Deserves to Die by Lisa Jackson Page A

Grayson.”
    Pescoli should have left it alone, but she was too raw, too bothered. “Yeah, well, I didn’t fancy myself in love with him, either,” she snapped and saw her partner’s lips tighten. “What the hell was that all about?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Oh, come on.” She hit the gas and sped around a tractor inching down the highway, the driver huddled against the elements in a thick jacket and hat with ear flaps. “Jesus. Why the hell would you pull your John Deere out in this weather?” she grumbled.
    Alvarez, obviously stung, didn’t answer. She pulled her cell phone from her pocket and turned her attention to her e-mail and texts, scanning them quickly “Got reports from the O’Halleran neighbors. The Zukovs, Ed and Tilly, who live on one side of the O’Halleran spread. They told the deputy they saw nothing, were inside all day because of the blizzard.”
    “Smart.”
    “Same with the Foxxes, who are on the other side of the Zukovs. The husband ventured out to his barn, but took care of his cattle and that was it. Haven’t heard from the ranch across the road or the one on the other side of the O’Hallerans yet.” She tucked her phone into her pocket.
    “I’m thinking whoever did it came in from the back,” Pescoli said.
    “A team checked the nearest access road.”
    “Tracks?” She felt a little ray of hope.
    “Some. Maybe hunters.”
    “In this?” Pescoli said, staring out the windshield.
    “Or cross-country skiers or snowshoers. People don’t necessarily stay inside just because it’s cold or snowing.”
    “Then they’re idiots.”
    Alvarez gave her a long look. “What’s going on with you?”
    Oh, shit . She’d hoped that since the conversation had turned to the case at hand it wouldn’t circle back to her. “What do you mean?”
    “Don’t play dumb. You’re even more out of sorts than usual.”
    “Nice,” she said, gripping the wheel more tightly as the farmland gave way to the outskirts of Missoula, but she silently admitted Alvarez had a point. Pescoli’s emotions were all over the place. Since there wasn’t much she could do about them, she shut up. Alvarez again buried herself in the information flowing through her phone and they drove the short distance to the hospital in uncomfortable silence.
    Each lost in her own thoughts, they parked, hurried inside, and took the elevator down to the morgue. Pescoli tried not to dwell on the fact that Dan Grayson had given up his tenuous grip on the world, because, like it or not, that part of her life was over.
     
     
    Ryder’s breakfast consisted of black coffee from the machine in the motel’s lobby and a burrito of sorts from a vending machine in the mini-mart located at the intersection half a block from the River View’s front entrance. Even with the addition of hot sauce from a couple free packets he’d gotten at the store, the meal was tasteless, but he didn’t much care. Along with the burrito, he’d picked up a newspaper, a bag of chips, a packet of jerky, and a six-pack of Bud, which he’d tucked into the tiny insulated cabinet the River View’s management had optimistically dubbed a refrigerator.
    Despite the fact that the bed had sloped decidedly toward the center of a sagging mattress, he’d slept like a rock. “The sleep of innocents,” his grandmother had said, though, in his case, that assessment was far from the truth. He’d learned to catch his winks wherever he could, whether it be wrapped in a thin sleeping bag on some ridge under the stars, or in his truck in broad daylight, after he’d spent a night huddled in his pick-up on a stakeout swilling strong coffee and holding his bladder until it felt like it would burst. Either way, he’d learned to drop off and catch whatever sleep he could. So the River View’s sagging mattress hadn’t bothered him any more than the meal of processed mystery meat—beef, if the label on the plastic-wrapped burrito was to be believed—trapped inside a tortilla