Total pages in book: 110
Estimated words: 103552 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 518(@200wpm)___ 414(@250wpm)___ 345(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 103552 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 518(@200wpm)___ 414(@250wpm)___ 345(@300wpm)
West appeared here and there, always looking serious, talking in low tones, occasionally glancing over to me with concern. Normally, I liked watching him work, but not this. Not with the dead woman inside.
When my ride showed up, I was glad it wasn’t someone I knew well enough to chat with on the way back to Sawyers Bend. I didn’t feel like talking. I wasn’t sure what I felt like. Scared. Sad. And angry. So fucking angry. Whoever killed my father hadn’t stopped with him. And this woman, as far as I knew, had been innocent.
You don’t know this has to do with Prentice’s murder, I reminded myself. Maybe she had an angry ex, or someone thought a jeweler had diamonds hidden away. It could be anything. I tried to make myself believe it, but the picture wouldn’t gel. This hadn’t been the first body we’d come across in the search for my father’s killer. It felt like too much to hope it was the last.
Chapter Twenty
WEST
Iput my SUV in gear and reversed out of the driveway, leaving behind the officers still at the crime scene. Not my town, not my jurisdiction. Wolf Mountain hadn’t seen a murder like this in decades, and their chief had been happy to let me stay once I’d explained who I was and why I was there. He’d cleared his throat, given me a hard look, and said, “Best you stick around then, but keep your hands to yourself. Don’t want the evidence gettin’ spoiled.”
I knew what he meant, and he was right. But I watched, and I listened, and I saw so much more than I wanted to. I couldn’t get the image of her body out of my head. The jewelry designer, Anna Novak, had been thirty-one, single, and a resident of Wolf Mountain since birth. The house she lived in had been her grandmother’s, and she’d made a pretty decent living recreating the nature she’d loved with precious metals and stones. Had she made the necklace Avery and Sterling found? We’d never know. Anna wasn’t just dead. She’d been murdered. Brutally.
As far as he could tell before the autopsy, the medical examiner estimated she’d been stabbed over twenty times, possibly as many as forty. That many stab wounds indicated a chilling level of rage. Based on the pool around her, she’d lost most of her blood, which indicated her heart had continued beating. She’d been alive through most of the attack.
I was a cop, but I hadn’t always been a cop in a small town. I’d seen bodies. I’d seen murder victims. More gunshot wounds than I cared to think about. But this murder held a level of savagery I’d never seen before. As far as we could tell, whoever killed her had been there for that purpose.
It begged the question of why.
Nothing seemed to be missing. The small house hadn’t been ransacked. The only disorder came from the fight Anna had put up to save her life. Chairs overturned. The kitchen table was in pieces on the floor. Broken glassware. The bloody handprints on the sliding glass door. I guessed they’d come from Anna crawling, trying to get away, desperate to live. Smears on the floor said they dragged her back and finished the job.
I tried to stay impartial. I couldn’t be a cop if I let my emotions get twisted up with every case. There were too many. I wouldn’t be able to function. But this... I swallowed, trying to force the roil of feelings down into my chest, to lock them away. I didn’t have time for this, for fear, or pain, or grief. But when I thought of Anna’s body on the floor, all I could see was Avery and that knife slice across her shoulder and down her arm. She’d escaped with barely a scar, but seeing Anna’s brutal attack, her life stolen, reminded me how close Avery had come to the same fate. They had so much in common. Small-town girls who’d grown up to be independent businesswomen. They were the same age. And they were connected by that necklace.
Was it coincidence that Avery and Sterling had been poking around and Anna ended up dead? It could be. We hadn’t found any proof that this murder was related to their search for evidence. But the timing...
It’s not that I don’t believe in coincidences. I’ve seen enough to know they happen. But they’re a lot less common than people think they are. This didn’t feel like a coincidence. Had the attack on Avery and Ford actually been about this damn necklace?
That I couldn’t answer, but I intended to.
One thing I did know: Harvey might be up to something. He surely knew more than he was telling, but he hadn’t done this.
I didn’t have proof, and I’d be getting an alibi. If he didn’t have one, his name was going straight to the police chief of Wolf Mountain. But my gut said this wasn’t Harvey or Edgar, but was screaming something else. Something Avery wasn’t going to like.