Bianca sighed again. “I know.”
Alvarez said, “It won’t take long.”
“That’s why I came over.” Luke swung his feet to the floor. “To be here for her.”
That irked Pescoli anew. “She’s not a suspect. She’s just making a statement, for God’s sake. You’ve been watching too much Law and Order, or NCIS or whatever.” She thought about pointing out that he’d been an absentee parent for much of Bianca’s life, but reading her expression, Luke got the message and rather than argue, took another swallow from his beer. “Just lookin’ out for my kid’s interests.”
Sure.
Alvarez intervened before the discussion turned into a full-scale argument. “We can talk over here,” she suggested, already setting up on the kitchen table.
“Fine.” Regan nodded and Bianca, grumbling a little, hobbled to the scratched table that had been in the family for decades. She sat with her back to the bay window, her injured foot resting on the seat of another chair, and Pescoli stood behind her, stretching the kinks from her back and feeling the baby move. The pending interview made her nervous; she was used to doing the asking, and not worrying about the answers. But this was her daughter.
“Let’s get started,” Alvarez said, scraping back a chair and sitting down across the table from Bianca.
CHAPTER 12
As Alvarez set a small recorder and her phone on the table, then pulled a notepad and a pen from her bag, Pescoli crossed her arms over her chest, making her blouse bunch, and her belly seemed to protrude even farther. She dropped her arms to her sides and smoothed her maternity shirt.
This wasn’t her first time defending her children or watching them be grilled by another detective. In high school, Jeremy had walked a thin line with the law, which made his current interest in law enforcement as a career all the more ironic. Pescoli had tried to talk him out of it to no avail. Even when she brought up his father, her first husband, Joe Strand, who had been killed in the line of duty. The thought that Jeremy, who looked so much like Joe, was following in his father’s footsteps chilled her to the bone. She was a cop herself, knew the pitfalls and the dangers. Currently Jeremy was enrolled at the local community college while volunteering at the sheriff’s department. If he didn’t change his mind in the next couple of years, he’d become an officer of the law, like both his father and mother.
What goes around, comes around.
“I know you’ve been through all of this before,” Alvarez was saying to Bianca, “but let’s go over it again. Start with how you ended up at Reservoir Point and how you found the body.”
Bianca took a deep breath, then launched once more into the tale: how she’d made plans with Maddie, been ditched in the guys’ game of hide-and-seek, been chased by an incredibly huge beast from the top of the ridge down to the creek, where she’d literally stumbled on the dead body of Destiny Rose Montclaire. She wrapped up with, “Of course I didn’t know who she was then, just that she was dead and rotting. . . .” Her voice lowered. “It was awful,” she admitted on a shudder, then told Alvarez about running into Rod Devlin, their argument, how she’d snatched the phone from him to call 911 and then had run back to the main area, where kids had been madly scrambling around, trying to take off as the cops arrived. “You know the rest,” she said, rubbing her arms as if suddenly cold when the temperature in the house was over seventy-five degrees and Pescoli was still sweating. But then maybe the perspiration was, at least in part, due to her case of nerves. She listened as Alvarez asked her daughter the same questions she had earlier: How do you know Destiny Montclaire? Who were the kids at the party? Who was connected to Destiny? Did she have any enemies?
Finally, Alvarez asked, “Did you know that Destiny was pregnant?”
Bianca’s jaw dropped. “Pregnant?” she repeated. “No. I mean, I hadn’t heard that.” She glanced up at her mother. “Really?”
Pescoli nodded.
“So there was no talk about it?”
“None!” Bianca said. “Well, at least I hadn’t heard anything. I wasn’t friends with Destiny, but she dated Donny Justison and even though he’s a year older, he runs around with my crowd, so . . . I think I would have heard something.”
“Did she date anyone else?”
“I don’t know,” Bianca said, shocked. “That’s kinda sad.”
“All of it is,” her mother agreed.
“So you didn’t hear any rumors from any of your friends, or from people who knew her?” Alvarez asked.
“No.” She shook her head, and after a few more questions about Destiny, Pescoli’s partner seemed satisfied. Only then did she ask about Bianca’s reference to being chased down the mountainside by a hairy monster.
“You don’t know who was behind you?” she asked.
“No. It . . . didn’t seem human.”
“Not one of the other kids?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t know. It was huge and hairy, and I know it sounds crazy, but I didn’t think it was a person.”
“An animal?”
“Or . . . maybe a Big Foot?” she said tentatively.