Tell Me Where He Lives – Excerpt

Chapter 1

Rain came at me in sheets, every drop sharpened by wind, working the seam of my coat and pooling above the tongues of my boots. I stopped just inside the fieldstone wall, shoes sinking half an inch with every step, each toe finding the season’s first leaves already mashed to pulp beneath the surface mud. The Mustang’s blue flank glared against the dullness of a hundred black umbrellas, sticking out in the lot like a neon sign at a wake. I’d parked beside a Prius crusted with environmental stickers and a Lincoln so new its leather still looked tight enough to squeak. Across from me, the city’s flint-gray skyline threw geometric shadows into the sprawl of the cemetery. Straight lines, mirrored glass, a middle finger extended at every stone angel between.

I took inventory of the crowd as I went. First, a tight knot of city hall strivers, teeth already bared in campaign grins, using their umbrellas as shields but glancing over to make sure they were being seen. Next, two dozen activists in what passed for funereal drag: Doc Martens slick with oil, pinned leather jackets soaked dark, the reek of fresh smoke never quite defeated by the rain. Network t-shirts under slickers, a paper sign held above a head to keep the runoff off dyed green hair.

Closer to the open grave, the press. Freelance reporters worked the margins, phones tipped horizontal, pretending at reverence while cataloging every soggy mourner for posterity. I knew three of them. One had spelled my name right in the Morgan coverage. The other two had settled for “a local private investigator,” which was worse, because it meant they’d be back to get it right. A guy with a telephoto lens loitered by the stone cherubim, using his bulk to block the worst of the wind and getting no resistance from security. He wasn’t shooting the grave.

I caught the black SUV again, engine idling, windows tinted too dark for a funeral, wipers smearing a gloss of water that refused to clear. It had been two cars behind me on Mercer. My notebook was in an evidence room on County Road 7, along with three years of legal pads and everything else Burton had carried out of my office, so I uncapped a ballpoint inside my pocket and wrote the plate on the back of my hand. The ink was already running.

The air had the stink of city wet: lichen, rotting leaves, faint tang of gasoline, undertone of earth turned over for business. I sidestepped a pair of union organizers, one in plaid, one in suit slacks tucked into mismatched boots, trading low remarks about a county judge whose name floated across from the politicos. “Can you believe she showed up?” muttered the suit. “Her office wouldn’t piss on Tanya if she was on fire.” If people in Riverview still respected the dead, I’d yet to see evidence.

The minister, jacket plastic-wrapped and umbrella black as new asphalt, stepped to the plywood at the grave’s edge. The rain flattened her voice until all that reached me was mouth shapes and the wet thud of water against wood. Tanya’s casket, pale oak, cheapest finish in the catalog, rain already lifting the varnish in slow blooms, sat balanced on nylon webbing above the drop. No roses. A pile of flyers, limp with weather, littered the grass at the foot of the grave: FIGHT FOR TANYA, scrawled and bleeding ink.

I leaned against a listing monument and worked the perimeter. A man in a thrift store raincoat stood by the fence, fingering a badge just far enough from his lapel to suggest off-duty Riverview PD. Twenty feet down from him, a uniform I’d shared a car with once, years ago, huddled under the dripping oaks and made no move to signal recognition.

Cops came for their own. Even dead, Tanya Helen Thomas wasn’t their own.

So they hadn’t come for her.

I counted again to be sure. The SUV. The lens. The off-duty with the itchy badge. The uniform who wouldn’t look at me. Four that I could see, which meant more that I couldn’t. Uncharged, unconvicted, a person of interest, and worth the overtime. The old current ran through me, low and hot. I turned away before it could settle into something I’d have to name.

The official gave a short nod. Two gravediggers shouldered closer and let the straps down slow. The casket’s belly settled toward the earth, no sound but the thump as a corner hit a root, listing, then settling into its angle. Mud spattered up from the ropes onto a pair of four-hundred-dollar Oxfords on a junior senator’s aide. His face twitched. The shoes, not the dead woman.

The casket sank, and so did the mood. Nobody rushed to cover the grave, not yet. The moment stretched, waiting for some social permission to end. I flicked a glance over the umbrellas. The telephoto had swung my way and stayed there.

I shifted my weight, mud sucking at my boot heel, picking out the fastest exit. Two routes: one past the politicos, one through the older section where the headstones were close enough to clip a hip. Someone moved in close behind me, and my shoulders squared before my brain caught up.

A dark umbrella shoved into the margin of my view, a shoulder snug against my arm. Some people crept into shared shelter apologizing for it. This one stepped in like she’d claimed a right. Cheap nylon, handle taped where it had cracked, water sluicing off in small streams right between us and the grave.

“How well did you know Tanya?” the woman asked, voice clean through the rain. Not shouting, not pretending shyness. Just speaking in a tone built for rallies.

I let myself appraise her openly. Younger, barely in her twenties. Good posture, boots bought for utility not show. A long navy coat, worn but holding the shape of its last hanger. A badge reading “Mich,” printed, not sharpied. No perfume, no patience for it.

“Some,” I said.

Some was one night. I’d followed her into Tempo Club on a case and followed her out again through its heavy steel door at two in the morning, back to her loft south of the river. At eight she’d kicked me out of her bed for a conference call, still laughing, still half asleep. Not long after, she was dead, because I’d handed her name to a grieving mother who needed somebody to blame.

“Did you?” I asked.

“I’m Mich.” The hand came out, fingers small, chill, callused at the tips. “We did the housing committee together. Three years. She was my friend.” She said it plainly, like a credential. “You’re—?”

“Granger.” I gripped fast, then dropped. My real name, the one that had run twice last month in the same paragraph as Lydia Morgan’s. One search on the bus home would do it. I didn’t give her a different one.

Under the umbrella the space was close, her breath tasting faintly of black coffee, maybe too much. The rain hammered the nylon above us like impatient fingers on a counter.

“Crazy, how she died,” Mich said. “I mean, two Tanya Thomases?”

I watched the rain trace streaks down the box. “Crazy.”

“At least the police did their jobs for once. I heard they arrested someone.”

“Yeah?” I edged further under the umbrella, hip to hip, a small adjustment that put my back to the wind and my eyes on the fence. “I heard that too.”

I’d heard it from Lydia Morgan herself, before anybody in a uniform had. I killed two innocent women. This is all your fault.

The badge-fingerer hadn’t moved.

“But I wonder why they aren’t giving much information to the public.” Mich glanced past me, scanning faces the way activists did, counting allies, counting witnesses.

“Cops usually don’t,” I said, bored. “Details spook the media. Or whoever’s next.”

“They’re such assholes.”

I almost laughed. “I agree. Used to be a cop. They’re assholes.” The words came out easy. They always did. The part that came after, the why of it, stayed where I put it.

Mich blinked, recalibrating. “No way. Really? What do you do now?”

“Private investigator.” My weight shifted so my shoulder pressed a fraction firmer into hers. I felt the warmth of her through two layers of wet fabric.

Her eyebrows arched, pleased, not threatened. “Really? Are you spying on anyone right now?”

I cut a grin sharp as a beer bottle. “I’d be fucked if I was.”

“Why?”

Over her shoulder, the telephoto lens had found us. Let them have it. I turned full-on, rain shutting out the world at our backs, my mouth near her ear, close enough to catch the soap under the coffee. “Because right now all I can see is you.”

Mich laughed, cheeks pinking despite the cold. Flattered, uncomfortable, glancing away like she’d lost track of her own script. I watched her search for footing and decide to ride the line.

“Are you always this forward, or do funerals bring it out?”

“Depends if the corpse would approve.” I let my gaze drop, then rise. “Tanya liked trouble. Figure I’m safe.”

A pack of mourners pushed past, their own bubble of shelter nudging me closer. I didn’t step away.

“Most people would ask about the investigation,” I said. “Try to figure out what I know.”

Mich’s teeth caught her lower lip. “If I ask, you’d just lie to me.”

“Probably. Or distract you.”

“I bet you would.” She let the umbrella tilt. Water sluiced down my pant leg, filling my boot another quarter inch. We stood chest to chest while the crowd pushed out toward the cars.

From the grave, the first shovel of earth hit Tanya’s casket with a percussive slap. The sound landed in my chest like a door slamming.

“I need to get out of these boots before I start to mildew,” Mich muttered.

“Could help you with that.”

She choked on a laugh and looked away. “Jesus. Don’t waste all your lines at once.”

“Never do.”

The last of the dirt slapped the lid, umbrellas dropping like spent flowers, no one lingering who wasn’t getting paid for it. I put a hand on the ridge of Mich’s back, not tentative, just redirecting. “Would you like to go somewhere dry and get a drink? To Tanya?”

“Yeah.” Rain carved clean paths down her cheeks. “That sounds nice.”

“Did you drive?”

“Bus.”

“My car’s in the lot.” I steered her around a collapsing news crew, past the fence where the off-duty had finally found somewhere else to be. The SUV hadn’t.

The Mustang sat blue as a bruise in the gray wash, sides streaked with road grime, the dented front fender, the silver one that had never matched the rest of the car, holding a puddle in its crease. The Prius next to it had acquired a parking ticket, already dissolving. I pulled the door open and waited until Mich ducked in, curls stuck wet to her face.

“This is a beautiful car,” she said, brushing rain from the cracked pleather before she sat.

“Thanks.” I circled to the driver’s side. The interior reeked of damp wool and warm vinyl, a car that had absorbed too many stakeouts and not enough detailing. The engine coughed, then settled into its old, combative growl, loud enough to announce us to anyone in the lot who hadn’t already noticed the color. Mich’s breath made ghosts above the dashboard. The plate on the back of my hand had bled into a blue smear, but I had it.

I twisted to face her. “Where would you like to go?”

In the mirror, the SUV pulled out of its space with its lights off.

The wipers hit once.

Obsession – Excerpt

Chapter Three

The alarm went off at 2:30. The phone screen lit the ceiling for two seconds and Reed silenced it. She was on her back. She was naked. She lay still for one second and then sat up.

The wax cracked. She felt it before she understood what it was: a dry fracture across her stomach, the pieces pulling away from her skin and falling. She looked down. Colored wax, red and orange and yellow, the remnants of whatever had pooled there and hardened while she slept. She picked the pieces off her stomach with two fingers, working methodically from her ribs down. Some of it had broken into the sheets. She pulled the sheet back and collected those pieces too, walking to the kitchen trash barefoot on the cold hardwood floor, and dropped them in. A red fragment stuck to her thumb. She scraped it against the trash can rim.

The candle stood on the nightstand, burned down to a stub, a skirt of hardened wax fused around its base.

She went to the bathroom.

The shower ran hot. She stood under it until the cold left her feet and her shoulders came down. She ran both hands across her ribs, her sides, down her lower back, over her hips. She turned and let the water hit her shoulder blades. The skin was unbroken. The bruising was where Lane had left it and nowhere else. She ran her hands over her stomach where the wax had been. Smooth. She stood under the water a little longer and then turned it off.

She dried off. She brushed her teeth at the mirror, looking at her own face, the cropped brown hair dark and flat against her skull. She plugged in the blow dryer and ran it over her head with one hand, fast and methodical, until her hair was dry. She set the dryer on the sink and looked at herself again. Reasonable. Fine.

She went to the bedroom.

Black slacks, laid over the chair the night before. She stepped into them and zipped and buttoned them. White shirt off the hanger, the collar starched and clean. She tucked it, fastened the buttons to the throat, tight. She moved to the nightstand and checked the phone: no messages, no calls. Thirty-nine degrees outside. She put the phone in her jacket pocket.

The gun safe was in the closet, on the floor, behind her spare pair of boots. She typed in the combination. The door came open. She took the Glock from the safe, checked it, holstered it on her hip. She closed the safe and heard the bolts throw.

In the living room the short leather jacket hung on the hook beside the front door. She took it off the hook and put it on. The gloves sat on the shelf above. She pulled them on, picked up the helmet from the kitchen table, and went out.

The hallway smelled of the building: old paint and the neighbor across the hall who kept a cat and the  cold draft that came through the exterior-facing window at the end of the hall that the building super had been promising to reseal for three winters. Reed went down the stairs. Two flights. The treads were worn in the center, smooth rubber, the kind of worn that meant decades. The banister was cold under her palm.

The lobby door was heavy. She pushed through it into the outer vestibule and then through the second door onto the stoop.

The cold hit her face. The sky above the street was black, the low clouds lit orange from underneath. The temperature sat just above freezing and the air had moisture in it, a pre-snow weight that pressed against everything. The street was empty. A few windows in the buildings across the way had lights on.

Mrs. Calloway was at the foot of the stoop, standing just outside the frame of the door to her ground-floor apartment, a cigarette burning in one hand. She wore a housecoat and a heavy cardigan over it and her slippers, which Reed had noted more than once were not rated for the weather, but Reed had said so once and did not intend to say it again. Calloway’s hair was in the same braid she slept in and her face was still arranged for nighttime: slow and soft and not yet assembled.

“Oh, don’t tell me you have to work today,” Calloway said.

“Sure do,” Reed said.

Calloway drew on the cigarette. “It’s Christmas Eve, for chrissake. Don’t people ever take a break?”

“Sure as hell never during the holidays,” Reed said.

She came down the last two steps and Calloway watched her go with the expression of a woman who had long ago accepted that the world ran on indifferent mechanics and still found it occasionally irritating.

The Derion was in her parking spot where she’d left it the night before. Reed put the helmet on, fastened the strap, swung her leg over. The engine turned over on the first try. She let it idle for thirty seconds, watching the idle RPMs settle. The exhaust made a small white cloud in the cold air and the cold air ate it. She checked the lot and the street: empty, the stoplights at the corner cycled green to yellow to red for no one.

Reed pulled out. The cold came in immediately and she kept her head low and watched the road open up ahead of her. The city at three in the morning on December twenty-fourth was not quiet because it was peaceful. It was quiet because it had run itself down and hadn’t started again. She rode east toward the station.

The station lot was half-empty. Reed pulled in off Alcott Street and found the lone RESERVED FOR MOTORCYCLES space on the south end of the lot, two spaces down from the handicapped ramp. Someone had parked a dark green Jeep half over the motorcycle space, its rear end crowding the lane. Reed pulled in alongside it and cut the engine.

She pulled off her helmet and hooked her elbow through it. She swung her leg off the Derion, and the heel of her boot connected with the Jeep’s rear panel with a flat thud. She did not look at the Jeep. She crossed the lot toward the entrance.

The former telephone exchange sat at the corner of Alcott and Mather, its ground-floor windows dark. The light above the entrance was on. Reed pushed through the main doors.

The lobby was empty. The security station, a long counter with a monitor and a sign-in sheet and a gray plastic bin for weapons, had no one behind it. The overhead lights were at their nighttime setting, half the panels off, the ones that remained casting the linoleum in a pale even glow. A radio somewhere behind the counter was on at low volume, something that was not music and not quite talk.

Reed went to the counter. She unholstered the Glock and set it in the bin and walked through the metal detector. It beeped. She reached back across the counter and took the Glock from the bin and reholstered it. The detector beeped for the belt buckle every time and she did not adjust for it.

She looked up. The security camera was mounted in the corner above the entrance, its little red LED steady. Reed looked at it for a moment. She turned and walked toward the elevator.

The lobby had an institutional quiet: not silent but low, the building’s systems running at maintenance levels, the ventilation audible, the lobby clock above the security counter clicking through the seconds. The clock read 03:19. Somewhere above her a pipe knocked once in the wall and stopped.

Reed pressed the elevator call button. The indicator above the doors showed the car on the third floor. She watched it begin to move.

Footsteps behind her. She did not turn. The footsteps slowed and stopped.

“Did you go through the detector?”

Reed watched the elevator indicator pass the second floor.

“Excuse me. Did you go through the detector?”

The elevator reached the first floor. The doors began to open.

She turned. A uniformed officer, mid-twenties, in a patrol coat that was still stiff and creased, the kind of creases that went away after six months on the job and this man still had them. He was standing near the security counter with the expression of someone who had decided that enforcing a rule would prove something worth proving.

“You are supposed to go through the detector,” he said.

Reed looked at him, then at the empty security station. She looked back at him.

The elevator doors stood open behind her.

“And you’re not supposed to leave your post,” she said.

She stepped into the elevator. The car smelled of cleaning solution. She pressed three. In the mirror panel on the back wall of the elevator she watched the officer cross the lobby in three quick steps and take his position behind the security counter. He sat down. He put his hands on the desk. His back was very straight.

The doors closed.

The elevator climbed with a low mechanical complaint and arrived at three with a lurch and a chime that was either broken or had always sounded that way.

The doors opened. Reed stepped out into the third-floor corridor. Dry recycled air floated along the old brick, vaguely attempting to overcome the single-pane windows on the north wall. Reed walked toward the homicide offices.

The homicide offices occupied the northeast corner of the third floor. Six desks in the open bullpen: Reed and Nova’s pair on the right side of the room, Ramos and Pelletier’s on the left, Burgess’s desk and an empty one in the middle. Filing cabinets along the far wall, gray metal, four drawers each, all of them labeled in the code the department had standardized three years ago and nobody had fully adopted. Chief Vasquez’s glass office sat in the corner, dark at this hour, the blinds angled down at forty-five degrees. The window that faced north showed the same black sky, the streetlights on Alcott still burning.

Hector Ramos was at his desk. He had his gas station cup at his elbow, the lid on, and he was looking at his computer screen with the focused patience of a man reading something dense and deliberate. His coat was on the back of his chair. He had the overhead light above his area off and was working by the desk lamp, which gave his side of the bullpen a dim enclosed quality, like a study. A stack of folders sat closed to his right. A legal pad with handwriting on it sat to his left. He did not look up when Reed came in.

“Hey, Ramos,” she said.

“Hey,” he said, still looking at the screen.

Reed crossed to her desk and set her helmet on it and peeled off the leather jacket. She hung the jacket over the back of her chair and dropped into her seat. Nova’s desk beside her was clean and dark, the monitor off, the inbox empty. Reed looked at it for a second and looked away.

“I thought Pelletier was doing the overnight shift,” she said.

Ramos looked up from his screen. “Yeah. I thought so too.” He turned back to the screen. “Surprise, surprise, he called in sick.”

Reed pulled her computer keyboard toward her and looked at the monitor. The screen was dark, the computer sleeping. She woke it. “Why the fuck do they ever schedule him on a holiday? He never works.”

Ramos leaned back. He had run this calculation before and arrived at the same answer every time. “That’s alright,” he said. “This is triple time and a half.”

Reed looked at him. “What?”

“Double time for the holiday. Plus time and a half for replacing someone on a holiday. Three and a half.” He spread one hand. The arithmetic was simple.

Reed looked at her screen. The login prompt was waiting. She typed in her credentials. “Well,” she said. “Merry Christmas to you then.”

“No call outs,” Ramos said. He turned off the monitor.

“Nothing?” Reed asked.

“Nothing. And you know what that means,” he said. “It will come ten minutes after I leave.” He said it without  inflection. “You know, I used to smoke, and every single fucking time you lit up, the bus would come.”

“Don’t jinx me,” Reed said.

Ramos smiled broadly. “Too late. Sucks to be you.”

The ventilation system cycled in the ceiling above them. The air that came through it smelled of the recycled air of the whole building. Reed’s monitor loaded her desktop. She sat back in her chair.

“It’s not time to leave yet,” she said.

Ramos looked at the clock. He did not disagree. He was already somewhere else, Christmas Eve dinner or early present unwrapping, and after a moment he began locking the file folders on his desk into the bottom drawer of his desk. The click of the lock was small and definitive.

“You alone?” he asked.

“Yeah. Nova’s on call.”

He nodded, pulling his coat off the back of his chair and putting it on, working the zipper. “Boring as shit,” he said. “Sucks to be you.”

“So you mentioned,” Reed said.

He picked up his gas station cup, patted his coat pockets, found his keys. “Enjoy your Christmas, Reed.”

“You too.” She was looking at her monitor. She raised one hand without turning around. His steps crossed the linoleum. The office door swung shut, its pneumatic catch hissing.

The homicide offices were quiet. Reed sat in the chair and listened to the quiet settle. The ventilation ran. The heating system knocked once in the wall to the south and was still. Somewhere below, a door opened and closed and opened again, the sound traveling up through the building’s bones. The clock on the wall above the filing cabinets read 03:27. The lights on Alcott below the window were still on, and they would be on until almost eight when the city ran its auto-shutoff, and the sky beyond them had not gotten any lighter yet and would not for hours.

Reed’s monitor displayed the desktop she had arranged three years ago and not changed since: a background the department IT had set to a static city seal, three folders, the case management software shortcut, the phone log. She looked at it. Her eyes went to Nova’s dark monitor beside hers.

Reed unlocked the bottom drawer with the key she kept on her keyring behind the office key and the apartment key. The Douglas file was at the front of the drawer, paper-clipped shut, the cover sheet face up. She pulled it out and set it on the desk.

The date on the cover page: June 2. Months ago. A case number, a classification, and her own badge number in the assigned detective field. Not quite a cold case, but not looking good.

No foot traffic below. No cars. The clock above the filing cabinets marked the seconds and nothing else.

Reed unclipped the folder and opened it to the first photograph.

Natasha Douglas. Found raped and strangled and thrown in a dumpster. The witness notes were Reed’s own handwriting, two pages of it, supplemented by a printed interview summary. She scanned them.

Shenton Werth, boyfriend, twenty-six. He’d been in the county lock-up on a probation violation when Natasha died. The alibi was institutional and perfect and airtight as only actual incarceration was airtight. Reed had gone to see him anyway, because she went to see everyone. He’d been angry and had cried once and stopped himself and not done it again. She had eliminated him. It held.

Dallas Becker. Fifty-five, worked at a machine shop on the west side, a regular customer of Natasha’s for six months. He’d been at work when she died, time-stamped through the shop’s keycard system and corroborated by two coworkers. Reed had pulled the keycard data herself.

Reed traced his name with her fingernail, not marking the page. Becker had put up two thousand dollars of his own money as a reward, through a tip line at the department, posted a flyer at the laundromat on Mather and at the bus stop on Sixteenth. The reward was still uncollected. The tip line had gotten four calls: two sightings of a man who turned out to be a sanitation worker on his regular route, one call accusing Werth, one hang-up. Reed had worked all four. None of them had gone anywhere.

She sat with the file open to Becker’s page. The machine shop. The keycard. The two thousand dollars. She turned the page back to Natasha’s photograph and looked at it again. She read the file through again from the beginning, slower. Then a third time.

She closed the file and set it on the desk.

She stood. The break room was dark. She thought about it, whether there was anything in the break room worth having before five in the morning on Christmas Eve, and decided she would look and see.

The desk phone rang. The clock above the filing cabinets read 04:56.

Reed sat back down in one motion and picked up the receiver. “Detective Reed, Homicide.”

“Detective, this is dispatch.” The voice was a woman’s voice, professional and level. “Patrol Officer Serrano is requesting Homicide response to 2097 Boulder Ridge Road. We have an unresponsive male, obvious trauma, scene is secured. Officer Serrano is holding the perimeter for you.”

Reed already had her pen in her hand. She wrote the address on the edge of the legal pad on her desk. Boulder Ridge Road. She wrote the name: Serrano. “I’m on my way,” she said.

She hung up.

The Douglas file went back in the drawer. She locked the drawer and pocketed the key. She stood and took the leather jacket off the back of her chair and put it on. She took the helmet off the desk. She checked that the Glock was seated in the holster.

She walked out of the homicide offices, down the third-floor corridor, and hit the stairwell door with her palm.

Tell Me Who Did It – Excerpt

Chapter 1

I’d been staring at the little numbers on my laptop screen for twelve minutes, jaw tight, chewing over whether to pay the electric bill or the phone this week. Either way, somebody would start calling. Out the office window, the traffic coughed and someone was shouting about rent two doors down. The floor was cold even through my boots. I pressed a knuckle into my left eye, ignored the hunger, and started scrolling my statements again, hoping they’d change.

The cursor blinked in a cell where rent, due in seven days, sat mocking me with the same four digits and zero grace period. Last client stiffed me. Week before, a check from a lawyer, the kind who expects to win by exhaustion and billable hours. I’d taken the check to the bank and stared at the window, dared the teller to ask about the memo line, because I needed them to ask, just so I could say something cutting and see someone else flinch. Nobody did.

Laptop hummed, tired fan struggling. One bar of charge left, because the cord had split last month and every so often I had to prop it with a matchbook, coax it to live. Smell of grease, like always, wafted through the iron-barred window from the Dragon’s Pub, caught in the swirl of traffic exhaust. I hadn’t eaten since last night and the scent didn’t help. Voices drifted from the sidewalk: someone pushing a stroller, someone cussing out a toddler. Downtown charm.

The pad on my screen, color-coded and grim, waited for a miracle. My phone buzzed on the plywood desk, plastic-on-plastic, and I winced like it had teeth. Calendar reminder. Consultation. Five minutes.
I muttered, “Fuck off,” at the device, as if that’d buy me another day. It didn’t.

Up from the chair, stretch until something cracked in my back. Fingers combed through my hair, short, still damp in back from a failed morning shower, the gray at my temple showing up strong against the black. Didn’t wear the glasses, didn’t need them for this part. I swept a palm over the desk: cup rings, receipts, last week’s gum foil. Two stacks of cases, held together by elastics, shoved into drawers that threatened to stick. I pulled a clean notepad from a drawer, dropped it center, clicked a pen three times, set it parallel. My ritual for clients. Kept the keyboard closed, old-school, made them feel like they were in a real detective’s office, not a former currency exchange on a street where rent was a monthly barfight.
One minute left.

I ran a thumbnail along the seam of my jeans, checked the clock, checked the window. My nerves were winding, just a bit. I hate that part; reminded me of first days on the force, waiting for a partner to actually show, not stand me up as some kind of institutional warning. Old habit: run through the conversation in my head. What’s your name? What do you need? How much are you going to argue about my rate?
Footsteps in the hall, uncertain rhythm: woman’s gait, heavier at the heel, nervous or just tired. My hand curled into a half-fist on the desk as I heard the rattle at the door. Lydia Morgan, if the calendar and the desperate grammar of the request form held true.

The bars on the door cast shadows up the inside glass as Lydia came into view. Taller than me by an inch, blond hair unbrushed and tied low, coat two seasons out of style, green eyes with a darkness under them that didn’t come from a bad night’s sleep. My mind worked through the checklist: parent, grieving, but not broken. Contained. Looked like she might take a punch, or throw one, if the world served it up.
I stood. I didn’t smile. That part was always fake. I wiped my hand on my jeans before offering it.
“Are you Lydia Morgan?”
Lydia hesitated at the threshold, eyes darting over the bars, the cracked concrete, the potted plant in the corner that I never watered but couldn’t throw out. She didn’t shrink from my hand, though. Shook it, grip direct, nothing in reserve. Her hands were cold, bone thin but steady.
“Yes.” Voice sanded down, polite on autopilot. She slipped into the nearest of the two guest chairs, plastic, no armrests, seat cool from the draft under the door. Bag on her lap, nothing else.
We regarded each other, silence settling for a tick, neither of us bothering to fill it. I waited, let Lydia take the first breath in my space.

Lydia let the bag sit in her lap, hands wrapped tight around the worn straps, like she might need to run. I watched the veins tense at her wrist, then fixed my eyes back on Lydia’s face, waiting for the reason people show up in daylight in a place that smells like fried onions and unfinished business.

“I want to hire you,” Lydia said, not bothering to work up to it. “I need someone to find out who killed my daughter.”

There was a flicker, not quite in the room, but behind Lydia’s green eyes: a hurricane trapped behind frosted glass. I tapped the pen against the notepad, not writing anything.

“Cynthia,” Lydia went on, voice deliberate. “She was sixteen. Hit and run. Police haven’t found the driver. It’s been two years.” No quaver, no big show. Just information, relayed for the record.

I nodded, bare minimum. “You want an investigation. Not closure, not therapy. Got it.”

Lydia didn’t blink. “The last therapist called it unresolved anger. She doesn’t return my calls either.” Lydia shrugged, the line of her shoulders thin, sharpened. “Police said it’s still open. Caseworker changes every time I ask. I’m supposed to call ‘the tip line’ with any updates.”

I could feel the shape of the wound in the room. No point bandaging it. “You got the accident report?”
Lydia shook her head once. “You probably already know what’s public. Early morning. She was walking back from the donut shop, Bower Street. Some piece of shit driving a small white car ran her down and just…kept going.”

“Small white car,” I repeated, making myself write it even though I remembered. It looked official that way, let Lydia see me put it down.

“That’s all anyone saw on the video.” Lydia looked at me, reading me, measuring out trust. “They don’t even know what make. Or license. Police said there’s ‘a list’ but it’s classified.”

“Typical,” I said. I glanced around my own office, plywood desk, three battered books stacked for effect, window shade drawn halfway. I felt Lydia’s eyes land on the cracks in the floor, the view of the bars.
Lydia’s lip quirked up, not quite amused, just making an inventory. “You chose this location for the charm?”

I grinned, just the right amount, a flash of teeth that didn’t pretend. “Rent’s lower on this end of the street. Lets me keep the hourly under two hundred. My charm costs extra.” I saw the moment Lydia checked the mental balance sheet: grief as commodity, price per wound.

Lydia nodded, a small huff of exhale. “Better than my lawyer. He charges two fifty to tell me there’s nothing he can do.”

“You got any enemies? Friends of your daughter’s with the wrong connections?” I asked. “Anyone pissed off at you? Family drama that spilled over?”

“No.” Lydia’s answer snapped out fast, automatic, as if she’d run the script in her head more times than she could count. “Cynthia was a kid. Good kid. No drugs, no trouble. No exes, no enemies. Teachers liked her. That’s why nobody understands how it happened.”

I let the silence settle. I saw the frown dig deep lines between Lydia’s brows, how she didn’t unclench the grip on her bag, how she picked at a string in the fabric like picking a lock.

“I’ll start with what’s public, based on the online form you filled out,” I said, finally. “News articles, maybe pull some old traffic cam logs if I can swing it. Social media. I’ll dig through any connections that pop. If the police missed something, I’ll find it, but I can’t subpoena records or go breaking into evidence lockers.”

Lydia said, “Just look. Try harder than they did.” Then quieter, not for my sake: “I don’t expect you to find closure. I want the name. Someone should have to look me in the face and know.”

I felt that one. All right, then.

“You want me on it, you got me.” My voice carried more bravado than promise; I didn’t have anything better than this.

Lydia set the bag on the floor, rummaged in it for a battered wallet, and pulled out a thick bundle of bills, green and grimy and rubber-banded tight. She counted quick, slid a thousand across the desk, didn’t even look at it as it passed out of her hand.

I picked up the money, felt the rough texture: no bank starch, just raw cash. I folded it once, slipped it under my laptop. “You want a receipt?”

Lydia’s hands tensed again, knuckles white. “No receipts. I don’t want to explain it to my husband.”
I cocked my head. “You sure? Never hurts to have a record.”

“I can trust you, can’t I?” Lydia’s gaze sharpened, like this was the actual interview. “Your website said you used to be a cop.”

I sat back, crossed my arms. “That’s right. Homicide. Two years in uniform, five as a detective. Left the department because I wanted to sleep at night.” The half-lie rolled easy. “No records, no leak. I keep things clean.”

“Good,” Lydia said, finality in it. “This is just for me. No one else needs to know.”

We sat a moment, two women with more history than future, sharing air thick with old grease and new secrets.

Lydia packed up, slung the bag over her shoulder like she was late for something that no longer existed, then paused halfway to the door. “You don’t do phone calls? Or…”

“Email’s better. I’ll call if I need you. I don’t check voicemail.”

Lydia’s nod wasn’t quite relief. She pulled the door behind her, the bar latch clicking into place. I watched the shadows on the glass stretch, then vanish. Just me, again, a thousand bucks up, more questions than before.

I stared at my hands for a second, flexed the fingers, then reached for the laptop and flipped it open, eyes hard as streetlights.

I leaned forward, fingers already sticky with old newsprint ink from the file drawer I’d raided for a scrap of copy paper. The laptop bathed my hands in sickly blue, the search bar a dare. I typed Cynthia Margaret Morgan, pressed enter, read.

The first headline was two years old. “Local Girl, 16, Killed in Apparent Hit-and-Run.” It sat next to an image that barely loaded, just a smudge in the preview. I clicked. A small, silent video spun and coughed and then popped up a freeze-frame: a cluster of patrol cars parked with their reds still running, sunlight harsh in all the wrong places. A patch of Bower Street cordoned by two bored deputies and a length of tape. Underneath, the copy writer’s best shot at sympathy: “Described as ‘bright and caring’ by classmates and teachers.”

They always were.

I scrolled, fast at first, eyes combing the lines for meat: Cynthia left the house 6:30, stopped for donuts, seen crossing Bower at 6:45. A passing driver called 911 at 6:50, reporting a body in the southbound lane. No witnesses, just security camera footage from a bar two blocks up, angled wrong. Investigators described the suspect vehicle as a “white compact” but “make and model unknown.” The driver “may not have seen” her, “unclear speed or intent.”

I grunted, wrote white compact under the “Car” heading. I didn’t need to be told that half the city drove beaters the same shape and shade; nobody kept real records, not when insurance could hike your rate for a scratch.

I skimmed to the official police quote. I read the lines out loud in my best imitation of the department’s press guy: “The investigation is ongoing and we urge anyone with information to come forward. The Riverview Police Department extends its condolences to the family of Cynthia Morgan.” I read it again, this time bitter enough to make the words curl.

There was a number for a tip line that, in my experience, got checked once a week if somebody remembered. “Calls will remain confidential.” I snorted and scrawled “Tip Line” in the margin of my scratch pad, circled it hard enough to tear the sheet.

Back to the search page. I found a few grainy stills: a frame of Cynthia from her school yearbook, brown hair, face scrubbed clean, mouth twisted into what must’ve been a joke seconds before the shutter clicked. In one article, a school administrator said, “We are devastated by the loss of such a promising student.” It read like a form letter.

I pushed past the obituary, its saccharine details: honor roll, French club, “loving daughter and friend.” The page was ringed with ads for cut-rate memorial jewelry and cheap bouquets. Every link stung, but I scanned each for anything useful, even if it was only to cross it off later.

I checked social media, what little was still visible on the dead girl’s locked-down profiles. Friends’ timelines stacked with recycled condolences: “Can’t believe you’re gone, Cynth.” Each echo duller than the last. No mention of fights, drama, wild stories. If there was dirt, it was buried deeper than a public feed would ever show.

Next, I went to the police’s site for the official case listing. The post was short. “On May 23 at approximately 6:50 a.m., patrol units responded to Bower Street…” Everything in passive tense. Everything in the third person. No update since six months ago: “still seeking public assistance.” A JPEG of the intersection showed nothing I hadn’t already read. Street name, crosswalk, bakery sign blurred in the background. No skid marks. I jotted: No drag. Not speeding? Or not braking? Eyes stung. I rubbed them, blamed the fluorescent light.

I shifted, the edge of the plywood desk cutting into my forearms. My back ached from how I hunched. I closed my eyes a second, let the sounds from the street invade: honking, a scrap of music, a voice sharp with anger. Somewhere in the office the radiator let out a dull clang.

I opened a new tab. Searched local forums and the public incident map, keying in hit and run, white car, Bower. Scanned for any pattern. Another wreck three months earlier, different borough, ruled “resolved.” One, five months after Cynthia’s, went unsolved. I gritted my teeth. Hit and run wasn’t rare; the only difference here was the face behind it, and the mother in my office ten minutes ago.

I drew a crude timeline on the copy paper. 6:30: home. 6:45: donut shop. 6:47-6:50: accident. One question underlined: Why that street, why then? No listed detour, weather normal, not even a construction notice archived.

I opened another search: Bower Street, complaints, dangerous crossing. City blog posts, neighborhood groups griping about lights timed wrong, sidewalks crumbling, nobody ever fixing anything. One photo posted six weeks after the incident, a cheap bouquet and a rain-logged teddy bear crumpled at the curb. I felt the wave of old resentment hit; civic memory lasted less than the floral foam.

My stomach knotted. I let it sit. Reached for my phone, fumbled it in one palm, thumb hovering over recent calls. I wasn’t sure yet if what I felt was the shape of a clue or just the low-grade anger I’d carried since the badge days, welded to my ribs by habit.

I pressed a contact, held it up to my ear, waited for the ring. Air smelled of spent oil and overdone fries. My eyes flicked back to the laptop, the picture of a girl in a too-bright yearbook photo, already halfway gone.

The line clicked. I didn’t blink.

The Geometry of Falling – Excerpt

Chapter 1

The engine was still ticking when her phone rang.

She was in the driveway with her keys in her hand. The house was lit from inside, every window warm, and through the glass she could see Tanya moving in the kitchen. Cameron was at the counter. Natalie was on the floor near the couch. The whole assembly of her life, proceeding without her, the way it always did.

She looked at the screen. Molenaar.

“Greenhouse.”

“Got a body. 749 Freeport Road. Museum of Stonebridge Artifacts. Curator named Evelyn Crest. Suspicious hit and run.”

She looked at the windows. “Fifteen minutes.”

Inside, the house smelled like garlic and salmon. Always fish on Fridays. The table was set. Cameron was at the counter with a paper airplane that kept folding wrong, explaining the aerodynamics to no one. Natalie was on the floor with a mason jar and what appeared to be a small civilization of pill bugs arranged on a newspaper.

Tanya was at the stove with a dish towel over her shoulder. She looked up when Greenhouse came in.

She read the keys. She read the coat.

“Mama.” Natalie held up the jar. “I made them a house.”

“Good house.” Greenhouse kissed the top of her head. The curls smelled like a whole afternoon outside.

“They need holes in the lid.”

“Ask your mom.”

Cameron looked up. “Did you know a paper airplane can fly for forty seconds if—”

“Tonight,” Greenhouse said. “Tell me tonight. Everything.”

He nodded and went back to his folds.

She crossed to Tanya. Tanya’s hand found her arm before she got there.

“Sorry honey,” Greenhouse said.

Tanya’s eyes moved over her face. “Are you eating?”

“I’ll get something on the way.”

“That means no.”

“It means I’ll try.”

She kissed her. Tanya’s hand stayed on her arm after.

“Go,” Tanya said.

She was back at the door in under a minute. Behind her, Cameron had found a new fold. Natalie was explaining something to the pill bugs through the glass. Dinner would be eaten without her. The dishes. The bedtime. Tanya would hold all of it, the way she always held all of it, without saying aloud that this was not what she had signed up for, because it was exactly what she had signed up for.

Greenhouse backed out of the driveway. The warm windows shrank in the mirror.

She drove east on Aldrich with two fingers on the wheel, the heater running, a voice on the radio giving scores she didn’t hear. Curator, she thought. Museum of Stonebridge Artifacts. Brick building, six stories, narrow footprint, parking in the rear. Molenaar had said suspicious. He didn’t use that word unless something had already looked wrong to him. Or he was covering himself. With Molenaar it was sometimes hard to tell the difference.

She turned the radio off.

Two minutes out she saw the patrol lights, blue-red-blue against the underside of the clouds.

The lot was large and mostly empty. The asphalt was still wet from an earlier rain, and the patrol lights turned everything blue then nothing then red. Crime scene techs had set up their floods near the building’s eastern corner, and Molenaar was standing with his hands in his jacket pockets, shoulders set, waiting for her to catch up.

“Walk me through it,” she said.

He pointed to a woman in high-visibility running gear on a parking block near the tape. “Melissa Daily. Called it in at five forty-one. Says she was cutting through the lot, heard an impact, came around the corner and found her.”

“She see a vehicle?”

“No.”

“Hear anything before the impact? Engine, horn?”

“No.”

He shifted his weight. “Security guard inside heard it too. The impact. Ran out the side door, says he saw a dark hatchback taking the northwest exit. No plate. Name’s Allen Renquist.”

“Where is he?”

“Gave a statement. Needed to vomit, so I sent him to the washroom.”

She moved toward the body.

Evelyn Crest lay on the concrete strip between the gravel and the brick façade. There was a great deal of blood. The left arm was broken. The right knee was wrong in a way that suggested high-velocity impact. Greenhouse crouched and looked at the back of the dark wool coat, which had ridden up and torn.

No transfer. No paint, no rubber, nothing a vehicle would leave.

She moved six feet left and crouched again.

Molenaar appeared beside her. “Hit and run. A hatchback clipped her, she went down hard.”

“Look at the gravel,” Greenhouse said.

He looked. “It rained earlier.”

“Before the responders got here. Look under the ambulance tracks. The gravel was already flat. No rooster tail, no scatter.” She stood. “And the coat. A vehicle moving fast enough to do this,” she gestured at the body, “leaves something. Paint. Rubber. Transfer.”

“Just not visible to the naked eye. Forensics will get it all.”

“With no tire marks. With no transfer.” She moved back two steps and pointed at the blood stain. “The pattern is radial. Centered. A vehicle strike throws it in the direction of travel. This went straight down.”

Molenaar was quiet. The patrol lights moved across both of them.

She left him and crossed to Melissa Daily.

“Ms. Daily.” She crouched to her eye level. “Detective Greenhouse. Can you tell me what happened?”

“Heard a thump.” The woman pressed her hands between her knees. “A really heavy thump. Like something dropping from a height. I’d never heard that sound before, but I knew what it was. You know?”

“Did you hear a car?”

“Nothing. No car. No scream. Just the thump, and then I came around the corner and she was there.”

“How long was it between the sound and when you came around?”

“Five seconds. Maybe less.”

Greenhouse stood and walked back.

“A dark hatchback in an empty lot at night,” she said. “Easy to invent. Renquist hears a thump, runs out, and his brain needs an explanation.”

“Or there was a car and Daily didn’t see it because her brain was already writing a different story.”

“Both things can be true.”

She looked up at the building.

Six stories of brick, the windows dark, the flat roofline cutting hard against the low clouds. The patrol lights reached up the face and died out halfway. The gravel strip where Evelyn Crest lay ran the full length of that wall.

Greenhouse went through the main entrance.

Inside, the building had the silence of a public space emptied against its wishes. Track lighting on its evening setting. Display cases in the dimness. A cluster of museum staff near the reception desk, watched by a uniform. Someone had been crying.

She found the stairwell at the back and went up.

Six flights. The stairwell smelled like concrete and institutional cleaning products, and her footsteps came back to her off the walls. She was not winded until the sixth floor, and then she was.

The roof access was an unmarked steel door. It should have had an alarm. It was propped open with a rubber wedge, as if someone had been working up here and planned to come back.

She stood in the frame before she stepped out.

The roof was flat and graveled, forty feet to the edges, no railings, nothing at the perimeter but air. The wind came from the north, cold and direct, carrying rain and the river. Below her she could see the lot, the forensics van, the body of Evelyn Crest, small and dark in its ring of light.

She looked at the gravel before she moved.

It was wrong near the access door. Not chaotically wrong. Quietly wrong. A compression pattern, feet planted, weight shifted hard. Two furrows ran from the struggle zone to the eastern edge, straight and deliberate, the width of heels. Twelve, fifteen feet of it.

She moved along the left side, keeping the drag marks in her peripheral vision until she could see them cleanly.

At the edge she stopped.

A square of white paper sat on the gravel eight inches from the lip. The fold was clean and precise. It was meant to be found.

She looked down.

Six floors below, the forensics team moved around Evelyn Crest in their slow orbit. The blood stain was darker than the gravel it had soaked into. The body was very small.

“Christ,” Greenhouse said.

She walked back to the access door. Took the elevator down. Found the officer at the side entrance.

“The roof is a primary crime scene. Nobody goes up without authorization and a suit.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She went back out into the lot. Molenaar was near the perimeter, talking to a tech.

“There’s a white folded paper on the roof,” she said. “Near the eastern edge. Drag marks from the door to the lip. Fifteen feet or so. Struggle evidence near the access point.”

He looked at her. The patrol lights crossed his face.

“White paper,” he said.

“Folded square.”

He stood very still. Then he started barking at the techs.

Renquist was leaning against the wall when she found him, arms crossed, watching. He had the look of a man who had seen things and wanted you to know it.

“Walk the exterior with me. Tell me about security,” she said.

They went counterclockwise. She looked at every corner, every mounted fixture, every place a camera should have been. Corner lights. A dead housing above the service entrance.

“No exterior coverage,” Renquist said before she asked.

“Elevator cameras?”

“No. Budget. Phase two never got funded.”

“The service entrance camera.”

“Out three months. Three work orders.”

She looked at him. He offered nothing further.

“When you saw the hatchback,” she said. “Which exit?”

“Northwest. Toward Clement.” He said it the way people say things they’ve already said twice and expect to keep saying. “Dark-colored and moving fast.”

“Make or model?”

“Civic, maybe. Focus. That size.”

They came back around to the rear. The body of Evelyn Crest was still there, patient under its lights.

“Visitor logs,” she said. “Who was in the building today?”

He made a face. “It’s a public museum. Pay what you can. General admission is cash or card, no name. Membership cards get scanned at the front desk.”

“Staff?”

“Sign-in sheet at the service entrance. I’ll get it.”

“The roof. Who has access?”

He hesitated. First time all night. “It’s supposed to be locked. Maintenance uses it occasionally.”

“Locked.” He looked up and saw light pouring off the roof. “Supposed to be, anyway.”

“Evelyn Crest. What do you know about her?”

“Ran the exhibition side. I’d see her directing staff around shipments. Professional.” He shrugged. “Didn’t talk much to security. Seemed like someone who worked late. That type.”

She looked at him for a moment.

“Go pull the employee sign-in sheet,” she said. “Stay available.”

The news vans were pulling into the lot when she came back out, their satellite rigs not yet extended, their drivers calculating angles.

Molenaar appeared at her shoulder. He had already seen them.

“Cover her,” he said quietly. The lead tech reached for the body wrap.

Greenhouse crossed to the technician crouched closest to the body.

“Bag the hands before you move her.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Forensics had the roof for forty minutes before Greenhouse and Molenaar came back up together in forensic white. The space had been transformed. Portable floods, hard shadows, numbered yellow flags from the access door to the eastern edge. Four technicians moving carefully through the documented zones.

The forensics lead came to meet them. Her clipboard was already full.

“Drag marks are consistent with a single person being moved horizontally. The heels would dig in under gravity. The furrow fans toward the edge, which means the person doing the moving was accelerating.” She paused. “Whoever it was knew what they were going toward.”

A second technician held up a clear evidence bag. Inside it, the white folded square, its creases sharp.

“Can you open it?”

“Not without risking trace.” He pulled out a flashlight and held it against the bag.

Greenhouse leaned in. Molenaar moved to get the angle.

Shadows dance in dark

Echoes fade in twilight’s hush

A guardian falls

She read it twice. She straightened.

“Goddamn it,” she said.

A gust came off the north. The evidence bag trembled.

A guardian falls.

“That haiku.” Molenaar’s voice had dropped. “Two days ago. The nine-one-one call.”

“Yes.”

“The same.”

“Word for word.”

He stood very still. The forensics lead was watching them both with the careful attention of someone who understood she should not interrupt.

Molenaar looked at the paper for a long time.

“Oh fuck,” he said. Quietly, and with feeling. “So he really did strike again.”

Dead Stop – Excerpt

Chapter 1

The suspect had good legs. That was the first thing I clocked when he vaulted the turnstile. Not the stolen bag still swinging from his fist, not his face, but the clean mechanical efficiency of the jump. Practiced. The move a man makes when he’s done it two hundred times and expects to do it two hundred more.

I badged through. The officer behind me vaulted the same bar the suspect had, with the same motion and younger knees, and was already ahead of me by the time his shoes hit the platform. I knew then I was trailing. Not by much. Enough.

Bowery Station late at night is ugly. The platform runs long and the ceiling vaults up into a darkness that the lights don’t reach, those new LED panels the MTA installed that are supposed to be an improvement and are not, which cast everything in a flat, shadowless white that makes people look post-mortem. The original mosaic B-tablets on the wall, the ones from 1913, grime-blackened and graffiti-layered, strobed past at the edge of my vision. The air tasted of concrete dust and the staleness of a space that has never in its existence been fully empty. Something sweet and rotten underneath. The permanent underground smell. You stop noticing it when you’re a transit cop. I had never been a transit cop, and I noticed it every time.

Forty feet ahead, the suspect. Thirty feet ahead, the officer. Me, making up ground I was not going to fully make up.

My lungs were doing their job. My legs were doing their job. The platform crowd had thinned to almost nothing at this hour. A man with grocery bags pressed back against a column, a woman in scrubs who stepped smartly out of the lane. And what remained of them were turning now, heads lifting, tracking the sound of three sets of shoes on concrete. Someone said something. I didn’t catch it. I was watching the suspect, watching the gap, watching the officer’s back.

The tunnel mouth was at the end of the platform. Round, black, absolute.

My body saw it before my mind did. Not registered. Not processed. Just there.

The suspect hit the end of the platform without slowing. He went into the tunnel.

No hesitation. Just gone. One moment he was lit by the platform’s fluorescents, and then the darkness took him, swallowing him whole, mid-stride, and the sound of his footsteps changed register: concrete to gravel, open air to a compressed echo that came back wrong, too close and too far at the same time.

The officer hit the tunnel mouth and went in after him.

No hesitation. Just gone.

I ran. I was running. My body was running and the tunnel was coming up and I could see the officer’s shape already dimming in the dark, could hear the gravel shift under his shoes, could see nothing beyond him, nothing, just the black compressed throat of it pressing in from every side, and I thought, I’m going in, I’m going in, I’m right behind—

I stopped.

I did not stop. My legs stopped. There is a difference, and for a long time I could not explain it to anyone, and eventually I stopped trying. My legs stopped as if something had thrown a physical switch, some circuit breaker buried deep in the brainstem that has nothing to do with courage or choice, that precedes both by several million years of evolution, and my body simply would not go forward into that darkness. Would not. The decision, if it was a decision, was made so far below the level of thought that thought arrived late to an empty room.

I stood at the platform edge. My right arm was extended. Reaching. I don’t remember raising it.

The tunnel breathed cold air against my palm.

In the distance, already muffled, was the sound of footsteps on gravel. Two sets. Then shouting. The officer’s voice, the compressed bark of a cop making commands in a small space, bouncing back to me distorted, the words mangled by the tunnel walls until they were just sound, just urgency without content. My arm was still out. My legs were concrete. Sweat broke along my hairline and ran cold behind my ear. My heart was doing something animal in my chest.

I stood at the edge of the platform, and I did not go in and my arm was still out and the tunnel was dark.

A woman on the platform said, loudly, to no one: “What is happening right now?”

I had no answer. I was standing at the edge of the world with my arm outstretched, and I had nothing.

The rumble started low. Below sound almost. You feel the J train before you hear it, coming up through your feet and into your bones, and for a moment in the dark I thought it was me, thought it was my body doing something new and catastrophic. Then I heard it. A deep, directional hum that had no ceiling, no edge, a sound that came from everywhere at once and would not stop.

From inside the tunnel, shouting. Louder now. Two voices. Overlapping. I could not make out words. I could hear urgency, which is its own language, and the language was saying something I already knew.

The light came second, a pale bloom at the far end of the tunnel, small at first, growing, the headlamp filling the black cylinder, eating the darkness, throwing rails into sudden relief as it came. I watched it come. I could not do anything except watch it come.

I counted. I don’t know why. Some synapse firing in the part of my brain that was still operating, that wanted to impose order on what was happening, that needed to measure the thing it could not stop. One. Two. The shouting from inside the tunnel was continuous now, tangled, the officer’s voice and another’s and something I couldn’t assign. Three. The light was swallowing the dark faster than I’d calculated when I started counting. My arm was still out. Four. The rumble had become the actual sound of the train, iron and mass and mechanical certainty, a sound that had no softness anywhere in it and did not apologize for that.

The horn. One long blast. Then a second, harder, and longer. The blast a driver makes when he understands what the problem is and understands he cannot fix it in the time available and makes the sound anyway because the alternative is silence and silence is worse.

Then the brakes.

The screech of brake shoes clamping steel wheels is not a sound that exists on any spectrum where the body can stay neutral. It lives in the teeth, the eyes, the skull, and it does not ask permission to be there. It is the sound of something massive attempting the impossible, trying to unmake velocity, trying to argue with physics, trying to turn motion into stillness fast enough for it to matter. The horn kept going. The brakes kept screaming. They did not sound like they were winning.

The wall of displaced air hit me before the train cleared the tunnel mouth. Not a breeze. A pressure front. It pushed against my palm like a warning and brought with it the smell of burning metal, brake dust, grease, and something else I identified for one half-second before the identifying part of my brain stopped.

The train came through the tunnel mouth and into the station still moving, slowing but moving, its headlamp flooding the platform with yellow and the screech of the brakes going past, screaming into a frequency that didn’t have a name yet, something new the materials were making under duress. And then it stopped. Not cleanly. A shudder. A metallic groan that ran the length of the cars. And stopped.

One second of silence. A genuine one. The kind that only happens when something very loud ceases abruptly and the air hasn’t recovered yet.

Then the screams. The woman in scrubs had both hands over her mouth and was making a sound around them. The man with the grocery bags had pressed himself into the far wall, and his bags were on the floor and he was making a sound I associated with things that didn’t have language. Two other people on the platform I hadn’t clocked until now. Everyone making sounds. The train’s emergency lighting strobed on, off, on, the orange strips along the car doors blinking into existence. The brake system released its compressed air in one long, low exhalation that sounded, grotesquely, like the train settling in for the night.

I was still at the platform edge. My arm was still out. The train had stopped with its front cab perhaps twelve feet from where I stood, and I was looking at the headlamp, still burning, aimed at my sternum, and my arm was still extended, palm still turned toward the tunnel mouth, reaching for something that was no longer where I’d last heard it.

A man on the platform, somewhere behind me, said: “The fuck just happened?”

I didn’t turn around. My arm stayed where it was. The tunnel behind the train was dark again, the headlamp having taken all the light with it when it arrived and left none behind. I kept looking at the dark. That’s all I did. That’s all my body would do.

They cut the power maybe four minutes later. The train’s main lights went out in a single beat and the platform dropped into the dim amber of battery-backed emergency panels, spaced too far apart, throwing more shadow than light. The fluorescent strips overhead went dark. The LED panels went dark. What remained was that low, unreliable amber glow and the train’s own emergency strips, a dull orange line running the full length of the cars, and the silence that follows when a lot of electrical equipment stops at once.

The tunnel stayed black. There was no emergency lighting in the tunnel. There was nothing in the tunnel but the dark and whatever the dark contained.

I had lowered my arm somewhere in those four minutes. I was aware of this only because when I came back to my body my arms were at my sides, hanging. I could not account for the transition. One moment my arm had been extended, palm toward the tunnel, and then it was not. My fingers were numb at the tips. The collar of my shirt was wet. My lower back had stiffened without my noticing, the way it does when you’ve held one position for longer than you know.

I looked at my hands. They looked fine. They looked like hands that belonged to someone who had done what needed doing.

The transit cops arrived from the street entrance in a cluster, four of them moving with the flat efficiency of people who have a job and are doing it, and they went directly to the platform edge without stopping, their flashlight beams hitting the tunnel mouth and going in, cutting the dark in long pale columns. I watched those beams do what I hadn’t done. Watched them find the dark and go into it without negotiation, without the body throwing a switch and refusing, just four men with flashlights walking into the place I hadn’t walked into. The light moved in there. Found things. I kept my eyes on the light and not on what the light was finding.

The paramedics came next, two of them with the orange bag, moving fast from the street side. Then more uniforms. A supervisor. Someone with a radio pressed to his ear having a conversation I couldn’t hear the other end of. The platform filled up fast with people who had somewhere to be and were going there, and every one of them crossed the line without hesitating, and none of them looked at me as they passed because I was not their problem. I was standing in the middle of the platform with my arms at my sides, and I was not the problem they had come down here to solve.

One of the transit cops put his hand on my arm without looking at my face. Not rough. Functional. The grip of a man removing an obstacle so he can get to the thing that matters.

“Step back from the edge, please.” Flat. The please a formality, doing no work at all.

“I’m on the job,” my voice came out steady. Steadier than I had any right to. My body had refused me my legs at the relevant moment and was now compensating by giving me my voice when I didn’t need it. Very generous. “Detective, NYPD.”

He looked at my face then. Did whatever quick calculation cops do when another cop says they’re a cop at a scene like this, reading the face for the information that isn’t in the words. He didn’t ask for my shield. He gripped my arm more firmly and walked me back from the edge, not far, not off the platform, just back, away from the lip where the gravel drops to the rails, and moved me to the bench against the far wall. The bench positioned to frame the platform but hide the tunnel, a bench designed for officers who weren’t in the conversation anymore. The bench was positioned in the way that someone had thought through this bench’s position so that I could sit and understand that I was not useful and not be in the way of the people who were.

My legs were very grateful for the bench. I didn’t let my face say so.

The overhead PA clicked on. The dispatcher’s voice, pre-recorded, uninflected, and perfectly calm in the way that only a recording can be calm because a recording has never been on this platform or any platform: “There is no train service at this time due to an investigation. Please exit the station and use the nearest bus terminal.”

The last few civilians still on the platform began to move toward the stairs. The woman in scrubs walked past me without looking. The man whose grocery bags were still on the floor near where he’d been standing looked at them, then at the stairs, made a decision, and left the bags. His footsteps went up and were gone. The amber emergency light held its position. The flashlight beams in the tunnel moved and stopped and moved again.

I sat with my hands in my lap, and I watched the lights move in the dark and I did not think about what I’d heard from inside the tunnel or what the paramedics were moving toward with the orange bag. I ran my fingers through my hair and they came back wet and cold and I kept doing it. Like there was something to straighten. Like that would help anything.

Sgt. Orbison had a slight limp, and he moved with the patience of a man who has learned to let the limp set the pace rather than fight it. I watched him come across the platform toward me and had time to take inventory: about forty, broad through the shoulders, carrying extra weight but wearing it without apology, clean-shaven, his uniform pressed immaculate in a way that felt deliberate at this hour. His way of saying, ‘I knew tonight would matter.’ He had his notebook out before he reached the bench.

He stopped in front of me. Looked down.

“Show your shield.”

I unclipped it from my belt and held it up. He looked at it without taking it, reading the number and committing it, then looked at my face the same way. The same inventory. I let him take it.

“Detective Billings.” Flat. Not unfriendly yet.

“Yeah.”

He crouched to my eye level. Brother officer posture. The posture that says we are in this together. That what happened is ours to carry. I had used this exact posture myself, hundreds of times, on witnesses and victims and occasionally the wrong people.

“Walk me through it,” he said. Unhurried.

I walked him through it. I kept my voice level and my account sequential and I did not editorialize and I did not offer anything he hadn’t asked for. That’s the rule. You learn it early if you’re smart and remember it on nights like this if you’re smarter. Mugging call, street level. Suspect fled into the station. Officer—I said this part carefully, I did not know his name, he had pulled his patrol car over when he saw us running and joined the chase without introduction, I had never worked with him before tonight—officer in pursuit with me. Suspect vaulted the turnstile. Officer vaulted the turnstile. I badged through. We ran the platform.

Suspect went into the tunnel.

Officer went into the tunnel.

I stopped. In both senses.

Orbison was writing. The pen moved in small, controlled strokes, the handwriting of a man who knows his notes get read in brighter rooms with more witnesses. “And you?”

“I stayed on the platform.”

He wrote that down. I watched the pen move. It moved for longer than those four words should have required, which meant he was building something the words hadn’t said, something he’d read off my face and the bench and the way I wasn’t moving before he arrived.

“You stayed on the platform,” he said again. He repeated it back to me, giving me a moment to correct myself. A courtesy, offered once.

“Yes.”

He wrote. Then: “Did you know the officer?”

“No.”

“How long had you been in pursuit before entering the station?”

“Forty, fifty seconds. Maybe less.”

“And you were where, exactly, when the officer entered the tunnel?”

This was the question. All the other questions had been building toward this one and we both understood that and the asking and the answering of it was a formality we were now obligated to perform together.

“Platform edge,” I said.

“How far from the tunnel mouth?”

My jaw tightened. I made myself unknot it. “Five feet. Less.”

He wrote. The pen moved and moved. I watched it and I thought about the officer, whose name I didn’t know and would know by morning, who had been five feet ahead of me going into a place I couldn’t go. I thought about the clean efficiency of his jump over the turnstile. I thought about the flashlight beams moving in the tunnel right now, finding what they were finding, and the paramedics with the orange bag who had gone in there too, and how all of those people had done what I hadn’t done and none of them had needed to be talked into it.

Orbison stopped writing. He looked at me and his face had made a transition, the brother officer stepping back, the investigator stepping forward, and the investigator had different eyes, the carefully neutral eyes of a man constructing a record who has learned to keep his opinions out of his expression while he does it.

“Detective Billings.” His voice had put formal distance in it now, deliberate as the pressed uniform. “You’ll need to come to the station for a formal statement.”

“I know.”

He stopped looking at me and looked back at his notebook and started writing again. The look had lasted exactly as long as it needed to. I was a subject now. I had been a colleague for three minutes, maybe four, which was exactly as long as the brother officer posture required, and now those three minutes were spent and here we were on the other side of them.

“We’ll escort you,” he said. To the notebook.

I nodded. I went to stand and my legs refused. Not dramatically. They didn’t buckle, there was no spectacle to it. They simply declined, the same quiet mechanical refusal I’d felt at the platform edge, and I sat back down on the bench. Orbison looked up from the notebook and looked at my face, and whatever he saw there he absorbed without comment and without expression, and he reached out and took my arm and pulled me to my feet with the same matter-of-fact grip the Transit cop had used to move me away from the edge.

I found my feet. I let go of his arm before he let go of mine, so that it would look like I hadn’t needed it.

“Ready,” I said.

He was already turning away, writing as he walked, the pen building the record in those small careful strokes. Getting it down before anything could shift or soften into something other than what it was. I followed him toward the stairs and behind me the amber light held steady on the platform and the flashlight beams moved in the tunnel and the train sat where the brakes had put it, going nowhere.

Return – Excerpt

CHAPTER TWO

Highway 43 was empty. Reed rode with her hands aching inside her gloves, the Derion’s engine settling into its highway register, the vibration steady through her thighs where the bite marks were still warm. The cold was the kind that came through leather and denim both, the kind that found the gaps at your wrists and your collar and worked inward from there. She kept the speed just under sixty. The road looked dry but the temperature had been dropping since sunset and black ice was a possibility she respected without being able to see.

The city thinned behind her. Storefronts gave way to low commercial buildings, then to chain-link fencing around lots that had been cleared for development and never developed, then to open land. The streetlights ended a mile back. Out here the only manufactured light was the Derion’s headlight, a cone of white that swept across the asphalt and gravel shoulder and the dark margin of frozen grass beyond. The moon was up. The sky was clear. The kind of January night where the cold had a sound to it, a high tight silence that pressed against the helmet and made the engine seem louder than it was.

Reed’s shoulders still ached from the rope. A good ache, the kind that sat in the muscle and reminded her she had a body, that the body had been used, that for an hour in Lane’s bedroom she had not been a detective or a liar or a woman who kept the heat low in an apartment she was never in. She rolled her shoulders once inside the jacket and felt the pull across her upper back and thought about nothing. The road ahead was straight and dark and she was twenty minutes from home.

The headlight caught it at the edge of the field.

Not all of it. A shape. Pale where nothing should have been pale, low to the ground, sixty or seventy yards from the shoulder. The light swept across it and past it in the time it took the front wheel to cover ten feet, and in that fraction of a second the image registered as a series of impressions that had not yet organized themselves into meaning: paleness, horizontality, stillness, the wrong kind of shape for a bag or a deer or anything else that belonged in a frozen field at 1:34 in the morning.

Reed was braking before the image assembled. The Derion slowed and she pulled onto the gravel shoulder and stopped. She killed the engine. The silence was immediate. No traffic behind her, none ahead. No wind. The field stretched flat and black to the east, the grass frozen stiff enough to hold its shape, the horizon a dark line against a darker sky.

She sat on the bike. Ten seconds. Fifteen. Her breath made short clouds inside the helmet that fogged the visor and cleared. The bite marks on her thighs pulsed against the seat with her heartbeat. The ache in her shoulders was still there, still good, still anchored to Lane’s bedroom and the rope and the consensual transaction that had ended less than an hour ago. That world was behind her now. Forty minutes behind her and getting further away with every second she sat on this shoulder looking at something in the grass that she already knew was a body.

She took off her helmet and set it on the tank. The cold hit her face and her ears and the back of her neck. She got off the Derion.

The field began where the gravel shoulder ended. No fence. No ditch. Just the edge of the road and then the grass, frozen into stiff pale rows that crunched when she stepped onto them. Reed walked into the field. She did not take out her phone. She did not use it as a flashlight. The moonlight was enough, and she did not want to create a light source visible from the road. She did not think this in words. She thought about it like black ice, as a condition she adjusted for without stopping to name.

The grass crunched under her boots. Each step was a small brittle sound, louder than it should have been, and she could hear the rhythm of her own breathing, steady and even, the breathing of a woman walking toward something she could not yet fully see but could already read.

At thirty yards she could make out the shape. At twenty she could see the arrangement.

Arms above the head. Extended, not reaching. The posture of a body that had been dragged by the wrists and released. The legs were together, angled slightly left, fallen.

Naked from the waist down. The clothing above the waist was intact except at the collar, where the fabric was torn in a line consistent with a hand that had grabbed and pulled. Not a precise tear. The tear of someone who had grabbed what was closest.

No purse. No phone. No shoes. No visible weapon. Nothing that explained how a woman ended up in a field in January.

Reed stopped. Close enough. The details were specific and irreversible, and every second she stood here added to the inventory of things she would have to either explain or conceal.

The frost around the body was disturbed. A broken perimeter of frozen white, and then the trail her own boots had pressed into the frost from the road. Visible. Legible. She had already made herself a problem.

Her first coherent thought was not about the woman on the ground.

It was about Marian Pruitt. Sixty-three years old. 14 Beech Lane, West Coldford, Ohio. Found on her kitchen floor with her wrists bound with lamp cord and her face beaten until the bones underneath shifted. Reed was fourteen. She had gone to Marian’s house to return a cake pan her mother had borrowed, and the back door was open, which was unusual, and the kitchen smelled like pennies, which was blood, which she did not know yet because she was fourteen and had not yet learned the smell. She put the cake pan on the counter and saw Marian on the floor and called 911 from Marian’s wall phone and sat on the back step and waited for the police to arrive and did not go back inside.

Sheriff Dale Henrys arrived in a brown cruiser with mud on the fenders. He was fifty-one years old and had held the office for nine years and he stood in Marian Pruitt’s kitchen for four minutes before he came outside and looked at Reed the way no adult had ever looked at her. The way a man looks at a thing he has decided is his to solve.

“What were you doing here?” he said. Not a question. An accusation with a question mark balanced on top.

Reed told him about the cake pan. He wrote it down. He asked her to tell him again. She told him again. He asked her a third time and she told him a third time and the story did not change because it was not a story. It was what happened.

Henrys did not believe her. Not that day and not any day after. A man named Paul Wicker confessed to the murder two weeks later. He had broken in to rob her. Marian confronted him. Wicker beat her with a ceramic lamp from the hallway table and tied her wrists with the lamp cord and took eighty dollars from her purse and a VCR from the living room and left through the back door, which was how Reed found it open. Wicker confessed in detail. The physical evidence matched. He pleaded guilty and went to prison.

Henrys kept coming.

He told Reed’s parents she had no business being at that house. He told them her story had inconsistencies, which it did not. He told the principal of West Coldford Middle School that Reed was a person of interest in an ongoing investigation, which she was not, but the principal did not know that and the word traveled through the school the way words travel through schools, which is to say completely and without context. Reed’s mother stopped answering the phone. Her father had a conversation with Henrys on the front lawn that the neighbors watched through their curtains and that ended with her father’s voice loud enough to reach the street.

It did not stop. Henrys came to the house. He came to the school. He requested Reed’s records from the guidance counselor. He told a reporter from the West Coldford Gazette that he had not closed his investigation, and the reporter printed it, and the sentence sat in the local paper next to Reed’s name, which was a juvenile’s name, which he had given to the reporter anyway. She was fifteen the first time a classmate called her a murderer to her face. She was fifteen the second time. She stopped counting after that.

Henrys lost the next election. His opponent ran on competence and the Pruitt case was Exhibit A of its absence. Henrys lost by six hundred votes and cleaned out his office and went home and kept calling Reed’s parents from his personal phone. He had no badge. He had no authority. He had a fixation that had outlasted his career, and the fixation was a girl who had found a body and called for help and been punished for it with a thoroughness that two years of her life could not absorb.

Reed left West Coldford at sixteen. Her mother drove her to her aunt’s house in Columbus with a suitcase and a box of books and did not explain why, because the why was a man who had decided that finding a body was the same as making one, and explaining that to a sixteen-year-old required a language that her mother did not have and Reed did not need. She understood it already. She had understood it since the second time Henrys came to the school. The lesson was not complicated. The lesson was: the person who finds the body becomes the body’s problem. The person who calls it in becomes the suspect. The person who does the right thing on the worst night of someone else’s life does not get thanked for it. They get examined, and the examination does not end when the examiner runs out of evidence. It ends when the examiner runs out of interest, and some of them never do.

Reed stood in the frost six feet from a dead woman in a field off Highway 43 and the lesson was nineteen years old and it was as solid as the frozen ground under her boots.

She looked at the woman’s face.

Young. Mid-twenties. Her features were still, composed by the absence of everything that animates a face. Eyes closed. Skin pale in the moonlight, drained of the warmth and color that would have told Reed something about who she had been before she became this. Lips slightly parted. She did not look peaceful. She did not look tortured. She looked like a body. She looked like the thing a person becomes when the person leaves and what remains is a problem for someone else to solve.

Reed saw her. One beat. She registered the woman as someone who had been alive tonight. Who had gotten dressed and left a house and expected to come home. Who had a face that was specific to her, that people recognized, that someone somewhere was not yet worried about because it was the middle of the night and worry hadn’t started yet.

She held it. Then she let it go.

The math was already running. Not a decision. A calculation that had started the moment the headlight found the shape in the grass and was now finishing itself without her permission. She was on Highway 43 at 1:34 AM. She was a homicide detective with the Drayton Police Department. She was next on the rotation. If she called this in as herself, she would be the reporting witness and the lead investigator and the woman who happened to be riding past a field in the middle of the night where a woman happened to be dead, and she knew with the certainty of a person who had lived through it once already what happened to women who happened to be in the wrong place at the right time.

There was more. She had been at Lane’s. Lane had a girlfriend named Petra Hoff who did not know Reed existed in Lane’s life the way Reed existed. If Reed reported this as herself, the timeline would require accounting for: where she had been, why she was on this highway, what she had been doing at 12:45 AM on a Tuesday in January. The accounting would reach Lane. Lane would be a footnote in a case file, read in a cubicle, referenced if the defense ever needed to establish that the lead detective had been conducting her personal life in a way that invited scrutiny.

None of this would help the woman on the ground.

Reed turned and walked back toward the road. She did not look at the body again. The grass crunched under her boots and her breath clouded in front of her and the highway was a dark line ahead with nothing on it. She walked at a steady pace. Not fast, not slow. The pace of a woman who had been here before and knew exactly how to leave.

She reached the Derion and put on her helmet. She checked the road in both directions. Empty. She started the engine, which caught on the second try and sounded obscenely loud in the silence, and she pulled onto the highway heading south.

The Speedy Gas station was three miles down Highway 43. Reed knew it. She knew the layout of the lot, the position of the pumps, the placement of the lights. She knew it had no exterior cameras because she had noticed their absence the way she always noticed. Exits in restaurants. Sightlines in parking garages. Blind spots in ATM vestibules. The information had been inert until now. A habit that looked like paranoia but was actually just attention, the kind a woman develops when she spends her adolescence being watched by a man with a badge and a theory.

The station appeared on her left. The sign was dark except for the price board, the lot was empty, and a single fluorescent tube buzzed over the pumps, throwing a thin circle of blue-white light that didn’t reach the edges. There was a payphone at the far end of the lot, bolted to a metal post near the air pump. Reed pulled in and parked near the phone, engine off.

She walked to the payphone. The receiver was cold in her gloved hand. She dialed 911 and listened to it ring once, twice, and then the operator answered, a woman’s voice, calm and procedural.

“911, what’s your emergency?”

“There’s a body in the field off Highway 43, east side. About a quarter mile north of the Speedy Gas station. Off the shoulder, sixty or seventy yards into the grass.”

“Can I get your name, ma’am?”

Reed hung up. She held the receiver for a moment, then wiped it with her glove and set it back in the cradle. The fluorescent tube buzzed above her. The lot was empty. The payphone stood on its metal post and waited for the next person who needed to say something without being known for saying it.

She walked to the Derion and rode out of the lot without headlights until she was back on the highway, and then she turned them on and rode south toward the city. The time was 1:56 AM. The 911 call would generate a dispatch. Patrol would respond. They would find the body and secure the scene and someone would call Homicide, and the rotation would determine the lead, and Reed was next on the rotation.

The ride home took twenty-two minutes. The streets of Drayton were empty at this hour, the traffic lights cycling through their colors for nobody, the storefronts dark, the sidewalks bare. Reed parked the Derion in its spot outside her building on Church Street, a six-unit complex with no security cameras in the lot because the landlord was cheap and the tenants hadn’t pushed it. She went upstairs and unlocked her door and stood in the kitchen in the dark.

The apartment was cold. She kept the heat low when she was out, and she was always out. The counter was clean. The bourbon was on the shelf where she’d left it. The cast-iron pan was on the stove, seasoned and dry.

She took off her gloves and her jacket. She unlaced her boots and lined them up by the door. She sat at the kitchen table in the dark with her hands flat on the surface and nothing in front of her. Reed waited.

Her phone would ring. She did not know when. She knew the machinery: the 911 call generating a dispatch, patrol responding, the officers confirming what she already knew, the call going up the chain to Homicide, the rotation list checked, and her name at the top. It could take thirty minutes. It could take an hour. The bureaucracy of death moved at its own speed and did not adjust for the woman standing in a dark kitchen who already knew what was coming.

Reed’s thighs ached. Her shoulders ached. Her wrists, where the rope had been, carried a faint tenderness that she pressed with her thumb, testing the soreness, confirming the body was still hers, that it still carried the marks Lane had put there, that the last hour at Lane’s was real and the hour in the field was real and both of them lived in her now without canceling each other out.

She thought about the frost and whether it would hold until the scene was processed. She thought about her boot prints in the grass and whether the patrol officers and the techs would trample them into the general mess of an outdoor crime scene in January. She thought about Marian Pruitt on the kitchen floor with the lamp cord around her wrists and the cake pan on the counter and Dale Henrys standing in the doorway with the look that had followed Reed out of West Coldford and across so many states and into a career where she found bodies professionally, on purpose, and nobody questioned why she was there because the badge answered that question before it was asked.

The badge was the answer. It had always been the answer. It was the reason she had become a cop in the first place, though she had never said this to anyone and would not have said it in these words. The badge meant she could be at a scene and the scene would not consume her. The badge meant she could find a body and the finding would not become the story. The badge was the thing Dale Henrys had, and she had watched what it did when it was held by a man who used it as a weapon, and she had spent her adult life carrying one as a shield.

Tonight the shield had a crack in it. She had been at a scene before the scene existed. Her boots were in the frost. Her headlight had swept across a dead woman’s body at 1:34 in the morning on a highway she was riding because she had been in her lover’s bed, and if she told the truth the truth would look exactly the way Dale Henrys had always said it looked: like a woman who had no business being where she was.

Reed checked her phone. No calls, no messages.

She did not go to bed. She sat at the kitchen table in the dark with her phone in front of her and waited. The building settled around her. The pipes ticked. A neighbor’s television murmured through the wall, the low blue sound of someone else’s insomnia. The cold pressed against the windows and the bourbon was gone and the marks on her body were fading and the woman in the field was dead or dying and the phone had not rung yet.

Reed waited. She was good at waiting. Waiting was not patience. Waiting was what you did when the machinery was running and you could not reach the controls.

The phone rang at 2:47 AM.

Reed picked up before the second ring. She listened. She said she understood. She said she would be there in twenty minutes.

She put on her jacket and her boots and her gloves. She walked downstairs and started the Derion and sat on the cold seat and let the engine warm up. The streets of Drayton were empty and dark and the traffic lights cycled through their colors for nobody.

She pulled onto the road and rode north toward the field.

Unmarked – Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

Lori’s fingers froze mid-button, caught.

“You’ve probably never had a woman do up your shirt,” she said, not backing down. “Contrario World. People put clothes on instead of tearing them off.”

She resumed her work, leaving Marti’s top button deliberately undone.

“Why?”

Marti Starova wasn’t just unhappy. She was skin-crawlingly unhappy, bristling at every point where Lori’s fingers made contact. Nobody dressed Marti. Not since she was five. She jammed her hand into her leather jacket pocket and fished out cigarettes.

“Marti, you can’t go to court half-dressed. Even your self-destructive ass knows that.” Lori tugged Marti’s collar out from under her jacket and smoothed it flat.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Marti said. She slid a cigarette between her lips and Lori huffed, that specific grating huff, and snatched it out of her mouth.

“Now what? I’m allowed to smoke.”

“You have to be in court in four—”

“Shh.” Marti’s hand shot up. She tilted her head.

Heather Blair. Federal Unified Task Force. The agent who’d busted Marti for drugs months ago, now ascending the courthouse steps, eyes on them.

“Lori, do you hear those birds? Absolutely beautiful songs,” Marti said, voice going honey-slow as Heather passed.

Lori watched as Heather ducked her head, cheeks going red, and accelerated up the stairs.

“How did you manage that?” Lori asked.

“What?”

“Making her blush.”

Marti lit her cigarette. “She really likes bird songs.”

“Jesus, why does everything you say sound dirty?” Lori glanced up at the sky. “It’s going to pour. Don’t come in soaked.”

She was already moving up the stairs.

Three years working together, and Lori had learned every one of Marti’s tells. Where she hid her drugs, how she took her whiskey, which silences meant she was thinking and which meant she was about to do something stupid. Infuriating. Also useful, but Marti would chew glass before admitting that.

She got through half her cigarette before the rain came down hard. She was about to flick the butt into a puddle when she caught the security guard watching, arms crossed, waiting. She pinched the ember out and pocketed the stub. Flashed him a smile. Darted up the stairs and through the heavy wooden doors.

Inside, projectile-proof glass stood between her and the courthouse proper, thick enough to warp the figures beyond. An anti-assassination feature installed after Mayor Seibert caught a bullet on these same steps. The fluorescent lights overhead sat behind metal grates.

Marti entered the vestibule, caged between sliding doors. The scanner crawled over her. She’d left her gun and drugs in the car.

Green light. Inner door opened.

Lori waited on the other side, jacket folded over her arm, already looking at her watch.

“Your case is in room 33C,” she said, moving.

“I still can’t believe this got to trial,” Marti said.

“No simple possession trials in four years. I checked the logs.”

They passed a row of courtrooms on the ground floor. Through one open door, Marti caught a defense lawyer pacing in front of an empty jury box, rehearsing his opening to nobody. She’d seen that before. Guys who practiced in empty rooms usually lost in full ones.

Their footsteps echoed through the corridor toward the stairwell. Elevators were never an option for Marti.

Lori dropped her voice. “What were they even doing there? Didn’t you say they were raiding that sex club?”

“Not soon enough to save Andreas.” Andreas Katsaros, murdered inside, mistaken for her. “But the place wasn’t illegal. No warrants, no complaints, nothing that justified a raid. They were lurking on Link Street, waiting.”

“Waiting for what?”

“That’s what I’d like to know.”

She yanked open the door to the third floor. The corridor was packed. Defendants leaned against walls, chewing nails or staring at phones. Witnesses clustered near courtroom doors trying to look like they wanted to be there. Lawyers moved between groups, files under their arms, talking too fast about plea deals nobody was happy with.

Marti scanned faces out of habit. Two women near the water fountain looked like public defenders running on caffeine and resentment. A guy in an expensive suit stood apart from everyone, checking his phone every few seconds. Private counsel. Billing by the minute, probably.

Heather stood outside 33C. The moment she spotted them, she turned and went inside.

“Interesting,” Marti said.

“What?”

“She’s jumpy.” Marti watched the door swing shut. “Last time I saw her in an interview room, she held her ground for an hour. Didn’t flinch. Now she can’t look at me in a hallway.”

Lori pulled her toward the courtroom. “Maybe she just doesn’t want to deal with you.”

“Nobody does. That’s different.”

“Mark my words,” Marti said, nodding at the door, “there’s more going on.”

“There’s always more going on with you.” Lori’s fingers drifted through Marti’s hair, lingering a second too long. “There. Better.”

The courtroom smelled like floor wax and old sweat. A dozen benches stretched before them. Defendants and lawyers filled the front rows. Behind them, a handful of journalists, a few bored citizens, and a cluster of FUCT suits sitting together near the back wall. Four of them. All in navy or charcoal. All sitting straight, hands in laps, not talking to each other.

Marti and Lori took seats on the opposite side.

“See?” Marti kept her voice low. “Simple possession, my ass. Four federal agents for half an inhaler of Shadow.”

Lori leaned in. “Maybe they’re here for another case.”

“Their case numbers would be posted outside. I didn’t see any FUCT listings on the docket board downstairs. Did you?”

Lori didn’t answer, which meant she hadn’t checked.

She studied the agents. The one closest to the aisle kept glancing at Heather, who sat rigid in the front row, staring forward. He was older, gray at the temples, senior rank probably. The look he gave Heather wasn’t supportive. It was watchful.

“No talking in the gallery!” A uniformed guard, neck gone to fat, barked from the corner.

Marti rolled her eyes, crossed her arms, and began swinging one foot.

Lori’s fist connected with her thigh.

They sat through two cases before Marti’s name was called. The first was a DUI plea deal that took four minutes. The second was a domestic assault where the victim recanted on the stand. The prosecutor barely argued it. The judge, Wilson, dismissed with visible irritation.

Marti watched Wilson through both cases. Old school. Short-tempered. Didn’t tolerate wasted time. Good.

“Martina Starova,” the clerk called.

Marti approached the lectern. Spine straight, eyes on Wilson. The prosecutor, name plate Duncan, shuffled papers at his table.

“Your Honor, Martina Starova was found in possession of—”

“Sorry, who?” Wilson peered over his glasses.

“Mart—”

“Shh.” He studied her. “Why do I know your name, young lady?”

“I worked Homicide in Falls City about ten years ago,” Marti said. “If you oversaw homicide trials then—”

“I didn’t.”

“Then it was probably because a few months back, I helped Falls City Police catch the Monster of Falls City.”

“Sir, that’s irrelevant,” Duncan cut in.

Wilson silenced him with a palm. “Were you a homicide detective then?”

“No sir. Private investigator. Hired by mothers with missing sons. His victims.” She’d found their boys when police wouldn’t lift a finger. Found others too, buried under Police Chief Franklin’s house. “Seventeen, in all.”

Duncan stood with his eyes down, shaking his head.

Wilson’s pen tapped against his bench. “And you’re here on charges of possession of a controlled substance.” Two taps. “Why are we here, Mr. Duncan?”

Duncan straightened up. He was younger than Marti expected. Thirty, maybe. Trying to make his career off whatever this was. “Your Honor, the People have a legitimate interest in prosecuting controlled substance violations regardless of the defendant’s background. Ms. Starova was arrested with point five grams of Shadow, an illicit inhalant classified as a Schedule—”

“I know what Shadow is, Mr. Duncan.”

“Yes, Your Honor. The arrest was conducted by Federal Unified Task Force personnel in conjunction with—”

“In conjunction with what? What federal interest does half a gram of an inhalant serve?”

Duncan’s mouth opened. Closed. He glanced at his notes, flipped a page, flipped back. “The arrest occurred during an ongoing federal operation, and the People believe it is in the public interest to—”

“The public interest.” Wilson set his pen down. “You’ve brought before me a case against a former Falls City Homicide detective who, as a civilian, helped locate and apprehend a serial killer police didn’t even know existed. A former detective with half a gram of an inhalant.” He paused. “I’m waiting for the part where this is worth my afternoon, Mr. Duncan.”

Duncan’s jaw tightened. Marti could see the sweat starting at his collar. He wasn’t a bad lawyer. He was a lawyer with a bad case who’d been told to run it anyway. She recognized the look. She’d seen witnesses wear it: the face of someone following orders they didn’t believe in.

“Your Honor, we brought this forward due to irregularities during and after the arrest, involving Federal Unified Task Force agent Heather Blair.”

Marti didn’t move her head, but her eyes went right. Heather’s face slackened. The color dropped out of it fast, replaced by something Marti had seen a hundred times in interview rooms. That split second where the mask comes off and you see the animal underneath, calculating how deep the shit actually is.

The older agent, the one who’d been watching Heather, didn’t react at all. He’d known this was coming.

So that’s what this was. They hadn’t dragged Marti in to prosecute her. They’d dragged her in to get at Heather. Half a gram of Shadow was the crowbar, and Marti was just the door they were prying open.

She looked at Duncan, who wouldn’t meet her eyes. Looked at Wilson, who was already reaching the same conclusion. Looked at Heather, who sat frozen in the front row.

Marti kept her mouth shut. For once, that was the smart play.

This Old Body – Excerpt

Prologue

Marissa measured the entry doorframe for the sixth time that morning when she heard the commotion. She ignored it. The crew, her crew, would handle it. She wasn’t paid to manage tantrums. The measuring tape snapped back into its metal case with a satisfying click, and she noted the number in her production binder. Three-quarters of an inch off from yesterday. Someone had nudged the jamb. Again. She sat, closed the binder, aligning its edge perfectly with the artisanal bistro table they’d bought from Temu, and decided there was still enough time to fix it before cameras rolled. Maybe.
“Ms. Hamilton? We can’t find Tommy.”
The production assistant—Katie? Kaitlyn?—stood at the bottom step of the porch, clipboard clutched to her chest like a shield. Her face was pale beneath carefully applied foundation.
“Did you check the coffee truck?” Marissa didn’t look up. She reopened her binder to the tab marked FINAL REVEAL and checked off another item.
“And his trailer. And the Port-a-Johns. And the—”
“I get it.” Marissa closed the binder again. The label tabs made a satisfying thunk as they settled against each other. “When’s the last sighting?”
“Last night. He took the Range Realty truck. Said he needed to pick up something special for the reveal.” The assistant’s voice quivered. “He never returned it.”
Marissa nodded once, acknowledging only the fact, not the concern. “That explains why I haven’t tripped over his work boots yet this morning.”
She tucked the binder under her arm and opened the front door. Four crew members huddled in the foyer, faces tense with what they clearly thought was a crisis. Money was bleeding by the second. The network expected perfection. Tommy had gone AWOL. A real emergency would be finding his body. This was merely expensive.
Skylar blocked the doorway, his substantial frame expanded by the yellow safety vest that had never once protected him from anything except sobriety. The flask in his pocket caught the light when he shifted.
“Can’t let you in there, Ms. Hamilton.” He crossed his arms, inadvertently pushing the flask higher. “Unstable joists. Safety concerns.”
“Unstable joists,” Marissa repeated the words without inflection. “In the portion of the house we finished framing three weeks ago?”
“Tommy’s orders.”
“The Tommy who isn’t here.”
“Standing orders.”
The crew shuffled backward, creating space for whatever was about to happen. The camera guy raised his equipment to eye level. Always filming. Never helping.
Marissa noted the way Skylar’s left eye twitched. Tommy had bought his loyalty cheaply, probably with the contents of that flask. She checked her watch.
“We shoot in forty minutes.”
“Yes ma’am, but—”
She ducked under his arm and was through the doorway before he could finish whatever lie Tommy had paid him to tell. She heard the satisfying thud as his shoulder hit the jamb, trying to follow her. Not her problem.
The first thing she noticed was the silence. Construction sites weren’t supposed to be quiet. The second was the darkness. Someone had covered the windows with black contractor bags.
She flicked on her phone’s flashlight and headed for the stairs. Three steps up, her foot caught something solid. A tripod, collapsed in the middle of the path. She heard the clatter before she felt herself falling, a perfect slow-motion disaster.
Her phone skittered across the floor, the flashlight beam sweeping wildly across the walls. The binder flew open, launching its perfectly ordered contents into the air. Building permits and blueprints, paint swatches and fabric samples, contractor schedules, and camera blocking: all airborne. Chaos, quantified and released.
She landed hard on one knee. The pain registered in the businesslike part of her brain that handled all unpleasant sensations. File it away. Deal with it later.
“Shit.” The word came out flat, a statement of fact rather than emotion.
The crew pressed against the walls but didn’t get closer. Skylar mumbled something about liability. Someone was still filming.
Marissa gathered the papers methodically, collecting each sheet in the order it would appear in the binder. She knew that order by heart. The permits went on top, followed by the contractor forms, then the design plans. As if the papers knew their place, they had fallen with the permits closest to her.
“Don’t just stand there,” she said to no one in particular. No one moved.
A paint swatch had landed in a puddle of something. She picked it up by the corner, watching the liquid soak through the paper, darkening the custom taupe she’d selected for the dining room. Ruined. She set it aside and continued collecting.
The flashlight beam bobbed on the floor a few feet away. She retrieved her phone, brushed off a light coating of drywall dust, and continued toward the stairs. At the landing, she paused to reorganize the binder. The tabs aligned with a satisfying click. Order from disorder.
She ascended to the second floor, footsteps echoing in the emptiness. Too quiet. Too empty. Even with Tommy missing, there should have been subcontractors finishing the last details. Someone had cleared them out.
The master bedroom’s window faced the rear of the property. It was covered like the others, but the plastic had come loose at one corner. She pulled it aside and peered out, her breath fogging the glass through a gap in the plastic. The safety goggles she’d put on by habit, provided by the studio for aesthetics, not functionality, clouded further in the morning chill.
Directly below, centred in the dirt like a museum display, sat Tommy’s hard hat. The custom “Luck is a Skill” logo faced upward, visible even from her vantage point. The hat’s pristine white surface gleamed in the morning sun, unsullied by actual work. The elastic band that would have mussed his carefully gelled hair had been removed entirely.
Marissa wiped the condensation from her goggles with one precise movement. Tommy was many things: unreliable, vain, and chronically late. But he was never careless with his image. That hat was his favourite prop. He wouldn’t leave it in the dirt by accident.
He wasn’t missing. He was hiding.
She turned back to face the empty room, binder clutched to her chest like armour. Behind the plastic-covered window, the cameras waited. Forty minutes until they expected a miracle. She would need thirty-five.
Marissa turned from the window, then stopped. Her reflection caught something beyond the hard hat: a glint of metal where there shouldn’t be one. She wiped the foggy glass with the side of her hand and pressed her forehead against the cold surface. The Range Realty truck sat nestled behind the storage container, its company logo half-obscured by an overhanging tree branch. The stolen truck was apparently less stolen than reported.
She adjusted her angle to see better and wished she hadn’t. Tommy’s bare back faced her, his body rhythmically moving between a pair of tanned legs. The woman shifted, and Marissa caught sight of platinum blonde hair. Brandi. Of course.
Marissa’s production binder slipped from her fingers and hit the floor with a dull thud. The sound didn’t register. Her attention fixed on Brandi’s t-shirt: a promotional “Marissa and Tommy Luck’s Lucky Home Renos” shirt they’d handed out at last season’s wrap party. It was rucked up around her armpits, the fabric grey with construction dust. They hadn’t even bothered to find a clean surface.
A fact clicked into place in Marissa’s mind: the shirt was from the box stored in the upstairs closet. They’d been in the house. Probably doing it.
Something hardened inside her chest. Not pain. Not even anger. A solidification of purpose, like concrete setting.
She looked down at her binder. The papers had stayed intact this time. It had fallen open to a floor plan. Her gaze drifted to the notation in the margin: “Remove load-bearing wall, reinforce with steel beam.” She’d circled it twice in red.
Marissa snatched it up and straightened and assessed her surroundings with new eyes. The room wasn’t just a half-finished space anymore. It was a supply depot.
She picked up a chunk of drywall, testing its weight. Too light. She discarded it and selected a piece of lath. Better balance. The edge was jagged where it had been torn from the wall. Perfect.
The window slid open with minimal resistance. She’d insisted on the premium tracks during installation. The investment paid off now.
She calculated the angle, factoring in height and wind resistance, then released the lath. It sailed through the air in a satisfying arc before striking the truck’s tailgate with a metallic clang.
Tommy froze mid-thrust. Brandi’s head popped up, looking in the wrong direction.
Marissa selected her next projectile, a broken tile that migrated into the room from the bathroom demolition. The ceramic fragment left her hand with surgical precision and pinged off the truck’s side mirror.
This time they both looked up. Tommy’s face shifted from confusion to horror as he registered Marissa at the window. Brandi recovered faster, her eyes leaving Marissa to look at something more important.
The cameras. The production crew had spilt out the back door, equipment raised and rolling.
“OMG, she wants to kill me!” Brandi shrieked, her voice pitched perfectly to carry across the yard.
A two-by-four, cut too short, flew through the air and bounced off the truck roof. Marissa watched the performance with professional detachment. Brandi’s volume modulation was impressive. Her gestures hit all the marks for maximum dramatic effect. She’d clearly been practicing for her reality TV debut.
Brandi shoved Tommy aside and scrambled to gather her things. Her fingers closed around his phone before she even reached for her own clothes. Priorities. She slithered over the side of the truck bed, leaving her cowboy boots behind in the gravel.
Marissa reached for something heavier. A brick fragment from the fireplace demolition felt right in her hand. She’d removed that fireplace herself after Tommy insisted it was “too traditional” for their modern aesthetic. Her fingers traced the rough edge where she’d split it with a chisel. Clean work. Precise.
The brick left her hand and struck the truck bed two inches from Tommy’s exposed thigh. Not an accident. Not a miss. A warning shot.
Tommy finally broke from his paralysis. He fumbled for his pants while trying to maintain eye contact with the nearest camera. Even now, he was calculating his angles, trying to position himself for the best light.
“She’s crazy!” he shouted, one hand covering his crotch, the other searching for his shirt. “Everyone saw that! She’s trying to murder me!”
The shirt was under him. He yanked it free and attempted to dress while climbing out of the truck bed. The hem caught on the tailgate’s latch. He jerked forward, then back, trapped like a fish on a line.
Marissa surveyed her handiwork. Each projectile had landed exactly where she’d aimed. Not one had struck flesh. The same precision she applied to measuring countertops and aligning cabinet doors had transferred seamlessly to this new demolition project.
She felt a strange calm. The chill that had settled in her chest when she first spotted them spread outward, cooling her blood, steadying her hand. This wasn’t chaos. This was renovation. Sometimes you had to tear things down to rebuild properly.
Tommy’s shirt ripped as he finally freed himself from the tailgate. The sound carried clearly in the morning air: a clean tear along a seam. Fixable, if anyone cared to try. No one would.
He stumbled backward, pants still unbuttoned, shirt hanging in tatters. His carefully gelled hair stood in disarray, his face flushed with exertion and humiliation. The cameras captured everything.
Brandi was already at the edge of the property, performing distress for a boom mic operator who’d broken away from the main crew to follow her. She clutched Tommy’s phone to her chest like a talisman, bare feet dramatically picking their way through gravel she’d walked across comfortably in boots just minutes earlier. Probably just minutes, knowing Tommy.
Through the open window, Marissa heard the director’s voice: “Stay with her. This is gold.”
Tommy looked up at Marissa, his expression shifting from embarrassment to calculation. She recognized the look. He was figuring out how to spin this, how to make himself the victim. His lips parted, ready to launch into the speech about her jealousy, her controlling nature, and her inability to let him flourish creatively.
Marissa cut him off with one final projectile: a handful of roofing nails that scattered across the truck’s hood like metallic confetti. The message was clear: conversation over.
She stepped back from the window. There was still work to be done.
Marissa took the stairs three at a time. Her knee throbbed where she’d fallen earlier, but the pain registered as data, not distress. The back door had been propped open by a cameraman’s foot. She brushed past him without slowing. The morning sun hit her face as she stepped outside, illuminating the scene like a poorly staged tableau: Tommy was still struggling with his shirt buttons; the crew was forming a loose semicircle; and the Range Realty truck was lightly dented where her projectiles had found their marks.
Tommy saw her coming and straightened his spine. He tucked in his shirt with deliberate motions, as if completing his wardrobe was more urgent than explaining why he’d been rutting in a company vehicle during a production day.
“Jesus, Marissa.” His voice carried the tone of a man who believed volume equalled authority. “You always have to make a scene.”
She stopped six feet away from him. A perfect medium shot distance. She’d memorized camera framing requirements during their first season.
“I make scenes?” Her voice came out steady. “That’s an interesting perspective from a man whose penis was on display in our client’s truck ten minutes ago.”
Tommy’s jaw tightened. Behind him, a camera operator adjusted his focus.
“You’re overreacting.” Tommy ran a hand through his hair, fixing it without a mirror. “This is exactly why the investors hate working with you. No flair for the dramatic beats.”
Marissa noted how he positioned himself with the sunlight hitting his best angle. Even now, he was producing himself.
“Why were you fucking in the back of a stolen vehicle?” She enunciated each word clearly, knowing the network would beep it later.
Tommy winced. “Language, babe. We’re rolling.”
“Answer the question.”
“The lighting’s terrible here.” He took a step sideways, recalibrating his position relative to the cameras. “Can we move this over by the foundation? Better composition.”
A boom mic swung over their heads. Tommy glanced up at it and pitched his voice lower, more intimate. “Let’s discuss this privately. For the sake of the show.”
“There is no show.” Marissa gestured toward the truck. “That vehicle was reported stolen last night.”
“A misunderstanding.”
“Like your wedding vows?”
Tommy’s face tightened into the expression he used for testimonial segments: serious but sympathetic, concerned but confident.
“This isn’t about us.” He took a step toward her. “This is about the brand. Think about the investors. The network.”
“The truck was never stolen. You’ve been using it to ferry your girlfriend to rendezvous spots. At our job sites. On my time. The company’s time.”
Tommy’s gaze flicked to the nearest camera. “That’s a serious accusation, Marissa. Brandi is a brand ambassador for our sponsors. We were discussing product placement opportunities.”
“With your pants off?”
“That’s crude, even for you.”
“I want a divorce.”
The words hung there. Tommy blinked, then recovered with the smile he used for sponsor meetings.
“You don’t mean that. You’re upset. We can work through this. Our viewers expect—”
“Mike, I need you to adjust Ms. Hamilton’s levels.” The director’s voice cut through the tension. “We’re getting some distortion.”
Mike, the sound guy, stepped between them with the casual indifference of someone interrupting a coffee order, not a marriage dissolution. He reached for Marissa’s collar where the lavalier mic was clipped.
“Enunciate clearly,” he whispered as he fiddled with the pack attached to her waistband. “And try to project toward the main camera.”
Marissa stood perfectly still while he adjusted the equipment. Behind Mike, Tommy was being powdered by a makeup artist who had appeared from nowhere. The sweat on his forehead disappeared under a professional touch.
“Can we get another take of the divorce line?” The cameraman lowered his equipment. “Marissa, you kicked up dust in that last shot. The particles are causing a flare.”
Tommy nodded eagerly. “Good call. And I think I can hit my reaction better on the next take.”
Marissa stared at him. “This isn’t a scene.”
“Everything’s a scene, babe.” Tommy straightened his collar. “That’s why they call it show business, not show friendship.”
The makeup artist retreated. The camera raised. The boom mic dipped lower.
“We’re still rolling,” the director called.
Marissa felt the weight of the production settle on her shoulders. This moment, this real, raw, terrible moment, was being processed, packaged, and prepared for consumption. Her marriage was ending in ten-minute segments suitable for commercial breaks.
“Skylar.” The director pointed. “Get a close-up of those safety goggles.”
Marissa looked down. Her safety goggles lay crushed under Tommy’s boot; the ones she’d been wearing in the house. They must have fallen during her dash outside. The plastic was fractured into a spiderweb pattern, and the frame was bent beyond repair.
Skylar nudged Tommy’s foot. “Can you press down harder? We need to hear the crunch for foley.”
Tommy obliged, grinding his heel into the goggles while maintaining eye contact with Marissa. The plastic gave way with a sound like breaking ice.
“Perfect.” Skylar adjusted his camera angle. “That’ll work great for the season teaser. Symbolic.”
Tommy smiled at Marissa, the camera-ready version that never reached his eyes. “See? Content. Even in crisis, we’re creating content.”
The word hollowed her out. Content. Not a marriage. Not a partnership. Not even a renovation. Just content. Endlessly generated, consumed, and forgotten.
Marissa unclipped the microphone from her collar and dropped it at her feet. She didn’t throw it. That would give them the dramatic exit they wanted. Instead, she placed it precisely on a clean patch of dirt.
“I’ve created enough content for today.”
She turned and walked away from the cameras, the crew, the house, and Tommy. No one followed her. They were too busy adjusting equipment, checking light levels, and reviewing footage.
The show was over. Her marriage was over. “Marissa and Tommy’s Lucky Home Renos” had reached its series finale.
But as she reached her car, keys steady in her hand, Marissa realized something that straightened her spine and cooled her blood. They could have the show. They could have the name. They could even have the footage of today’s disaster.
She had the skills. She had the contacts. She had the vision.
“Marissa’s Mansions” had a better ring to it anyway.

Dig – Excerpt

Chapter 1

Livvy was polishing a femur when the phone rang. She ignored it. Mother—mom—would get it. Livvy wasn’t allowed to answer the house phone anymore. Not since that cold call from that gutter cleaning company. The O’Neills were furious when some guy showed up and clambered onto their roof, but even angrier when they had to pay.

Dresses and skirts were sorted into piles according to year obtained, satchels of hair hung on hooks and boxes of bones waited to be dusted. A mason jar with a heart in water had tipped over in the corner and Livvy righted it and decided there was still enough water to keep the heart looking fresh. Ish. Each time she shifted the shoes a puff of dirt floated from the soles, as if she hadn’t dug them up years ago.

“Livvy, what in the hell are you doing?”

Her mother stood over her, a leather belt dangling between her fingers. It wasn’t the first time her mother walked around with a belt in her hand. In fact, it had become a habit after that Hanbly kid broke into the garage. She’d strung him up but claimed it was an accident. They bought it, and the belt became her mother’s go-to.

“Just reminiscing,” Livvy said. She ran her fingers through a tangle of hair, but gagged a little when a piece of scalp snagged on her finger.

“Have you robbed another grave?”

“Not recently.”

“Define recent.”

“Mom,” Livvy said as she straightened the shoes one last time. “It’s been a while.” She stood and turned around, brushing a stray hair—she wasn’t sure if it was hers or theirs—off her skirt.

“I doubt that,” her mother said, holding out the phone so Livvy could see the caller ID: Westmoreland PD.

Livvy’s shoulders sank and her voice hit that note. “Mom! It was a couple of days ago. If it’s more recent than that, it wasn’t me.” She stomped her foot as if that would make it true.

“The dirt on those is still damp,” her mother said, pointing at the beautiful red shoes Livvy had not been able to resist. Livvy had no fondness for digging in the dirt—well, maybe a little. She liked treasure hunts.

“Livvy, honey,” her mom said, handing her the phone. “Deal with it.”

Smug bitch. “It’s not fair. They’re just going to waste if they stay there.”

“I said that.”

“And?”

“The family disagreed and called police.”

“What? They’re just being mean,” Livvy said to the phone as much as to her mother.

Her mother cleared her throat, an affectation she used whenever Livvy pushed back. “Officer Jenkins thought the family might withdraw the complaint with the right incentive.”

“If I had money, I wouldn’t be taking the shoes off corpses. Just when I thought it was safe to start digging again.”

“Talk to Officer Jenkins. Maybe he can lose the paperwork for less than the family wants.” She’d heard that tone before from her mother. Hated it.

“Is there any proof the family actually complained? Jenkins is a complete—”

“Don’t say it.”

“But he’s an asshole.”

“You talk like that, yet forget to put the phone on mute. I don’t think he’s the asshole. Honey.”

Livvy hung up on Officer Jenkins. “I’ll go visit.”

She headed out the door, saying hello to Frankie who always sat on the third stair, and tapped him on the head as she passed. He cussed at her, as he always did, and she gave him the finger behind her back. He shouldn’t sit there if he didn’t want to be tapped.

The city air was rank and brown. It always was. Livvy coughed and swiped at it as if that would make it disappear. Livvy stomped on every crack—hope springs eternal—and decided the coffee shop would be the first stop on her way to the police precinct. They had terrible coffee and even worse service, but Livvy loved The Big Brew because the coffee was lukewarm. It was the only way she could carry the paper cup.

Livvy stood in line, minding her own business, when a woman of moderate age said, “Excuse me.” Livvy moved aside, but that was not what this woman wanted.

“That ring you’re wearing. My grandmother had one just like that.”

“It’s beautiful,” Livvy said, holding her hand out so the woman could get an eyeful.

“Where did you get it?”

“My father gave it to me.” He hadn’t, but the woman did not deserve honesty from Livvy. She was lucky to be acknowledged at all.

“My granny got hers from France. A honeymoon gift.”

Livvy nodded and smiled and asked for her coffee, black. Years ago, her father had prepared her to follow in his footsteps. That was before he drank himself useless. “Lovely to chat,” Livvy said as she raised her coffee to the moderately-aged woman, and walked away. She didn’t want to give the woman too much opportunity to look, or she’d have to give up this ring, too.

The city still stank as she stepped outside. She sipped her cooling coffee and let out a contented sigh. It was convenient that the coffee shop was exactly halfway between her home and the police station. It was always up to her to go to them.

In less than an hour, she was standing in the precinct lobby, asking for Officer Jenkins. She put her now cold coffee on the sergeant’s desk and sat down. They didn’t provide trash cans to the public, and she wasn’t going to carry it around with her.

“Livvy.”

“Officer Jenkins.” Livvy stood, smiled, nodded.

He blinked. Stared. Cleared his throat. Just like mother. Livvy folded her hands in front of her and waited.

“You didn’t bring the shoes.” Clever man.

Livvy held out her empty hands and shook her head. “What shoes?”

“The ones you took from Mrs. Abernathy two days ago.”

“Did not.”

“Did.”

“Not.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Did, did, did.”

“Prove it.”

When Jenkins rolled his eyes and huffed, Livvy knew she’d won. “No proof, no shoes, no payoff. You know the rules.” Livvy stared at him. He hated that.

“Stop harassing me.” Livvy turned on her heels and headed toward the door. A cold red paper cup of coffee flew past her head, hitting the wall and running down.

“Missed me.” Last words as she stepped into freedom.

Now You Don’t – Excerpt

Chapter 1

Cal Dempsey clicked through the evidence database. Case number 2438-19. Three-year-old strangulation case. Prostitute in the park. Every detective before her had missed it. The fiber match was right there in the supplemental analysis. Blue polyester with traces of motor oil. Same as Zamora’s work gloves. She’d found it last night at 2 AM. Hadn’t gone home.

The bullpen hummed with morning activity. Desk phones chirped. Keyboards clicked. Coffee cups steamed. Dempsey hunched over the warrant request form, pen scratching as she filled in the boxes by hand. Her back ached. Her eyes burned. Worth it.

Two female detectives from Robbery hung gold tinsel along the edges of their desks. December first. Christmas. Dempsey barely registered the date as she wrote it on the form.

“Suspect: Darius Zamora.” She printed the letters in careful block capitals.

Knight’s voice boomed across the room. “Bet Dempsey’s idea of a hot date is a fresh corpse.”

Polla’s laugh followed, high and nervous. “Better conversation than you, Knight.”

“At least I have conversations.” Knight leaned back in his chair until it creaked. “When’s the last time you had a life outside this place, Dempsey?”

Dempsey didn’t look up. The form required her full concentration. Address. DOB. Prior arrests. The evidence chain that connected Zamora to the dead woman. It needed to be perfect. No technicalities. No loopholes. No way out.

She flipped through her case notes. Highlighted the fiber analysis. Made copies. Stapled them to the warrant application.

The case had gone cold under two previous detectives. Hussain had worked it first, then Miller before he retired. Both good detectives. Both had missed the fiber evidence. Not their fault. The original crime scene tech hadn’t labeled it properly.

Dempsey had found it by accident. Looking for something else entirely when the mislabeled evidence bag caught her eye. A hunch made her send it to the lab. The results came back yesterday afternoon. Perfect match to Zamora’s work gloves. Gloves he’d been wearing when they first questioned him three years ago. She’d seen them in the interview video.

The detectives with the tinsel laughed as they taped it up. One dropped a length that sparkled on the floor. Neither noticed.

“What do you think, RB?” Knight kicked his desk, sending his chair rolling toward Polla’s desk. “Think Dempsey talks to her reflection just to hear a human voice?”

Polla adjusted his glasses. Smiled weakly. Looked away.

Dempsey printed her name and badge number on the last page. Signed and dated it. Put everything in order. Three years waiting for justice. The dead woman had a name. Carla Mendez. Twenty-six. A daughter in foster care. A mother in Phoenix. Dempsey had their numbers ready for when they made the arrest.

She carried the completed warrant request to the copier. Added the final lab report to the packet. The fiber wasn’t just similar to Zamora’s gloves. It was a perfect match down to the specific type of motor oil. Venneroil 10W-48. Same as in Zamora’s garage. Proof he’d been there. Proof he’d lied.

Her desk phone rang. She crossed back and picked up.

“Dempsey.”

“My office. Now.” Chief Brandt’s voice. Clipped. Pissed?

Dempsey hung up. Glanced at the warrant request in her hand. She wanted to get this to the DA immediately. Zamora worked nights. Slept during the day. Best time to arrest him would be afternoon. She wanted the warrant by noon.

“Chief wants me,” she told Knight as she passed his desk.

“Better you than me.” Knight spun his chair. “Probably wants to know why you’re still wearing yesterday’s clothes.”

Dempsey ignored him. The chief’s call couldn’t have come at a worse time. She needed to move on Zamora today. Before he could run. Before the evidence could get contaminated or lost again.

She tucked the warrant request into a folder. Carried it with her. She’d go to the DA right after meeting Brandt. Whatever the chief wanted could wait.

The hallway to Brandt’s office stretched long and quiet. Mint green walls. Polished floor. Budget meeting notices tacked to a bulletin board. Dempsey passed an office where detectives watched surveillance footage, their faces lit blue by the screens.

She rehearsed what she would tell Brandt. In and out. Fifteen minutes tops. She had a case to close. A killer to catch. A family to call with news they’d been waiting three years to hear.

Brandt’s door was closed. Dempsey knocked twice. Heard “Enter” from the other side. Turned the handle.

Chief Brandt’s office smelled like lemon cleaner. A water stain spread across the ceiling in the far corner. Brown. Old. Dempsey had been watching it grow for months. Brandt sat behind her desk, reading glasses perched on her nose, reviewing a document that she set aside when Dempsey entered.

“Close the door.”

Dempsey did. Stood with the Zamora file pressed against her leg. Waited.

Brandt removed her glasses. Folded them carefully. Set them on a stack of personnel reports.

“I hear you broke the Mendez case.”

“The fiber evidence matched. Zamora’s work gloves. I need to get the warrant to the DA.”

Brandt nodded. “Good work. Cold cases are the hardest.”

“Three years. But we’ve got him now.”

“You’re going to make the family very happy.”

Dempsey shifted her weight. The conversation felt wrong. Too much praise. Too much small talk. Brandt didn’t do small talk.

“I need to catch the DA before noon if we want to make the arrest today.”

“About that.” Brandt leaned back. Her chair creaked. “I have another assignment for you.”

Dempsey’s grip tightened on the file. “I’m in the middle of three active cases.”

“Knight can handle the Zamora arrest.”

“It can wait until tomorrow.”

“Your call. The warrant request has your name on it. Your case, your collar.”

Dempsey didn’t move. The Zamora case had consumed her for weeks. Every night. Every weekend. She’d reviewed every report. Every photo. Every interview. What was one more day, except everything.

“What’s the assignment?” Her voice stayed flat.

“Mara Snowden hasn’t shown up for work in two days.”

“The photographer?”

“Yes. She missed a scene yesterday morning. Another today. Not answering calls or texts.”

Dempsey’s eyebrows drew together. “That’s a welfare check. Patrol can handle it.”

“I want you to do it.”

“Why?”

Brandt tapped her fingers on the desk. Once. Twice. “She was scheduled to testify in the Parsons case next week. Key witness.”

The Parsons case. Drug dealer with three bodies on him. One of them a cop. The trial had been all over the news.

“You think something happened to her?”

“I think our best crime scene photographer missing work right before a major trial warrants attention.”

Dempsey thought of the warrant request in her hand. The DA expecting her. Zamora sleeping, unaware they finally had him. The tidy arrangement of evidence she’d constructed that someone else would present.

“I can get the warrant, then check on Snowden.”

“No.”

“The family deserves—”

“They deserve to know we caught him. And they will.” Brandt leaned forward. “This is important, Dempsey.”

Dempsey knew that tone. No arguments. No negotiation.

“You have Snowden’s address?”

“Brownstone on Fourth and Pine. Apartment 3B.” Brandt handed over a slip of paper with the details. “She lives alone. Department tried calling but got voicemail.”

“Who’s the emergency contact?”

“A little early for that, hmm?”

Dempsey took the paper. Folded it. Slipped it into her pocket.

“If it’s just the flu, I’m coming back to get my warrant.”

“Fair enough.” Brandt picked up her glasses. Put them back on. Reached for the document she’d been reading. “Call me when you know something.”

Dempsey turned to leave.

“And Dempsey?”

She paused at the door.

“Keep this quiet. Just a routine welfare check as far as anyone needs to know.”

Dempsey nodded. Stepped out into the hallway. Let the door close behind her.

She stood there a moment. Stared at the Zamora file in her hand. Three years of work. Three years of dead ends and false starts. Three years of a killer walking free. And now she was doing a welfare check instead of arresting him.

Knight was at his desk when she returned to the bullpen. Feet up. Phone to his ear. Laughing at something.

She walked past, went to her desk, put the file in the drawer. Collected her coat, gun, badge. Checked her watch. 11:30. If Snowden was just sick, she could still make it back. No she couldn’t.

Dempsey sat down and quickly sent an email: Request meeting tomorrow, 6:00PM, to get run through evidence, get warrant. ~ Dempsey.

The female detectives had finished with their tinsel. It sparkled under the fluorescent lights. Christmas music played faintly from someone’s computer. Dempsey felt a thousand miles removed from all of it. She hit send, locked up her desk, and left.

She took the stairs down to the parking garage. Cold air hit her face when she stepped outside. Her unmarked car waited in its spot, frost on the windshield. She scraped it quickly. Started the engine. Let it run while she checked the address Brandt had given her. Fourth and Pine. Fifteen minutes in midday traffic.

As she pulled out of the garage, her phone rang. The DA’s office. She let it go to voicemail. Nothing she could say would change anything now. Hoped for the best.

She turned toward Fourth and Pine. Snow began to fall in fine, dry flakes. Perfect weather for staying home sick. Maybe that’s all it was. She’d check the apartment. Find Snowden with a fever. Be back in time to salvage something of the case she’d solved.

But as she drove, Brandt’s words echoed. Key witness. Major trial. Keep it quiet. Something didn’t add up. Dempsey’s detective instincts, dormant since leaving the bullpen, began to wake up.

The brownstone at Fourth and Pine looked expensive. Five stories. Red sandstone. Black iron fire escape zigzagging up the facade. Snow fell against it, melting on contact, making the stone slick and dark. Dempsey parked across the street. Checked the address against Brandt’s note. Right place. Wrong assignment.

Dempsey crossed the street. Snow caught in her hair. Melted down her neck. The cold felt good after too many hours in the precinct’s dry heat. She hadn’t showered since yesterday morning. Hadn’t changed clothes. Hadn’t slept more than twenty minutes at her desk.

The building entrance had an intercom system. Brass plate with apartment numbers. 3B. Snowden, M. Dempsey pressed the button. Waited. Pressed again. No answer.

She pulled out her phone. Dialed the number Brandt had given her. Let it ring until voicemail picked up. A woman’s voice, professional and clipped: “This is Mara Snowden. Leave a message.”

Dempsey didn’t. Slipped the phone back into her pocket.

A man with a dog exited the building. Held the door open with his elbow. Looked Dempsey up and down.

“Thanks,” she said, moving past him.

The lobby smelled musty. Marble floor. Old mailboxes with tarnished brass doors. A potted plant drooping in the corner. The elevator had an “Out of Order” sign taped to it. Dempsey took the stairs.

Third floor hallway. Faded carpet runner down the center. Sconce lights with yellow bulbs. The kind of building that had been fancy once. Still tried to look it.

Apartment 3B at the end of the hall. Heavy wooden door. Brass numbers. Dempsey raised her fist to knock.

Stopped.

The door wasn’t fully closed. Open about an inch. No splintered wood around the lock. No tool marks on the frame. No forced entry.

Dempsey’s hand moved to her gun. Didn’t draw it yet. She leaned close to the gap.

“Ms. Snowden? Police.”

Silence from inside.

“Mara Snowden? Detective Dempsey, Metro PD.”

Nothing.

Dempsey considered her options. Call for backup. Standard procedure for an open door. But this wasn’t a crime scene. Not yet. Just a welfare check on a photographer who’d missed work. Probably left her door unlocked by accident. Gone to the doctor. Visiting a friend.

Except people don’t leave their doors open in the city. Especially not people who live alone. Especially not people scheduled to testify against a drug dealer with three bodies on him.

Brandt’s words echoed. Key witness. Major trial. Keep it quiet.

Dempsey drew her weapon. Held it low at her side. Used her left hand to push the door open wider.

“Police. Anyone home?”

The door swung inward without resistance. No chain or deadbolt engaged. Just the door left slightly open. Like someone had intended to close it but hadn’t quite managed. Or hadn’t cared.

Dempsey took a breath. Felt the familiar focus settling over her. This wasn’t the Zamora case. But it was something. Her instincts rarely lied.

She stepped back. Called Brandt. Got voicemail. Left a message.

“Chief, Dempsey here. At Snowden’s apartment. Door’s open, no signs of forced entry. No response inside. I’m going in.”

She ended the call. Checked her email. Nothing from the DA. Put the phone away.

Traffic sounds filtered up from the street below. A horn. Brakes squealing. Normal city noise. Nothing to match the twist in her gut that said this wasn’t normal at all.

Dempsey positioned herself to the side of the doorway. Drew her weapon properly now. Held it in both hands, pointed down.

“Police. Entering the premises.”

She used her foot to push the door all the way open. Stood listening for any sound from inside. Heard nothing.

The smell hit her first. Jasmine. Strong but not overwhelming. Like a candle had been burning recently. Or perfume.

Dempsey took a step into the apartment. Paused. Listened again. Still nothing.

She glanced back at the hallway. Empty. No neighbors peeking out to see what was happening. No witnesses if this went bad.

Dempsey adjusted her grip on the gun. Stepped fully into the apartment. Kept her back to the wall. Eyes scanning for movement. Ears straining for any sound.

The entryway opened into what looked like a living room, though she couldn’t see much from her position. No obvious signs of struggle or disturbance. No broken furniture. No blood spatters on the visible walls.

Her phone vibrated in her pocket. She ignored it. Focus on the scene. Deal with Knight later.

Dempsey moved forward another step. Checked corners. Checked shadows. The apartment felt empty but she couldn’t be sure. Not yet.

She took another breath of jasmine-scented air. Thought of Zamora, who should be in handcuffs by now. Thought of Mara Snowden, who should have been at work yesterday. Thought of the door, left open just enough to be noticed by someone at this end of the hall.

Her hand steady on the gun, Dempsey prepared to clear the apartment room by room.

Dempsey swept the apartment in a pattern. Living room clear. Kitchen clear. Bathroom empty. Closets checked. Nobody home. No Mara Snowden. No signs of struggle. No blood. Just a tidy apartment with the scent of jasmine hanging in the air and a desk with items arranged too perfectly to be coincidence.

“Mara?” Her voice sounded loud in the silence. No answer.

She holstered her weapon. The immediate danger had passed. Now it was time to observe. To see what the apartment told her.

The place was neat. Orderly. Bookshelf with photography books and crime novels. Couch with a throw blanket folded over one arm. Kitchen with clean counters. Single mug in the dish rack. A woman who lived alone but kept her space ready for company.

Dempsey checked the bedroom again. Queen bed made with military precision. Corners tucked. Pillows arranged. Closet with clothes hung by type and color. No sign anyone had slept here recently.

She returned to the living room. The desk sat against the wall opposite the couch. Oak surface. Clean. Three items placed in the center. A closed laptop. A spiral notebook. A printed photograph face up.

Dempsey approached slowly. The items hadn’t been left randomly. Someone had arranged them deliberately. A message. For whoever found them. For her.

The laptop was closed. Silver. No visible fingerprints on its surface. The notebook beside it, spiral-bound, green cover. Closed as well.

The photograph drew her eye. Color. High quality. Professionally printed on glossy paper.

A dead man in an alley.

Dempsey recognized crime scene photos. Had seen hundreds. This was different. This wasn’t documentation. This was composition.

The photographer had crouched at the feet of the corpse. Shot upward along the body. The angle made the dead man look larger than life. Important. Like a fallen statue. Sodium streetlights cast everything in amber and shadow. No flash had been used.

The victim lay on his back. White male. Twenties maybe. Death metal t-shirt now ruined with blood. One arm flung outward. The other across his chest. His legs bent at odd angles. The way bodies lay when they collapse, not when they’re arranged.

Dempsey leaned closer. Three wounds visible. A bloody mess at the crotch where denim and flesh became indistinguishable. A neat bullet hole in the center of the chest. And the head… part of the skull missing. Execution style.

This wasn’t a random mugging. This was professional. Multiple wounds. Multiple messages. Emasculation. Heart shot. Head shot. Someone wanted this man very dead.

The photograph made it look like a Renaissance painting. The lighting. The composition. The careful framing that captured the stillness of death and the violence that caused it. Beautiful and terrible at once.

No police evidence markers visible. No measurement tools or case numbers. This photo wasn’t from the official crime scene documentation. This was taken before the police arrived. Or by someone who knew how to work a scene without disturbing the evidence.

Someone like Mara Snowden. Crime scene photographer.

Dempsey didn’t touch the photo. Didn’t move any of the items. She paused, looking again at the dead man’s face. Familiar, but incomplete. She needed an ID on the victim and the scene location. And she needed to know what case Snowden was testifying on. This doesn’t look like a simple missing person anymore.

Studied the photo again. Someone had wanted him dead in a specific, message-sending way.

Dempsey took out her own phone camera. Photographed the desk arrangement exactly as she’d found it. The laptop. The notebook. The printed photo. Evidence of evidence.

Traffic sounds continued from the street below. A siren wailed in the distance, growing fainter. The jasmine scent seemed stronger now, or maybe she was just more aware of it. The smell of someone who should be here but wasn’t.

She looked again at the photo. The dead man in the alley. The artistic composition. The professional eye that had captured death as a moment of terrible beauty. Mara Snowden’s eye.

A key expert in a major trial who had missed work for two days. A door left open. A photograph carefully placed for someone to find. None of it was coincidence.

Stood in the silent apartment. Waited for Brandt to call back. The dead man in the photo stared up at nothing, his secrets as carefully arranged as the items on the desk.