Afraid to Die Read Free Page A

cringed.
    Damn it, she loved that dog and maybe, just maybe, Roscoe was just what she needed. She knew only that no matter what, she wasn’t going to give him up.
    Wheeling into the parking lot, she turned her thoughts to the weeks ahead. There was the Christmas party for the office, of course, and Joelle Fisher, the receptionist cum Christmas elf, had already decorated the department and started talking about the Secret Santa exchange that she always organized. Alvarez wasn’t interested; she just knew that she’d pile on a lot of extra hours over the holidays. That was her Christmas tradition; let the people with families stay home.
    It was just easier.
    She locked the car, then half jogged through the falling snow to the back door of the building. Stomping the melting white fluff from her boots, she paused in the lunchroom, frowned when she saw the coffee hadn’t been made and reluctantly started a pot. Then found her favorite cup, heated water in the microwave and located the last bag of orange pekoe.
    A pink box lay open on the table, a few picked-over cookies visible, but she ignored them for now. At this time of year, with Joelle in charge, there were certain to be fresh goodies arriving on the hour.
    Unwrapping her scarf, she made her way to her desk, deposited her purse and sidearm, hung her jacket on a hook and started through her e-mail and messages, making sure all the reports were filed on one case, getting ready for a deposition on another and seeing if the autopsy report had come in on Len Bradshaw, a local farmer who died in a hunting accident. His friend, Martin Zwolski, had been with him, and while going through a barbed-wired fence, his weapon had gone off, shooting Len in the back and killing him dead.
    Accident or premeditated?
    Alvarez was buying the accident scenario. Martin had been distraught to the point of tears and beleaguered by Len’s friends and family. It all seemed to be an accident, but Alvarez wasn’t totally convinced, not until the investigation was buttoned up. There were three loose ends that kept her from totally buying Martin’s story.
    First, the two men were poaching on private property, neither one with deer tags, and second, Martin and Len had been in a business together that had gone bankrupt two years earlier, largely due to the fact that Len had “loaned” himself a good portion of the company profits. Also, another little tidbit that had come to light was that Len had once been involved with Martin’s wife. Martin and Ezzie had been separated at the time, but still ... It was all just a little too messy for Alvarez.
    She checked her e-mail.
    No autopsy report yet.
    Maybe later today. Flipping over to the missing persons information, she checked to see if Lissa Parsons had been found.
    Lissa was an acquaintance, a woman Alvarez knew from a couple of classes she took at the gym. Twenty-six and single, with short, black hair and a killer body, she worked as a receptionist for a local law firm and had been reported missing a week earlier. When the detectives started asking questions, they’d deduced that Lissa had actually been missing for over a week. Her boyfriend and she had been through a rough patch and he was “giving her some space,” and her roommate had been out of town for a couple of weeks, an extended trip to Florida, only to come home to an empty apartment where the organic produce in the refrigerator was beginning to rot. Lissa’s purse, cell phone, car and laptop were all missing with her, but her closet was untouched, her wardrobe neatly folded or hanging, a hamper in her bedroom filled with dirty workout clothes.
    The roommate, boyfriend and an ex-boyfriend had rock-solid alibis. No sign of forced entry or a struggle at the apartment. It was as if Lissa had just left for the day, intended to return and hadn’t bothered. Her cell phone and credit card activity showed no use after the day she went