Expecting to Die

This . . . this thing was huge. Massive. Like way taller than me and it ... I mean, I
couldn’t tell, but it was on two legs. Rearing up. And it smelled. Bad. . . . maybe
a really big human. Massive. And hairy.
“I’m just sayin’—” Farnsby said, but Pescoli had heard enough.
She held up a hand to stop any further argument. “Yeah, I know. Just collect
the evidence, bring it in, and . . . let’s not go anywhere near the whole Sasquatch
thing. Okay? We just need to ID the victim, find out what happened to her, prove
it, and if foul play was involved, nail the bastard who did it to her. That’s our
job. End of story.”
What the investigation didn’t need was anything that would turn a tragedy into
a media circus. Like some tech, a supposed man of science, bringing Sasquatch
into the mix. If it was anything, it was some kind of hoax.
“Big Foot,” she muttered under her breath and wondered why those two
words sounded like an omen.
Pescoli headed downhill and met up with her partner; then, seeing that
Alvarez was dealing with the coroner, she made her way back into the graveled
area where the kids were being detained. By now, parents were at their children’s
sides.
Wiping the perspiration from her forehead, she observed the little groups of
parents, kids, and cops standing between the parked cars of the teenagers. The
interviews were progressing.
The thing of it was, Pescoli knew most of the teens, as well as a good many of
the adults. She’d met several sets of parents, or the single parents, over the years
that Bianca had been in school, some of them as far back as preschool, over a
dozen years earlier.
Interviewing them would be a trip down memory lane—make that a bad trip,
considering the situation.
Reading their faces in the strobing lights from the department-issued cruisers,
she noted that a good percentage of the parents were horrified, as would be
expected, a few seemed angry and nervous, and a few others refused to have
their children talk to the cops at all, as if the kids, or maybe the parents
themselves, had something to hide, or because they’d been down this road before
and decided to say nothing until they lawyered up.
Too bad. The way Pescoli figured it, every last one of them, including herself,
should be relieved that it wasn’t their child being hauled out of the woods in a
body bag sometime this morning.
The interviews weren’t going to be fun. That much was certain. She headed to

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a clutch of women she recognized, all of whom had aged in the dozen or so
years that had passed since she’d seen them every morning as she’d dropped off
or picked up Bianca from preschool. At this time of night—make that morning
—being pulled out of sleep to come and get their kids at a wild-ass party where a
body had been found—yeah, it didn’t look good on anyone. Except maybe for
Mary-Beth Delaney, who was as trim as ever, her auburn hair without any gray,
no lines marring a face with high cheekbones, pointed chin, and wide eyes. She
was dressed in a jogging suit, her hair drawn up in a messy bun, hooped earrings
glinting in the harsh lights from the cruisers, not a smudge of makeup out of
place.
She smiled at Regan, though her gaze did flick down Pescoli’s body for a
quick, judgmental second.
Never had Pescoli felt so hugely pregnant.
“This is so awful. So awful. Can we just get out of here?” Mary-Beth asked
anxiously, as if she and Pescoli were tight, had been friends for years, though
they hadn’t seen each other for a decade. Pescoli remembered Mary-Beth as
being a pushy mom in preschool, already insisting her little Simone excel at
letters and numbers or whatever it was the kids did then. While Bianca was
coloring butterflies outside the lines and drawing some additional free-form
insects on the page, Simone had been encouraged to keep her work neat, the
coloring shaded, the hues blended, each stroke of the crayon smooth. Like the
little toddler was going to become some female, twenty-first-century
Michelangelo or something.
And yet both of their daughters had ended up here, in the forest, in the dark of
the night, where a classmate had apparently died.
“You can go soon. I just have a few more questions for Simone,” Pescoli said,
turning toward Mary-Beth’s daughter. She forced a smile as Mary-Beth flicked
another glance at her protruding waistline.
“Bianca left,” Simone asserted. Challenging. Defiant.
“Yes, she did,” Pescoli agreed.
“I don’t see why she got to leave, and I have to stay.” She flipped her hair off
her face, her eyes narrowed, her lips in a flat angry line.
“It’s not fair,” Lindsay Cronin chimed in petulantly. In a quicksilver moment,
Pescoli remembered Lindsay as a preschooler, chubby arms crossed over her
chest, chin pointed out, lips turned down, spouting the same words, “It’s not
fair,” over some minor infraction at the school. Then, as apparently now, Lindsay
felt the need to point out when things didn’t go as she liked.
“She gave her statement. I already spoke with her,” Pescoli said.
That was too much for Mary-Beth. “They let you interrogate your own

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daughter?” One manicured hand flipped skyward in an expression of disbelief.
“Isn’t that like a major conflict of interest?”
Well, yeah. “Not interrogate. We’re interviewing. Asking a few questions.
That’s all. Someone else from the department will talk with Bianca again. Of
course.”
Mary-Beth silently accused her of lying.
“It’s so unfair!” Simone crossed her arms over her chest. Her pouting was
nearly palpable.
A step behind her daughter, Mary-Beth was nodding.
Pescoli agreed. “You’re right. It’s not. Fair, that is. But then nothing is.” She
eyed the girl, who was wearing enough makeup to look like she was trying out
for a reality show. Simone’s eyeliner and mascara were applied nearly as thickly
as her haughty expression.
“And I heard Bianca thinks she saw a monster, some kind of big hairy ape
thing in the woods.” Simone’s chin inched up a fraction.
“You heard that?” Pescoli really wanted to downplay any talk of a monster.
Finding the dead girl up here would create enough of a media frenzy as it was.
“Everybody heard it. Rod Devlin said she was raving like a lunatic. Emmett
Tufts says he was walking back to base camp, and Bianca came racing down the
hill and nearly knocked him over, she was so out of it.”
Pescoli caught a glimpse of Emmett and his brother, Preston, standing next to
a pickup with a king cab. Between them was their mother, Terri. The boys had
gotten their height from their mother, as she nearly looked eye-to-eye with her
sons, both of whom were over six feet and had played basketball for the high
school. Terri, she’d heard, had played college ball. As had she. Terri had been a
center, Pescoli a guard.
“Everyone knows about the Big Foot,” Simone said, and Lindsay nodded
vehemently.
Pescoli thought of the huge footprint Farnsby, the supercilious Sasquatch-
believing tech, had discovered and even now was probably casting. It wouldn’t
be long before the story got out.
Pulling her small recorder from her pocket before the girl could protest again,
she said, “Let’s get started, so we can get you home.” She hoped she sounded
affable, but she wasn’t quite able to hide the sarcasm in her words. Too bad. “So,
Simone, why don’t you tell me what you were doing up here at around two in the
morning?”
Her mother winced.
Good.
“Just hanging out. With friends,” the girl said, some of her attitude dissipating.

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“What time did you get here?”
“I dunno. Maybe a little after midnight?” she said slowly, eyeing her mother
for her reaction. Mary-Beth’s tight mouth seemed to pinch even tighter.
“Were you alone, or did you come with someone?”
“With Lindsay,” she admitted, blowing air through her nose as if disgusted
with herself.
“Lindsay?”
“Lindsay Cronin.”
“The girls are best friends,” Mary-Beth cut in. “Good girls. Simone even
volunteers at the hospital.” She placed her hands over Simone’s shoulders, her
fingertips clenched in the girl’s T-shirt, as if she were trying to silently and
subtly warn her daughter to tread carefully.
Of what?
A cop they’d known forever? Pescoli remembered a time when Simone, all of
four, had been on a playdate with Bianca after preschool, where Simone had
played dress-up and tried to master Candy Land. Even then, Pescoli had caught
the little girl cheating, if she’d even understood what she was doing, which
Pescoli hadn’t believed.
Now, in the middle of the hot August night over a decade later, she considered
that maybe she had.
The rest of the interview didn’t go well, no surprise, nor did any of the others.
As it was: Nobody knew nothin’.
At least that’s what all the teenagers who’d been rounded up wanted the cops
to believe. But Pescoli wasn’t so sure. She figured they were more interested in
covering their asses than finding out the truth. Most of them smelled like a
brewery, and talking to any of them to get any relevant information was like
pulling teeth from a cement jaw.
Madison Averill, who’d probably been instrumental in getting Bianca to come
up here in the first place, had been sullen and clinging to TJ O’Hara, “Teej” to
the kids. TJ had tried to shrug Madison off, but she’d wrapped her fingers tightly
around his arm and looked at him with doe-soft eyes.
Teenage angst on display. At a tragedy. Pescoli had trouble dealing with it.
TJ had been polite enough, but had kept his answers short and had avoided
eye contact with Pescoli. In fact, he’d kept tossing looks across the parking lot to
a spot where Lara Haas was engaged in a whispered conversation with both of
her parents. She was hard to miss with blond hair, and a tight, white T-shirt and
shorts, not exactly the kind of outfit one would wear trying to hide in the game
of hide-and-seek that Bianca had described.
The girl was a knockout with a body the stuff of teenage boys’ wet dreams; a

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porn movie producer’s opinion of a “real woman.” Huge breasts, nipped-in
waist, and a rounded butt above legs that wouldn’t quit.
No wonder TJ was throwing surreptitious glances in her direction. Most of the
boys were, including the Bell kid, who had been belligerent, almost defiant, just
like his old man and older brother, Kip. In the Bell brothers’ case, the bad apples
certainly hadn’t fallen far from the rotten tree.
Some of the girls had been crying and couldn’t or wouldn’t tell them anything,
Lindsay Cronin’s histrionics had apparently taken over her ability to speak
coherently as she’d looked up at the sky and sobbed, only to be comforted by
TJ’s brother, Alex. Older than TJ by a couple of years, Alex O’Hara was also
taller and heavier, a football-lineman type. He had his arm around the wailing
Lindsay while Simone Delaney, standing a few steps away and still with her
mother, took in the scene and scowled darkly. Something was definitely going on
there, Pescoli thought and made a mental note.
It didn’t look like those “besties” were all that close, at least not as tight as
Mary-Beth Delaney wanted Pescoli to believe.
The worst of the lot, Pescoli thought, was Austin Reece. He was smart and
privileged and wasn’t about to be intimidated by the authorities.
“I don’t have to talk to you without my lawyer present,” he first told Detective
Sage Zoller, a bit of a thing with a tight, gymnast’s body, springy curls and a
bad-ass attitude. Now he was giving Pescoli the same song and dance all served
up with a smug, frat-boy smile. “I know my rights.”
“We’re just trying to find out what was going on.” She was attempting to hold
on to her patience, but it was growing thin . . . fish-line thin.
He arched an imperious eyebrow. “I’ve called my dad. He’s on his way.”
Perfect. Not that the kids didn’t need their parents. Hell, hadn’t Bianca? But
this one? Not so much. Reece’s imperious attitude rankled. Big time. Pescoli was
hot, tired, and not interested in playing nice. What she’d like was a cool bath, a
cigarette, and a Coors Light, not necessarily in that order, but she’d given up
nicotine—well, kinda—years before, drinking anything alcoholic was out while
she was pregnant, and a cool bath, well, that would have to wait.
“My father’s with Reece, Connors and Galbraith,” Austin reminded her.
“Actually, he’s the ‘Reece,’ in the firm’s name. You know, as in senior partner.”
Pescoli regarded him with a cool eye. He really had a bad case of the I’m-
better-than-you flu. A lot of it going around these days. “I know who your daddy
is. And I don’t care. But when he gets here, I’ve got a few more questions for
you.”
She was rewarded with a bored “oh-sure” expression that was mostly a smirk,
but she held on to her fast-escaping cool for all she was worth.

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Now was not the time to get in a wrangle with a teen.

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