Culver Creek, Pennsylvania, population 14,335. It was home to the Everluster Paint factory and the Rixby Potato Chip plant. The town was named for the body of water that wound through it. The creek was barely more than a trickle of water much of the year, though it swelled up after heavy rains, and during the spring rainy season it resembled a raging river. On a few notable occasions it had overflowed its banks and flooded homes and businesses in and around Culver Creek’s downtown.
Right now it was somewhere in between, thanks to the rain they had the previous day. Sage Dorian stared at the water as he sat in his department-issue car eating a tomato-and-Swiss sandwich.
Culver Creek’s two factories meant that the small town would always have a certain number of transients, and that led to the occasional problem, but for the most part this was a quiet, working-class town. Major crimes were nearly nonexistent, except, of course, for that one—the one that made Culver Creek famous in the crime forums.
A nineteen-year-old unsolved murder was the reason he had up and moved to this sad little town in the middle of nowhere. When he thought about it too much, he’d start to wonder if he was as mentally stable as he pretended to be. He feared the answer. Moving to a strange town because of a little girl he’d never known who had gotten killed there nineteen years ago was hardly the most impulsive thing he had done. He owed his whole career to an obsession with web sleuth crime forums that stemmed from an entirely different unsolved murder.
It was how he had wound up in law enforcement, first as a uniformed officer and then as a detective in a small Pennsylvania city. He had job security and just enough work to keep him from being too bored. But he’d thrown it all away when he saw the job posting that someone from the web sleuth forum had shared with him.
Two weeks later, he headed to the town, which was somewhat notorious on the forum, for a job interview.
Five months ago, Sage Dorian sat in the Culver Creek police department trying his best not to sweat through his interview suit. Rayanne Lawrence drummed her fingers on the desk as she reviewed his resume. Culver Creek’s chief of police didn’t rate a big shiny office, but it was her own private space, which was more than any of the other officers in the department had. Her fingernails, like her hair, were cut short and practical. Sage guessed her to be around thirty-five. He attempted to do his best Sherlock Holmes on her, trying to read her life story in the condition of her skin and the way she wore her clothes.
From the way she held herself, he got the impression she hadn’t grown up with much. Maybe she was raised by a single mom. Was she from Culver Creek or a nearby town? If she was from here, she would have grown up in one of those apartment buildings downtown or maybe one of the sad little houses near the town’s two factories. He had been in Culver Creek all of twenty minutes, but he had spent a lot of time reading up on the town via internet forums, and he got the impression of a closed-off town that didn’t trust outsiders much. For them to make Rayanne Lawrence, a woman, chief of police, she would probably have to be from here. She would have worked her way up from the bottom. He liked this about her. He felt a kinship with her.
“So, I have to ask,” she said after a few moments, “why are you applying for this job, Sage?”
She spoke in the blunt, direct way of a cop. He knew he wasn’t wrong about her working her way up the ranks. He also knew this wasn’t just some canned job interview question. She was genuinely mystified why someone with his background would leave a city police department, where he was on track to be promoted to lieutenant and later captain, to come to this backwater burg and take what was effectively a dead-end detective job. He knew the right answer was not that he was looking for a challenge.
Folded into the smallish chair that sat across from Rayanne’s desk, Sage shifted in an effort to get comfortable. He found that most furniture seemed to be constructed for someone of a smaller stature.
“I think it would be a good fit for me,” Sage said.
Rayanne nodded speculatively as she gave him an appraising look. A support bar in the chair dug into the backs of his thighs, and it took every ounce of his willpower not to shift around again. He didn’t want to give the impression that he was squirming beneath her gaze. It felt like this was what she wanted, and for one conspiracy-theory moment, he entertained the thought that she had deliberately chosen this too-small chair for the interview because she wanted him to be uncomfortable. Of course, that was absurd. She wouldn’t have known how tall he was until he showed up here.
“I’m just wondering if you’ll find the pace of things here a bit slow for your liking,” Rayanne said. “We don’t have too many murders.”
He wondered if she was baiting him.
“If memory serves,” Sage said, “wasn’t there a notorious murder in this town some years ago?”
She raised one eyebrow at him, and her lips twitched into what could have been called a smirk.
“You’ve done your homework.”
“Comes with the territory,” he said.
“Well, I don’t want to burst your bubble, but that was probably the last exciting thing to happen in this town, and that was nearly twenty years ago.”
Was it weird to describe the murder of a little girl as an “exciting thing”? Sage thought the word choice made him even more uncomfortable than the chair he was sitting in, but the murder had occurred long before Rayanne was a cop. Temporal distance could make people forget about the human victims of old tragedies. He wondered what the cutoff point was when a murder victim ceased to be a human and became a sort of mythical figure. He figured it had to be more than six years. Six years hardly seemed to be any time at all.
As if she could read his mind, Rayanne asked, “Where do you see yourself in five years?”
I want to have caught my sister’s murderer, he thought, but of course he didn’t say that out loud.
“I’d like to be in a position where my work makes a difference, where people are more than just numbers.”
“The town council has mandated that the department add a detective to our staff,” she explained. “There was a series of incidents, nothing too serious, but they all happened to occur right in a row and no arrests were made.” She ticked them off one by one on her fingers. “A series of businesses downtown were burglarized, a woman was attacked while walking home from work one night, and then someone stole some equipment and fixtures from the park. As crime waves go, it was fairly mild. So if that’s the sort of police work that would suit you, the job is yours.”
A month after he got the job, he had solved the three crime wave cases. Well, the one—the missing park equipment—had already been solved. That had been local teens messing around, and since some of the guys on the force knew some of the kids’ parents, they had handled things quietly without arresting anyone. Sage traced the downtown burglaries to a meth addict living in one of the apartment buildings in town. That took less than half a day. Finding the woman’s attacker required a little more digging, but in the end it all stemmed from a love triangle and a case of mistaken identity.
Sage had been on the job five months, and Rayanne Lawrence had been right about the slower pace. Detective work in Culver Creek was boring as sin, but that was all about to change. This morning he had asked and Rayanne had granted Sage permission to tackle Culver Creek’s notorious cold case, the murder of Lily Esposito.
But it was a different murder on Sage’s mind as he watched the creek and finished his sandwich. Last night he dreamed about Melodie. His sister showed up at his front door, much the way she had shown up at his college dorm room the last time he saw her. In his dream, she kept trying to tell him something, but her voice was too quiet or there were too many other noises for him to hear what she said. He awoke frustrated, never having heard her words. Well, he didn’t need a dream interpretation guide to know what that meant.
Memories of the last time he had seen his sister started to come back to him, and he crumpled up the last few bites of his sandwich in the paper wrapper and shoved it into a plastic shopping bag. He didn’t have time for that. He had a murder to solve.