“The jury’s still out,” Alvarez said as she reached into her pocket and withdrew her keys. “You coming?”
“Meet you there.”
CHAPTER 8
Early the next morning Trace looked out the front window and saw snow falling steadily, only to pile up around the fence posts and drift onto the front porch.
Eli was still asleep, though he’d had a bad night, the pain in his arm and his cough waking him every few hours. In the end, around three this morning, Trace had carried the kid downstairs, and together, with Sarge curled up near the banked fire, they’d bunked on the oversized sectional. At five thirty Trace had woken, let the dog out; then, once Sarge had taken care of business and Trace had started the coffee, he’d turned on the television to catch the weather report.
The first thing he’d seen was a woman reporter on the screen, snow covering her blue hooded jacket, a microphone clutched in her gloved hands as she stood near the entrance to the park on the crest of Boxer Bluff. Rescue and police vehicles were visible behind her, lights flashing in the dark as snow continued to fall. She was speaking to the camera, but her voice was too soft to hear.
Trace scooped up his remote and upped the volume.
“. . . where an unidentified female jogger was discovered just an hour ago on a rocky ledge that juts out over the river nearly a hundred feet below street level.”
The camera panned behind the reporter, to the steep grade and an area below. A narrow shelf protruded over the roiling water, and upon it was one rescue worker in a harness, a coil of rope in his hands. The snow on the ledge had been disturbed by boot prints and what Trace assumed was the area where the jogger’s body had lain before the rescue.
“You can see how lucky this unknown jogger was,” the reporter was saying. “Had she slid off the ledge, she would have fallen into the river.” The camera panned to Grizzly Falls, where white water sprayed and churned before a swift current sliced beneath a hundred-year-old bridge and past the glittering lights of the town.
The camera’s eye returned to the reporter. “This is Nia Del Ray,” and she signed off to the two anchors sitting behind a joined desk. The blond female anchor clarified, “That footage was shot last night, and the latest report from the hospital is that the woman is in critical condition, but the identity of the jogger has not yet been confirmed.”
Trace stared at the set and felt that same sense of doom that had been with him when he’d visited Jocelyn’s apartment. Without a thought to the time, he picked up the phone and dialed Ed Zukov’s number. He’d need his neighbor’s help; someone would have to look after his boy for a couple of hours. Though he didn’t want to believe that Jocelyn Wallis was the unidentified jogger who’d lost her footing and nearly her life at the crest of Boxer Bluff, he had to find out.
Pescoli’s cell phone rang sharply near her ear.
She groaned and rolled over to the side of the bed, scrabbled for the damned thing where it was charging on her night table and knocked her reading glasses onto the floor.
“Great,” she muttered as she flipped on the lamp, then said into the phone, “Pescoli.”
“I think you’d better come down here,” Alvarez said as Pescoli eyed the clock near her bed. The digital readout shone a bright red 5:57.
“And ‘here’ is where? The station? Geez, Alvarez, it’s not even six. What the hell time do you get up in the morning?” How could anyone be so alert at this god-awful time of day?
“Yeah, the station. I think we might get an ID on the Jane Doe.”
“Give me half an hour.” Pescoli rolled out of bed and stumbled into the main bath, where she yanked off her University of Montana Grizzlies football jersey and panties, then stepped under a much too cold shower spray.
Twenty-eight minutes later she was walking toward the back door of the sheriff’s department. Ignoring the rumbling in her stomach and Joelle’s winking snowflakes in the windows, she clomped the snow from her boots and walked inside, down a series of short hallways to Alvarez’s desk, where her partner was busy talking to a tall man in an unzipped fleece jacket, faded jeans, work shirt, and sporting a dark beard stubble. He was sitting in the visitor’s chair but got to his feet as she approached.
Alvarez glanced up. “This is my partner, Detective Pescoli, and he”—she hitched her chin to indicate the visitor—“is Trace O’Halleran. He thinks he knows who our Jane Doe is.”
O’Halleran’s lips pinched at the corners a bit. He shook Pescoli’s hand. “I just think it’s an odd coincidence that a woman I know is missing about the same time. She jogs, too, and I dropped by her house yesterday because I heard she hadn’t shown up for work.”
As Alvarez waved him back into his chair, she listened to O’Halleran while he explained that he and Jocelyn Wallis, a schoolteacher whom he’d met through his kid at Evergreen Elementary, had dated a few times and that the relationship had stopped before really getting started. Then, yesterday, he had gotten a call from a friend who worked at the school and was informed that the Wallis woman hadn’t shown up for work. He’d noticed she had phoned him but hadn’t left a message, so he’d gone to her apartment, investigated on his own by letting himself in with a hidden key he knew where to find, and subsequently discovered her missing. Her purse and car had still been at her home. As had been her phone. He’d found it odd, as it was out of character for her; to his knowledge Jocelyn Wallis had never missed a day of work.
“Then I saw this morning’s news,” he said, wrapping up. “That woman was pulled from an area of the park ... one of the trails Jocelyn runs. So, I came to you.”
Pescoli watched him closely all through the recitation. He seemed earnest, intense, and worried. His hands were clasped between his knees, the thumb of his right hand working nervously. He hadn’t called her family, hadn’t wanted to worry them, thought maybe the school would start contacting friends and relatives, and hoped that she would show up.
He was emphatic that he and she weren’t dating. There had been no big blowup; they’
d just quit seeing each other. It had been O’Halleran who had cut things off.
Pescoli wanted to trust the rancher. Handsome in that rugged way she’d always found sexy, he was used to working outside and had the winter tan to prove it. His thick hair brushed the collar of his fleece jacket, and his hands were big, calloused, and had a few tiny white scars. A single father whose wife, he’d admitted, had left him, O’Halleran seemed sincere, and he had come in of his own accord, but that didn’t mean a whole helluva lot.
She’d seen the most pious, timid of men turn out to be cold-blooded killers.
“So, is this Jocelyn Wallis?” Alvarez asked as she slid a couple of pictures of the battered woman to him.