Addison Fox - The Colton Sheriff

Along with the hair color match, she was roughly the same age as the other victims and she had the same physical build. Medium height. Slender. Petite frame. The sort of young woman who turned heads when she walked into a room.

A young woman was supposed to turn heads, Aisha thought, the frustration and anger for these unfortunate six rising up in her chest. You were supposed to be young and free and silly and sometimes a little stupid. You weren’t supposed to be dead.

And all these victims would still be missing if it weren’t for the overwhelming avalanche that still defied explanation. They’d had late snows before—Mother Nature was always unpredictable if nothing else—but this was something else. A large, prodigious disaster that had killed a ski guest at The Lodge as it did its destructive work.

A while later these six bodies were discovered during the clearing of brush and debris. Although two of the six had been identified, Sabrina Gilford and another young woman who’d gone missing in Roaring Springs the prior winter, April Thomas, Trey was working day and night to identify the others. It was maddeningly slow work and had kept Trey and his best deputy, Daria Bloom, in constant motion for months now.

And then, a few weeks ago, they had a new, potentially disturbing problem fall in their laps. Trey’s cousin Skye had gone missing. Marketing director for The Colton Empire—an enterprise that encompassed nearly half of Roaring Springs, including The Lodge, the town’s major ski resort—Skye was vivacious and always on the move. Aisha had met her off and on through the years at various events held by Trey’s parents and even now she could picture the once small redhead who used to race around Trey’s parents’ ranch with her quieter twin, Phoebe, in tow.

It was her busy, whirlwind personality that they were all counting on now. Skye rarely sat still and they’d all retained a stubborn hope that she was off on an adventure. Hopefully as far away from Roaring Springs as she could be. Only none of them could ward off the more disturbing idea that Skye had attracted the attention of the Avalanche Killer. Her vivid red hair didn’t fit the pattern, but beyond that, her slim frame and age were a direct match.

Thoughts of Skye were inevitably tied to The Lodge and the strange circumstances that had led to the discovery of the bodies. Even with his 24/7 work schedule running down leads, Trey had spoken more than once about the circumstances that caused the avalanche. He was so busy dealing with the voracious press as he tried to investigate the murders that any further investigation into Mother Nature’s vagaries had to wait.

Even as the freak incident clearly gnawed away at him.

The ski slopes were groomed regularly, specifically to avoid nature’s wrath in the form of an avalanche. Yet here was one, overpowering in scale and scope and late in the season, no less. It was odd. And it was one more thing on Trey’s overfull plate that Aisha knew bothered him.

She knew a lot of things about Trey. The broad shoulders that looked as impressive in his sheriff’s uniform as in a casual T-shirt while jogging around Roaring Springs. The firm cut of his jaw, lightly stubbled when he wasn’t on duty. Which was increasingly rare since he always seemed to be on the job. Or working on behalf of the role he’d sworn to uphold to the best of his abilities, even if that best had his delicious brown eyes bloodshot more often than not lately from lack of sleep.

Trey Colton was a man working off the very edge of his reserves and she was damned if she’d let him come up short. It was why she’d finished up a challenging afternoon session with one of her patients and raced over here. Back to the gruesome files and the endless clues that didn’t seem to go anywhere.

“Aw, jeez, Aish, don’t look at those.”

She turned at the rich, husky tones, unsurprised to see Trey standing just inside the conference room at the Bradford County Sheriff’s Office. She hadn’t let him know she was coming but had figured the scent of pizza would eventually give him an inkling that she was there. The fact she’d had three other pies delivered along with hers, for distribution around the office, would only smooth her way if anyone was bothered by her taking up space in one of their conference rooms.

“How am I supposed to help you catch a killer if I don’t look at the bastard’s handiwork?”

“Still.” Trey had already dived into the pizza, dragging out the half that was his—pepperoni and sausage with extra cheese. “Looking at that’ll make you lose your appetite. Not to mention any belief in humanity and basic decency.”

He took a large bite of pizza, momentary relief closing his eyelids to half-mast. “You ordered from Bruno’s.”

“Of course I did.” She reached for another slice of cheese, pleased to turn this time into a shared dinner. “Would I deign to order anywhere else?”

He grinned at that. “No. Of course not. That New York education was good for more than just a psychology degree.”

“Damn straight it was.”

She’d not only learned the ins and outs of the human psyche, as well as the proper ratio of toppings to sauce, while gathering an education in the Big Apple, but she’d learned a tremendous amount about her own heart, too. Despite what she’d always assumed about herself, it was shockingly fragile.

Breakable, even.

And she’d been unwilling to do much to risk it since. Pining over her best friend was about as far as she was going to go, that lingering hurt keeping her from making any moves to change the status quo between them.

“So what have we got here?” He polished off the end of his first slice and reached for another. “We’ve all been staring at the same photos for weeks now and nothing’s turned up. Other than time of death from the medical examiner and estimated ages and builds on all six women, there are very few lines to tug.”

“Sabrina appears to be the only local,” Aisha pointed out. “That’s a place to start.”

“Daria homed in on that, too. It would go a long way toward explaining why we haven’t focused on any missing persons in the search for these women at the point they were murdered. But they’re also unidentified, so that may be a false assumption.”

“But the few missing persons you ran don’t match the victims?” Aisha pressed him, well aware his trusty deputy would have been all over those runs in a New York minute.

“No.” Trey polished off the last of his crust. “But let’s play out your theory. The killer has been stalking victims elsewhere, then dragging them back to Roaring Springs like trophies. Why change patterns with Sabrina?”

“Serial killers do change pattern. It’s infrequent but it does happen. Maybe Sabrina was a replacement for the killer’s intended victim? Or maybe it’s a point of escalation.”

“There haven’t been any reports anywhere in the state of a young woman escaping a killer’s clutches. Isn’t it usually an incident like that when a killer scrambles to replace the victim, even if elements aren’t perfect?”

She and Trey had been over this already and Aisha knew she was grasping a bit. But everything in the details they’d found so far suggested things were escalating with this killer, who was growing even more dangerous than they had previously envisioned.

“Besides,” Trey spoke again, his attention on the photos spread across the table. “If you’re doing your dirty work somewhere else, why come back to the scene of your crimes?”

Trey’s insight matched hers, but Aisha hadn’t had a good answer for it. Was her theory about the killer escalating off track? The time between the fifth and sixth victims suggested her hunch was indeed correct, but it was far too big a leap to assume this was the killer’s only grave site, too. Colorado was a big, wide-open state and the vast, undeveloped expanses of mountain and forest would offer any number of places to hide bodies.