3

Preach forced away thoughts of Claire Lourdis and concentrated on the crime scene. With the steady hand of a surgeon, he moved the flashlight slowly over the body and across the top of the water. The sump was about twenty feet wide and smelled like a sewer. He walked the perimeter, stopping to examine the impressions in the mud, poking the light into the trees and clumps of undergrowth.

No sign of a weapon. No evidence of a struggle.

Just the looming presence of the forest, thick and dark, secrets lurking like ghosts.

Bill started walking toward him. Preach held out a hand. “One of us is enough. I want forensics to check for shoe prints.”

“All I see is animal tracks.”

“Me too,” Preach said. “Which is why I want forensics. The kid didn’t fly in here, and neither did the perp.”

“The path we came in on looked clean,” Terry said. “Think someone swept it?”

“That, or they came in another way. I don’t see another path. But we’ll have to check where these woods lead in the daylight.”

“Any first impressions ?”

As he thought, Preach blew into his hands to warm them. “Two shots, close in, small caliber weapon. One in the gut, the second in the right temple. A kill shot.”

“You mean, like a professional?”

Preach shook his head. “Too messy for a pro. If you’re in that close, why not just go for the head ? No scratches or bruises on the face, either.” He looked down at the body. “If I had to guess, I’d say it was someone he knew. Or at least knew well enough to get in close.”

“Drug deal gone bad?” Terry asked.

“As good a guess as any, at this stage.”

Bill crossed his fleshy arms and peered into the water. “What were

they doing out here, anyway?” he muttered. “It smells like shit.”

“I don’t think anyone was doing anything,” Preach said, “besides dumping a body. There’s no sign of blood on the trail or anywhere else. I suppose the kid could’ve been standing in the water when he was shot, but that doesn’t ring true. As you said, there’s nothing here. That kid was tossed.”

“Makes more sense,” Terry agreed, but Preach had already moved on. He could hear forensics lugging their equipment down the trail, and he wanted another moment alone with the body. A barred owl hooted in the distance as the detective knelt again beside Claire Lour- dis’s son, studying his face, trying to read his story before the floodlights came on and forensics treated the body as the lifeless husk it was.

David Stratton, star quarterback. Town golden boy. A demigod in his insular little world.

What had brought him to this foul, rotten, mud-soaked conclusion to a promising young life ?

Who had looked into his eyes and pulled the trigger? What had happened between them?

What dreams and thoughts and regrets had passed through David’s mind between the first shot and the second, knowing he was about to die?

When Preach turned back, vaguely aware of the commotion behind him but lost in his reverie, he saw a handful of new faces in the clearing, dressed in blue nylon jackets and hovering over a pile of equipment.

Lela Jimenez, the new deputy chief of forensics, met Preach’s gaze. “Okay to proceed, detective ?”

“Yeah,” he said, with a final glance at the body. “Do your thing. Make sure to drag the water for a phone.”

Lela flicked a switch and a flare of white light lit the clearing.

Later that night, when he had finished with the crime scene, Preach left the woods and returned to his car. So far, forensics had uncovered nothing new. He hoped the full report would add some color.

He started the engine and sat with the heater blowing, knowing what he had to do. More than anything, he wanted to go back home, climb in bed with Ari, and dream away the memory of the boy’s sightless eyes. The last thing he wanted to do was face the mother’s grief. It was the worst part of the job, or one of the worst, but Preach wasn’t about to hand it off to anyone else. Not when he was the only officer with any real homicide experience. Not when he knew the mother personally.

Nor was he willing to wait until the morning. It wasn’t his place to judge whether Claire’s suffering for her missing son was worse before she knew the truth, or after.

At 4:00 a.m., the town of Creekville was as quiet as an ocean bottom, the night a burden of dark water pressing down on the detective as the empty streets whisked by, bringing him closer and closer to Claire Lourdis’s house.

He drove down the oak-lined sidewalks and expansive lawns of Hillsdale Street, then through the tiny resting heart of downtown, a few blocks of shops and restaurants centered around the repurposed cotton mill. The closer he drew, the more it felt as if he were journeying back in time, pushing through some kind of reverse womb where death awaited on the other side, instead of life.

The worst death of all.

The death of a child.

Soon after passing the Wandering Muse bookstore, Ari’s former employer, he turned left onto Highline Street, a busy two-lane road that linked up with an old state highway. A mile down Highline was the first of three entrances to Wild Oaks, one of Creekville’s more desirable neighborhoods. After glancing at the GPS, he turned into the second entrance, past a series of houses with front-yard gardens enclosed with chicken wire to keep out the deer. Most of the residents had accented the pine needles covering the ground with boulders and locally sourced wood chips. This neighborhood was built when he was a kid, and he remembered how his mother had once scoffed at the new construction and labeled the new owners as hopelessly bourgeois. Now, the quaint bungalows and wooded tracts of common space were the very definition of Creekville, and flat grassy lawns that reeked of normalcy were frowned upon.

Still, it was hardly bohemian. Most of the houses had undergone extensive renovations and cost far more than most working-class people, including Preach, could afford. The housing prices in Creekville were pushing out all of the artists and students and starry-eyed dreamers who had given the town its character in the first place.

On his left, 122 Howard Street appeared, the address Terry had given him. Preach parked on the road and sat with his hands gripping the wheel, eyes shut for a long moment before he stepped out of the car.

The walkway to Claire’s front door stretched before him like the plank of a pirate’s ship dropping into the icy dark. He took a deep breath and started walking, gravel crunching underfoot. Halfway to the two-story house, twin lights kicked on beside the front door.

Preach knocked and shifted on the balls of his feet as he waited, his badge held high.

The door cracked open, stopped by a chain. A moment later it widened, and Claire stood in the doorway wrapped in a silk bathrobe, hair mussed and falling past her shoulders in gentle waves, her long face smooth and beautiful even without makeup. Though she looked more mature and dark circles floated beneath her eyes, no doubt due to worry and lack of sleep, Claire Lourdis was still the same bombshell she had been in high school.

Preach saw the recognition in her eyes at once. Normally when someone answered the door at night, they did so with sleep-filled eyes, blinking, addled from the sudden interruption.

Claire looked very much awake. She peered right through him, as if trying to see into the back of the car parked by the curb.

“Claire, do you remember me ?”

She swallowed before she spoke. “Of course, Joe. Everyone knows you’re back. I’m sorry about last year.”

He gave a curt nod. “Me too.”

Her eyes flashed, and he knew the niceties were over. “Do you have him?” she said quietly. “Tell me you have him.”

He stepped forward and lightly touched her arm, trying to project as much strength as he could in the hope that some of it would flow into her. “Claire,” he said as gently as he could. “I’m sorry. We—”

She smacked his arm away, hard. “What do you mean you’re sorry? Where is he ? Where the hell is he ?”

Preach gripped her by the arms, just hard enough to stop another blow. “We found him in the woods, Claire. He’s gone. I’m so very sorry.” In the split-second it took her to register his words, her head cocked to the side in a confused manner, as if disoriented. Then her eyes rolled back and she ceased to have weight. He caught her as she fell, eased her to the ground, and held her as she screamed, a knife of grief slicing into the calm center of the night.

When she finished screaming, her nails dug into him as she clawed her way to her feet, using him as leverage. She looked as if she might bolt, but he applied an ounce of pressure on her arms, suggesting, and she convulsed with sobs as she fell into him. It took all of his willpower to maintain his own composure.

“Joe,” she moaned. “Joe, my baby boy.”

He hugged her tight, trying to absorb her pain. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered.

“Tell me it’s not true. Tell me it might not be him.” She gripped the hair on the back of his head so hard it made him wince. “Tell me, Joe!” It was the one thing he couldn’t do.

When Claire was coherent again, Preach told her how her son had died and where they had found the body, though he wasn’t sure she was listening. Worried she might be a suicide risk, he flipped through her cell phone and called her mother, a local retired nurse. After her own breakdown on the phone, she rushed over to console her daughter. He left them huddled together on the sofa, weeping, calling out the name of their lost one.

Unable to imagine their grief but feeling it twisting inside him, he drove home and drank bourbon on the screened porch until he was numb enough to sleep.

A piercing siren sounded over and over in Preach’s dreams, a foghorn on a boat adrift in a wine-dark sea. The boat started rocking as the waves crashed in, and an image of Claire’s face was superimposed in the moonlit sky like an ancient goddess gazing down on her creation with infinite sadness. Then it was Ari’s face and she was leaning over him, shaking him awake.

“Joe! It’s almost eight. You slept through the alarm.”

He blinked and sat up. “I did?”

“When did you get home ?”

The events of the night flowed back into him like a returning tide of polluted water. “I don’t know. Late. Then I stayed up a while.”

“Why?”

With a sigh, he dressed for work and gave her a recap.

Ari pressed a hand to her mouth. “God, how terrible. I can’t imagine.”

“I know the mother,” he said. “Or I used to. We went to high school together.”

She approached and cupped his cheek in her hand. “I’m sorry. You’re handling the case ?”

“Yeah. Though . . .”

“What?”

“I’m afraid it might get worse when I dig. Worse for Claire, I mean.”

She took his hand. “Does it have to be you? Maybe it’s time for Terry to step up ?”

“He’s got a full plate right now, and he’s not ready for this. Besides, I think I . . . I should be the one. It’s why I’m here, you know?”

Preach had over a decade of homicide experience in the war zone of the Atlanta PD. Besides Chief Higgins, who had cut her teeth in Charlotte, no other officer in Creekville had worked lead on a homicide.

She reached up to kiss him. “I understand. Come to breakfast, okay? I made French toast.”

“You did?” he said, surprised.

He followed her to the table and saw the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time sitting beside a plate of buttered toast, along with a cup of coffee and a bowl of scrambled eggs.

He gave her a rueful grin. “Cute.”

Ari never had time to cook, but even when she did, culinary innovation was not one of her talents. He always appreciated the effort, but decided to reach for the Cackalacky sauce. The eggs would need it.

She sat across from him, dressed in gray sweats and one of Preach’s old T-shirts. It was nice to see her relaxed. These days he usually saw her in business attire, and he knew she resented the conformity of it all. But she had kept the same hairstyle, a disheveled look that he loved, and that resembled a pile of straw assembled by a diligent family of squirrels. She also still wore her silver thumb rings, and instead of covering up the twin Jane Austen tattoos on the undersides of her wrists, half hope and half agony, she had added another: the scales of justice, just above her left ankle.

As they ate, she pored over a legal brief while he made the daily news rounds on his cell phone. On the local scene, it was all about an issue that had inflamed Creekville in recent months: the push from developers to buy up real estate downtown, change the zoning laws, and shove in big-box stores and high-rise apartments. The locals were fiercely opposed to change, and everyone Preach talked to was convinced the developers would lose. But he knew money talked, and walked, and sifted through nimble fingers beneath tables.

Nationally, the news had grown so absurd he had stopped paying attention. The unending litany of agenda-driven vitriol did nothing but divide a nation that needed desperately to be working together.

Still, his eyes flicked over the headlines. Children buried alive after an earthquake in Mexico, displaced families wading through a filthy river in Bangladesh, another Hollywood mogul crashing through life with the mindless depravity of a Greek god.

He slowly closed the phone. “Remember when we used to sit side by side and talk over breakfast ?”

She glanced up. “Mmm?”

“Do you really have to read that right this very moment ?”

She frowned. “Yeah. I kinda do.”

“It’s Sunday.”

“You know I have an important witness interview tomorrow.”

“Life’s short, Ari. The whole world is buried in their cell phones or in their work.”

He glanced away, knowing his outburst was unwarranted, and she laid a hand over his. “I know you’re processing last night.”

“Yeah.”

“Listen, I understand you’re busy all day, and I’ve got to run, but maybe we can meet for lunch tomorrow, if I get done in time?”

From her tone and the way her gaze slipped away, he could tell that the very thought of meeting him during the work day stressed her out. “It’s okay,” he said quietly.

“You’re sure?”

He downed his coffee, stood, and carried his dishes to the sink. “Knock ‘em dead tomorrow.”

The Creekville police station was located on the second floor of a brick building with white awnings, situated above a gluten-free bakery and an ice cream parlor that specialized in frozen custard.

Even though it was Sunday morning, the station was buzzing with the nervous energy of a murder. As soon as Preach passed through reception, Chief Higgins called him into her office and slapped a piece of paper on her desk.

“What’s this ?” he asked. “Preliminary autopsy?”

“An autopsy already?” the chief said. “What are we, McDonald’s for the dead?”

“It’s the second murder in a decade.”

“Check back tomorrow.”

“They find a phone ?” he asked.

“Nope.”

The chief was a top-heavy redhead with oily skin, a thin determined mouth, and arms as thick as barrels. Her personality, like her voice, was an odd combination of Southern matriarch, hardened police officer, and Zen Buddhist.

“Tell me about the kid,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Does he have a record?”

“You spent too much time in Atlanta,” she said. “This is Creekville High we’re talking about. He was a model student, no discipline problems we know of.” She held up a palm. “Though views can get distorted when the star quarterback is involved.”

“Who was looking into his disappearance ?”

“Bill.”

“Great.”

She wagged a finger. “Be nice.”

“Nice doesn’t solve murders.”

She picked up a stress ball marked with a yin-yang symbol, leaned back, and started gently kneading it. “You’re right. Talk to Bill, but you should probably start from scratch.”

“I was going to anyway.”

She nodded, and her mouth tightened as she gripped the ball harder. “Dig, Preach. Coaches, friends, neighbors, Sunday School teachers. Short-term pain can be forgotten. But the longer this thing goes unsolved . . . this is one of those crimes that can tear a town apart.”

“Thanks for the added pressure. What I can promise is that I’ll do my job, the best I know how.”

“I want a list of suspects by Friday.”

Before he left, he picked up the piece of paper the chief had set in front of him. “What’s this?”

“Bill’s report on the missing person case. Look at the second paragraph. The night David disappeared, one of the neighbors heard a disturbance at the Lourdis house. A screaming match.”

He finished reading Officer Wright’s notes from Friday, October 3. In response to Bill’s inquiry, Claire had blown off the incident, saying her son was a typical angst-ridden teen upset with his mother’s boyfriend. “So Claire and David were fighting about her new fling. That’s not uncommon after a divorce.”

“The divorce was years ago.”

“It’s hard to see your mom date around.” A long breath seeped out of him. “God, she’ll never forgive herself if she drove him away that night.”

“Probably not. But you need to ask her a few questions.”

“That’s the plan.”

“You need to ask her if she owns a gun.”

He started. “With an execution-style shot to the head? A mother? I don’t think now’s the time—”

“We’re not positive about the time of death, but it looks like it’s going to be soon after he left the house. How many people could he have run into?”

“It just takes one. He was distraught and could have gone anywhere. Who the hell knows what happened?”

“That’s right,” she said softly, pointing a finger at him. “It just takes one. So ask.”