And the fact that the victims resembled each other troubled her.
She left some food out for the skittish Jane Doe, but the cat was hiding again. Give it time, she told herself as she downed a power shake of frozen blueberries, banana, yogurt, and some wheat germ blended into a froth. “Breakfast of champions,” she said under her breath, then grabbed her gym bag and headed outside.
Of course the snow had iced over, glazing the walkways and gardens, but she eased her Jeep out of the slippery lot and onto the county road, which had been plowed sometime during the night.
Fortunately, traffic into the heart of Grizzly Falls was light as it was early, a weak sun just starting to brighten the eastern sky, a few pink streaks of dawn playing in the clouds. She turned on the radio, and as a weather report faded, the beginning notes of “Up on the Rooftop” popped through her speakers, but she barely noticed. She’d pushed aside all her mortification over the Thanksgiving debacle with the June Cleaver clone Hattie and her two kids at Grayson’s house. What a mistake that had been.
Sister-in-law. . oh, sure!
Ridiculously, she felt her cheeks turn hot. “Never again,” she vowed, switching lanes around a slow-moving truck hauling a load of baled Christmas trees, and a chorus of children’s voices blared from the radio:
“Ho, Ho, Ho!
Who wouldn’t go?”
She found the exit for the gym, took the corner, and eased into the near-empty parking lot.
“Up on the rooftop,
Click, click, click!”
“Oh, stop already!” Alvarez snapped off the radio as she nosed into a parking space not far from the main doors of the massive building that housed an Olympic pool, saunas, weight rooms, and several basketball courts. She signed in and grabbed a towel, then made her way to the ladies’ locker room, where she stashed her bag.
She hoped that she could exercise her muscles and relax her ever-spinning mind. Today her routine would be a cardio workout of forty-five minutes on the elliptical machine, then another half hour of weight lifting on different machines dedicated to toning and strengthening specific areas of her body.
Usually, somewhere in the middle of her routine, she would zone out, and whatever issues she was trying to work through on a case would start to unravel, but today, as she made her way through a series of arm, leg, and torso machines, no answers came on the Jocelyn Wallis murder. Alvarez had spent hours going over the woman’s phone records and through her bills, even her garbage, but nothing had leapt out at her as odd or suspicious, no blinding lightning bolt of insight had illuminated her mind. The ex-boyfriends had alibis. The paperwork was benign.
No will had been located, at least not yet, nor had any life insurance beneficiary been uncovered.
Jocelyn Wallis was a schoolteacher who didn’t have a lot of friends and had no known enemies, with no link to Shelly Bonaventure, aside from where she’d been born and her looks. The case was frustrating as hell.
Swiping her forehead with the towel, Alvarez settled into the seat of a leg press and upped the weight. Her muscles were loose now, and she was able to do three sets of fifteen reps, though she strained. When she was finished, sweat dripping from every pore in her body, she still knew no more than she had when she’d taken her first step into this two-storied, state-of-the art gymnasium.
Heading for the showers, she told herself the truth would appear. She just had to dig a little deeper. Work a little harder.
Kacey rubbed the kinks from her neck as she glanced at the clock in her office. Two fifteen in the afternoon. The day had flown by with appointment after appointment, and, again, with a few extras squeezed in. The fact that it was a holiday weekend, the shopping weekend of the year, didn’t deter flu viruses, chest colds, infections, or thumbs from being dislocated.
She’d looked down enough throats and into enough ears for a full day’s worth of work. On Saturdays the clinic was scheduled to close at three, but rarely did that happen, not when so many working parents arranged doctors’ visits around their job schedules.
Fortunately, Kacey worked only every other Saturday, while Martin took the other weekends. They also alternated on Fridays, so that they each had two consecutive days off each week, a plan that worked for the entire staff.
Now her stomach rumbled, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten anything since a banana at six in the morning. The three subsequent cups of coffee hadn’t been enough to sustain her. Reaching into her desk drawer, where she kept her stash of granola and candy bars, she found a Snickers and promised herself a healthy tuna salad with tons of vegetables for dinner.
Maybe.
Practice what you preach, she told herself, invoking one of her grandmother’s, Ada’s, timeworn bits of advice as she peeled off the wrapper. How often had she suggested her patients eat healthy, balanced meals, drink eight glasses of water a day, and avoid too much sugar? “Too often,” she said aloud, then, ignoring the stacks of files on her desk, bit into the chocolate and caramel and sighed contentedly.
She’d felt a little off all day and attributed it to a restless night filled with worries about intruders and dark pickups, along with the more pleasant fantasies about Trace O’Halleran.
She reminded herself that he was her patient’s father, strictly off-limits, but after running into him at the veterinary clinic yesterday and spending time with Eli and him, she’d had trouble pushing the rugged rancher from her mind.
She’d just taken the last bite of her Snickers when there was a tap on the door and Nadine, the weekend receptionist, poked her head inside. “Your next appointment called, a new patient, Mrs. Alexander. She’s running fifteen minutes late, but Helen Ingles is here and asked if you would work her in.”
Kacey nodded.
Nearing sixty, Nadine was trim, her jaw strong, and her eyebrows were plucked to a fine line. She wore little makeup, lavender-framed glasses, and let her gray hair feather around her face. Her pale lips were pursed into a knot of disapproval.
“Something else?” Kacey asked.
“This morning I was the first one in, and that damned circuit breaker had tripped again. Not a light on in this place!”
An ongoing issue. “Would you put in a call to the landlord?”
“I already left a message on his answering machine and shot him an e-mail,” she stated primly. Once in the military, Nadine Kavenaugh was a stickler for detail and didn’t like anyone who, as she put it, “couldn’t get their act together.” Routines were not to be changed.
“Good.” Whirling her desk chair around, Kacey tossed the candy wrapper into her wastebasket, then grabbed her lab coat. As the chair stopped, she saw that Nadine’s skinny eyebrows had dipped below the rims of her glasses. Obviously, she didn’t approve of the changes in the schedule or much of anything else, for that matter.
“I’ll put Mrs. Ingles in room two,” she said with a bit of bite, “and when Mrs. Alexander gets here, in one.”
“I’ll be in as soon as Randy takes vitals.”
Huffing her disdain through her nose, Nadine closed Kacey’s door, but through the thin panels Kacey heard her sharp footsteps marching back to the main reception area.
Slipping on her lab coat, she checked her pocket for her stethoscope, then paused to take a look at her e-mail. She’d hoped for some word on the birth records she’d asked about, even though she knew no state offices had been open for the past three days. Her grandfather’s warning, Don’t be gettin’ the cart before the horse, there, Missy, echoed in her ears, and as expected, there wasn’t a response. Then again, maybe she was tilting at windmills. Just because a couple of women who resembled her had died, and her mother was a little weird about her family, weren’t reasons to go off the deep end.