Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

I once read somewhere that life was a series of lessons that had to be lived to be understood. Over the last thirty-something years, I've lived a lot of lessons. It was the understanding I had trouble grasping. Because under no circumstances could anyone explain to me why I was standing over the body of a young girl—an innocent life taken violently and needlessly.

My name is J.J. Graves, and…for the first time in as long as I could remember, I wasn't sure I was going to be able to stand for the dead. My chest was tight—it was a struggle to draw in a breath—and my eyes burned, though I wasn't sure I was capable of tears.

There were shadows in my periphery—I only had eyes for what was in front of me—though I knew there were other officers and techs on scene. Just like I knew that there were tears streaming down Officer Benson's cheeks as he cordoned off the area. He had a daughter about this girl's age.

There was an underlying rage simmering inside the veteran cops working the scene.

Usually crime scenes were ordered chaos. There was chatter and noise and movement. Everyone had a job to do, but after a while, the job became monotonous. The longer and more often first responders worked these kinds of scenes, the more desensitized they became to the humanity of it. We always had to remind ourselves of the humanity. It's what kept us grounded. It's what kept us sane. And sometimes not so sane.

But this crime scene was different. It was quiet—eerily so—and there was a slow-motion quality about everyone's movements, as if reality hadn't quite caught up to our brains.

It had been a wet spring, one for the record books, and we'd had thirty straight days of rain as we moved into the first week of April. The ground was soggy and damp from the early morning fog, but there had miraculously been no rain overnight to wash away blood spatter and physical evidence.

I was the coroner for King George County, Virginia. Some of the cops affectionately called me a last responder. There was a responsibility that went along with the title. It was my job to be a voice for those who no longer had one. It was my job to collect the evidence and put together the puzzle of what happened to victims so criminals spent the rest of their lives behind bars. My job was to bring justice.

But looking at the small and broken body of an unknown girl, I wasn't sure there was any amount of justice I could bring her. Nothing would be enough.

"You okay, Doc?" Martinez said low and under his breath so no one else overheard.

I started to tell him I was fine, but I stopped myself. I'd been around cops too long. Cops and feelings didn't exactly go hand in hand. Expressing emotions was considered a sign of weakness.

"I can't say that I am," I admitted.

He blew out a breath. "Yeah. Me too."

"It's always harder when it's kids," I said. "We're supposed to protect the weak and the innocent. But there are still people in the world who can do this to a child. I'll never understand it."

"There's been a battle between good and evil since the beginning of time," Martinez said. "My abuela always says to remember that there was murder when there were only four people on the planet. It's a battle good will continue to fight for as long as we're on this earth."

"You sound a little like Reverend Thomas," I said.

"Hey, I was an altar boy," he said. "I know my stuff."

"Your abuela should be proud."

"She is," he said. "Which is why I'm her favorite instead of my no-good cousins."

The conversation with Martinez had given me enough time to settle and to see clearly.

"I guess it's me and you on this one," I said, finally able to look him in the eyes.

Martinez had earned the nickname of GQ Cop in the squad room once he'd been promoted to detective and no longer had to wear a uniform. He was smooth and charming and charismatic, and he would probably make a great politician one day. He had Latino good looks—a strong jaw and dark, hooded eyes that women found irresistible. His hair was stylishly cut and his face shaved smooth.

He wore an expensive dark gray suit, a silvery gray shirt, and a tie with hints of lavender and silver in a checked design. It was barely six o'clock in the morning and he looked like he'd stepped out of a magazine. The press loved him as much as women did.

I looked down at my own standard-issue dark blue coveralls with Coroner's Office stenciled across the back, and was glad they covered up the old gray sweats I'd managed to pull on when I'd rolled out of bed that morning. I wore a baseball cap that had the KGSO logo embroidered on the front to cover my bed head.

I shivered, wishing I'd had time to make coffee before I'd left the house, but it wouldn't have done much more than warm my hands. I'd left my fleece-lined windbreaker in the car and was regretting the decision now. The constant rain had kept the overnight temps unseasonably cool, and it was still in the mid-forties, though the brisk wind made it feel colder.

Looking between the two of us, it was obvious Martinez and I were not cut from the same cloth. It would be interesting working with him solo for the first time.

I had no idea where Martinez got his money from, and to my recollection, no one had ever bothered to ask. All I knew was that he couldn't live how he did on a cop's salary. I figured it was probably better not to ask questions. I liked Martinez and he was a great cop. No point in ruining a good thing.

"I guess that makes us partners," he said, squinting against the pale sunlight that was trying to eke its way through the clouds. "Just so you know I always like to drive, and I hate eating sandwiches for lunch."

"Good," I said. "Because I like being driven around, and I also don't like to eat sandwiches for lunch. Sounds like a match made in heaven"

"The sheriff and Cole are stuck in the Simmons trial all week," he said, pulling out a piece of chewing gum from his pocket and unwrapping it. "Lucky bastards." He stuck the gum in his mouth and put the wrapper back in his pocket.

"Yeah," I said, scanning the scene. "It's a big case. Very high profile. Lots of media attention. National media."

"Pain in the ass," he said, shaking his head. "Could be weeks before they're out of there."

When I'd gotten the call from dispatch the bed had been empty beside me and the sheets cool. I'd been no stranger to cool sheets over the past few days. Preparing for the Simmons trial had been more than enough to occupy Jack's time, along with his regular workload. But it had been for the best. Things were strained between us at the moment, and I think both of us were relieved the trial was giving us time and space.

The last year had been the best and worst of my life. Jack and I had come through so much and we were at the height of our professional and personal lives. I had no idea why it felt like things were falling apart. Maybe there had been so much bad in my life I didn't know how to process when things were good.

Some people didn't wear peace well. Maybe I was one of them.

Despite all the good in my life and my marriage to Jack, there were things we didn't have answers to. Like why two people who loved each other and whose heart was family, were having such a hard time starting their own. Or in reality, why I didn't seem to be capable of conceiving.

I'd always heard the saying about sins of the father. And my father had a great many sins so maybe there was some truth to it. It was just one of the many questions I'd asked that I had yet to get answers for.

The rift between me and Jack was my fault. All my fault. I knew it in my mind, but I didn't know how to right the ship, so to speak. This last round of false hope and pregnancy tests had broken my spirit, and I just hadn't pulled myself out of the quicksand yet. And Jack hadn't offered to pull me out either. I was guessing he was dealing with his own pit to crawl out of.

Jack would be occupied with the trial for the rest of the week, so I had at least that long to try and figure out a way to apologize and make things right again.

I watched the black Suburban we used to transport bodies navigate through the media vans and past the police barricades. The media was relentless this morning. They'd showed up close behind the first officers on scene and it had been a fight to maintain the integrity of the scene and respect the victim's privacy since we didn't have an identification and no family had been notified. The techs had constructed a half wall of sorts to block the victim to prying eyes since she was in a public park.

If Jack had been here he'd have put the fear of God in every one of those reporters, especially since the victim was a minor, but Martinez had done a pretty good job in Jack's absence and all the cameras and fresh and polished reporters stood behind the barricades so they could go live for the six o'clock news.

Lily was driving the Suburban, her face partially hidden by a baseball cap and a pair of dark aviators, but I could see the half smile on her lips as a cameraman dodged out of her way. Lily was working for me as assistant coroner while she was finishing up medical school to become a pathologist, and I was lucky to have her. She'd go on to a bigger city and a higher paying job at some point, but for now she was a gift to King George County. She had a brilliant mind that people overlooked because of her beauty.

Sheldon Durkus sat in the passenger side next to her. He was my assistant at the funeral home, but more often than not he got roped into helping me on the forensics side of my job description. I'd been a medical doctor working in the ER at Augusta General up until my parents had died a few years back, though it had turned out they'd faked their deaths and had been secretly working for a foreign government to smuggle in everything from weapons to drugs. It had also turned out they weren't really my parents and I'd been stolen as a baby. That might traumatize most people, but to be honest, I'd been relieved to find out I didn't share their blood.

All that to say, I'd inherited the family funeral home, and then Jack had helped me get hired on with the county as coroner so I could pay my most of my bills after the FBI froze all my assets. They came in and took apart my life and business just to make sure I was an innocent party where my parents were concerned. I was innocent, by the way.

I hadn't inherited Sheldon along with the funeral home. He'd showed up on my doorstep like a stray puppy looking for a job, and somehow, I'd become responsible for him. He was young and knew the craft, and he was great with the dead. It was the living he wasn't so good with.

I gestured to Lily where I wanted her to park, and then watched as she and Sheldon got out and went to the back to get prepped for transport. They were already dressed in their coveralls, but it would be a while yet. I hadn't even started the preliminary report.

I drew in a deep breath and grabbed a pair of latex gloves from my bag.

"It's been a while since we had a kid," Martinez said.

"Peter Winslow was the last," I said automatically. "You never really forget them."

My breath was coming in cold puffs as I blew into one glove and slipped it on, and then the other. An old trick from my ER days.

The grass was damp with dew, so I squatted down next to the victim, and tried my best to compartmentalize what I saw. Pure science. No emotion. Emotions were paralyzing.

"She's not been moved?" I asked.

"This is how responding officers found her," Martinez said. "The call came in from an early morning jogger." He read from his phone where he'd taken notes. "Kelly Sandborn is her name. She's sitting in the back of the ambulance with the blanket wrapped around her."

I looked in the direction where the ambulance was parked and the woman sitting on the back, taking the occasional huff of oxygen. She looked to be mid-thirties or forties. She was in good shape, and she was decked out in Spandex leggings and a long-sleeved Spandex shirt in hot pink.

"She doesn't look like an idiot at first glance," I said, shaking my head.

"Right?" Martinez asked. "Why the hell was she jogging alone at five in the morning in a mostly deserted area? Maybe this will be a wake-up call for her."

"People generally don't think they'll become a statistic. Especially in a place like Bloody Mary, but this isn't the small town it used to be."

"Tell me about it," Martinez said. "DC has started bringing their crime here."

I knew this to be true. Over the last year Jack had created a white-collar-crime division and hired cops from bigger cities with the experience to deal with it. Developers and politicians had tried to make King George County their playground, and Jack was having no part of it, which put a very large target on Jack's back from some very powerful people.

I pulled my camera from my bag and took several shots so I could remember how she was positioned and then I got a couple of close-ups of the trauma and bruising on her body.

"Rigor is fully set in," I told him. "All the rain we've been having has kept temps in the forties, so that could accelerate rigor and factor into TOD, so it'll be a little wider range of time."

I couldn't cover the body until I'd taken all the samples I needed, and I could tell it bothered Martinez that she was still exposed. My lungs burned and I kept reminding myself to breathe. Everything had to be done right. I documented her body temp in my notes. Checked her eyes and mouth.

Martinez grunted and shifted his feet, his expensive dress shoes beaded with water. "Ms. Sandborn said she always runs this route. She and her husband live in one of the new condos on the square. She takes Anne Boleyn all the way down to Jane Seymour, and then cuts across the empty lot on the corner to get to the park. She would have had a direct line of sight of the vic as she jogged around the corner, but it's pretty misty this morning, so she was almost directly under the park light before she saw her. Sandborn said it was like the girl was being spotlighted."

"Pretty ballsy of our killer," I said. "To leave her right under the park light like he did."

Martinez grunted in agreement. "Seems to me like he didn't care about being seen and didn't care how fast she was found. There are plenty of trees in this park, so he could have dragged her out of the way. But he left her on the perimeter where anyone driving or jogging by would see her."

I looked at my watch and calculated the time. It was a few minutes past six. "I'd put time of death somewhere between nine and midnight," I said. "Bloody Mary is all tucked into bed at that time of night. Especially on a Monday. All of the local restaurants are closed. There are no sporting or church events."

"Almost like he knew that," Martinez said. "What about sexual assault?"

I sighed, trying to focus my attention away from the trauma her skull had sustained. "There's evidence of blood and semen. We're not going to be short on DNA evidence."

"Yeah, I figured," Martinez said, and I could hear the anger in his voice. "She's so small. You think you've seen the worst of things, and people still manage to surprise me."

"She is small for her age," I said, carefully massaging the rigor out of her jaw so I could stick my finger in her mouth. "But she does have upper and lower molars, so she's probably close to twelve at the least.

"Blunt force trauma to the head," I continued. "Overkill. There's a lot of rage in those blows. Significant trauma to the skull. But she was also strangled. Look at the bruising around her neck and the broken capillaries in her eyes. Contusions and abrasions cover most of her body. Ligature marks around the wrists and ankles signify she was bound. Even her heels are raw."

"Indicating she was dragged," Martinez said, taking notes.

I looked up and around the playground area—a place that should have been filled with children and laughter—noting the wood chips at the bottom of the slides and the loose pebbles under the swings.

"I'll take samples to send to the forensics lab in Richmond and see what comes up," I said. "But she's got particulates embedded in the skin. Probably gravel or sediment from the sidewalk. She hasn't been moved since she was killed. Livor mortis has set in."

I lifted her body slightly so Martinez could see the purplish hues of her skin where the blood had settled along her back and thighs. The human body always told a story. Flesh and blood and bone were as descriptive as the pages of a book.

"Any idea what did this kind of damage to her skull?" I asked, but Martinez didn't respond.

His gaze was scanning the crowd that had gathered on the outside of the police barricade. Then he looked toward Officer Plank and gestured him over.

"Yes, sir," Plank said, hurrying to us and standing at attention.

We all had a soft spot for Plank, even though he was still a rookie. He was the boy next door, and all of us were a little baffled at how he'd ended up in uniform instead of coaching Little League or settling down with a wife and living the picket-fence life.

But that rookie shine was beginning to tarnish, and he'd proven himself when the bullets had started to fly. Gone was the na?vety in his eyes, and in place was a harder outlook on humanity that had taken away some of his approachability—cop eyes. I grieved a little for that.

Despite the cop eyes, he was still fresh faced and pink cheeked. His hair was freshly cut and his uniform starched so stiff it could have stood up by itself.

"Let's check out the crowd that's gathered to watch us work," Martinez told him. "Get names and contact information. Several of them are still in their nightclothes so I'm guessing they live close. Start with that tall guy standing at the back. He's giving me the creeps."

I couldn't see who Martinez was talking about while I was kneeling down, so I stood up to see over the privacy partition that had been erected.

My gaze scanned the crowd of older people, at first not seeing the man that Martinez had singled out. There was still a hazy mist in the air and it was the time between dark and light when everything was in shades of gray. But then the man came into partial focus. He stood next to a tree, dressed in black and blending in with the tree bark. I couldn't clearly see any of his features, but he was a head taller than those standing around him.

"Yes, sir," Plank said, and headed off to follow orders.

I knelt back down by the victim and Martinez came with me and sighed.

"I kind of miss the old Plank," he said. "This job really sucks."

"Yeah, but you wouldn't do anything else," I told him.

"Isn't that the truth," he said, shaking his head. "What does that say about me?"

"That you're the perverse creature we've always known you to be," I said. "Besides, somebody has to catch the bad guys. Better us than letting all hell break loose."

Martinez snorted out a laugh and rubbed his hand over his face. There was a resoluteness about him, a determination to face the horror of what one human being could do to another. He made himself look at the victim, to not shy away from the atrocities. The girl deserved that much. But I knew from experience we'd all pay for it later. In our marriages. In our dreams. In sex or thoughts of suicide. In the bottles of alcohol that awaited some at the end of a hard day. First responders all dealt with trauma differently. Whatever vice they chose, I noticed it usually wasn't the healthiest way of dealing with things.

"We found several large rocks covered in blood and brain matter," Martinez said, pointing to the yellow numbered evidence tags spaced along the ground.

"Several?" I asked. "So he used multiple rocks to bash her head in?"

"That's what it looks like."

"Well, that's different," I said. "Any evidence of more than one killer?"

"Not that we've found," he said. "The rocks were all lining that flower bed there. Maybe in the struggle he was just grasping for something to hit her with. Those rocks are covered with blood. They would have been slippery. So he loses one and then grabs another."

"Wouldn't have been much of a fight," I said, looking at the wounds with my flashlight. "The first blow would've incapacitated her. She wouldn't have been fighting back then."

"Maybe he was just so caught up in the moment he couldn't stop," Martinez said. "What kind of man leaves his DNA and fingerprints all over the place?"

"A stupid one or one who isn't in the system."

"Yeah, that's what I'm afraid of. Maybe a combo of both. This looks frantic. Not calculated. Maybe his first kill."

I grunted in the affirmative. "What about a ligature? Find anything he could have strangled her with? Or whatever he'd bound her wrists and feet with?"

"Nothing so far, but I've got guys canvassing the area checking trash cans and dumpsters. It's trash day in this neighborhood so it would have been easy for him to shove any evidence in a nearby bin. We would've been out of luck if the trashmen beat us to it. They usually start their rounds about this time. If he got rid of evidence we'll find it. She's covered in blood. He would be too."

"She did put up a fight," I said. "She's got particulates and skin under her fingernails." I carefully bagged both of her hands. "And she's got defensive bruising along her forearms. See the pattern?"

I held my arms up in an X over my chest to demonstrate. "He hit her with something," I said. "Not his fist. See how the bruising almost wraps around the arm. Like a whip, but wider."

"Belt," he said. "I've seen those marks before."

"People tend to grab whatever is closest in a fight. If she surprised him and tried to escape out of a vehicle or house he would have grabbed whatever he could to make her stop. A child in her condition would draw notice if they were out in public. Looks like a couple of fingers are broken too," I said.

"I knew I should have put in for vacation last week," Martinez said. "I could be drinking margaritas in the Florida Keys and flirting with tiki bar waitresses. It sure would beat the hell out of this."

"You probably have kids you don't know about all over the country," I said, trying to lighten the atmosphere. It would be too easy for both of us to spiral down, and I knew from experience it was a lot easier to go down than it was to come up.

"Not me," he said, shaking his head. "I took care of that a couple of years ago."

My head snapped up in surprise. "Get out! You got a vasectomy?" I asked, keeping my voice quiet. "But you're so young."

"No regrets. My family is crazy complicated, and I've never wanted to add to the madness," he said. "Besides, this job isn't good for families. How many guys on the force are paying child support and never get to see their kids? It's a rare woman who can put up with being married to a cop. Though don't tell my abuela. She's very Catholic, and she'd probably disown me if she knew there was no Mrs. Martinez or great-grandchildren in her future."

I'd never actually met any member of Martinez's family, so his secret was safe with me.

His phone rang. "Martinez," he said. It was a short call and Martinez didn't say anything else other than, "Thanks," before he disconnected.

"That was the station," he said. "No missing persons or abductions have been reported in the tri-state area in the last seventy-two hours, and there's nothing in the system with a description matching our victim from previous filings. She's a Jane Doe as of now."

"She's not a street kid," I said. "She's healthy and seems well nourished despite her small stature, and she's got orthodontia. That doesn't come cheap. It shouldn't be too hard to find an identity."

"From your mouth to God's ears," he said. "She's not from Bloody Mary or we all would have heard about it by now."

That was a true statement. Bloody Mary only had a couple of thousand people in it, and every one of them was a nosy busybody. Citizens in Bloody Mary knew enough about their neighbors to make the CIA blush. If one of our local kids had been missing we all would have heard about it.

"There's not much more I can do here," I said, packing my bag. "Let's get her back to the lab."

I gestured for Lily and Sheldon to come over with the transport board. The gurney would be too hard to roll through the grass and there were so many evidence tags along the ground I didn't want them to disturb anything.

I stood up and took off my gloves, dropping them in my bag, and then I moved over to stand next to Martinez to make room for Lily and Sheldon. The sun was struggling to break through the heavy clouds, and I could tell by looking we were in for another wet day. If the crime-scene techs missed something while they were searching this morning, it would most likely be lost forever.

As if my thoughts had been projected aloud, a long, low rumble of thunder sounded in the distance.

"Great," Martinez said, looking up at the sky. "Have I mentioned how much I hate this rain? I need the sun. Look at my skin. Does this look like the skin of a man who can do without the sun? This place is depressing."

"More than forty-five percent of adults struggle with depression in Seattle because of the lack of sun," Sheldon said. "There is a suicide every eleven minutes."

"I can believe it," Martinez said.

Sheldon's Coke-bottle-thick glasses were fogged, and there was a thin bead of sweat on his upper lip. It was still chilly outside, so I could only assume it was nerves making him sweat like a racehorse.

Sheldon hated coming to crime scenes. Seeing a body so fresh after death and not on a cold slab in the lab didn't sit well with him, though he hardly ever threw up anymore. Sheldon had spent his childhood reading random trivia as some kind of coping mechanism. He always had information to share that was in no way helpful for whatever our current situation happened to be. But I also knew spouting useless information was probably keeping him from tainting the crime scene with his own DNA.

"I used to like the rain," Lily said, carefully lifting the small body so they could maneuver the body bag around her. It was important to catch any particulates that might fall off in the bag so we could examine them in the lab. "It's always helped me to focus and study. But after the last month I'm starting to change my mind. Cole and I drove down to Greenville for the weekend to see a concert and I thought I'd died and gone to heaven when the sun came out."

"Cole has terrible taste in music," Martinez said. "All country, all the time."

Lily's mouth quirked in a half smile, her cheeks pinkened by the wind that had started to pick up. "I'll admit I didn't like it at first. I think it's an acquired taste. But after I started listening to it for a while I figured it wasn't any different than watching reality TV. Lots of drama going on in those songs. Think of it as reality TV for the radio."

"I knew Cole would be a bad influence on you," Martinez said, shaking his head. "You missed your chance. I would have treated you like a queen."

Lily snorted and said, "I think there's a country song that says the same thing. I'll send it to you so you can drown yourself in your sorrows."

She and Sheldon lifted the body bag and placed it on the board, securing the victim with wide yellow straps. When they shifted I saw a glint of something in the grass.

"What's that?" I asked, grabbing one of the gloves from my bag and, without putting it on all the way, I used it to pick up a delicate heart necklace.

Martinez still had his gloves on and gently took the necklace from me, examining the simple gold heart on both sides.

"Daddy's girl," he said, reading the inscription on the back of the necklace. "The chain is broken."

"It probably snapped while the killer was strangling her," I said, furrowing my brow in thought. "She was still wearing this necklace at the time of her murder. What about her clothes? Where are they?"

"We've not found any," Martinez said, brow furrowed. "I've got guys canvassing the streets and nearby dumpsters, but nothing has come back so far."

"We did find a baseball cap," Lieutenant Daniels said. "It's an adult man size. About fifteen feet from the victim. I did find a trace of blood on the bill, so we'll send it to the lab and see if it matches our victim."

She'd been crouched down only a few feet from us, cataloguing items they were taking into evidence. Daniels and her crime-scene team were the best, and we'd worked several cases together. She was a short plump woman with dark skin and beautiful tawny eyes, and she'd recently added blond to her braids.

"Fifteen feet isn't far," Martinez said. "Wouldn't have been hard for it to fly off in the struggle."

"So she either ran to the park naked or he stripped her here before he killed her," I said. "No matter which scenario you go with he was asking for someone to notice. Maybe he was in a hurry when he took her clothes and he didn't notice the necklace. But you saw the blood spatter pattern across her body. She was naked before he killed her."

"I see what you're getting at," Martinez said. "She's got defensive wounds. She fought like a wildcat. He's in the middle of the park trying to get her subdued, but she's not making it easy for him. Taking her clothes and raping her at that moment would have been the last thought in his head. He would have been in panic mode. And in panic mode you make stupid decisions."

"Like forgetting your baseball cap and leaving your DNA all over the scene." I looked around the park, at the houses that surrounded the area. "Where did she come from?"

"He wasn't worried about being sloppy," Martinez said. "He kills her in the middle of a public park, violently, where anyone could drive by or walk by and see. Hell, one of the neighbors could have stepped outside for a cigarette and the killer would've been spotlighted. Not to mention, he left fingerprints on the rocks he used to bash her head in. The techs pulled several latent prints from them."

"Maybe not stupid. Maybe just a complete psychopath and not concerned about consequences," I said.

"Comforting," Martinez said.

Regent Park was a small community park a few blocks from downtown and the funeral home. It was the first and oldest park in Bloody Mary, and the homes around it had been built in the last half of the 1800s. They were all narrow, two-story homes with red-brick chimneys, black shutters, and nothing but a stoop leading to the front door. If I had to guess the median age of the people living in the area I'd say anywhere from seventy to a hundred and twenty, plus or minus a few years.

"You think someone's surveillance camera could've picked it up?" I asked.

"That's the hope," Martinez said, looking at the houses that were most visible from our location, but he didn't sound hopeful.

Martinez held the locket up between two fingers and looked at it closer. And then he used his thumbs to open the heart locket. Inside was a small picture of the girl at my feet, though it seemed to be taken a couple of years prior. Her smile was bright and she sat on the lap of who I could only assume was her father, but they shared the same smile. They were both blond and blue eyed and on the verge of laughter. It was a sweet photo.

"Oh man," I said, taking a closer look at the man in the photo. "Why does he look familiar?"

"I was hoping I was imagining things," Martinez said. "Is that Councilman Lidle?"

"Oh," I said. "Yep."

"Hell."

"Yep," I said.

"My mother wrote him a strongly worded letter once," Sheldon said. "She said she wasn't about to let her hard-earned tax dollars be used for him to cut down trees and build ugly wind farms. She said he doesn't have the sense that God gave a goose."

"White people say the weirdest things," Martinez said.

I didn't know Councilman Lidle on a personal level. I tried to stay out of local politics unless Jack needed me to be at an event to eat rubber chicken and smile like I was happy about it. But I'd heard Jack mention Lidle's name on plenty of occasions. Lidle was all for the big developments and bringing progress like wind farms to King George County. Unfortunately for Lidle, Jack and the Lawson family owned most of the land he wanted to see developed.

"Let's check out the neighbors and see what they have to say," Martinez said.

I'd never worked one-on-one with Martinez before, so I was curious what it was like to do the job with someone other than Jack.

"You're the boss," I said. "Lily and Sheldon can transport and unload our vic. But I'll head back to the lab after we're done here so we have a definite identification and can notify next of kin."

"Maybe we'll get lucky and her prints will be in the database," Lily said. "More parents have started having their kids fingerprinted with the rise in trafficking over the last decade or so."

"We can hope," I said, and watched them walk away with precious cargo between them. They loaded her into the back of the Suburban and then slowly made their way back through the police barricades and press line.

My heart was heavy. I didn't know what we were about to step into. Politics usually wreaked havoc with truth and justice. But I knew what my job was, and I knew that the little girl whose life had been so viciously taken was where my loyalty belonged. And though I liked Martinez and figured he'd be fun to work with, I missed Jack.