Afraid to Die by Lisa Jackson Page B

enough that it looks like there might be a whole new trial.”
    â€œCrap.” The headache that had started early this morning and had been exacerbated by the couch pillow evisceration was really beginning to pound inside her skull. J. R. “Junior” Green, the creep of all creeps, was an ex-pro football lineman who had turned coach and pedophile. Alvarez had been instrumental in sending him up the river and he’d sworn that he’d return the favor by ruining her life. “He’s guilty!”
    â€œAs sin. We just have to prove it all over again.”
    Her headache throbbed, and as Pescoli walked off, Alvarez’s cell phone rang. She checked the number, saw that it was Terry Longstrom and didn’t pick up. She couldn’t deal with him right now, at least not personally. If he needed to talk to her about business, he could leave a message; then she might call him back. Maybe.
    She reached into the top drawer of her desk, found a bottle of Excedrin she used only if her periods were severe. Those times she washed the painkillers down with some kind of herbal tea. Today she popped two into her palm, tossed them into her mouth and swallowed them dry.
    It wasn’t yet nine in the morning, and so far, the day was turning into a nightmare.
    Â 
    Â 
    A couple of hours later, while Pescoli was checking with several members of the Bible study group at Brenda Sutherland’s church, the members of which were some of the people who’d last seen Brenda alive, Alvarez headed over to Missing Persons, where she made some inquiries, asking Taj about other women who may have been reported missing.
    â€œLet me see,” Taj said, typing into her keyboard and studying her monitor.
    Alvarez was antsy. She’d been waiting for hours to talk to Taj, as all night she’d tossed and turned, wondering what connection, if any, there was between Lissa Parsons and Brenda Sutherland.
    She wasn’t one to believe in coincidences, and if the past few winters had taught her anything, it was to be wary. For a small town, Grizzly Falls had its share of nuts. There were the harmless ones, like Ivor Hicks, who, pushing eighty, still swore that he’d been abducted by aliens years before on Mesa Rock. He’d been brought to the mother ship and was experimented upon by a reptilian race headed by a particularly nasty general named Crytor. He’d sworn that his experience with the aliens had not been due to his intimate relationship with Jack Daniel’s. Alvarez wasn’t convinced. Then there was Grace Perchant, a woman who lived alone with not one, but now two wolf-dogs, her older female named Sheena and a newer addition, a big male that she called Bane. So now, in Alvarez’s opinion, Grace had a bona fide pack. Great. Convinced she spoke with ghosts, Grace was always making weird predictions that strangely came to be. Again, she was, at least to Alvarez’s way of thinking, for the most part, benign.
    However, on the other side of the coin, Grizzly Falls had seen more than its fair share of sadistic killers recently, psychos who had terrorized this area for three years running. As Pescoli had said often enough, “It’s the cold around here; the sub-zero temperature brings out the crazies.”
    Alvarez, a woman of science, couldn’t put her finger on what was the cause of the horrid phenomenon; she just didn’t like it. And now, with two women missing, she felt that little tingle at the base of her skull that warned her of bad news.
    â€œWe have quite a few missing people,” Taj said, scrolling down on her computer screen. “An elderly man wandered out of an elder facility and he’s still not been located; two potential teenaged runaways, a set of twins, probably abducted by their own father; and a baby taken out of the hospital.”
    â€œI’m looking for another woman, somewhere between nineteen and forty, probably, but not