LITMIR.BIZ

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branches that appeared to scrape the sky. He stopped to catch his breath, watching it fog and cursing the aliens who had forced him up the mountain trail when his arthritis was acting up. The pain now was exacerbated, he was certain, by the experiments they’d done on him and the invisible chip they’d slipped into his body.

      “I’m goin’, I’m goin’,” he said when he felt that little pinch at his temple, the prod they used to urge him on, the one that had pushed him out of bed before the sun climbed over the mountain crest. Hell, he hadn’t even had a swallow of coffee, much less a sip of Jim Beam. Crytor, damn his orange reptilian hide, was a more intense taskmaster than Lila had been, God rest her soul. He made the sign of the cross over his chest in memory of his dead wife, though he was not a Catholic, never had been and had no intention of becoming one. It just seemed like the right, reverent thing to do.

      Even Crytor didn’t seem to mind.

      Through a stand of fir he noticed elk tracks and dung in the snow and wished he’d brought his rifle, though it wasn’t hunting season. Who would ever find out?

      Well, besides Crytor.

      Rounding a bend in the path, he caught a glimpse of the valley below.

      And he stopped short, nearly slipping.

      His seventy-six-year-old heart almost quit on him as his gaze, as good as it ever was, focused on a solitary pine tree and the naked woman lashed to the trunk.

      “Holy Mother Mary,” he whispered and headed faster down the hillside, his walking stick digging deep through the snow to the frozen ground below as he hurried downward.

      No wonder the aliens had wanted him to see this.

      They’d probably abducted her, did what they wanted and left her here in this frigid, unpopulated valley. That’s what they did, you know.

      He wished he had a cell phone, though he thought he’d heard that the damned things didn’t work up here. Too remote. No towers. He slid and caught himself, moving quickly along the familiar trail. She was probably still alive. Just stunned into submission. He could wrap her in his jacket, and hike back and get help.

      Digging his stick deep and fast into the snow, he descended rapidly, hurrying down the switchbacks to the valley floor, where a snow owl hooted softly in an otherwise eerily quiet canyon.

      “Hey!” he cried, half-running, nearly out of breath. “Hey!”

      But before he reached the woman strapped to the tree, he stopped short and froze.

      This was no return of a body from an alien ship.

      Hell no.

      This was the work of the very devil.

      The hairs on the back of his wrinkled neck lifted.

      This woman, an Asian woman, was as dead as dead can be. Her skin was blue, snow dusting her dark, shiny hair, her eyes staring without life. Blood lay on her skin, dark and frozen. A gag covered her lips. The bindings strapping her to the tree had cut deep bruises and welts into her arms and chest and waist. Not quite hog-tied. But close enough.

      Somewhere a tree branch groaned with the weight of snow and Ivor felt as if unseen eyes might be watching.

      He’d never felt more fear in his life.

      Not even as Crytor’s prisoner.

      Again, wishing he had his hunting rifle, he stepped backward slowly, easing out the way he’d come, until, at the edge of the mountain trail, he turned and started running as fast as his legs dared carry him.

      Who or whatever had done this to the woman was the purest and deadliest form of evil.

      And it lingered.

      God in heaven, it was still here.

      Detective Selena Alvarez dropped into the chair at her desk. It wasn’t yet seven, but she had piles of paperwork to sift through, and the unsolved case of the two dead women found nearly a month apart, linked by the way their bodies had been left in the snow, was uppermost in her mind.

      The images of those bodies—naked, tied to trees, gagged and left in the snow to die—chilled her to her bones. For years any dead bodies discovered in and around Pinewood County were few and far between, usually the result of hunting, fishing, skiing or hiking accidents. One time a jogger was mauled nearly to death by a cougar, and there had always been the domestic disputes gone bad, fueled by alcohol or drugs, a firearm or other weapon in handy reach. But murder had never been common in this part of the country. Multiple murders rarer still. A serial killer in this neck of the woods? Unheard of.

      But one was here.

      She had only to look on her computer screen and see the dead bodies of Theresa Charleton and Nina Salvadore, two women with little in common, to know that a psychopath was either nearby or had passed through.

      She clicked her mouse and the dead body of the first victim, Theresa Charleton, came into view on her monitor. A few more clicks and she split the screen with several images: the woman’s driver’s license picture, procured from the Idaho DMV; a photo of the wrecked green Ford Eclipse, labeled Crime Scene One; and another shot of a lonely hemlock tree in a snowy valley with the woman lashed to the trunk, tagged as Crime Scene Two. The final image was of the note left nailed above the woman’s head: her initials, T C, in block letters, written below a star that had been not only drawn on the white paper but also carved into the bole of the tree about five inches above her head. The lab had found traces of blood in the carving, blood belonging to the victim.

      Alvarez’s jaw tightened as she stared at what had been left of the schoolteacher from Boise. She’d had no known enemies. Married for two years, no children, the husband devastated. He’d claimed she’d been visiting her parents in Whitefish and his story had checked out. The victim’s parents and brother were beside themselves with grief and anger. Her brother had insisted the police “find the monster who did this!”

      “We’re working on it,” Alvarez said to herself as she opened a file and saw a copy of the note.

      The star, similar to the one cut into the tree over the victim’s head, had been drawn high over the letters:

      T C

      Why? Alvarez wondered. What did it mean to the killer? The sheriff’s department had checked on the people who had seen her last and come up with nothing so far. They’d thought the incident was a single murder—until the next victim had been found in an identical situation.

      Again Alvarez clicked her mouse and another image, so similar to the first that it turned her blood to ice, flickered onto the screen. A naked woman with long dark hair was bound to the trunk of a fir tree. Different location, but eerily similar.

      Victim number two was Nina Salvadore, a single mother and computer programmer from Redding, California. She, too, had been found tied to a tree in a tiny valley within the wilds of the Bitterroots. Her body had been two miles from her vehicle, a Ford Focus wrecked into a nearly unidentifiable crush of red paint, metal and plastic, found several weeks earlier.

      The star cut into the tree over Salvadore’s body was located in a slightly different position in relation to her body, and the note that had been left at the scene was slightly different as well. This time, though the star had been drawn on a standard-size piece of printer paper, new letters had been written on it. It appeared that both sets of the victims’ initials had been interwoven:

      T SC N

      Was the killer playing with them? Trying to communicate? If he wanted credit for both killings, why not write T C N S, the order of the women’s first and last names? Why mix the initials up?

      Alvarez narrowed her eyes. She was a computer wizard and had run several programs trying to find out if the four letters meant anything. So far, she’d come up dry.

      “Bastard,” she muttered, trying to imagine what kind of monster would do something so brutal and cruel as to leave a woman

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