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  Mitchell occasionally thought of himself as a hound dog. Sniffing at the trail, catching a scent, following it, getting ever closer. Maybe at times the scent would dissipate, and the hound would sniff around, trying to catch it once again, running into a few dead ends, finally catching a break.

  Other times, when cases were vague and frustrating, he felt he was more akin to a chicken, pecking the ground for morsels, looking for anything edible. Peck peck peck. What was that? A tasty seed? Nope, just a small rock. Peck peck, hang on, found something! A paper clip? What was a paper clip doing here? Peck peck peck peck, completely random pecking, shoving its beak hopefully into the ground again and again. Peck peck. Nothing good here. And eventually, this chicken might tire, and begin to think it would never find anything worthwhile to eat.

  Kendele Byers’s murder investigation seemed to be more like the chicken type of investigation. For every tiny seed, the detectives would find a lot of sand, a lot of pebbles.

  Kendele’s father had a tight alibi for the date of her murder. He worked every morning at the grocery store he owned. Started working at six. Never missed a day. He had security tapes and customers to support his alibi. He claimed that he had never abused his daughter, and his wife and son said the same.

  Peck peck peck.

  Kendele had eighteen regular customers, and thirty-two additional customers who had purchased from her once or twice. Alibis trickled in. Most of the customers lived abroad. There was no hint of the so-called “creepy” e-mails Kendele had received, nor was there any indication of those customers in the subreddit Ronnie Kuperman gave them. Perhaps there were no creepy customers, and Kendele had only said it to dissuade Debbie from going down the same path. Who knew.

  Peck peck.

  The plants found in Kendele’s lungs matched plants in the pond, but they were commonly found in other ponds and lakes in the area. It probably meant the detectives’ theory about the murder was correct, but there was no way to be sure.

  Peck peck peck.

  There was no DNA match in CODIS, the database used by the bureau, for any of the objects found at the crime scene.

  Peck peck.

  They searched for other similar crimes. Other crimes in which someone was drowned, then buried nearby. Other crimes involving women who sold their underwear online. They found nothing.

  Peck.

  The chickens were getting tired.

  Chapter Seven

  Kenneth Baker should have known better.

  Cocaine? Hell, he snorted the stuff on a daily basis. How could anyone function in this crazy world without cocaine, anyway? Who could even generate the amount of productivity modern life demanded, without resorting to a bit of snow? No, cocaine was fine.

  Alcohol was also fine. No question there. Alcohol was even legal. You could walk into a store, buy a bottle of whiskey, and walk out—just like that, no questions asked. Was there any better way to go to sleep then after a glass or two of cheap whiskey? There wasn’t. In fact, these days he couldn’t manage to fall asleep at all without drinking first.

  But mixing the two?

  He really should have known better.

  And now it was on. Kenneth’s heart raced like crazy. He was overcome with massive waves of euphoria. When the euphoria was gone, he realized he was shaking with rage. Someone was screaming. It was him.

  “—this is how you repay me?” he yelled. “After all these years that we’ve spent together? After all the money I invested in you? I took care of you! I did everything you asked me to do, and now… this?” Tears ran down his cheeks. How could this happen? His life… ruined.

  He grabbed his helpless victim, his fingers whitening as they pressed hard. His victim emitted strange, unintelligible noises, but Kenneth ignored it.

  “We’re done, you and me,” he growled. “This is the end of the road, darling. No! It’s too late to try and make amends now. It’s gone. It’s all gone!”

  He stomped out of the bedroom, carrying his victim with him, not hearing the panicked screeching and moaning. He paused in the kitchen, opened a drawer, and grasped the gun inside. He had never used it before, except at the firing range. He would use it tonight.

  He kicked the front door open, the drug in his blood pumping him with adrenaline. There was no going back.

  This relationship was about to end. Terminally.

  Officer Tanessa Lonnie opened the front passenger’s door of the patrol car and got in, handing a Styrofoam cup of coffee to her partner, Sergio Bertini.

  “There you go,” she said. “I asked them to make it extra strong.”

  “Thanks,” he said, his face sagging with relief as he held the cup in his hand. He sipped from the cup and shut his eyes for a second, taking a long breath. “God, I needed that.”

  “Didn’t sleep again?” Tanessa asked, sipping from her own cup. It was one a.m. They were parked near a small gas station, having just began their patrol shift an hour ago. Tanessa and Sergio were on the graveyard shift—midnight to eight—as they had been for the past six weeks, ever since Tanessa finished her training in the academy.

  “It’s Gabriella. She keeps waking me up,” Sergio said, shaking his head. “She’s driving me insane.”

  Tanessa nodded, her face full of empathy she didn’t feel. The whole thing with Gabriella should never have started; it had clearly been a mistake. Tanessa had warned Sergio he would regret it. But she wasn’t the type to spread salt on the open wounds of a suffering man. She squeezed Sergio’s shoulder—a sympathetic touch, full of support.

  He turned to face her, his eyes red and swollen, his bushy eyebrows raised in an expression of acute misery. When he wasn’t so tired and morose, he was quite attractive. Tan, wide-shouldered, a nice enough face, white teeth. Teeth were important to Tanessa. She was really turned off by bad teeth. He was bald, which was a shame, but he shaved his head on a weekly basis, so it had a certain sexy appeal, if one liked that sort of thing.

  “She screams,” he said. “All day long. Terrible screams. Ear-shattering.”

  “Yeah,” Tanessa nodded.

  “And she bites me! When I try to calm her down she bites me! Look!” He showed her a scratch on his finger.

  “Why don’t you get rid of her?” Tanessa suggested.

  “How? Who would take her?” Sergio asked, his voice dripping with misery.

  “No one needs to take her,” Tanessa said patiently. “You just… open the window, and she’ll fly away.”

  She had told him buying a parrot was an idiotic idea. Her cousin had had a parrot once. She remembered the incessant noise that had filled his house whenever the damn thing was awake. When that parrot died, they’d nearly thrown a party.

  “I can’t do that,” Sergio said. “She would never survive on her own.”

  “Who knows,” Tanessa said. “Think about it—”

  The radio suddenly burst to life. “Attention all units, report of shots fired at the corner of Adams and Cedar Road.”

  Tanessa grabbed her shoulder mic and pressed the PTT button “Four fifty-one, responding.”

  Sergio shoved his cup into the cup holder, and started the car. They weren’t far, no more than five minutes’ drive. Tanessa buckled her seat belt and took one last sip from her own cup before putting it down as well.

  If there was one joy in the midnight shift, it was the absence of traffic. Rush hour was not a thing when Tanessa and Sergio drove through Glenmore Park’s streets, the moon high in the sky. A few cars passed them, the drivers inside quickly making sure their seatbelts were fastened and their car lights were switched on. At one point they slowed down as a man dressed in rags crossed the street slowly, pushing a supermarket cart full of plastic bottles. Other than that, their drive was a smooth and silent affair.

  They were calm as they drove, knowing well that the majority of shots fired calls turned out to be kids lighting firecrackers, or cars backfiring. Even in the case of actual shots fired, the people involved were often far away by the time
the patrol managed to arrive on the scene. They didn’t talk. Tanessa thought about her mother’s upcoming birthday. She had to come up with a good gift. Last year they’d blown it, buying their mother a handbag she never used. She would have to talk to Mitchell and Richard about it tomorrow morning, before she went to sleep.

  They approached the corner of Cedar and Adams and as predicted, the street appeared to be empty. It was usually a quiet neighborhood, the residents a mix of young parents and old pensioners. The right side of the street was populated by two- and three-story houses, their walls wooden in various stages of neglect. On their left was a small park, dark and abandoned, a swing, and a small slide barely visible in the pale moonlight. In the day, Tanessa thought, this park was probably full of young mothers or nannies, and their children. But now the only occupants would be homeless people, asleep on benches. The road was cracked in numerous places, weeds sprouting on its margins.

  Where had the shots come from? Tanessa looked around, alert to any movement. The windows were all dark. She could see no one.

  “What do you think?” Tanessa asked.

  Sergio shrugged. “There’s nothing here,” he said. “Let’s drive around a bit, make the residents feel safe.”

  They drove slowly. The patrol car’s flickering blue lights illuminated the street, signaling to anyone who cared that the police were there, that everything was fine.

  “Hang on,” Tanessa said. “What’s that?”

  There was a tiny alley between two of the buildings, a place in which garbage cans resided. It was cast in shadow and, within, something moved. A silhouette of a man.

  He stood still, facing away from them. As they came closer, the car’s lights partly illuminated him. He was moving animatedly, as if talking to someone. Sergio stopped the car and Tanessa got out, walking slowly toward the man, a hand on her gun.

  “Excuse me?” she said. “Sir?”

  “… such a long time together,” the man was saying. He sounded as if he was crying. “How could you? Two months’ work, down the drain.”

  He was drunk, Tanessa thought. He was a bit wobbly, his stance unstable. She heard Sergio get out behind her as she got closer. Something about the man made her uneasy.

  “You forced my hand!” the man said, raising his voice. “I didn’t want to do it! But did you really think this would go unpunished?”

  “Sir!” Tanessa said. “This is the police. Please turn around very slowly.” She drew her Glock, her muscles tense.

  He swerved drunkenly to face her, and the first thing she saw was the gun in his hand.

  She didn’t even realize as months of training took over, her arms rising to point her own gun at his chest, aiming for center mass, her lips moving, shouting at the man. Shouting at him to drop it.

  She was surprised by how much her mind registered in a very small fragment of a second. The bewildered, unfocused stare of the man as he looked at her, the blue light flickering on his face, blinding his eyes. The way his gun hand moved, rising higher, the fingers clutching the gun fiercely, unwilling to let go. Her ears heard her partner as he yelled at the man to let go of the gun, that he was about to shoot.

  His finger wasn’t in the trigger guard, Tanessa realized. His five fingers were wrapped around the weapon’s grip, as if he held a walking stick, or a ball.

  “Sergio, don’t shoot!” she shouted. “Don’t fucking shoot!”

  The man froze completely, his hand halfway up. Only his lips kept moving, though Tanessa couldn’t hear a word.

  “Sir,” she said, walking even closer, blocking the patrol car’s blinding lights with her body. “Put the gun down.”

  The man stared at her and then looked at his hand. He seemed surprised to see the weapon clutched in it. Slowly, he knelt down and laid the gun on the ground.

  She was already at his side, grabbing his arms and twisting them behind his back. He didn’t resist, quietly saying, “I had to do it. I had to. I had to.” Her handcuffs clicked, fastening around his wrist, the metallic noise a soothing lullaby in her ears. The suspect was disarmed and restrained. No one was about to get hurt. Except…

  “I think he shot someone,” Tanessa told Sergio without looking back. She let go of the man, grabbed the flashlight from her belt, turned it on, and pointed it at the alley.

  There was something in the dark. She aimed the beam of light at it, and caught her breath. A small, open laptop stood on the alley’s floor, its screen shattered, spotted with multiple holes. It was clearly beyond saving.

  “I had no choice, I had to do it. Two months of work, gone! Just like that. BAM. Blue screen of death. No backup.” Kenneth Baker babbled in the back of their car as they drove toward the city jail. Tanessa half-listened to him, feeling exhausted. She was drained after the encounter, the adrenaline that had been pumping through her blood gone now. She wished for some peace and quiet, but it wasn’t meant to be.

  “I mean, you could hear the hard drive spinning. It was definitely still working, but it just wouldn’t start! Do you know how that feels? The fruit of your toil consumed by a… a… machine? I was furious.”

  Tanessa was sure he was. His breath reeked of cheap alcohol, and she’d spotted some white powder traces under his nose, probably cocaine. With such a fun cocktail running through his blood, it was no wonder he decided to go out to the alley and shoot his computer.

  “This never would have happened forty years ago. A typewriter wouldn’t suddenly chew up your novel. Humanity is being enslaved by machines, and we don’t even notice. People need to open their eyes, before it’s too—”

  “You know,” Tanessa said, turning around. “I’m not sure we read you your rights. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law…” She recited the rest of the Miranda warning. “Got that? Remain silent?”

  “My novel is gone!” the man said, his voice brittle.

  “Well, maybe it could have been restored, if you hadn’t shot your computer eleven times!”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “I doubt it,” the man finally said.

  “Yeah, well, you keep telling yourself that. Whatever helps you sleep at night.” She sighed and turned to face forward again.

  “All units.” The dispatcher’s voice filled the patrol car. “There’s a hit and run on Ambleside Drive. Ambulance needed.”

  “What the hell is going on tonight?” Sergio muttered.

  “Turn right,” Tanessa told him. “We aren’t far.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “This is four fifty-one, responding,” she told Dispatch.

  Sergio accelerated, turning on the car’s flashing lights.

  “This is eight-o-one, on our way,” someone said on the radio. It was the medical emergency crew.

  “Hey,” the drunk novelist called from the back. “Where are we going?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Sergio said.

  “You can’t just drag me along! I have rights!”

  “It’s research for your new novel,” Sergio said sharply. “Now shut up.”

  The car swerved onto Ambleside Drive, and Sergio slowed down. It was a small residential area at the edge of town. The street was narrow, cars parked on both sides, the streetlights dim. Tanessa looked intently ahead, her eyes scanning the area.

  “There!” she pointed.

  Someone was kneeling in the middle of the road. As they got closer, they saw it was a man, kneeling by a motionless body. Sergio stopped the car on the side of the road and they both leaped out. Sergio ran for the trunk to get the temporary roadblock gear. Tanessa dashed over to the body. It was a young woman, lying in a pool of blood. The man by her side was saying, “Hang on, just hang on, the ambulance will be here any moment.”

  Tanessa knelt by him. “I’m Officer Lonnie,” she said. “Can you tell me what happened?” She looked at the woman on the ground, who was young—nineteen or twenty—her skin dark, her black hair braided into hundreds of th
in braids. She stared upwards, her eyes blinking in confusion. There was a trickle of blood at the corner of her mouth, as well as a gash on her forehead. Her body was positioned strangely, her torso twisted sideways. She wore a black tank top and black pants. Her lips moved slowly, opening and closing.

  “I… I don’t know what happened,” the man said. “My house is across the street. I heard a large crash, and screeching tires. When I came outside, the car was driving away.”

  “Can you describe the car?” Tanessa asked, bending over the girl’s mouth and listening intently. The girl was breathing.

  “No… Square taillights. I couldn’t see anything in the dark. Is she going to be okay?”

  “We’ll do the best we can.” Tanessa said, trying to sound much calmer than she felt. They were both kneeling in a growing pool of blood. She couldn’t see where it was coming from, but there was a lot of it. She didn’t dare move the girl, knew she should wait for the ambulance. She caressed the girl’s forehead gently.

  “Hey,” she said, half whispering. “Hang in there, sweetie, you’re going to be okay. Can you hear me? You’re going to be just fine.”

  The girl kept blinking. Her eyes turned toward Tanessa.

  “What’s your name, sweetie?”

  “Tamay,” the girl croaked, her eyes suddenly narrowing in pain.

  “Shhhh. It’s okay. Don’t talk if it hurts. Tamay? That’s a beautiful name. Tamay, my name is Tanessa. The ambulance is on its way, okay, sweetie? They’re going to take really good care of you, don’t worry.” She put her hand on Tamay’s cheek, her fingers brushing the girl’s skin. She was cold, Tanessa realized.

  “Sergio!” she called, “Can I get something to warm this girl up? She’s really cold.”

  Her partner was by her side in seconds, handing her his uniform jacket. Tanessa spread the coat over the girl’s body, whispering reassurances the entire time. She heard the ambulance stop behind her, the men inside shouting at each other as they got their gear out of the vehicle.

  “Move, Officer,” one of them said firmly. Tanessa got up and moved aside, grabbing the witness’s arm and pulling him back. They let the emergency crew work, checking the girl, immobilizing her, putting her on a stretcher, wheeling her toward the ambulance. It took only minutes, and the ambulance was already screeching away, not a moment to lose.