose worst nightmare would be the loss of her son. Her stomach churned with the news she would impart. There were no soft words, there would be no promises. Simply an end.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Esparza,” Nicole began.
“Have you found her?” the mother persisted.
“You knew she was missing?” Nicole countered. “But you didn’t call the police.”
“We weren’t sure,” Dr. Esparza stepped into the conversation. “She has friends here already. They could be talking and she lost track of time.”
“We told her be back at two. She’s not so late that we should call the police.”
They were grasping at hope. Did they already sense how slippery it was? How fragile?
“I wish I had better news,” Nicole said. She stood in the center of the room, turned so that the mother was her focal point but also so that she could keep both male Esparzas in her scope. Her words caused a ripple through the family. Shoulders jerked; facial tics were triggered. The tension inside Mrs. Esparza reached a breaking point and was released in a sharp humming from her lips. “We found Beatrice early this morning, out on Lake Maria. She’s dead.”
Joaquin straightened in the doorway then, his arms dropping to his sides. “You’re wrong,” he said.
A whistling noise rose from the throat of Mrs. Esparza, almost as if her airway had narrowed.
Dr. Esparza wavered on his feet. His hands were stuffed into the pocket of his hoodie and his elbows flapped once, twice.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Nicole said. She made her breaths long and deep and waited, mired in their pain. Steady. Ready to offer what she could but unable to ignore a voice in the back of her brain. Some things weren’t adding up. The tension in the room when she’d entered, the division she sensed between the family members. The body of a young girl on a frozen lake.
Nicole thought of Jordan at home, sleeping peacefully, and wanted to be there, with her son, holding him, though he was much too old for that and seldom allowed it now.
“We need a positive identification,” Nicole said, and pulled the snow bunny ID pass, still in its evidence bag, out of her coat pocket. She held it up, and the father closed the space between them. He touched his fingers to the plastic, and Nicole noticed their fine tremor. He stroked his daughter’s face and confirmed, “Yes, my daughter. My beautiful Beatrice.”
Mrs. Esparza began keening then, and her husband crossed the room and sat down beside her. Joaquin kept his vigilance in the doorway. There was more in his face than shock; there was surprise. He had believed he’d hear something else. His parents had hoped for something different, but the teen had actually expected it.
Later that day, Esparza would have to come to the hospital for an official ID. Nicole explained this to him.
“Of course,” he agreed immediately, but his voice was hollow, the words adrift. He held his wife’s hand, and his gaze was fixed on their woven fingers.
Nicole stepped farther into the room, hoping to draw his attention.
“When was the last time you saw your daughter, sir?” Nicole directed her question to the father but watched Joaquin. The shock in the young man’s face eased and the surprise morphed into something else. Grief, certainly, but anger too.
“Dr. Esparza?” Nicole prompted.
“Last night. We had dinner together and returned to the room,” he said.
“Eight twenty.” The words were whispered, patchy. Mrs. Esparza lifted her eyes from the study of her hands and hooked Nicole’s gaze. “We left the room at eight twenty, my husband and I.”
“We skied the moonlight run,” Dr. Esparza clarified.
“Yesterday we stayed in with the girls—our little ones. They have colds.”
“We have two young daughters,” the doctor said. “Not even teenagers yet.”
“They are eight and ten,” the mother said.
Color was slowly returning to their faces and strength to their words.
“And you, Joaquin? When was the last time you saw your sister?”
Nicole stepped toward him. The young man was lanky, had more height than his father but the same slim build. But where his sister had had rounded cheeks and curves, he was broad angles and plains. And no small amount of defiance. His arms were crossed again and he shrugged before answering.
“Last night. We ordered cable.” His gaze adjusted until he was staring at the blank face of the flat-screen TV. “I brewed hot chocolate in the coffeepot.”
“What was the movie?”
“Fast and Furious six.”
“Did Beatrice watch with you?”
“Some. She only likes reality shows.”
“What time did she leave the room?”
“I didn’t see her leave.”
“The movie was that good?”
“I went to bed,” Joaquin said. “I was tired.”
“What time?”
He eased his shoulder against the jamb and didn’t pretend to give her question thought. “Nine thirty.”
She called his bluff. “It doesn’t look like you ever made it to bed.” The pajamas, for all his vinegar, could simply be a costume call.
Nicole turned to the parents. “What time did you get back to the room?”
“After eleven,” the father said.
“It was midnight,” the mother corrected.
“Exactly?”
“I heard the bells chime in the lobby. I think there’s a clock there. It chimed twelve times as we were waiting for the elevator.”
Dr. Esparza spread his hands. “So it was midnight.”
“Where do you live?”
“Live?” Dr. Esparza repeated, struggling with the change in questioning.
“Yes. You’re here on vacation, right?”
“Oh, yes.” He shook his head—an attempt to clear his mind. “San Diego.”
“You don’t get a lot of skiing in there,” she commented. “Are you a medical doctor, sir?”
“Yes. Oncology,” he offered.
Nicole nodded. “Is the purpose of this trip solely vacation?”
“We ski every Christmas holiday,” the mother said. “Last year it was Telluride.”
“The year before, Stowe,” Dr. Esparza continued. “Every year we find the snow. For Christmas.”
“Do you work, Mrs. Esparza? Outside the home?”
“No, not anymore.”
“She was a nurse,” Dr. Esparza said.
“For a few short years.”
“How old are you, Joaquin?”
“Seventeen.”
“And Beatrice?”
“Fourteen,” the mother said. “June fourth, two thousand five. Her birthday. Just one day before mine.”
Nicole pulled a small notebook out of her coat pocket. She’d make a note of the important details of their conversation when she got back to the Yukon. When she interviewed people, especially the first pass, she liked to watch their faces, read their body language, which often told her more than words or tone.
“We’ll need some information,” she told them. “Your full names—all of you, Beatrice included—ages, address, phone numbers.” She handed the notebook to the doctor and then gave her full attention to Joaquin.
“Your sister left to meet with friends?”
He shrugged, as much as he could and still maintain his sloucher pose against the doorjamb. “I don’t know. Probably.”
“But she has some here? New acquaintances?”
“We’ve met a few people on the slopes. We’ve been invited to parties and stuff.”
“Could Beatrice have gone to a party last night?”
His gaze remained steady. “Maybe, but she didn’t tell me that.”
“Would she have told you?”
He seemed to think about that. “Yes.”
“Sheriff?” Dr. Esparza stood. His wife sat in his shadow, teetering on the edge of the couch. He extended his hand and offered her the notebook. It was open, and Nicole could see that he had filled the page with a thin, scratchy print she would have difficulty reading.
Nicole left Joaquin at the door and pocketed her notebook, but she had a few more questions for the Esparzas.
“Was Beatrice sick?”
“You mean like a cold? The flu?” Dr. Esparza asked.
“I mean like bronchitis or pneumonia.”
“No,” the mother answered. “Not even the sniffles.”
“But your younger girls have colds?”
Dr. Esparza stepped forward. “Yes, we told you that. And Beatrice was rarely sick. She took care of herself. She ate the right foods, took vitamins. She trained. Exercised regularly. She expected more from her body than illness.”
“She’s a top runner,” Mrs. Esparza added, and she smiled brightly though her tears were still falling. “Always first place.”
High expectations, and Nicole wondered, how wide a margin had they given their daughter for failure? For learning? For being a teenage girl craving exploration and independence?
“Then why was she prescribed Augmentin?” Nicole asked.
Dr. Esparza shook his head. “You’re wrong. Beatrice had no need for the medication, and had she, it never would have been Augmentin.”
“Beatrice is allergic to anything in the penicillin family,” the mother explained.
Nicole chewed on that, then pulled her smartphone from her parka pocket. She asked the Esparzas for a moment’s patience and pressed speed dial for Lars.
“Yeah, Chief?” Lars’s voice was sharp, slightly breathless. He was still in the field, knee-deep in yesterday’s snowfall and rummaging for any beacon of evidence.
“You close to the evidence bin?”
“I’m sitting on it.”
He’d pulled chain-of-evidence duty.
“Good. I want you to take a picture of the pill bottle—get Beatrice’s name, doctor’s name, drug, and dosage—and send it to me.”
“Doing it, but do you want to tell me why?”
“Beatrice didn’t get sick,” Nicole informed him. She sensed that the Esparzas weren’t raising merely a child in Beatrice. The girl had been in training, possibly from conception. Cultivated—mind, body, spirit—for high performance. The doctor’s tone had said as much. And that bothered Nicole. “And she was allergic to Augmentin.”
There was a pause on the other end, and then Lars said, “No shit?”
“No.” Cell to ear, she glanced at the Esparzas. Joaquin leaned. Mrs. Esparza rocked. The doctor stood, hands in pockets, elbows twitching, eyes locked on Nicole.
“Done,” Lars announced, and a moment later a ding sounded from her cell. She ended the call.
“We found a pill bottle,” Nicole explained. She walked deeper into the room until she met the windows, the drawn curtains, and turned. It put her closer to Joaquin, to Mrs. Esparza, and left the doctor outside the tight circle Nicole had created. “The prescription is written out for Beatrice. Five hundred milligrams of Augmentin, two times daily.”
“One thousand milligrams daily?” Dr. Esparza stopped just short of a scoff.
Mrs. Esparza shook her head. “That’s too much. A girl her size, half that would do.”
“But she’s allergic to Augmentin,” Nicole pointed out.
“If she wasn’t allergic,” the mother said. “If she were prescribed that, as you say.”
“What happened to Beatrice if she took Augmentin? What symptoms?”
“A rash. It’s called a body flush, because on Beatrice it erupted on her torso, traveled up her throat and into her underarms,” Mrs. Esparza explained. “It’s itchy and uncomfortable, and Beatrice would never take it. She knew better.”
“And she was never sick anyway.” Nicole continued to probe.
“She wasn’t.” Joaquin spoke, and his voice fell on the room like a solid chunk of cement. Strong, heavy, unyielding.
Nicole chose to ignore him for now and continued with the doctor.
She opened the attachment Lars had sent her. The photo was blurry, but the type on the prescription label was readable. “You want to guess the name of the prescribing physician?”
“Not my husband,” Mrs. Esparza said. “No, never. That is against ethics. He wouldn’t do that.”
“He wouldn’t make so big a mistake, Mrs. Esparza?” Nicole led. “He wouldn’t prescribe his daughter a drug he knew she was allergic to? Or a dosage that was too much? Or he wouldn’t risk his career by prescribing for family?”
“I would not,” the doctor interrupted. “And I did not.” He paced to the edge of their circle. “You’re mistaken, Sheriff.”
Nicole held his gaze as she lifted the cell phone. His eyelashes flickered. Creases fanned out from the corners of his eyes. Then he disconnected and focused on the incriminating photo.