The air stirred, and snow lifted from the trees and sprayed the icy surface of the lake. It was just after two AM and the temperature hovered at zero. The clouds were low in the sky, and Nicole felt their heaviness. Her shoulders shifted under their weight. Eight years in Toole County, Montana, and she still wasn’t comfortable with the building storm systems or the swift changes in weather conditions.
She listened to the wind, the groaning of the tree branches, the sharp crunch of boots through drifts, and wished it were a better night for a murder.
Snow melted and changed the composition of evidence. The wind skittered across the lake and tossed the remains of the crime scene. And the weather wasn’t their only challenge. The ME—the local family practitioner who was better suited to delivering babies and curing the common cold—had arrived an hour before and was on his knees beside the body, pulling threads from the dead girl’s hair with a pair of tweezers. His ME field guide was stuffed into a pocket of his parka, and even three years into the job, he consulted it often and openly.
Forensics had towed portable lamps through the woods and hooked them to a generator stationed in the bed of a pickup truck. Nicole stood within the halo of that light and watched the ME. His meticulous care pulled on her nerves. They’d been out of time even before the investigation began, and MacAulay carried out his duties with the sedate pace of a tortoise.
She exhaled and watched her breath crystalize. She stuffed her gloved hands into her coat pockets and tipped back on the thick heels of her boots. And she stared into the shadows beyond the light. She could barely make out the pinprick of head lamps worn by her men and women as they combed the surface of the frozen lake and followed several sets of footprints over the rolling slopes and through a thin stand of trees. The body and the footprints were so far the only physical evidence of their suspect.
The weather, the distance to reasonable equipment and personnel, and the attitudes of small-town life were a source of constant frustration when there was a crime to be solved.
“Damn boonies,” she mumbled.
“I thought we were growing on you,” Doc said.
“Toole County is the best thing that ever happened to me,” she returned. And it was true. She’d needed out of Denver. Law enforcement there was polluted, her personal life even more, and the worst of it was that Jordan had started feeling the pain. At only three years of age then, he’d become anxious about Nicole’s return every evening and be reduced to fits of screaming and head banging whenever Nicole prepared him for the court-ordered visits with his father. Kids were intuitive. They felt things, knew things. And Jordan more than most. Her son was sensitive. He was a sponge for nature and nurture. The move had saved them both. “But it puts a crimp in my cape.”
MacAulay laughed. “You thought you could come in here and single-handedly wrestle crime into the dust?”
“Caped Crusaders rock, Robin.”
The doctor snorted. “Not in Toole County, Sheriff. Here it’s all about cooperation—people, weather, science. It’s a package. But you know that by now.”
She’d joined the department as a sergeant and risen quickly to undersheriff. Six years later she’d become the first female sheriff in county history. She thought her election had had a lot to do with her Big City past, which included a gold shield and several accommodations, and her skills as a communicator. Toole County was the seat of a lot of law enforcement activity. In addition to the sheriff’s department, they had the highway patrol and U.S. Border Patrol working out of their little town of Blue Mesa. With Canada serving as their northern border and three major freeways barreling through the county, it was a natural choice for command centers. And it had served Nicole well.
“I know it, but I don’t always like it,” she confirmed.
MacAulay squinted at the fiber in his tweezers and then held it up. A young forensics tech scrambled forward with a plastic evidence bag.
“Our biggest mistakes are made when we think we can do it alone.”
She wondered if the comment was a professional or personal observation. Either would apply, although she and MacAulay didn’t make it obvious. No talk, no touch on the job, and other restrictions that preserved her image as the sheriff. But it had been a long time since Nicole agreed to dinner—two weeks at least.
His tone was neutral, sounding more like advice than judgment, so it was hard to gauge his investment in the conversation. He was crouched over the girl’s body, peering closely into her eyes with a penlight, but he spared Nicole a glance. And she found a wealth of emotion in his gaze. Concern, warmth beyond the professional, and not a small amount of challenge.
She ignored it.
“I’d settle for an honest-to-God crime lab,” she returned. A full team to back her on the field. She was a quarterback who relied on her defense. MacAulay knew that.
“And a tried and true ME to run it?”
“Yes, that too.”
He stood and turned to her. His salted hair lifted in the breeze. His ears were pink. “You’re losing evidence,” he acknowledged. “Probably more than any of us have been able to gather for you.”
“You suck at the bedside etiquette, MacAulay.”
He smiled. “Just commiserating.” He nodded toward the body, a young girl, underdressed for the weather. She was slender, with hair a shade darker than coffee, and was probably thirteen or fourteen years old. Nicole didn’t recognize her, so she wasn’t local. They hadn’t received a missing child report. A lot of parents had dinner with the kids, tucked them into bed, and then hit the mountain for a little air time before turning in themselves. It was the day after Christmas, 2:00 AM, and the hotels, lodges, and resorts were packed with tourists.
“Want to know who she is?”
Always a loaded question when it came from MacAulay. Once an identity was established, the doctor referred to their victims by name. Nicole and her team had learned to harden themselves to it. MacAulay was first and foremost a physician, and a small sliver of Nicole’s heart was relieved that the doctor saw people where she and her officers saw bodies. But in cases where obtaining objectivity was difficult, such as the murder of a child, even the most experienced of them softened—and that got in the way of good police work.
“She have a wallet?”
“I’m guessing there’s a snow bunny ID card at the end of this lanyard.” He bent and tugged at a braided pale-blue string. It was tucked under the crew neck of the girl’s sweater and twisted so that the body trapped the laminated pass beneath her. Nicole stepped closer. The lanyard was complimentary and the pass doubled as a room key. With any luck, the card was still intact. “I’m ready to lift her.”
Nicole knelt beside MacAulay as he slid his hands under the girl’s shoulder and hip and rolled her. This close, the girl’s face looked almost translucent. She had the smoothest skin Nicole had ever seen and big eyes that sloped at the ends. She was Hispanic. Her cheekbones and chin were curved and full and had beamed with health a few hours before.
MacAulay held the girl’s body with one hand and turned over the slope pass with the other.
“Beatrice Esparza,” he read aloud, and held the card up for Nicole’s inspection.
The photo matched. She checked the print at the bottom, though the lanyard was familiar—all the resorts had them, each a distinctive color and style and easily recognizable on the slopes and in the bars. “The Huntington Spa.”
“You going yourself?”
“I always do.”
“That’s what I like about you,” he said.
“My work ethic?”
“Your respect for human life,” he clarified. He lowered the body back to the snow. “Dead or alive.”
The truth was, Nicole did better with people after they’d taken their last breath. She was good at fighting for those who couldn’t do it for themselves. Her old CO had called her tenacious. A number of ex-lovers had been less diplomatic, and Nicole was no longer surprised when, toward the end of each relationship, her passionate nature had become a “problem.” “Single-minded” and “stubborn” often followed declarations of that kind. Her son, however—because Jordan was straddling those years between child and teen—was as kind as he was judgmental about her job. “It’s cool,” he assured her. “A little cray-cray, but you spend a lot of time with dead people.”
She felt a smile spread from the inside out. Her son did that for her—he was light in a dark place.
Nicole glanced again at the girl. A child still, with the soft curves of womanhood just developing. Neither she nor the world would know her full potential. And that caused a chain reaction of emotion in Nicole, beginning with an intense sadness she knew was useless and finishing with a consuming anger that would propel her through the necessary steps toward justice.
She was looking at another mother’s child. Much loved or cast away? She focused on the raven hair spread out on the ice and the gold piercings in the girl’s ears—a hammered teardrop hoop with a diamond accent dangling in the center. A quarter carat. Beatrice Esparza was tended to, from her long, trimmed tresses to the tips of her acrylic nails.
“Time of death’s going to be a bitch,” she said. The first officer had arrived on scene at 12:22 AM and taken an ambient temperature reading. Two degrees. And she’d watched MacAulay insert a common mercury thermometer through a nostril in the victim’s nose, then note the body temperature in a small notebook he kept. He’d already reconciled the numbers and given her a window of possibility, but it was wide open at four hours—sometime between 8:00 PM and midnight. Most criminals could slip through a crack in the pavement, and currently they had a crater.
MacAulay nodded.
“You can’t narrow that window a little, Doc?”
“That’s the best I can do, but it’ll work until Missoula.”
The state lab and morgue. Nicole thought briefly about having the body bagged and driven the 230 miles to the Big City and the state medical examiner, but there was nothing extraordinary about the case. Not yet. Murder by asphyxiation was about as common as a hangnail. A child victim was no longer an anomaly. MacAulay would do the prelim in the basement morgue of their tiny hospital and then move her on to Missoula, where the body would wait in line behind other murder victims for a more thorough exam.
“Sheriff?”
Nicole looked up. She had promoted Lars Solberg to undersheriff when she’d won the election two years ago. It was his job to supervise heavy crime—murder, grand theft, abduction—and the three sergeants under him worked the lighter investigative detail. Then there were eight deputies who patrolled and answered calls. Together they were spread out over nineteen hundred miles of county jurisdiction.
She had moved all but three deputies to Lake Maria. She had called in their reserves—there were only two, and she made a mental note to increase that number—and borrowed a handful of forensic techs from the highway patrol. She’d alerted them to the need for heightened watch, as was protocol when one of the related agencies was stretched thin.
She stood and gave her second-in-command her full attention. “What do you have, Lars?”
“A size-ten shoe, heavy tread. Probably a hiking boot.”
Nicole looked at the girl’s feet. One foot was bare, her toes painted a solid shade of pumpkin. The other foot bore a stone-colored suede boot that ended at her knee. It had a discreet half-inch heel and, on the sole, the embossed-triangle logo of Prada.
Not a snow boot. Their vic was dressed for a party, not the slopes.
Lars nodded his head. “My wife has a knock-off pair,” he said, and shrugged. “Three kids, a house, and a car.”
And nowhere on a cop’s salary for the real thing.
“Vic’s a size six,” he continued. “We bagged the left boot and a knee-high purple sock seventy and a hundred and twenty yards southeast.”
“Anything else?”
“A pair of gloves. Brown suede, made for a man.”
“And you found both?”
“A present under the tree,” he said.
“Can I see them?” MacAulay asked.
“Sure, Doc.” Lars made the request through his radio, then turned back to Nicole. “There’s a reason you made me lead,” he informed her. “And it had nothing to do with my prowess in the box or at the range.”
He was smiling broadly, and Nicole felt her lips splinter in the cold as she responded. The solemn mood of a crime scene often relied on humor.
Lars was a bad shot and every year had to repeat the marksmanship test for a pass.
“It was your ability to remain level-headed even under the esteemed accolades of your peers,” she assured him.
MacAulay laughed, and Lars’s smile grew impossibly wider.
“That, and assess a crime scene for motivation.”
The last part was true. Nicole had already made undersheriff when Lars came around in answer to a recruitment ad. He’d had several years in Missoula and wanted a slower pace and to keep his state retirement. The man was good. He had a degree in criminal psychology and made practical use of it. And he was the only city, other than her, in the department.
“You know the why?”
“I have a hunch.”
He held up a clear evidence bag. Inside were two items, individually bagged, tagged, and numbered: one unopened condom packet and a prescription bottle. “This stuff”—he jiggled the bag— “scattered but easily recovered.”
“Too easy?” she asked.
“Maybe not. There are impressions in the snow, like the guy was kneeling. He’s right-handed—he pulled off his left glove first, then the right, and dropped them beside him, left of his position.”
“Kneeling because he dropped the condom and the pills?”
Lars nodded. “Like they fell out of a pocket while he was running.”
“And he took his gloves off to try and pick them up.” She smiled, following his thoughts to what was a clear break in the case. Few people thought forward to cleaning up evidence. “We’ll get prints off them.”
“Exactly.” Lars didn’t pause to enjoy the moment. “There’s a third set of footprints,” he began. “And they put a spin on things.”
“Predator or prey?” Nicole asked.
But as usual, Lars didn’t answer. He set up the scene and ran through the evidence so Nicole could form her own opinion.
“Three sets of footprints that matter to us. The vic’s. This guy”—he raised his arm and waved the evidence bag—the hiking boot. His prints leave a longer trail. “After his scramble in the snow, they pick back up and end here, with our vic’s body.” He’s our killer. He does the deed, then cuts over the slope, across the bike path, and we lose him on the Lake Road.
“The third set of prints run parallel to his, thirty yards between them, and maybe they don’t even see each other,” he poses. “The third set of prints are a soft sole. Maybe an UGG. Or a boot like it. This guy was trailing our vic from the beginning. We traced their prints back to the Lake Road. The vic leaves the road and cuts into the trees. Maybe she thinks she can lose the guy in the woods. And it’s working. The soft-sole print is running out of steam fast, clearly can’t keep up with our vic. These prints stop at the top of the slope, never make it down to the bike path and nowhere near the lake. For a minute, our vic, maybe she thinks she’s okay. But she’s underdressed and struggling with the weather. She’s already lost a boot, no coat, hat, gloves. And now a dip in adrenaline.”
“The guy in the hiking boots gains on her.”
“Easily,” Lars agrees. “He has a longer, stronger stride. He breaks out of the woods, barrels down the slope, and he’s on her.” Lars turned and walked, retracing the tangled trail, and Nicole followed until they were twenty yards out and silhouetted by light from the halogen lamps. “Right here, he grabs our vic. Her toes drag in the snow. A small struggle, because the girl is wiped out, clinging to life, but even in her last breath, she denies him.” He snaps his fingers. “Then he kills her.”
It felt right. If not an exact match to the events leading up to Beatrice Esparza’s murder, then close. But she knew too that evidence could be manipulated by a perspective that was too narrow, by an approach that wasn’t flexible.
“Denies him what?” Nicole asked.
“Sex. Love.” He lifted the evidence bag and shuffled it between his hands until the pill bottle was on top. “I think that’s Rohypnol.”
Benjamin Kris leaned against the hood of the SUV, the engine long cold and the windows growing some serious frost. He didn’t want to draw attention his way. He didn’t want to answer questions, have his name jotted into some slunk detective’s notebook. How many times had he watched her smile bloom on her face and felt a lightness in his chest? His heart had been like an air bubble, rising through fathoms of water to bob on the surface of a vast sea. She had done that for him, and then ripped it all away. She had known who he was, what he was, and then later decided it wasn’t enough. Or worse, that he was too much. Too much of a fuckup.
He was here to prove himself, having made it to the top. He wanted Nicole to see that he was king of the mountain before he buried her alive.
He lowered the binoculars and gazed at the scene from a distance. He knew how cops worked. Soon their tight circle would grow larger, closer, and he would have to be gone by then. He had people waiting on him, appearances to keep up. An alibi to maintain.
One more look, he told himself, because he found her obsessive. Nicole in action, tall and solid. He hated her calm, her strength, that she had once beaten him and beaten him badly. And Benjamin Kris did not like to lose.
He was tired of dangling from her string. Killing her would eliminate the threat, but he wanted more than that. He wanted to destroy her, and that took more time, more effort, more closeness. It would take striking her where it hurt most. Going for what she had been afraid of all along. Jordan. Losing him would crush Nicole. And Benjamin was looking forward to it.