Chapter One

      “How is this a cold case?” Detective Olivia Watson squatted down beside the body with the bashed-in head lying on the plush office carpet.

      The pool of blood looked fresh enough. The alleged murder weapon, a civic volunteerism trophy from the dead man’s own desk, had already been bagged and packed away by the CSI trading notes with the medical examiner nearby. A uniformed officer and two building security guards were holding back a bevy of shocked and grieving office staff from the Kober & Associates PR firm, as well as curious onlookers from other businesses in the building beyond the yellow crime scene tape that blocked off the victim’s outer office door. The two Kansas City PD detectives on the far side of the room interviewing the distraught secretary who’d discovered her boss’s body after her half-day spa appointment seemed to have the crime scene well under control. So why call in representatives from the Fourth Precinct’s Cold Case Squad?

      Olivia rested her forearms on the thighs of her dark wash jeans and studied the sixtyish man’s still features again. The glass-and-steel high-rise in downtown Kansas City was almost as new as the murder itself. She was used to working cases with pictures out of dusty boxes and autopsy reports that raised a lot of unanswered questions. She’d worked with skeletal remains and mummified corpses and alleged victims whose bodies had never been found at all. Most people assumed the Cold Case Squad was an easier gig than working a fresh investigation. She liked to think of it as a smarter assignment, requiring more insight and diligence than other divisions at KCPD.

      Olivia was a third generation cop, like two of her three brothers. And the third one worked in the medical examiner’s office. After two years in a uniform, five years in vice and the past year working cold cases, she’d learned that killers