Afraid to Die Read Free Page B

missing.
    Alvarez didn’t like it. Especially the fact that she’d been missing for nearly two weeks. Not good. Not good at all.
    And it seemed from the most updated information that she was still missing.
    No body.
    No crime scene.
    No damned crime.
    Yet.
    All of the nearby hospitals had been checked and she hadn’t been admitted, nor had there been any Jane Does brought in. Nor, of course, had Lissa been arrested by any local agency.
    Just ... gone.
    â€œWhere the hell are you?” Alvarez wondered aloud as she sipped her tepid tea. She didn’t expect to see her partner for another hour or so, but Pescoli showed up before her usual time with a cup of coffee from one of the local shops in hand, snow melting in her burnished hair, her face flushed.
    â€œWhat’re you doing here at this hour?” Alvarez asked, spinning her chair around as her partner stood in the doorway. “Somebody die?”
    â€œBad joke this early in the morning.” She took a sip from her cup. “I had to drop Bianca off at school early for dance practice.” Bianca was Pescoli’s teenage daughter, a junior now and as headstrong as she was beautiful. A dangerous combination and it didn’t help that the girl was smart enough to play each of her divorced parents against the other. It worked every time. Though Pescoli and her ex had been divorced for years, there was still a lot of animosity between them, especially when it came to their kids. Bianca and her older brother, Jeremy, an off-again college student who lived with Pescoli in between his attempts at “moving out,” worked them both.
    â€œI thought the dance team practiced after school.”
    â€œLimited gym space.” Pescoli glanced to the window. “Basketball, wrestling, cheerleading, dance team ... whatever, they all juggle times, though right now, basketball has priority, I think. So for the next two weeks, Bianca has to be at school at six forty-five; that means she’s got to get up around six, and believe me, it’s killing her.” Pescoli’s lips twisted into a thin smile at the thought of her teenager struggling with the early-morning routine. “And this is just day one. It’s damned hard to be a princess when you have to be up and at ’em in the friggin’ dark. What did she call it? Oh, yeah, ‘the middle of the night when no one with any brains would get out of bed.’ ” Pescoli was shaking her head. “I’m tellin’ ya, we’re raising a generation of vampires!”
    â€œVampires are in.”
    â€œGo figure.” She turned serious, pointed a finger toward the computer screen on Alvarez’s desk where a picture of Lissa Parsons was visible. “The autopsy report come in on Bradshaw?”
    â€œNot yet.”
    Little lines grooved deep between Pescoli’s eyebrows. “You know I’d really like to believe Zwolski—that it was an accident—but I just can’t.”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œSomething just doesn’t quite fit. What about the Parsons missing persons case?” Pescoli asked.
    â€œNot yet.”
    â€œHell.” Pescoli took a sip from her coffee. “Hard to say what’s going on there,” she thought aloud. “Just a flighty girl who got a wild hair and took off for a while, or something else?” Obviously not liking that idea, she frowned even deeper. “Still nothing on her car?”
    â€œDon’t think so. I was going to walk down to Missing Persons and talk to Taj, see what she has to say.”
    â€œLet me know.” Pescoli patted the doorway and started to leave when the familiar click, click, click of high heels caught her attention.
    â€œToot, toot! Coming through!” Joelle warned in her little-girl voice as Alvarez caught a glimpse of the tiny receptionist, her beehive of platinum hair sprayed with red and green glitter, her snowman earrings catching in the