Chapter 1

      Friday, 8 a. m.

      “Well, that’s less than helpful,” Maggie said of the snow.

      The white flakes drifted lazily downward, landing on the frozen grass, the bare limbs of the large trees, the bloodstains sprinkled across the worn stones and the very stiff body of a young man who had not dressed well for the weather. Yet exposure hadn’t killed him—he had been dead long before his body froze.

      From the deep red stain blossoming from the center of his chest, Maggie Gardiner assumed a gunshot—or shots—had been the likely cause of death. Something had penetrated his internal systems to leak his lifeblood out across his white shirt and over the stones beneath him, which marked, coincidentally, a grave. But Maggie didn’t say so; declaring cause of death was a pathologist’s job and she worked as a forensic specialist. Her job would be to find the evidence around said death in order to help her colleagues at the police department determine who had walked away from this boy’s last encounter.

      Which would be more difficult to do with each passing moment as the snow slowly covered up the body, the blood, and all her evidence.

      She had arrived at the scene immediately before the assigned detectives, and now felt them standing on either side of her, Jack Renner to her right and Thomas Riley to her left. Renner, tall, only a bit dark and not so handsome, and his partner, distinctly shorter but lighter in both coloring and personality.