Lisa Jackson - Born To Die

“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.

O’Halleran swept in a breath. “God, I hope not,” he said fervently but studied each of the two shots. “I–I don’t know. Maybe. Jesus.”

“I’ve got a few pictures of Jocelyn Wallis,” Alvarez said.

“From the school’s Web site?” Pescoli guessed.

“Motor vehicle division.” Alvarez clicked on her keyboard, and a driver’s license appeared on the screen. The woman in the picture was somewhere in her early thirties with a bright smile and long reddish brown hair.

“Could be.” Pescoli looked at O’Halleran. “Any identifying marks? Tattoos? Scars? Birthmarks?”

He lifted a shoulder. “Don’t know.”

“You didn’t see her naked?” Pescoli questioned. “She didn’t talk about any surgeries or injuries as a kid? Or getting a tattoo?”

“We didn’t get that far.”

“You didn’t sleep with her?” Pescoli asked.

He hesitated and looked down at his hands before meeting her eyes again. “Once. At her place. I didn’t see anything. She didn’t tell me about anything like that, but she did wear earrings. Three in one ear, I think, and two in the other.”

“That’s something,” Pescoli said. “So why don’t you come down and see if you know her?”

“The hospital will allow it?” he asked.

“We’ve got friends in high places.”

He was already climbing to his full six feet two inches, and Alvarez was reaching for her jacket, purse, and sidearm. “I’ll drive,” Pescoli said. She wanted to see his reaction to the injured woman, and then she’d double-check his story.

And if the woman turned out to be someone other than Jocelyn Wallis, there was still the problem that the schoolteacher was missing.

If what O’Halleran had told them was true.

“Oh, thank God, Doctor Lambert! I was so afraid…. Oh, sweet Jesus!” Rosie Alsgaard said, the fingers of one hand theatrically splayed over her chest as she hurried along the hallway of the second floor of the small hospital. Dressed in scrubs, the ear tips of the coiled stethoscope peeking out of her pocket like the tiny twin faces of a double-headed snake, the ER nurse jogged over the shiny linoleum as she met Kacey. “Oh, man, I was worried. We all were.”

“Worried? What’re you talking about?”

“Because of the patient who was admitted last night, before my shift! She’s a dead ringer for you, and Cleo, she was certain it was you! The Jane Doe.”

“Cleo?”

“The nurse’s aide who was working ER last night. And not just her. Me, too. I saw the patient and… and it’s freaky!” Rosie was breathing hard, her words tumbling out of her mouth in no sensible order. “I mean, of course her face is swollen and bruised, her nose broken, but her hair… and she looks like you. I was sure when I saw her this morning… I mean, I was worried sick that you had fallen and—”