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 shifts. 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 shining 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."

"Not legally," Ryder bit out, irritated. "Kind of important."

"Oh, forget it." She threw up her hands in surrender. "Saying I'm sorry now doesn't cut it. I know that. I screwed up."

"Big time."

"Yes. Yes." When he didn't respond, she said, "I can't believe that you hunted me down, in this . . . in this d.a.m.n blizzard in Montana to steal my gun and argue about the past. You scared me." It felt like a dream, a remnant of the terrors that had invaded her brain during the night and made her think she'd woken up when she was really still asleep, everything taking on a weird twist. But that was only wishful thinking. She was very much awake, beyond alert, and she was in the cold, dark, smelly cabin with the wild-a.s.s cowboy she'd fallen for so hard that she, like him, had ignored the details of the law.

"I get it that you're p.i.s.sed. You should be. But that was over a year ago and . . . and since when are you such a stickler for legalities?"

"When it comes to my d.a.m.n wife." He strode closer to her. "You're impossible, you know."

"I'm not the one pointing a gun at the person I once swore I loved." Folding her arms over her chest, she squinted up at him, trying to see his features, read the expression in his eyes. "But why? Why go to all these lengths? I thought we understood each other."

He muttered furiously under his breath, but just said, "I came to get you."

For the briefest of instants, her heart tripped, a tiny bit of hope soared, but she tamped it down quickly. She wasn't that foolish anymore. She didn't trust him blindly. Nor did he trust her. And then, there was the matter of the weapon. "Well, okay, but most men who come for a woman, don't hold her at gunpoint."

"It probably happens more often than you think. I never understood until now. But I didn't come here to patch things up."

"You couldn't," she said, cringing inwardly at the bit of a lie. The truth was, she'd never completely gotten over him. Not one hundred percent. There was a part of her, a tiny very feminine part of her, that still fantasized about him, but she tamped that emotion down, wishing she could kill it.

"Just for the record, this"-he moved his hand, displaying her pistol-"is a pathetic excuse for a gun."

"Thank you so much. That's so helpful," she shot out, then wished she'd held her tongue. That was the trouble with Ryder. Her blood ran hot around him, her emotions volatile. "It might be small, but you're still aiming it at me."

"You're lucky I don't just pull the trigger."

"You didn't come all this way just to shoot me. You could have done that and been halfway back to Louisiana by now."

"Well, darlin', at least you're starting to get it."

"What?"

"It's time to go. The reason that I'm pointing this gun at you is because I want you to grab your things and get moving. I figured you might not be all that keen on the idea, so your pistol came in handy. So, get up. Now."

"I'm just not buying it," Pescoli said from her desk chair. She was still processing the information her partner had given her and trying to see a woman as their doer. "I know a lot of women who have jewelry envy. They're all about who has the biggest rock as some kind of validation of love or something. Even my daughter went crazy over my ring when she first saw it. But I've never heard of one who would kill for a ring by cutting the d.a.m.n finger off."

"Women kill," Alvarez said. "If it isn't for a justifiable cause like protecting their children, then it's over a man. Usually a loser of a man."

"Yeah, that's true," Pescoli admitted.

"You ever watch Judge Judy?"

"No. You do? You have time for reality TV in the middle of the day?"

"I record it."

That surprised Pescoli as she'd pegged Alvarez as a workaholic.

"O'Keefe got me started on it, and once in a while I tune in. If the litigants are complaining about loans and gifts or rent and broken leases, it's usually some woman all up in arms that her friend slept with her boyfriend or husband or whatever. The weird thing is that to a one, they blame the other woman as if it was all that woman's fault and their poor, dumb husband couldn't resist. That he was just the patsy in the Jezebel's lurid, malicious trap, and that's why he couldn't keep it in his pants."

"No one on Judge Judy is a killer," Pescoli pointed out.

"I'm just saying it's not impossible. We've run in our share of women who've killed. You know it."

"But to cut off a finger-"

"What about those women who kill a pregnant woman and cut open her uterus because they want the baby or have somehow convinced themselves that the baby inside is really theirs?"

"Those women are mentally deranged." Pescoli fought an overpowering need to place her hands protectively over her own midsection and failed.

"Sorry," Alvarez said, pulling herself up short. "But our killer's mentally deranged, too. Taking a finger wouldn't be past a woman. That's all I'm saying."

Pescoli glanced at the autopsy report on Calypso Pope, a copy of which lay atop another file on her desk. "A crushed hyoid bone. In both cases. That takes strength."

"Strength, but not necessarily size. And know-how. Maybe martial arts?"

Pescoli tossed the remains of her banana in the trash. "So you think this Anne-Marie Calderone is our killer?"

"That's the avenue I'm taking."

"Doesn't it seem a little too obvious? To leave a print on the one piece of evidence that's located? There's not a second shoe, and that's the only print on Pope's Mercedes. Lots of other prints all over that car," she corrected herself. She was thinking aloud. "The Cantnor woman's purse wasn't located, but the second victim's bag was found fairly easily and it had that identifying print."

"But any way you look at it, this woman is at the top of the suspect list. Right now, she's all we've got. She's obviously involved, we just don't know how. I've got a call in to the New Orleans PD and Zoller is checking all the newspaper and police databases, looking for information about Calderone." Sage Zoller was a junior detective with the department. Tiny and fit, she ran marathons, mentored at-risk teens and was a techno wiz kid. A dynamo. "She'll report back to us."

"Good."

At that moment, Alvarez's cell phone rang. She answered, "Detective Alvarez," then held up a finger. "Thanks for calling back, Detective Montoya. We've got a situation up here-a couple homicides-and we found the same fingerprint at both scenes. Looks like it belongs to Anne-Marie Calderone. I was hoping you could supply me with a little more information about her as she's just become a person of interest up here."

She nodded at Pescoli and headed out of the office.

Pescoli rolled her chair closer to the desk, where she brought up the basic information on Anne-Marie Favier Calderone from New Orleans. The woman's driver's license picture and information appeared on the screen and though, more often than not, the photo taken at the DMV was usually pretty d.a.m.n bad, this woman was stunning with her large eyes, easy smile, and oval face. Her hair was a deep brown with red highlights, shoulder-length and thick, her height and weight consistent with someone who kept herself in shape.

Pescoli stared long and hard at the photo. Was she looking into the face of a cold-blooded killer? A woman who took satisfaction, even joy, in cutting off fingers and diamonds?

She found herself playing with her own ring and stopped. This was insane. Or was it?

"No way," she said aloud, but, of course, she couldn't argue the facts. Anne-Marie Calderone was connected to the dead women. Pescoli just had to figure out how.

Chapter 24.