Expecting to Die

Like Terri Tufts. Ex-wife.
Farnsby went to work on the trunk, unlocking it with a pick and shining the
beam of his flashlight over the empty, pristine interior.
“Hey! Got something over here,” another tech, a large woman, called as she
took a picture of the sparse gravel and dirt of the once-upon-a-time road.
“Cigarette butt. Looks like it’s fresh.” With gloved fingers, she picked it up and
held it to her nose. “Yeah. Camel filter.” She dropped it into an evidence bag.
Alvarez remembered that one of the Bell boys smoked Camels, but he probably
wasn’t the only one in the crowd of kids who’d know Marjory. Hadn’t she seen
Preston Tufts slide a pack into his pocket after having a smoke with Donny
Justison on the steps of the Sons of Grizzly Falls Building at the end of the Big
Foot Believers’ meeting?
And wasn’t this spur in the forest about half a mile from where the body of
Marjory Tufts had been found and less than two miles from the Tufts’s home?
For a strong athlete, covering the distance on foot would take little time. Kill the
stepmom, dump her body, drive here and sprint home to catch the end of a ball
game on ESPN. The gears inside Alvarez’s brain began to turn, and for the first
time in this investigation, she felt a sizzle of anticipation, the inkling that things
were finally falling into place. She was getting close to solving this crime.
Maybe.
“Bingo!” Farnsby said as he slid open a panel in the trunk of the T-Bird. Once
the covering was removed, a hidden compartment, meant for more luggage

---

storage, possibly a custom feature, was exposed and it wasn’t empty.
Haphazardly jammed within that secret space was a very lifelike ape suit, mask
and foot coverings included.
“The mother lode,” Farnsby said under his breath, and Alvarez couldn’t agree
more.
Size-thirteen tennis shoes were still tucked into the feet of the suit. All a tall
person had to do was don the costume, slide into the shoes, adjust the headpiece
and voila: Big Foot, alive and well in Grizzly Falls, Montana.
Alvarez and Zoller hung out less than fifteen minutes, then headed back to the
station. Once back in the offices, she decided to let the Tufts kid sweat a little
longer, let him feel what lock-up was all about. Though he wasn’t Marjory
Tufts’s baby daddy, he probably knew all about it, that his brother had been
sleeping with his stepmom. Let him think about it.
So she started with Kip Bell.
He didn’t so much as glance her way as she entered the room and introduced
herself. Again. For the record. For the camera and recording. “We need to find
your brother,” she said, laying a slim file folder on the small table between them.
His eyes barely moved, but he glanced at the folder with its white pages
showing a bit. “Don’t know where he is.”
“I think you do.”
Still no eye contact.
“We located an ape suit. Probably the one that was stolen from the Big Foot
Believers.”
He shrugged.
“You’re a member of the club.”
Sneering, he said, “Me and like a couple hundred others.”
“But you knew Destiny. And Bianca.”
Kip sent a bored expression her way. “Your point?”
She tried a different tack. “We know Kywin’s the father of Destiny Rose
Montclaire’s baby. We know he was in contact with both Destiny Rose
Montclaire and Lindsay Cronin on the day each girl disappeared. He was one of
the last people to communicate with them.”
“You don’t know shit,” he said.
She smiled. “I think we do.” She kept calm. Stared at him, and though she
wanted to shake the answers from his lying lips, she played it cool. “Both
Lindsay and Destiny texted him.”
“He never got the texts.” He looked up then, his eyes harboring a secret, and
she saw that he was silently laughing at her, that he seemed to think he had one
up on her, on the police in general.

---

But she knew better. She slid the file folder in his direction.
“How do you know he didn’t get the texts?” she asked.
Again the silent mockery. “Because he said he never got ’em.”
“He could have lied. The phone company records say otherwise.”
“So what? Kywin says he never saw ’em.” A lift of one massive shoulder. “I
believe him.”
“He’s lied about a lot of things. Including being involved with Destiny.”
A roll of one big shoulder. Defiance in the set of his jaw, and throughout the
rest of the questioning, the attitude that he knew more than she and he wasn’t
going to tell her a thing.
“So, let’s talk about Lindsay Cronin.”
He flinched slightly. Not much, but a little twitch near his eye that told
Alvarez he was listening. Worried.
“We have phone records,” she said, nudging the file folder closer to him.
“And the interesting thing, Kip? Not only did Lindsay text Kywin, but she also
called you.”
“What?”
“On your cell. What appears to be a pocket-dial or butt-dial.” She leaned back
in her chair and eyed him. “Go ahead, take a look. It’s almost as if Lindsay was
warning you. Kind of like Destiny. She did it too. Why? So that you could . . .
what? Tell Kywin that she wanted to talk to him, to make certain he got the
call?”
He didn’t respond. Just froze and stared at the folder.
“I think the short calls were a signal. I’m not talking about the longer
conversations she had with you, just those that coincided with the texts to
Kywin. I figure the signal told you to pick up your brother’s phone, so that no
one, not even Kywin, knew how close you and Lindsay were.”
“What?” he snarled. “That’s crazy.”
“I think you knew where Lindsay Cronin was heading that night and you
knew exactly when she’d be on Horsebrier Ridge. That somehow, some way,
you caused her death.”
His eyes, deep in his sockets, glowed with a dark, horrifying rage. “You know
nothing,” he said through tight lips.
“That’s where you’re wrong, Kip. I—we—know a lot,” she assured him.
“And one thing’s for sure. You’re up to your eyeballs in this. So you have a
choice: Come clean, tell us everything you know, and I’ll talk to the DA, try to
get you a deal. Or you can clam up and it might take a little longer, but we’ll get
to the truth and when we do?” She paused for effect, arching her eyebrows, then
said, “Your ass, my friend, is grass.”

---

“You’re no friend of mine!” he bit out.
“That’s right. I’m not.” She managed an icy smile. “And that is the first time
you’ve ever told me the truth. So think about it.” She climbed off her chair and
left him alone to stew.
Then, she headed for the next interview room.
* * *
At the location of the filming of Big Foot Territory: Montana! Bianca watched
the action from the sidelines. Her part, after the discovery of the body, and the
scene with her “mother,” Michelle, was minimal, so she waited around a lot,
observing the other actors on the set, seeing how some of the previous scenes
were reshot to highlight Lara.
It kinda made her sick.
Maddie grabbed a Diet Coke from the drink cart, and while Teej was in a
scene with just boys, she sidled up to Bianca. “Can you believe it?” she said as
Lara was positioned on one of the rocks, a guitar at her side, her blouse undone a
few buttons, her remarkable cleavage visible. “They’re going to make her this
orphaned girl with dreams of a singing career or something.” She opened her
drink, took a swallow, and glanced at Bianca out of the corner of her eye. As she
brought the bottle down, she said, “I think she faked it. The attack.”
Bianca knew it! Her dad was right. “Did she say so?”
“Nu-uh, she’s not that stupid. But Alex did. To Teej. Just kind of bragging
about it. See—” Still holding the plastic bottle, she pointed at TJ’s brother. “He’s
in the scenes, too.” Maddie’s lips curled in disgust. “It worked out for him.”
“I thought that might be because Kywin and Emmett are MIA,” Bianca said.
“Where are they anyway?”
“Don’t know. Don’t care. They’re both just big bullies.” She was eyeing a
makeup artist running into the scene to brush some kind of powder on Lara’s
face. “But trust me, these scenes were changed on purpose because Lara asked
them to be. She’s kind of in charge now, because of ‘the attack.’” Maddie let out
a huff of disapproval. Or was it jealousy? “Have you seen how Barclay is around
her? As bad as the rest of the boys, practically drooling. Men. All the same.”
Somewhere overhead, hidden in the darkness over the lights illuminating the
set, an owl hooted softly.
“You heard about Marjory, right?”
“No.” Bianca was still watching as the makeup artist backed away from the
campsite. “What about her?”
“She’s dead.”

---

“Dead?” Bianca said a little too loudly and was rewarded with a warning look
from Mel. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “What do you mean ‘dead’?”
“What do you think I mean? They found her body in the forest and I think it
was like Destiny’s, y’know. She was strangled, I guess. It’s all over Facebook
and Twitter. My phone’s been blowing up. How could you not know?”
“I left my phone at home.”
Maddie shot her an are-you-out-of-your-mind look. “What?”
“It was crazy there—when I left. Mom was in labor, Dad was there freaking
out about the show, and we all just took off because the baby was coming and
fast.” Maddie was nodding; she’d heard all the details about Tucker’s birth
before, when Bianca had first arrived a few hours earlier. Now, it was after
midnight, the temperature dropping, the night closing in.
The production crew was wrapping up the final scenes and Bianca couldn’t
help but wonder why she’d even come in the first place, as she’d been little more
than window dressing in a couple of scenes, part of the crowd in the background,
her luster, the girl who’d been chased by a Big Foot in real life, dimmed.
Her dad had been right. Her chance at stardom, if there ever had been one,
was over. As she watched Lara, the glow from the fake campfire gilding her skin
and catching in the blond strands of her hair, Bianca felt something akin to
hatred for the girl. Lara had manipulated everything, just as Dad had said.
Maddie had confirmed it and it pissed Bianca off.
What was fair about this? Bianca had been scared out of her mind the night
the beast had chased her through the woods, scared to death. Of course, now, she
wasn’t certain a real Sasquatch had been running after her. But something had
been careening down the hillside, crashing after her, breathing hard, smelling
fetid, and clawing at her. Her fear had been real. Real. Something, she’d been
certain, had been hell-bent on killing her.