Part 26 (1/2)

Chapter 23.

Grabbing a cup of decaf from the carafe in the lunchroom, Pescoli settled down at her desk. Though it was still early, the department was starting to come alive. Officers, talking, laughing, and shaking off the cold, were drifting into the building with the change of s.h.i.+fts. Phones rang and a common printer positioned off the hallway near Joelle's desk hummed and clacked while the beast of a furnace wheezed as if it was on its last breath.

She sipped her weak-a.s.s coffee and scanned her e-mail. Though she wouldn't admit it to Blackwater, she'd spent a lot of her free time on Sunday going over the Bart Grayson suicide file, as much for Dan as for Hattie. She felt it was an exercise in futility, but it had seemed fitting somehow, almost cathartic. With her kids at Luke's for the weekend, and Santana working on the new house, she'd put in some serious hours reviewing the years-old case and had tried to look at it with a new eye. But she'd found no hard evidence in the old reports that indicated Bartholomew Grayson had died by anything other than his own hand. Even though there was no suicide note left at the scene, nor message found in his belongings, nor conversation with a close friend or family member about taking his life, it still added up to the same conclusion. Friends and family alike had admitted how despondent Bart had been over the breakup of his marriage to Hattie. Apart from his widow, they, like the authorities, believed he'd ended it all. He'd died from suffocation by hanging himself in the barn, which was where his brother Cade had found him.

Bart Grayson's death had been a tragedy, of course. Unfortunate. And probably preventable. He'd been a young, strapping man with two kids who, it seemed, had so much to live for.

Pescoli was certain everyone in the Grayson family, Dan included, had beat themselves up for not seeing the signs of Bart's depression. No one had been aware of how deep his despair had run.

Still, the bare facts of the case all pointed to the man taking his own life.

She would have to call Hattie and tell her as much. No doubt Bart's ex-wife still wouldn't accept the truth. In Pescoli's opinion, Hattie had been grappling with guilt ever since hearing the sad news about her ex and it was probably the root cause of her obsession with proving the suicide was really a murder. She fervently believed Bart would never willingly leave his daughters, that his love for them would have stopped him from taking his own life.

Pescoli wondered about the whole tangled web of Hattie Dorsey and the Grayson brothers. As rumor had it, Hattie's love for Bart hadn't exactly trumped her interest in the other men in his family. Then there was Cara, Dan's first ex-wife, whom Pescoli had learned at the funeral was Hattie's half sister. That was the family connection. It was all so intertwined, but hey, who was she to judge? Hattie had always had a fascination with all things Grayson.

Another aspect of the case was the insurance money. Bart had taken out two substantial policies with Hattie Grayson and her daughters listed as the beneficiaries. As it was, those benefits had never been paid, not because Bart had changed them, nor because he and Hattie had been divorced at the time of his death, but because Bart had taken his own life, thereby nullifying the payment. The insurance companies had been within their legal rights to refuse to pay. The upshot was that Hattie and her daughters had inherited Bart's portion of the Grayson ranch, but they'd been cut out of several hundred thousand dollars that would have been theirs if Bart's death was declared a murder.

Therein lay the problem. Hattie Grayson was not a rich woman and could really use the money. A single mom, she worked in her own catering business in order to support her children, no doubt struggling at times to make ends meet. She could probably sell her part of the Grayson ranch to the remaining brothers, but she hadn't done that yet.

Money, in the form of insurance benefits, could be another reason beyond basic guilt that Bart's ex and beneficiary was so stubbornly insistent that he hadn't killed himself.

”The facts are the facts,” Pescoli said to herself, satisfied that Bart Grayson's death was neither a mystery nor a homicide. The man took his own life.

She replaced the reports in the box Jeremy had brought in a few days earlier, then unzipped her bag to retrieve a banana.

G.o.d, she was hungry. Always, it seemed. So she'd eat, then, not half an hour later, puke.

Taking her first bite, she heard quick footsteps in the hallway and half-expected Joelle to appear. Instead, Alvarez nearly slid as she rounded the sharp corner into Pescoli's office.

”Guess what?” Alvarez said.

”Not in the mood for twenty-questions.”

Alvarez actually flashed a smile, the first Pescoli had witnessed since Dan Grayson had been shot, and she was energized for the first time in weeks. ”We got a hit.”

”A hit?” Pescoli repeated, and for a second or two, she forgot the hunger pangs that had been so overpowering only seconds before. ”On the fingerprint?”

”Yeah.” Dark eyes sparking, Alvarez nodded. ”It's from a missing person from New Orleans.”

”New Orleans?”

”Yep. A missing heiress who was disowned by her family. They filed the report, uncertain if she were alive or dead, but, I'd say from the prints we found, she's very much alive. And deadly. Her name is Anne-Marie Calderone.”

”How do you know this already? It's barely eight in the d.a.m.n morning.”

”It's earlier in New Orleans, so I've been in contact with them already. Been here since five.”

”Good G.o.d,” Pescoli said, aghast.

”Look, I couldn't sleep. O'Keefe's not here. The animals wanted to get up early, so the dog and I tried to go for a run, but it was too nasty. Nearly impossible, so I gave it up. Anyway, I had too much on my mind to sleep in,” she admitted. ”Like you, right? You're in earlier than usual.”

”Not at five friggin' a.m.”

Alvarez's smile faded a bit, and she glanced over her shoulder to the open doorway as if she thought someone might overhear. ”It's weird, you know,” she admitted over the rumbling of the furnace and the hard tread in the hallway as two deputies pa.s.sed by the open door. ”I thought that after the funeral, I'd be able to put everything in perspective. Get back to business here and make sure my personal life was on track, kind of sort things out, but . . .” She shrugged, her black hair s.h.i.+ning nearly blue under the fluorescent fixtures on the ceiling.

Pescoli nodded. Sometimes it was eerie how Alvarez's thoughts echoed her own feelings. ”At least we have a lead now. Though, I gotta admit, I didn't figure the killer for a woman. The strangulation and then the pre- or postmortem mutilation? It just seems too brutal, too physical.”

”Women can be violent,” Alvarez countered, though she, too, sounded a little dubious.

”I know, I know, but . . . it's hard for me to get my head around it.”

”Well, that's the way it's looking.”

”How was she careless enough to leave a print at each crime scene? Who the h.e.l.l is Anne-Marie Calderone?”

”You're not my husband,” Anne-Marie said, her fear bleeding into anger at the realization that the man standing in front of her had the nerve, the unmitigated gall to hold her at gunpoint and say he was her husband when they both knew it wasn't true. He wasn't the maniac she'd expected, the butcher from whom she'd been running. The man by the door was Troy-d.a.m.n-Ryder.

”And whose fault is that?” he drawled in the d.a.m.nably s.e.xy West Texas drawl she'd once found so intriguing.

She decided to duck that particular, painful question. ”What the h.e.l.l are you doing here?” she demanded, her heart trip-hammering. A million emotions, none of them good, swirled inside her.

Troy was no killer. Or not that she knew of. Okay, he was rough around the edges and the law had never been something he'd worried about too much, but he wasn't the brutal psychopath she'd thought was chasing her down, the person she'd thought had killed at least two women as some kind of warning to her. How could she have been so foolish to think those poor women who had been murdered had anything to do with her? Was she that much of an egomaniac? If she could jump to such conclusions, maybe she really was ready for the loony bin again, just as her husband had claimed.

And this d.a.m.n cowboy in front of her, the one she'd tried, and failed, to marry . . . what is he doing here?

In the shadowy interior of her cabin, she struggled to see his features, to read his expression, but failed.

”Isn't that what husbands do when their wives just take off? Track them down?”

”But you're not my husband,” she repeated. ”You know you're not my husband.”

”Oh, yeah, that's right. When you said 'I do' at that little chapel in Vegas, you were still married.”

That much was true. ”I didn't know,” she said, but even as the words pa.s.sed her lips, they sounded lame.

”How could you not know?”

”It was an a.s.sumption on my part. A mistake. We've been over this.” She felt the chill of his gaze cutting through the dark atmosphere, and for a second, she regretted what she'd done, how she'd led him on, not that she'd meant to. ”You know I thought my ex had signed the papers and-”

”He wasn't your ex.”

”Okay, okay. Not officially.”