Her heart was pounding, and a mixture of anger and fear slid through her blood. “I don’t know, Jer, but you have to fix it. Figure it out. If you didn’t do it—”
“If? Really? You don’t believe me?” He was shocked and offended, his lips flattening. “Come on, Mom!” Slamming a fist onto the arm of the couch, he declared vehemently, “I’m not a thief! Someone set me up!”
“You didn’t let me finish, Jer. I was saying that if you didn’t do it, then you have to find out who did. Prove it. It couldn’t be that tough. The station has cameras and records of all the transactions.”
“Are you crazy? You think they’re going to let me see any of them?”
“They’ll have to if you sue them and they fight it. Your attorney will—”
“I don’t have an attorney, and I can’t afford one. Get real!” He was starting for the back stairs.
“Where are you going?”
“My room.”
“You moved out, remember?”
“It’s still my room.” Big feet began clomping down the steps.
“I was going to turn it into a sewing room.”
“You don’t even sew!” he yelled up the stairwell.
His door slammed shut, though not with the same righteous, passionate thud as Bianca’s had.
“I’m a failure as a mother,” Pescoli confided to the dog. “A complete and utter failure.” Opening the toolbox, she searched for a screwdriver with which to pry the pins out of Bianca’s door hinges. After digging through the rarely used wire cutters, pliers, and wrenches, she found a large screwdriver with paint drips on it, proof she’d used it to force open stubborn paint cans, and was about to attack the door in question when her cell phone rang.
“Pescoli,” she said as she pressed the talk button.
“Alvarez,” her partner answered her. “I think you should come up to the bluff over Grizzly Falls. Looks like a jogger slipped and fell over the railing up around the park. No ID on her.”
“Dead?”
“Nearly. EMTs are working with her. Probably an accident. It’s slippery as hell out here.”
“Don’t you have enough to do with the cases we’ve already got?” Pescoli asked. “This isn’t even a death yet, much less a homicide.”
“Hmmm. . yeah.”
“Well, it beats what’s going on here,” Pescoli decided. “I’m on my way,” Pescoli said, tossing the screwdriver back into the open toolbox. Clicking off, she yelled loudly toward her daughter’s closed bedroom door, “This is a reprieve, Bianca, but only a short reprieve. I’ll be back.” For once she didn’t change her voice into her pathetic Arnold Schwarzenegger impression.
Today, she figured, it wouldn’t be appreciated.
Cisco trotted after her as she headed for the back door. “Not this time,” she told the dog as she zipped up her insulated jacket and stepped into her boots. She patted him on his furry little head. “Today you’re in charge.” His tail began moving so quickly, his whole rear end nearly gyrated. Then she slipped out the back door to the garage, where her Jeep was still dripping melting snow.
She opened the garage door, slid behind the wheel, and backed out. Jeremy had parked in his usual spot, as if he’d never taken a stab at moving out. There was a part of her that wanted him back home, but that was a purely emotional mother response. She knew better, had witnessed some of her friends allowing their kids to yo-yo in and out of the house.
That wasn’t for her.
The kid had to start making some serious choices.
She threw her Jeep into gear, hit the remote on the visor, and saw the garage door begin to close.
How had it come to this, where she and her kids were forever testing each other, and they were determined to make the wrong choices? Last year, when she’d been in the clutches of a madman, thinking she would never see either of her children again, she’d vowed to make it up to them, to either turn in her badge or change her ways, work only a forty-hour week, put her family above all else. And her kids, too, had promised to change their self-involved habits, to walk the straight and narrow, get good grades, make the right choices, never give her a minute’s grief.
All those New Year’s Eve vows had been broken by Valentine’s Day, and they’d slipped into their same old, dysfunctional routines.
Maybe she’d made a mistake by not moving in with Santana. Maybe a strong male role model was just what Jeremy and Bianca needed.
“It’s never too late,” she told herself.
Obviously what she was doing alone wasn’t working.
On the outskirts of town, where the neon lights began to glow, she told herself to close her mind, for the moment, to her kids and their problems and turn her attention to whatever lay ahead.
By the time she reached the crest of Boxer Bluff, she saw police and rescue vehicles, their lights strobing in the night, flashing red and blue on the surrounding snow. Firemen, rescue workers, and several cops were working the scene of the accident. Alvarez, dressed in department-issued jacket and hat, was standing near a short, crumbling wall overlooking the falls and talking with one of the town cops.
Pescoli nosed her Jeep into an empty parking slot near the park as two medics loaded a woman on a stretcher into the back of a waiting ambulance. A crowd of about fifteen people had gathered, all craning their necks and talking amongst themselves beyond a police perimeter. A news van and camera crew were following the EMTs’ every move as they transported the injured woman.
Pescoli flashed her badge at the town cop, who seemed to be in charge of keeping the bystanders at bay.
“What gives?” she asked Alvarez.
“She’s alive, but barely. Looks like she was jogging and either tripped or slid and fell over the rail.” Alvarez indicated a spot where the snow was disturbed on the top of the crumbling guardrail, an old rock wall that had been built over a hundred years earlier and was barely two feet high.
She shined her flashlight over the broken snow and path where the woman had fallen over the cliff face. “She hit on that ledge down there and somehow didn’t slide farther, into the river. It’s a miracle that she’s alive.” The beam of her flashlight played upon the broken ground below.
“Is she conscious?”
“No. Don’t know how long she was out here or how serious her injuries are, or if she’ll make it.” Frowning, Alvarez shined the light back on the path. “Too many footprints and too much snow to see if anyone was with her.”
“And no ID, no car?”
“Her run didn’t start here, just ended here.”
“But you think it’s more than an accident.”
“Unknown.” But Alvarez was clearly puzzled, eyeing the snow-covered path where dozens of footprints had been left. “The crime scene guys are doing what they can, separating out her prints, the ones that match her shoes, and they’re looking for anything that might help, other prints.”
“Nothing on her to ID her?”
“Just a key. No cell, no iPod, or anything else.”
“She could have just tripped.”
“Yeah.” Alvarez’s breath fogged in the air.
“No witnesses?”
Alvarez shook her head.
“Who found her? And please don’t tell me it was Ivor Hicks or Grace Perchant,” she said, mentioning a couple of the locals who had a history of being in the middle of trouble. Ivor thought he’d been abducted by aliens years earlier, and Grace Perchant claimed to talk to ghosts. Pescoli didn’t think either of them was all that reliable.
“No,” Alvarez said. “Iris Fenton was out taking a walk.” She motioned to a woman bundled in a heavy down coat, gloves, and a red stocking cap, from which silvery curls protruded. “She lives on the other side of the park with an invalid husband. Already checked her out.”