Lisa Jackson - Born To Die

Kacey hesitated and frowned. She wrote back: Stomach.

Alvarez wrote back: Maybe poison. Arsenic found in Wallis stomach contents .

“From what?” Kacey mouthed.

Alvarez wrote: In the coffee. Most likely a small dosage.

“Damn it,” Kacey’s voice was barely discernible, probably wouldn’t be picked up on the mic. Her expression turned from concern to anger, and she wrote quickly: We need to talk .

Nodding, Alvarez scribbled back: My car . She then turned up the television to the point that nothing else could be heard and, carrying the coffee, pot, and grinder, all bagged and tagged, walked through the kitchen and outside.

The wind was blowing hard, snow slanting sideways at times, a tree branch banging against one of the gutters on the second story. She unlocked her car and climbed in. Trace and Kacey showed up a few moments later.

“Okay, it’s safe here,” Alvarez said as she turned on the engine and ignored any banter or crackling on the radio. Trace was stretched across the back; Kacey in the passenger bucket seat. Alvarez adjusted the heater, to blow out the condensation, then let the wipers swipe off an accumulation of snow. “I think you may have been poisoned, though probably not more than enough to make you sick. And the reason I think so is because we found traces of arsenic in Jocelyn’s blood. The guy was toying with her. He’d put it into her coffee somehow.”

“Sick bastard,” Trace said.

“You think he put it in my coffee, too?” Kacey asked.

“I’ll find out.”

“I think this ‘sick bastard’ could be related to me,” Kacey said slowly, picking her words.

“How so?” Alvarez asked.

Kacey then, somewhat reluctantly, launched into a story about being the love child of her mother and one Gerald Johnson, a doctor who had invented a certain type of heart stent. She told of her findings that afternoon in Missoula, at Gerald’s place of work, summing up her impressions of him and his children, then dropped the bomb that Gerald Johnson as a medical student had been a sperm donor to a now-defunct clinic.

Alvarez took a long moment, savoring the feeling of a case breaking wide open. “We were already on the sperm bank angle,” she told Kacey, surprising both her and Trace. “From Elle Alexander’s parents.” Quickly, she recapped what she’d learned, then gazed at Kacey seriously across the dark interior of the car. “But you have to cease and desist. Give me a statement back at the station, then disappear, hide out. At least until we determine if you’re a target and what the story is with Johnson and his kids.”

“One of them is like me. Robert Lindley. His mother was another of Johnson’s mistresses. And another one of his children, a girl named Kathleen, died in her twenties in a skiing accident.”

“Another accident,” Alvarez said.

“You think she was a victim?” Trace asked.

“Maybe.”

“What about his other kids?” Kacey asked. “Kathleen died years ago. And Agatha, when she was eight. The rest of them, as far as I know, haven’t had any brushes with death.”

“That’s just it. As far as you know. For now, though, you have to quit playing detective. It’s too dangerous.” Alvarez was adamant. “It’s our job. We’ll handle it from here.”

“Jesus,” Pescoli muttered, stunned as she knelt on the snow near the corpse, a cross-country skier who had apparently slammed into the snag of a pine tree perched on the banks of the icy creek. Pescoli had been on her way to the Lambert house when she’d gotten the call.

The dead skier was a woman with reddish hair, and though her face was mangled from her crash with the pine and blood had frozen over a shattered cheekbone and eye socket, Pescoli felt a shiver of dread run through her.

The accident victim’s features, though discolored and frozen, were similar to those of Jocelyn Wallis, Elle Alexander, and even Shelly Bonaventure.

“Son of a bitch,” she said as the body was photographed, then bagged and driven to the medical examiner’s van, which was parked in the lower lot, next to the red Honda, which was registered to Karalee Rierson, who lived ten miles east.

What were the chances?

She spent time talking to the couple who had found her, newly married twentysomethings who had been snowshoeing and happened upon the dead body. They’d nearly missed seeing her as she’d been half buried in snow, but the man had caught a glimpse of something red beneath the fresh snow and investigated.

They had been terrified but, having cell phones with them, had called 9-1-1. Kayan Rule had taken the call and been dispatched to the scene. When he’d seen the victim, he, in turn, had phoned the station again, requesting a homicide detective. Pescoli had been the detective closest, and she’d driven her Jeep up to the lower lot and snowshoed in a quarter mile to the area where the victim had lost her life, in an apparent accident.

The crime scene crew had arrived and was combing the area for trace evidence, but Pescoli figured they wouldn’t find much. The weapon of death was the tree; bloodstains on a particularly vicious eye-level snag were still visible.

It could have been an accident, she supposed. A careless or startled skier, maybe. But Pescoli wasn’t buying it for a minute. She figured that the dead woman now on her way to the morgue would prove to be yet another victim of a killer who had a vendetta against the offspring of Donor 727, whoever the hell he was.

No, the killer was even more precise in his intentions than that. So far, all the victims had been women. Elle Alexander’s brother, Bruce, was alive and well according to her parents.

A mistake?

Probably not.

Now, as she snowshoed back to her Jeep and waited for the truck to come and tow Karalee Rierson’s little Honda, she flipped open her cell phone and called Alvarez. When her partner didn’t answer, Pescoli left a short message: “I think we’ve got another one.” Then watched as the frozen Honda, with snow piled over its hood and dirty icicles dangling like long, snaggy teeth along the wheel wells, was winched onto the flatbed.

Another “accident.”

Another dead woman.

Probably related to good old 727.

Whatever the hell that meant.

Poisoned?

She’d been poisoned, and she hadn’t even realized it? With Trace at her side, Kacey was seated on a folding chair in the interview room at the sheriff’s department while listening to Alvarez, from the other side of the small, battered table, describe finding arsenic in Jocelyn Wallis’s coffee grounds. Kacey thought of her own symptoms, how she’d never considered that there was a toxin running through her veins. She was a doctor, and she would have noticed if the symptoms had become violent, the pain more intense. Still…

It all made sense.

Now.

Already the interview was well into its second hour. Detective Alvarez, after warning them to stay out of the investigation, was now doing this by the book.

Trace, though he tried to appear relaxed, was antsy, his jaw, beneath a darkening beard shadow, tight, his lips flat, his eyes serious. Twice during the conversation, he’d stepped outside of the room to call Tilly and get an update on his son. Though he didn’t really need to be here and Kacey had encouraged him to go home, he’d stayed.

Alvarez had listened to Kacey’s theory about the dead women being related to Gerald Johnson twice so far, once at Kacey’s house, and a second time now. When her partner, Pescoli, arrived, Alvarez quickly brought her up to speed.