LITMIR.BIZ

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the most dedicated at home.

      Clicking off her headset, she walked toward the locker room, passing a row of treadmills occupied by a handful of people. One woman was reading a magazine, but the other stationary runners stared at a wall-mounted television, sweating, hearts racing, legs moving at different speeds, all going nowhere.

      On the screen, Ivor-the-Idiot was prattling with great animation to a petite newswoman in a blue parka. Snow was falling, catching in Ivor’s thick eyebrows and dusting the steps of the courthouse behind them. Over the whine of several treadmills, Alvarez couldn’t hear much of what Ivor was saying, but it didn’t matter. She got the message.

      Her day, already far from stellar, took a nosedive. Couldn’t that old coot keep his mouth shut?

      Not on a dare. You know the old man wallows in all of the attention.

      “Terrific,” she muttered under her breath, then made her way down a hallway past a group of teenaged boys playing basketball in the gymnasium. Further on she passed a step-aerobics class consisting of a handful of diehards exercising to a trim dance teacher’s instructions.

      Alvarez grabbed a towel from a bin and stepped into the locker room, where she stripped off her sweaty workout clothes, then headed to the shower.

      All the while, she thought about the case.

      It was getting to her, like a lover who had turned stalker. It kept her awake at night, nagged at her in the morning and throughout the day, even when she was supposed to be on her own time, relaxing or having “fun.”

      She lathered her body and laughed at herself.

      Fun.

      What the hell was that?

      She was only thirty-three and she wasn’t sure she remembered the last time she’d really let her hair down or kicked up her heels, or got down or whatever the hell you called it. Her life was her job.

      Which was not only stupid.

      It was pathetic.

      She rinsed off, toweled dry and put on clean jeans, a black turtleneck and a down vest and checked her image in the mirror bolted to the inside of her locker. She was fit and pretty, no doubt about it, but her lips didn’t pull into as quick a smile as they once had and her eyes sometimes looked haunted.

      Where was the girl who had once liked shiny lipstick, hoop earrings, loud music and high heels? The freshman in high school with a perfect figure to go along with her perfect GPA?

      Oh, her! Don’t you remember? You left her nearly twenty years ago. And when you fled, you didn’t look back at family, friends or the grinding poverty of Woodburn, Oregon.

      Her stomach twisted and she had the insane urge to make the sign of the cross over her chest, a rite she’d abandoned and buried along with her poor Hispanic roots and her secret…the damned secret that haunted her to this day.

      Knock it off!

      Alvarez grabbed her bag and slammed the locker shut.

      She didn’t have time for reminiscing or wondering about the rocky path she’d taken that had ended here in Grizzly Falls, Montana. Far from her dreams. Far from what she’d planned for herself. Not that it mattered today. All she needed to concentrate on now was catching the twisted sicko who was terrorizing this part of the state.

      The gym was located fifteen minutes from the sheriff’s department, though the drive took her nearly half an hour, as the streets were tangled from bad weather. Several vehicles were abandoned on the roadside and a collision made the icy conditions more difficult. Alvarez stopped to see if she could help, but the city officers who had responded had the situation handled. There were no injuries aside from the bruised ego of a driver of a Land Rover that had slid into a Ford Taurus.

      She cut through the heart of the city, the part that had been first settled, on the banks of the river. Christmas lights winked in store windows. Snow was piled high along the gutters; walkways carved out on the sidewalks. A few shoppers braved the elements and in front of the courthouse a band was assembling for a holiday concert at the base of a huge fir tree strung with clusters of white lights in the shape of snowflakes. One tuba player, dressed in a thick coat, earmuffs, gloves and boots, was blowing a few practice notes.

      She drove along the plowed streets, electing to take the longer, less steep road to the upper part of the city, where the sheriff’s department was housed. For the first time since joining the Pinewood County Sheriff’s Department, Detective Selena Alvarez was late.

      “Wait a second…let’s back up,” Jillian insisted, her heart tapping a drum. It was one thing to suspect that the man who had pulled her from the wreckage of her car wasn’t what he seemed, but another thing for him to admit he was a killer. “Why did you want the man dead?”

      “My business.”

      “I need to know,” she said tautly, wishing she’d never given up the knife. She didn’t think he would do her harm, otherwise why bring up the killing at all? But she was still nervous. “Why did you want him dead?”

      MacGregor’s lips whitened. “Because he was beating his wife to a pulp.”

      “What? Where?”

      “I was in a bar in Denver. This guy is drunk and starts insulting his wife, pushing her around, and he gets kicked out of the bar. His wife goes with him. I leave a few minutes later and he’s in the parking lot, has her on the asphalt and is wailing on her, beating and kicking at her.” MacGregor leaned on the mantel, staring at the coals, and his face looked a dozen years older. “She was swearing and writhing and yelling about the baby. Begging him not to hurt the baby. Pleading with him. And he just kept kicking.”

      Jillian’s jaw slackened in empathy.

      “I saw red,” he went on. “She’s screaming and crying, and I jumped over the hood of a car and grabbed him. He threw a punch and I threw a better one. Knocked him to the ground.”

      Jillian barely breathed. She knew that MacGregor wasn’t in the room with her any longer, that in his mind’s eye, he was reliving the whole nightmare scene again.

      “She was just lying there, shuddering in the snow and slush, blood everywhere. Her face was…hardly a face. Jesus, it was black and blue, cuts everywhere, her jaw and nose broken. And her jeans. She had on tight jeans and there was blood running down her legs….” He drained his bottle of beer and the room went deathly quiet. When he spoke again, his voice was softer. “I remember…oh hell…I remember sirens and the air crackling and the blue-and-red flash of lights against the snow. Someone had called the police and they yelled at me to put my hands in the air and get down on the ground. I did and the next second some two-hundred-fifty-pound cop was on me, forcing my face into the slush and gravel, cuffing my hands behind my back.” Frowning, he set his bottle on the mantel.

      “They arrested you?”

      “Yep.”

      “But just until everything was straightened out.”

      He turned to face her, his eyes dark, his lips curved in irony. “Nothing ever got straightened out. The guy died that night. Cracked his skull wide open. Intracranial hemorrhage, I think it’s called. Bleeding in the brain.” MacGregor sighed through his nose. “And the wife…her name was Margot, not that it matters. Margot claimed that I was the one who was beating her, that I tried to rape her, that her husband Ned was the hero.”

      “What?” Jillian whispered, horrified.

      “Yeah.” He shook his head. “The evidence proved otherwise. The toes of good old Ned’s boots told the story, but the end result was that he was dead. If I hadn’t stuck my neck out for Margot, he could have survived. The baby wouldn’t have, regardless. Margot miscarried. But I was directly responsible for Ned Tomkins’s death. At least that’s what the coroner and judge decided. I pled down to a lesser charge and spent sixteen months in jail.”

      “That’s terrible!”

      “Margot

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