The towers stood 328 feet tall, each with three blades that tilted slowly, creating a whooshing sound as they picked up and recycled the air. There were several wind farms in Toole County now, and Nicole had grown used to them. It seemed that every time she descended a mountain pass, it was into a stretch of valley populated by the turbines. She didn’t like them. There had been too many accidents in the few years since they went up, and jurisdiction had recently shifted from the county to the state so that even Nicole had trouble figuring out who was responsible for regulating their safety.
That morning, with the sun just rising and the shadows of the turbines elongating, an unnatural hush fell over the hills. Nicole knew that silence was deceptive.
She had stayed with the Esparza family for more than an hour and during that time had received few straight answers about the night before. Perhaps nothing accurate about their stay in Montana. When a simple yes or no to a direct question was called for, Nicole had gotten evasion: Did you watch TV with your sister? She only likes reality shows … Does Beatrice have friends here? We’ve met a few people on the slopes … Did Beatrice go to a party? Maybe, but she didn’t tell me that …
Until she’d asked if Beatrice had left the room willingly. Then Joaquin’s reply had been explosive.
She’d left. She wasn’t taken. She wasn’t coerced. And it angered Joaquin. But that was the perspective of a seventeen-year-old boy, and the act was tangled in the barbed wire of pubescent emotion. Was it truth? Or was it as skewed as the other answers Nicole had received?
She needed to decide a point of entry into the investigation. Murder was the certainty, but how had Beatrice arrived at that moment?
Rendezvous or runaway? Or neither?
The mother’s sharp keening had reached deeply into Nicole’s heart and, like fingers stirring a pool of water, left turbulence where before there had been peace. She wanted to see Jordan. To wake him, put his breakfast on the table. Motherly things. Normal things. Because despite what MacAulay had said, normal did exist. For her it did, because she had created it. She relied on it. When life got crazy, she bumped along its shores seeking anchor.
She turned the Yukon south, the tires singing on the wet pavement as she drove toward the town proper of Blue Mesa—a main street, stubbornly called Merry Weather Boulevard, and two crossroads. A diner, an art gallery, several outdoor adventure shops, and a grocery store. The station was isolated from commercial business and took up half the block on the east end. Gas stations and mini-marts, fast-food pit stops and a coin-operated car wash were perched atop freeway exits but still close enough to Blue Mesa to be a convenience. Open space, rolling hills, quiet homes—modern and rustic—and rugged mountain peaks were like a membrane that surrounded their little piece of the pie and isolated them from a bigger, badder world. Usually. The familiar sights made for an easy ride that let her think.
She began a mental catalog of all she knew so far about Beatrice Esparza. The girl had been in the ninth grade, had earned high academic marks and enjoyed cross-country running—she’d won several first- and second-place finishes, her mother had boasted through her tears. She’d had a social group, was extroverted and made friends easily.
Beatrice Esparza was no stranger to responsibility. Grades were earned and honor roll was not easily attained. Placing in a sporting event took discipline and training. Would Beatrice sneak away, into the cold and dark, in a strange place? Teenage hormones aside, Nicole was leaning toward no.
They’d eaten Christmas dinner at five o’clock—the steak house on Queens Road—and returned to the resort after that. That was the story Dr. Esparza had given her. The waiter would probably remember the family as a whole—but individually? Could a witness confirm Beatrice’s presence? It was worth sending a deputy out to check.
The victim and the brother, Joaquin, had stayed up and watched—or not watched—a movie on cable after the two little girls went to sleep. They’d used the microwave for popcorn and brewed hot chocolate using the coffeemaker. Joaquin had turned in before Beatrice. The parents had taken the moonlight run at the resort and returned to their room at midnight. They didn’t check on the kids—the girls were light sleepers and the parents didn’t want to disturb them.
Or Beatrice had gone to a party, leaving before or after her parents. Nicole had taken another shot at that line of questioning but with no progress. Joaquin had been unrelenting in his pose, slouching, arms crossed, mouth closed, and Dr. and Mrs. Esparza had insisted that they knew of no party plans.
There were two certainties—the victim had left the room, and she had been murdered. Could it be as Daisy believed—Beatrice Esparza had never returned to the resort after Christmas dinner?
Nicole had felt what she called her inner tuning fork vibrate several times during the interview. Parents checked on their kids. Especially if they’d been out. Maybe not every mom and dad and not every time, but strange place, late hour? In that set of circumstances, Nicole was willing to bet an all-or-nothing on the parental check-in. She knew she would be back, she would question the parents further, and she knew from the way the information had been delivered—hesitantly, vaguely, and without commitment—that she would get different answers.
She wanted a look in the mother’s closet. Did she own a pair of UGGs? Did Dr. Esparza?
She would question Joaquin and the doctor on their shoe size and examine every pair for tread. She hadn’t brought it up in the room—she didn’t want to alert them to specific evidence when they had an opportunity to dispose of it—but both Esparzas seemed to have smaller feet. Hands too. And she doubted that either Esparza—father or son—weighed in at 150 pounds.
They were both suspects.
No, they didn’t fit the date-rape angle, but Nicole knew better than to forge ahead with only one possible motive in mind. And the additional set of footprints in pursuit of their victim complicated things. The watcher. Certainly a different motive there, but what was it?
Of the two, Joaquin and his father, who was the most likely? Both had been evasive, but the doctor had been firm with his answers and even challenging. Joaquin had been a typical teen, angry, grieving, grudgingly giving answers that he doubted would help.
The call, her initial point of contact with the family, bothered her. The father was a doctor, accustomed to late-night disturbances. But the man was on vacation, and the police were calling. At some point in that brief conversation, that had to have sunk in. Yet there had been no alarm. He’d been cautious, as though poised at the precipice between disaster and redemption. Life and death. Hope and despair. If he hadn’t been expecting her, her voice at the end of the line was still a relief.
The family had known Beatrice was missing—Nicole believed that—but for how long?
Nicole turned east, away from Glacier National Park and directly into the rising sun. The glare off the snow was blinding, and she slowed the vehicle. She passed a small gift shop, its turnout parking lot empty and its windows boarded against strong winds and sleet.
She felt that irritating rub, like a finger scratching beneath the surface of her skin. She knew from experience that it was revelation. There was something else not quite right about her conversation with the Esparza family. Something out of place, missing or imposed on a scene that didn’t fit. And she was close to knowing what it was.
She turned off the county road and felt the world grow smaller as the trees thickened and darkened the gray sky. The homes here were built on acre plots and separated by fence lines that marked boundaries and contained livestock. Her neighbors kept horses and even a steer or two, raised to feed the family. When Jordan was seven he’d talked Nicole into a dog, but she had refused every other request for pets. She wasn’t good with animals. They required time, of which she had little, and maintenance. But the dog, a Saint Bernard–husky mix, served two purposes. He was a natural protector as well as a friend. Trips to the vet and chew bones for tartar—she could do that. Training, exercise, companionship—Jordan took care of all that.
Set back from the road and tucked between two hillocks in the rolling valley, her home came into view. It had a calming effect on Nicole. Tranquility. The house had been built in 1961, a ranch with three bedrooms and a detached garage. It was big enough that the cleaning was more than Nicole wanted to deal with, and she hired a woman who came in once a week and took care of the bathrooms, floors, and windows.
MacAulay’s comment earlier was still lurking in her mind. She wasn’t opposed to help. She utilized her officers, had support at home. MacAulay knew that, so his observation had been personal. Possibly a complaint and definitely an encroachment—she was determined to keep work and relationship in their own tidy places.
She turned onto the gravel drive way and focused forward.
She and Jordan had decided on a small, natural scene to display their Christmas spirit this year and had strung lights on two trees and put up a scattering of lighted deer, some of which moved. Colorful lights on the trees; the deer in white lights. And above it all, the Star of Bethlehem. It had a diameter of five feet and bulbs a brilliant shade of yellow.
Nicole had been raised on Sunday morning church and afternoon potlucks and didn’t have to reach deep for faith or conviction. She wanted to raise Jordan the same way, but she’d lost count of how many weeks had passed since their last appearance in church.
Her tires spinning on the gravel drive woke Mrs. Neal. She was waiting for Nicole at the front door, wrapped in her fleece robe, her short gray hair alternately spiked and flattened from her pillow.
“Anyone we know?” she asked, closing the door after Nicole.
“A tourist, but a child,” Nicole said, and watched Mrs. Neal’s eyes water. That quality of genuine empathy was why she’d hired the older woman. Her son was sensitive, soft in the heart and easily led by compassion, sometimes into harm’s way. Mrs. Neal nurtured, never criticized, and maybe she hovered just a little. “I want to look in on him,” Nicole said, walking down the darkened hall to the back of the house.
“Of course you do.”
Jordan’s bedroom was currently the victim of an intergalactic attack: Star Wars mural, shelves with action figures, Styrofoam planets suspended from the ceiling. The curtains were Wookiee and C-3PO, the comforter set Luke and Darth Vader. Her son was small for eleven and slow to develop in height and breadth. Nicole stood at five feet nine inches and was a constant reminder that once Jordan hit puberty, anything was possible. She watched the blankets lift with his breath. Her gaze caught on his blond head as he turned onto his back, his eyes wide open.
“That bad?” His voice was scratchy, thick, rising through layers of sleep.
“You’re supposed to be deep in dreamland.”
“I always wake up when you check on me.”
“Squeaky shoes,” she said.
“No. You don’t even have to touch me and I feel it sometimes.”
“Strong love,” she sang it to him, changing the words but not the melody of the Marley tune.
He rolled his eyes and pushed to his elbows. Then his soft cheeks pulled in a frown.
“Someone died.”
“Yes. A girl. A little older than you,” she disclosed, because he’d know about it before he sat down to breakfast. Small towns were like that.
“I’m sorry.”
“Me too.” She leaned against the door and thought about ruffling his hair, kissing his cool skin. But he was almost twelve. Too old for that, he’d told her a few times. Only with Jordan did emotional separation feel like the tearing of skin.
“It’s okay,” he said, and sat up. “So long as you know you need it more than I do.”
He smiled, and the light from the living room reached just far enough to make his eyes shine. He waved her over.
Nicole sat on the edge of his bed and snuggled him close. “Be safe today,” she said. He had a Scout meeting and after that a Lego build-off planned with friends.
“Always.”
“I mean—”
“Don’t fall for the usual tricks?”
She nodded, her chin rubbing against his silky hair.
Lars stood knee-deep in drift. Flurries swirled around him, lowering visibility, but Nicole was able to find half a dozen of her men and women scattered across the lake, following the perimeter of the woods, weaving between the trees. Lars raked through a three-by-three-foot patch of snow and then moved on. Grid search. The girl’s coat, scarf, mittens were still missing.
She checked her watch: 7:20. The flurries had started eight minutes before, were thick and warm when they burst on her cheeks. They were seven hours into their crime scene. The body had been discovered just after midnight by a local couple as they traveled home from a party. They’d brought their snowmobile close enough that it might have compromised evidence, and the woman, an ER nurse, had approached the victim and felt for signs of life. They had waited with the body, had been questioned, but they’d neither seen nor heard anything beyond the norm. But the couple helped establish time of death, and MacAulay was still working on that too.
“MacAulay narrowed the window. He says the girl died between ten and twelve.”
Lars looked up from his sweep of the area. “He’s been attending more of those Quantico classes.”
The department had sent the ME to several conferences over the past two years.
“A two-hour spread.” Lars was hopeful.
“The changing temperature. Exposure. Time of discovery. They’re all variables.” She used the doctor’s reasoning, which she knew to be sound. Lars did too. They just wanted it to be different. They wanted TOD to the minute but were lucky to get it to the hour.
Nicole hadn’t stayed to make Jordan’s breakfast but had pulled the covers up over his thin shoulders and watched him settle back into the pillows. She hadn’t taken the time to brew a cup of coffee. She was regretting that now. The cold was numbing her fingertips.
“The vic has an older brother,” Nicole said. “He knows more than he’s saying.” The whole family did.
“So we talk to him some more.”
She nodded. “As soon as we’re finished here.”
“You get anything useful?”
She shrugged. “The brother thinks the vic went to a party.”
“Good.”
It was a place to start, and in many cases the epicenter of trouble.
Nicole gave him the details of her interview but hesitated before sharing her impressions—she was still forming them herself.
“What?” His eyes narrowed, his face ruddy with cold. He planted the rake and leaned on the handle. And waited.
“They knew I was coming. Or that someone was.”
“Why do you think so?”
She explained the phone conversation, the breathless relief, and then the brother’s surprise when Nicole delivered the news.
“She wasn’t supposed to die,” Lars said.
“Exactly. They knew Beatrice was gone and didn’t call us. They knew she was in danger but expected a better outcome.”
“There are only a few reasons for that. One, if she did run away, it could be an embarrassment. If she left to meet up with a boy, equally embarrassing.”
“And if she was kidnapped?” Nicole knew this was a stretch. They had absolutely no reason to go there except for the feel Nicole had gotten off the family. The poised tension. A breath held too long. She’d stood in a vacuum of expectation.
Lars thought about that, stomping feeling back into his feet and shifting so that snow gathered in the wells made by his boots. “Why not tell us now that they know their daughter is dead?”
“They would have,” Nicole agreed.
“So how are we going to go about this?”
Rendezvous or runaway? “Something wasn’t right,” Nicole said. “I could feel it. It’s more than runaway, less than a kidnapping, something in between that paralyzed the family but kept their hope alive.”
“Something inside the family, then?”
Nicole nodded. “I worked a case once where the uncle was the perp. A kidnapping, crimes-against-a-child thing. This case has that kind of feel.”
“A reasonable expectation of return.”
“The brother thought so. The father was cautious expectation.”
“And the mother?”
Nicole thought about Mrs. Esparza and the way she’d stood by her husband at one turn and the next groped futilely for her daughter. “Desperate.”
“Sheriff?”
Nicole and Lars both turned as a deputy clambered toward them through the snow. The flurries had thickened and with them the fog had rolled in, creating an almost opaque cast over the scene. Still, she was immediately able to identify the object dangling from the officer’s hand: the victim’s purse. Purple leather, braided shoulder strap, the gold plate upon which she would find Beatrice’s name engraved, all exactly as the mother had described.
“Good work.” She accepted the bag and turned it, finding first the victim’s name in fine calligraphy and then the slot for her cell phone. The curved edge of an iPhone was visible above the pocket. Nicole took it out and held it in her gloved hand. Pressing the buttons would be a challenge, wrapped as her fingers were in Gore-Tex and thick lining.
She handed the purse back to the deputy. “Bag this and get it back to me.” Then she turned to Lars. “I don’t know a teenage girl who’d willingly turn her phone off.” But this unit had been shut down, the buttons unresponsive and the screen black.
“Maybe the battery ran out,” Lars suggested. “Or froze.”
Nicole took a plastic evidence sleeve from Lars and dropped the phone inside, then turned it over so that she was staring at its blank screen. She used her teeth to pull off her glove and blinked away a rush of flurries as the wind shifted. “It’d be gold if it turned on.”
She pressed the power button, and blue light flickered in response. The screen came to life with an animation of a flower opening, its fuchsia throat a vivid contrast against the white petals, and Nicole couldn’t help comparing that to the markings on Beatrice’s neck. Or keep herself from remembering that the young lady had been on the verge of blooming into womanhood.
Nicole didn’t tear up at crime scenes. She hadn’t puked at the sight of murder in at least a decade, no matter how grisly. But she was moved by the sudden loss of life here, when the girl had been so close to realizing her potential.
“Password-protected?” Lars asked.
She slid her finger over the screen, and the flower disappeared. In its place was a photo of the vic and an older man, Caucasian and graying at the temples.
She shook her head. “So far, no.”
The man wore a tailored jacket, shirt open at the collar, and he was smiling. He had his arm wrapped lightly around the girl’s waist. Beatrice looked into the camera, bold, smiling, happy.
Lars moved so that he was looking over her shoulder. “An uncle?”
“Maybe.” There was no familial resemblance, but Nicole didn’t have long to study the photo before it changed to another. This one of a girl younger than their vic, blonde hair and blue eyes, who looked up at the camera from an awkward angle. She was smiling, braces and dimples. And she was in a wheelchair.
“Who’s that?” Lars wondered.
“Friend?”
Someone important enough that their vic had placed her photo on the rotation app that drove the slide show. Next up were two little girls, dark hair and eyes, pink parkas and rosy cheeks.
“Her sisters,” Nicole said. She could see their vic in each of the faces. “Let’s see what else we can find.”
She rubbed her fingertips together, ignoring the sting and the falling snow. She paged through a few screens, over the protective evidence film, and brought up the girl’s call log.
“A lot of calls from the same three numbers, all California area code, I think.”
“Parents, brother.”
“Yeah. Last call in came at four twelve this morning.”
“What time did you get to the Huntington?”
“I knocked on their door at four fourteen.” She looked up and caught Lars’s gaze. “Give time for me to get directions to the room and get up three flights—they called her when I was talking to Dr. Esparza or as soon as we hung up.”
“Hope has teeth.”
She scrolled through the log. “Last outgoing call was Christmas Day, early evening.” She brought the phone closer to her face and peered through the snowflakes, which had grown denser. “Six twenty-two. It lasted three minutes six seconds.”
“Where to?”
“One of the family lines,” she guessed. She had glanced at the numbers the doctor had written in her notebook but would cross-reference them when she got back to the station.
“Look at the texts,” Lars prompted.
Nicole had to wipe moisture off the protective plastic, and she cupped her hand more firmly around the phone. “There are four threads.”
The wind whipped the treetops close by and screamed as it tore over the lake. Nicole looked up as the deputy materialized out of the gloom, holding the victim’s purse, which was now wrapped in an evidence bag.
“You going to take it in?” Lars asked, nodding at the cell phone. He took the purse and handed it to her.
“Yeah. It looks like she has a digital diary on here. And a lot of photos.” A gold mine. She looked up and caught his gaze. “I’m going to take a look before I pass it to forensics,” she decided. “And when I’m done, we’ll head over to the Huntington together.”
“We going with family involvement?”
Nicole nodded. “We’re going in with three possibilities. Leaving, I hope, with one direction in mind.”
“And which would that be?”
She’d already told Lars that Esparza had denied prescribing the Augmentin. “You know what really bothers me about that?” she said. “He dismissed it. He was cocky about it, until he took a look at the photo and saw his name on the bottle label. He was surprised.” The tremor that ran through the doctor’s body had been brief but betraying: Esparza had felt fear. “But then nothing. Like he shut himself off.”
“He’s got to know we can pull the records.”
“With a court order that will take time to get. To open a confidential record already available to a handful of people.”
“All working in the doctor’s office?”
“Yep.”
“Reasonable doubt,” Lars agreed. “But was he thinking about that?”
Nicole shrugged. That would mean that the doctor was calculating, and he hadn’t seemed cold as much as caught. But at what? “We’ll pull the record, of course. But I’m not thinking Esparza for the pill bottle.”
There was a great pressure building inside the doctor, his wife, Joaquin. They were holding back, and whatever they weren’t saying was pushing against that restraint. It threatened to fracture the mother’s composure. She was equal parts desperate and reaching, scared and powerless. The doctor was all about self-control, but he was slipping, his gestures beginning to reveal what his words would not. But the secret seethed inside Joaquin, and that made him the most likely to explode.
“I’m thinking the mother.” She had a medical background. She would know how to fill out a prescription, and she had access to the doctor’s electronic stamp. She didn’t fit the physical profile of their suspect—not as her husband and son did—but she was their way in. “She gave the Augmentin to Beatrice.”
“Why?”
“Because her daughter was sick.” It was simple, but it made sense. “You mentioned once that Amber was taking a medication that had some pretty big side effects.” Lars’s oldest daughter had survived leukemia, but it had been an arduous fight, and medication had been just one of the struggles. “But you kept her on it, right?”
“The benefits outweighed the drawbacks. But when you’re fighting a deadly disease, you pick your battles.”
“So maybe that’s what happened here. Maybe Augmentin was the most effective medication for the vic’s need.”