Deserves to Die by Lisa Jackson Read Free Book Online Page B

remarks. Watershed tended to push it. If he weren’t a good cop, dedicated and all business when on duty, she would have been in his face more than she already was.
    “What have we got?” she asked, the wind rushing in when she rolled down the window.
    “DB found in the creek out back,” he said, pointing to the area behind the house. “You can drive down there. Just follow the tracks. I’ll come with.” Leaving his partner in the other vehicle, he climbed into the back seat and pointed out the makeshift road. “This is the lane O’Halleran uses for his tractor and hay baler and other equipment,” Watershed explained.
    She drove through a series of paddocks where the gates had been left open and followed the tire tracks that wound their way onto a huge field where the pristine blanket of snow had been broken into a thick trail of tire tracks running along one fence.
    “This butts up to government land,” Watershed explained. “O’Halleran and his kid were out checking for holes in the fence.” As the Jeep powered through six to eight inches of snow, he went on to tell the same story Alvarez had relayed earlier, finishing with, “So once the kid spooked and took off for the house on his horse, O’Halleran investigated and found the woman, obviously dead. Still, he pulled her from the water and checked for a pulse, listened to her lungs, but she’d been in there awhile, her body half frozen. You’ll see.”
    “And the missing finger?” Alvarez asked.
    “Ring finger, left hand. Not found. So far. Sliced off pretty cleanly at the first knuckle. Don’t know if it was pre- or postmortem.”
    “Lovely,” Alvarez said. “A finger fetish?”
    “Just a freak,” Pescoli said as they reached the end of the field near a meandering brook bordered by stands of trees. Officers were already on the job, a tarp laid out across which a partially clothed body of a woman lay. Her skin was blue, her hair wet, the finger missing, but Pescoli noted there were earrings visible in her earlobes. “O’Halleran didn’t see anything out of the ordinary?”
    Watershed shook his head. “Nope. And no tracks have been found around the area. Don’t know if she was killed here, or brought here and the body dumped. Could have come from the federal land. There’s an access road about a mile west.”
    Pescoli asked, “What about the neighbors?”
    “Haven’t talked to them yet.”
    “Let’s do it,” Pescoli said, scanning the area. “She had to get here somehow.” Squinting through the falling snow, she added, “Not much chance of finding any trace.” The frigid weather was working against them, but then it always did.
    “You don’t know what we’ll find.” Alvarez was always more optimistic than she, a woman who believed that with today’s technology, anything was possible.
    At the edge of the trees, parked helter-skelter, were a rescue vehicle from the fire department, another department-issued Jeep, a crime scene van and a banged-up pickup with two dogs locked in the cab, their noses pressed to the window. Officers dressed in heavy outerwear were already scouring the creek bed and surrounding area. Crime scene tape stretched from one sapling to the next, roping off the area that was to be searched.
    Pescoli parked the Jeep close to the rescue van. “O’Halleran here?”
    “Yeah, out talking to Cabral,” Watershed said as Pescoli cut the engine.
    She noticed the rancher standing near another deputy, Rosetta Cabral, new to the force, all of twenty-four years old. Just a girl in Pescoli’s opinion, though she was a college graduate, divorced, and a single mother of a two-year-old. Cabral was blessed with the same gung ho fire as Blackwater and was currently engaging Trace O’Halleran in conversation.
    “The kid?” Pescoli asked.
    “In the Jeep with Beaumont.” Watershed nodded toward the other Pinewood County vehicle. “Came back down here with his mom after he ran back to the house. She’s a doctor, you