Left To Die Read Free

communicate? If he wanted credit for both killings, why not write T C N S , the order of the women’s first and last names? Why mix the initials up?
    Alvarez narrowed her eyes. She was a computer wizard and had run several programs trying to find out if the four letters meant anything. So far, she’d come up dry.
    “Bastard,” she muttered, trying to imagine what kind of monster would do something so brutal and cruel as to leave a woman to freeze in the wilds of Montana in the winter.
    Interviews with those closest to Nina Salvadore had provided no additional clues. She’d been on her way back to California, though she’d planned to meet up with friends in Oregon first, and had driven from Helena, Montana, where she’d been visiting her sister. The missing persons report had been filed in Oregon first, when she hadn’t arrived in the small town of Seaside and had been missing for twenty-four hours. In Helena, Nina’s sister had filed a similar report that same day.
    Despite combing the crime scenes, bodies and wrecked cars, and working with police in the hometowns where the women had lived, the department had no suspects.
    Random killings?
    Or victims who had been targeted and stalked?
    Alvarez bit her lip and found no answers.
    After staring at the screen for a few minutes, she gave up, left her cubicle and made her way down a long hallway. She veered to the left and through a doorway to the lunchroom, a windowless area complete with small kitchen and a few scattered tables.
    A glass pot of congealing coffee sat on a warmer. Left over from the night shift. Selena dumped the dark liquid and the pre-measured packet of grounds and started over, rinsing the pot, filling the reservoir with water and finding a fresh package of dark roast in a drawer.
    All the while the coffee machine sputtered, dripped and brewed, she considered the bizarre killings. The lab had found traces of bark in both victims’ hair. The wood splinters matched those of the trees to which they had been lashed. The bruises and contusions on their bodies had been consistent with being tethered to the trees, and they each had a cut or two from a knife, nothing deep, just a quick little slice, or prick, as if whoever had been urging them to their ultimate place of death had prodded them along.
    But other wounds had begun to heal, according to the autopsies. Injuries consistent with what had been sustained in their car wrecks had begun to heal: broken metacarpals, cracked ribs and a fractured radius in Theresa Charleton’s case; a broken clavicle and dislocated knee for Nina Salvadore. Each woman’s bones appeared to have been set, her abrasions tended to. Salvadore even appeared to have had recent stitches on her right cheek and an area of scalp where some hair had been shaved away.
    Where had he kept them?
    And why?
    Why bring them somewhat back to health only to leave their naked bodies out in the weather? Why heal them only to let them die?
    According to the ME, neither woman had been sexually molested.
    The case was odd. Nerve-wracking. And Alvarez had spent dozens of hours of overtime trying to get into the killer’s head. To no avail.
    The FBI was being consulted. Field agents from Salt Lake City had come and left again.
    On the kitchen counter the coffee machine gurgled and sputtered its last drops just about the same time Joelle Fisher, secretary and receptionist for the department, breezed in.
    “Oh, you already made the coffee. That’s my job, you know,” she said with one of her ever-present smiles. Nearing sixty, Joelle looked ten years younger except for the fact that she insisted upon wearing her platinum hair in some kind of teased hairdo reminiscent of the fifties screen sirens Alvarez remembered from watching old movies with her mother.
    “Yeah, I know.”
    Joelle’s pretty face squinched up as she quickly picked up some old napkins and stir sticks left on one of the tables, then wiped the surface. “You’ll get me in trouble