The dead skier was a woman with reddish hair, and though her face was mangled from her crash with the pine and blood had frozen over a shattered cheekbone and eye socket, Pescoli felt a shiver of dread run through her.
The accident victim’s features, though discolored and frozen, were similar to those of Jocelyn Wallis, Elle Alexander, and even Shelly Bonaventure.
“Son of a bitch,” she said as the body was photographed, then bagged and driven to the medical examiner’s van, which was parked in the lower lot, next to the red Honda, which was registered to Karalee Rierson, who lived ten miles east.
What were the chances?
She spent time talking to the couple who had found her, newly married twentysomethings who had been snowshoeing and happened upon the dead body. They’d nearly missed seeing her as she’d been half buried in snow, but the man had caught a glimpse of something red beneath the fresh snow and investigated.
They had been terrified but, having cell phones with them, had called 9-1-1. Kayan Rule had taken the call and been dispatched to the scene. When he’d seen the victim, he, in turn, had phoned the station again, requesting a homicide detective. Pescoli had been the detective closest, and she’d driven her Jeep up to the lower lot and snowshoed in a quarter mile to the area where the victim had lost her life, in an apparent accident.
The crime scene crew had arrived and was combing the area for trace evidence, but Pescoli figured they wouldn’t find much. The weapon of death was the tree; bloodstains on a particularly vicious eye-level snag were still visible.
It could have been an accident, she supposed. A careless or startled skier, maybe. But Pescoli wasn’t buying it for a minute. She figured that the dead woman now on her way to the morgue would prove to be yet another victim of a killer who had a vendetta against the offspring of Donor 727, whoever the hell he was.
No, the killer was even more precise in his intentions than that. So far, all the victims had been women. Elle Alexander’s brother, Bruce, was alive and well according to her parents.
A mistake?
Probably not.
Now, as she snowshoed back to her Jeep and waited for the truck to come and tow Karalee Rierson’s little Honda, she flipped open her cell phone and called Alvarez. When her partner didn’t answer, Pescoli left a short message: “I think we’ve got another one.” Then watched as the frozen Honda, with snow piled over its hood and dirty icicles dangling like long, snaggy teeth along the wheel wells, was winched onto the flatbed.
Another “accident.”
Another dead woman.
Probably related to good old 727.
Whatever the hell that meant.
CHAPTER 32
Poisoned?
She’d been poisoned, and she hadn’t even realized it? With Trace at her side, Kacey was seated on a folding chair in the interview room at the sheriff’s department while listening to Alvarez, from the other side of the small, battered table, describe finding arsenic in Jocelyn Wallis’s coffee grounds. Kacey thought of her own symptoms, how she’d never considered that there was a toxin running through her veins. She was a doctor, and she would have noticed if the symptoms had become violent, the pain more intense. Still ...
It all made sense.
Now.
Already the interview was well into its second hour. Detective Alvarez, after warning them to stay out of the investigation, was now doing this by the book.
Trace, though he tried to appear relaxed, was antsy, his jaw, beneath a darkening beard shadow, tight, his lips flat, his eyes serious. Twice during the conversation, he’d stepped outside of the room to call Tilly and get an update on his son. Though he didn’t really need to be here and Kacey had encouraged him to go home, he’d stayed.
Alvarez had listened to Kacey’s theory about the dead women being related to Gerald Johnson twice so far, once at Kacey’s house, and a second time now. When her partner, Pescoli, arrived, Alvarez quickly brought her up to speed.
“Gerald Johnson,” Pescoli repeated, shaking her head. “Think this is his work, too?” She offered up pictures that looked as if they had been taken digitally, then printed out. Kacey inwardly cringed as she looked at the graphic images, not so much from the woman’s injuries—she’d seen worse in medical school and her practice—but because of what she saw beyond the battered, bloody features. The victim’s hair, poking out of a blood-encrusted cap, was a deep red-brown, as close to Kacey’s own color as it could be, and the one eye that was open, pupil apparently fixed, was a green shade that wasn’t quite as blue as her own but was definitely in the color spectrum of all the victims.
Had her face not been so battered, this woman, too, would have resembled Kacey enough as to have been her sister.
Which, she thought sadly, was probably true.
“You know her?” Alvarez asked.
Kacey shook her head. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen her in my life.”
“I was talking to him.” Alvarez hitched her chin toward Trace, her dark eyes holding his.