“It’s never too late,” she told herself.
Obviously what she was doing alone wasn’t working.
On the outskirts of town, where the neon lights began to glow, she told herself to close her mind, for the moment, to her kids and their problems and turn her attention to whatever lay ahead.
By the time she reached the crest of Boxer Bluff, she saw police and rescue vehicles, their lights strobing in the night, flashing red and blue on the surrounding snow. Firemen, rescue workers, and several cops were working the scene of the accident. Alvarez, dressed in department-issued jacket and hat, was standing near a short, crumbling wall overlooking the falls and talking with one of the town cops.
Pescoli nosed her Jeep into an empty parking slot near the park as two medics loaded a woman on a stretcher into the back of a waiting ambulance. A crowd of about fifteen people had gathered, all craning their necks and talking amongst themselves beyond a police perimeter. A news van and camera crew were following the EMTs’ every move as they transported the injured woman.
Pescoli flashed her badge at the town cop, who seemed to be in charge of keeping the bystanders at bay.
“What gives?” she asked Alvarez.
“She’s alive, but barely. Looks like she was jogging and either tripped or slid and fell over the rail.” Alvarez indicated a spot where the snow was disturbed on the top of the crumbling guardrail, an old rock wall that had been built over a hundred years earlier and was barely two feet high.
She shined her flashlight over the broken snow and path where the woman had fallen over the cliff face. “She hit on that ledge down there and somehow didn’t slide farther, into the river. It’s a miracle that she’s alive.” The beam of her flashlight played upon the broken ground below.
“Is she conscious?”
“No. Don’t know how long she was out here or how serious her injuries are, or if she’ll make it.” Frowning, Alvarez shined the light back on the path. “Too many footprints and too much snow to see if anyone was with her.”
“And no ID, no car?”
“Her run didn’t start here, just ended here.”
“But you think it’s more than an accident.”
“Unknown.” But Alvarez was clearly puzzled, eyeing the snow-covered path where dozens of footprints had been left. “The crime scene guys are doing what they can, separating out her prints, the ones that match her shoes, and they’re looking for anything that might help, other prints.”
“Nothing on her to ID her?”
“Just a key. No cell, no iPod, or anything else.”
“She could have just tripped.”
“Yeah.” Alvarez’s breath fogged in the air.
“No witnesses?”
Alvarez shook her head.
“Who found her? And please don’t tell me it was Ivor Hicks or Grace Perchant,” she said, mentioning a couple of the locals who had a history of being in the middle of trouble. Ivor thought he’d been abducted by aliens years earlier, and Grace Perchant claimed to talk to ghosts. Pescoli didn’t think either of them was all that reliable.
“No,” Alvarez said. “Iris Fenton was out taking a walk.” She motioned to a woman bundled in a heavy down coat, gloves, and a red stocking cap, from which silvery curls protruded. “She lives on the other side of the park with an invalid husband. Already checked her out.”
Pescoli was nodding.
Alvarez glanced to the departing ambulance. “Hopefully she’ll wake up and tell us she’s just a klutz.” She then eyed the embankment, the steep ravine, and the river, tumbling over the falls, the water roiling wildly far, far below. “Helluva place to slip so hard that you vault over the rail and land just where the cliff drops off, four feet from the wall, right here at the very top of the bluff. A few years ago this part of the hill fell away.” She ran her light over the outside of the rail, to make her point. In either direction the drop-off beyond the guardrail wasn’t as sheer, the vegetation more viable, but the spot where the accident occurred was the most steep. “Real bad luck.”
“That why the crime scene people are here?”
She nodded. “I’ve already called Missing Persons. We’ll see if we can find out who she is. In the meantime, I want to go to the hospital and talk to the docs who examine her, find out if her injuries are consistent with her accident.”
“Which you’re not buying.”
“The jury’s still out,” Alvarez said as she reached into her pocket and withdrew her keys. “You coming?”
“Meet you there.”
CHAPTER 8
Early the next morning Trace looked out the front window and saw snow falling steadily, only to pile up around the fence posts and drift onto the front porch.
Eli was still asleep, though he’d had a bad night, the pain in his arm and his cough waking him every few hours. In the end, around three this morning, Trace had carried the kid downstairs, and together, with Sarge curled up near the banked fire, they’d bunked on the oversized sectional. At five thirty Trace had woken, let the dog out; then, once Sarge had taken care of business and Trace had started the coffee, he’d turned on the television to catch the weather report.
The first thing he’d seen was a woman reporter on the screen, snow covering her blue hooded jacket, a microphone clutched in her gloved hands as she stood near the entrance to the park on the crest of Boxer Bluff. Rescue and police vehicles were visible behind her, lights flashing in the dark as snow continued to fall. She was speaking to the camera, but her voice was too soft to hear.
Trace scooped up his remote and upped the volume.
“. . where an unidentified female jogger was discovered just an hour ago on a rocky ledge that juts out over the river nearly a hundred feet below street level.”
The camera panned behind the reporter, to the steep grade and an area below. A narrow shelf protruded over the roiling water, and upon it was one rescue worker in a harness, a coil of rope in his hands. The snow on the ledge had been disturbed by boot prints and what Trace assumed was the area where the jogger’s body had lain before the rescue.
“You can see how lucky this unknown jogger was,” the reporter was saying. “Had she slid off the ledge, she would have fallen into the river.” The camera panned to Grizzly Falls, where white water sprayed and churned before a swift current sliced beneath a hundred-year-old bridge and past the glittering lights of the town.
The camera’s eye returned to the reporter. “This is Nia Del Ray,” and she signed off to the two anchors sitting behind a joined desk. The blond female anchor clarified, “That footage was shot last night, and the latest report from the hospital is that the woman is in critical condition, but the identity of the jogger has not yet been confirmed.”
Trace stared at the set and felt that same sense of doom that had been with him when he’d visited Jocelyn’s apartment. Without a thought to the time, he picked up the phone and dialed Ed Zukov’s number. He’d need his neighbor’s help; someone would have to look after his boy for a couple of hours. Though he didn’t want to believe that Jocelyn Wallis was the unidentified jogger who’d lost her footing and nearly her life at the crest of Boxer Bluff, he had to find out.
Pescoli’s cell phone rang sharply near her ear.
