LITMIR.BIZ

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her handheld recorder. “Just a sec,” she called over her shoulder, then returned her attention to the right front wheel of the sedan.

      Pictures had already been taken of every angle of the wreckage, so she brushed away a dusting of snow and examined the hole torn through a snow tire.

      Identical to the others.

      No doubt the result of a bullet being shot from a long-range rifle.

      “Son of a bitch,” she muttered, though she wasn’t surprised. She’d been at two similar crime scenes in just as many months. The right front tires of the cars registered to Theresa Charleton and Nina Salvadore had been shot by a high-powered rifle, causing the cars to careen off a high cliff, only to land, crunched and twisted, at the base of the steep hillside. They were still looking for Wendy Ito’s vanity-plated, white Prius, but this car didn’t belong to the dead woman.

      Alvarez said as much into her pocket recorder, the quickest way to take notes in freezing conditions, then clicked the recorder off and straightened as she gazed over the snowbound ravine.

      Today the normally empty canyon was transformed: detectives, deputies and criminalists working together, using the best equipment Pinewood County and the State of Montana had to offer, hoping for some bit of evidence leading them to the son of a bitch who was behind three, now possibly four, brutal murders.

      As with the previous single-car crashes, all personal effects and the driver of the vehicle itself were missing from the scene. The killer had left each car’s license plates intact, though that was of little help, as a car’s owner could be traced from the vehicle identification number. Otherwise, all that had remained in each case was a twisted piece of metal that had once been a vehicle, skid marks on the road above and a few broken trees and branches that the plummeting vehicle had snapped in its free fall to the bottom of a canyon deep in the Bitterroot Mountains.

      So far the right front tire had blown, and Alvarez was willing to bet her master’s degree in psychology that upon further investigation, the reason for this latest blowout would be the same as the others—a bullet from a .30-caliber rifle.

      “You sick son of a bitch,” she muttered, her breath a cloud, and despite her down jacket, gloves, ski pants, thermal underwear and boots, she felt a chill deep inside, far colder than the icy breeze sweeping through the canyons.

      She pointed at the tire and said to the tech with a camera, “Let’s get a shot of this.”

      “You got it.” Virginia Johnson, a black woman bundled in a county-issued jacket, gloves and ski pants, snapped off several shots as Selena picked her way through the crusted snow and downed branches littering the floor of the ravine.

      “So what’ve you got?” she asked Watershed, who, as always, appeared impatient, his eyebrows pulled together, his thin lips in a perpetual scowl. He, too, was wearing a down jacket issued by the department and a wool hat with a wide brim that shielded his glasses while collecting the falling snow.

      “Take a look here.” He squatted down close to the ground and pointed one gloved finger to a spot in the thick, newly fallen snow where, beneath nearly two inches of the frigid fluff, bits of red were visible. “Blood,” he said, “a trail.” He motioned east, toward a bend in the creek bed where a forest service road was partially hidden. “Looks like he dragged her out on some kind of stretcher.”

      Alvarez shone the beam of her flashlight onto the drifts of snow and, sure enough, ruts were visible in the drifts and between them was a definite blood trail, dark drips of red beneath a thin crust of snow.

      “Let’s collect it,” she said.

      Mikhail Slatkin, one of the forensic techs who’d been attempting to take a casting of a boot print in the snow, nodded without looking up. Tall and raw-boned, the son of Russian immigrants, he was barely twenty-six and was one of the best forensic scientists Alvarez had ever met. “I’ll get it in a minute. Just let me finish here.” He worked fast, racing against the elements as snow was blowing through the canyon, covering evidence at the rate of half an inch an hour.

      Over the whistle of the wind, Alvarez heard the rumble of an engine and looked up to see Regan Pescoli’s rig grind to a stop behind the county truck. Pescoli was out of the car in an instant, pulling on a stocking cap to cover her tangle of reddish curls. She was pale and wan-looking, dark smudges beneath her large eyes indicating she hadn’t gotten enough sleep.

      Which wasn’t a surprise.

      Though Pescoli’s private life wasn’t any of Alvarez’s business, she couldn’t help but be a little ticked off. Nine times out of ten she had to cover for her partner, either because she’d had a long night waiting up for one of her kids, a battle royale with her ex or a late night at a bar with one of her many loser boyfriends.

      Despite it all, Pescoli was a brilliant detective. And that’s all that mattered. She had a knack for pegging a person on first meeting, for cutting through the usual BS and finding the truth. It bugged the hell out of Alvarez that all of her education and degrees didn’t seem to stack up to her partner’s gut instincts.

      It was a slap in the face, but Alvarez would get over it.

      Alvarez looked back at Watershed as Pescoli signed in to the crime scene with one of the deputies, her eyes already taking in the single-car accident as she scribbled her name on the sheet. “Same damned thing,” she said, heading toward Alvarez. “Same bloody damned thing.”

      She smelled of cigarette smoke and looked like hell, but then, no one was their best at this hour of the morning, bundled in outdoor gear.

      “So what’ve we got?”

      “Nothing new. Take a look.” Alvarez walked her partner through the trod-on snow to the car.

      “Wendy Ito’s?”

      “Nope. Washington plates, but this is an older-model Subaru Outback. Ito drove a newer Toyota with vanity plates.”

      “A Prius. I remember.” Pescoli’s jaw tightened as she bent down to peer into the twisted wreckage. “So we’ve got another one.”

      “Looks like.”

      “Hell.” She sighed as she straightened, her eyes, usually a gold color, darkening. “Driver’s door jimmied open? Tire shot? No ID, no personal effects like a wallet or purse?”

      Alvarez nodded, snowflakes drifting from the steely heavens. “Same as before.”

      “But no body found?”

      “Not yet.”

      Alvarez walked Pescoli around what was left of the silver Subaru and gave Pescoli a rundown of what they’d found. She had to shout, as the wind began to shriek down the canyon again, tearing through the trees, rattling bare branches and blowing tiny sharp flakes of snow against Alvarez’s skin.

      “Just like the others,” Pescoli observed, her full lips pulled into a frustrated scowl. “What the hell is the bastard up to?”

      A moot question.

      Pescoli squinted upward, toward the ridge, suspecting that this car, like the others, had been forced off the road, then plunged and careened down the canyon wall to land at the bottom of the canyon floor, in this frozen creek bed.

      Alvarez followed her gaze and knew what her partner was thinking. It was a wonder anyone survived the crash.

      But then, they weren’t certain anyone had. Just that the driver had been removed. Damn.

      “We know when this happened?” Pescoli asked.

      Alvarez tugged her gloves on tighter. “It could’ve been as early as yesterday afternoon, judging by the snowfall.”

      “Then the victim’s probably still alive.” Pescoli glanced around the bleak ravine with sheer walls of ice and rock. “The son of a bitch tends to them, nurses them like some damned Florence Nightingale, then ties ’em to a tree and leaves ’em to freeze to death. Sick bastard.”

      Amen

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