Expecting to Die

CHAPTER 32
“I
need a cigarette,” Preston Tufts said when Alvarez slipped into the second
interrogation room.
“Sorry.” She wasn’t going to play nicey-nice. Not tonight. So he was having a
few cravings, a need for a hit of nicotine. Fine. Let him itch for a smoke. “No
can do. Not in here. But you can have one later, when we’re done.”
“And when will that be?”
“Depends on you, I guess. When you want to tell me the truth.”
“Hey, I haven’t lied. And I could really use a smoke.”
She acted as if she were considering the request. “What’s your brand again?”
“Excuse me?”
“Camels, right?”
He stared at her warily, as if wondering where she was going. “Maybe.”
“I’d say, ‘for sure,’” she countered. “And you know, that’s funny.”
“How?”
“Because we found the butt of a Camel cigarette not far from where we found
your stepmother’s car. The pink classic T-Bird with the vanity plates.”
He swallowed hard, his gaze fixed on hers.
“It will be interesting to find out whose DNA is on that butt, a filter-tip by the
way, like the kind you smoke. It’s with the lab now.”
His jaw clenched, but he didn’t respond and she noticed a trickle of sweat
running from his brow. The room was a couple of degrees too warm by design.
She’d wanted him uncomfortable.
She continued, her voice even, “Also, pretty soon we’ll find out whose
fingerprints are on the steering wheel of her car and if there’s any DNA, you
know from sweat on the ape suit we found in the trunk.”
He froze.
She smiled.
“God, it’s got to be hot running in that thing in the middle of summer—and
we’ll figure out who was wearing the ape suit . . . oh, excuse me, Big Foot
costume. Got to be DNA in it.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed for a second.
“Did you wear it?”
“I didn’t even know it was there!”

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Another lie. She saw it in his eyes.
“You’d better be straight with me, Preston,” she warned him. “Because it will
be pretty easy to link the person inside the suit to the murders and whoever
chased Bianca Pescoli the night Destiny Rose Montclaire was found.”
“Wait a second! What does one thing have to do with the other?” he asked,
and his eyes had rounded, a newfound fear evident. “I mean . . . Jesus.” His
shoulders slumped. He bit his lower lip. “I think I need a lawyer.”
Damn!
She’d known it would come down to this, the lawyer request, of course, and
she’d gotten more from him than she’d expected, but she’d hoped he’d open up.
For now, the interview was over. “Okay, we’ll call one for you or if you don’t
have one—”
He closed his eyes and dropped his face into his hands. “I am so fucked!” he
said into his palms. “So damned fucked.”
She didn’t wait, but there, on the spot, with the cameras rolling, read him his
rights, the Miranda warning. “Now, you’ll need to stay here until your lawyer
arrives. But if there’s anything you want to tell me, I promise I’ll try to get a deal
for you.”
He hesitated, then lifted his face. It was wet. Tears shined in his eyes. “I didn’t
mean to kill her,” he said, and she froze in her chair. “I didn’t mean to kill
Marjory, but she was banging my dad and he would find out, especially with all
the DNA samples you took. My mom told me a long time ago that Dad . . . well,
his sperm wasn’t viable, and that she’d gone to a sperm bank.” At her
expression, he nodded, his lips pulling into a frown, the dam of silence that he’d
built suddenly broken, the flood waters of guilt rushing through.
“Yeah, how do you think that feels, huh?” Preston demanded. “Dad, he
doesn’t even know. She did it behind his back, only told me because I had to go
to the hospital, got in a car wreck and might need a transfusion, and she was
afraid it would all come out. That somehow the blood type would show up
wrong and . . . But it didn’t matter cuz he left her for Marjory. You know the end
of that story, that she was originally Emmett’s girlfriend and so, once they were
married, she and Emmett got back to it. And crap, she gets pregnant?
“How stupid is she?” He was unloading now, still fighting tears but seeming
to want to unburden himself. Sniffing, he said, “It was an accident, really.
Marjory and Dad had gotten into another one of their fights—rip roarers—and
this time Emmett, he thinks he’s going to take Dad on. Which is just stupid, so I
talk him down, say I’ll handle it and you know, talk some sense into Marjory.
“Like that was going to happen. Anyway, I met up with Marjory in town
before she got to the hotel where she was going to stay after her fight with Dad.

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We drove around and stopped the car, up near Cougar Pass, and you know what?
She not only doesn’t listen to me, she actually comes on to me. Like kissing me
and touching me and . . . and I start to go for it, y’know?” He was staring at
Alvarez, hoping she understood.
“Of course,” she forced out.
“I mean she’s hot and I’m always horny, and we start going at it. I mean, big
time.”
“You had sex.”
“Yeah, yeah, in the car, and then, when it’s all over, she kind of freaks out, and
not just a little bit, not like she feels a little guilty. Nuh-uh, she fuckin’ goes
psycho on me and starts to try to kill me and screaming that I took advantage of
her, that I raped her when she was all over me—all over me. She was, like, all of
a sudden fuckin’ nuts!”
“So what did you do?”
“I tried to shut her up. That’s all.” His hands flew to the side of his head,
palms out, as if he were trying, in his mind, to back away from an impossible
situation. “When she comes at me, hitting me and trying to bite me, I just try to
shut her up, y’know. So I put my hands around her neck and squeezed until she
quit attacking me and . . . and I guess . . . I guess I didn’t stop. Not when I should
have. I was kind of like in a different dimension, you know?”
She didn’t.
“It was like almost an out-of-body experience. And when it was over and I
knew she was dead and the baby was dead too”—fresh tears erupted from his
eyes—“I just panicked and thought, maybe I could leave her in the woods,
somewhere close to Reservoir Point and . . . and maybe everyone would think
that a Big Foot or whoever killed Destiny Rose had done it.” He let out a long,
shuddering breath.
“What about Destiny Rose?”
“I don’t know. I had nothin’ to do with that. Nothin’, I swear!” He ran an arm
under his nose and sniffed loudly.
“And the ape suit?”
“Shit. How the fuck did that get in there? I have no idea.” He looked at her so
ingenuously she almost believed him. Almost.
“You didn’t kill Destiny Rose Montclaire?”
“No.”
“Or Lindsay Cronin?”
“For fuck’s sake, didn’t you hear me? I said no! I don’t know what happened
to them.” He shoved the fingers of both hands through his hair. “For the love of
Christ, Detective, can I please have a cigarette now? And would you call my

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fuckin’ lawyer?”
* * *
Where the hell were they taking her? Two men had abducted Bianca. She
knew that now. They’d tied her hands quickly, stuffed a rag into her mouth so
she couldn’t scream, then thrown her into the back of a pickup and driven wildly
through the night, the huge truck bouncing and grinding over the old road at
Reservoir Point to the country road where the engine had roared smoothly, the
tires humming over smooth asphalt, hip-hop music blasting through the open
windows.
This she only knew partially, as her rattled brain was trying to make sense of
what had happened and regain control of her body again. But it had been
impossible, and as she’d stared upward, seeing a wide night sky filled with
thousands of twinkling stars and feeling the rush of the wind as the truck sped
down the road, she could do nothing but wait and see what fate they had in store
for her.
Nothing good. She realized that horrifying fact. She’d heard the thrill of
excitement in their voices, felt the testosterone thrumming through them,
pumping them up, pushing them into the caveman mentality of sheer brutality.