Brynne knew, as did Sara’s other friends, that the simplicity of that house was a reflection of Sara’s nature. She lived well, but possessions weren’t that important to her; she valued her children, her brother, her friends. She wrote because she was a born storyteller, and she confided to Brynne more than once that she sometimes felt a little guilty, being paid so well for something she would have done for free.
Sara, by her own admission, had been making up stories since the age of ten, at first to create refuges for herself, imaginary places where life was kinder and far more interesting, then because she’d grown to love writing so much that she couldn’t stop.
Stories followed her, haunting her, demanding to be told.
Brynne got out of her car and went around behind it to collect the wine.
Dan Summers burst out of the front door, startling her. Beaming that infectious smile of his.
“Let me get that,” he said. “You go on inside, where it’s nice and warm. Sara’s waiting for you in the kitchen.”
Brynne laughed. “Well, happy New Year to you, too, Dan.”
The grin broadened. “Hurry up,” he said. “Eric’s been handing me my ass at World of Warcraft for an hour. I need to get back in there and try to save my honor as a man.”
“I’m hurrying,” Brynne answered, smiling. Halfway up the walk, she turned and called over one shoulder, “Are Melba and the girls joining us?”
Instantly, the grin was gone from Dan’s handsome face.
“She’s busy,” he said. “And the girls are with their grandmother.”
The sadness Brynne saw in Dan Summers was as big as the man himself, maybe bigger.
Brynne wanted to reassure him, but she wouldn’t have known what to say.
Melba was a police officer, a deputy sheriff. And whatever was going on in the Creek at the moment, she’d be in the thick of it. Totally absorbed. Totally committed.
Just like Eli.
CHAPTER NINE
THE BODY RESTED on a cold steel slab, hidden beneath a sheet.
Dr. Alec Storm, suited up in scrubs, was washing his hands at a large sink when Eli left the open doorway to enter the room.
The tile on the floor of that small, cramped space reached halfway up the walls. There was a drain beneath the autopsy table where Jane Doe lay, and the whole setup—especially the competing smells of disinfectant and death—made Eli feel faintly nauseous.
He’d seen his share of bodies, naturally, but it wasn’t something he’d ever gotten used to; each one was unique, of course, with its own tragic or merciful story.
This girl’s obviously fell into the former category.
“Hello, Eli,” Alec said, with a sad smile. “I’d wish you a happy New Year, but that would clearly be inappropriate at the moment.”
Eli nodded in response to the doctor’s greeting. “Sorry to drag you away from your family on a holiday,” he said.
Alec was drying his hands, tossing the paper towel into the nearby trash bin, pulling on latex gloves. Growing up, the man had been Eli and Sara’s physician—everybody’s physician, since he’d been the only doctor in town until about ten years ago, when the local hospital had been built.
After that, three other MDs moved to the Creek and set up their practices—one of them was Alec’s eldest daughter, Marisol. She’d taken over for him when he retired.
Alec hadn’t adjusted to retirement straight off. He’d gone through a second divorce—the first had been the break with Marisol’s mother—and, by his own admission, taken to drinking too much, too often.
When the next election year rolled around, he’d run for coroner, unopposed since his predecessor had died of a heart attack six months before and nobody else wanted the gig. He’d been doing an excellent job ever since, having slowed way down on the booze and found himself a live-in girlfriend named Isabel.
“Sam and I have taken various samples, but that’s about all I can tell you. I’ve been dodging calls from people who can’t get through to you ever since we came back from the scene.”
Eli wanted to protest that he hadn’t been avoiding calls, but he knew Alec hadn’t meant anything by the term. He was a very direct man and Eli understood that because he was the same.
“What is it with the media?” he countered. “What part of ‘no comment’ do they not understand?”
Alec chuckled grimly. “Reporters don’t get very far if they have any comprehension of the word no, Sheriff. They just keep asking until they get some kind of answer, preferably one that fits their personal and professional biases.”
It was rhetoric, Eli knew, so he didn’t reply.
Sam Wu showed up then, clad in surgical duds now, and frowned at Eli. “Are you here to observe?” he asked moderately. He was young, a freshly minted pathologist serving an internship, and he wasn’t out to make friends.
Eli admired Sam’s reserve.
“No,” he said, keeping his distance from the autopy table, not out of revulsion, but because he didn’t want to contaminate anything that might turn out to be evidence. “I just wanted to ask if there’s any sign of sexual assault.”
“Nothing visible,” Alec said. “We did a rape kit, just in case, but if I had to guess, I’d say this attack was motivated by something else. It was violent—no question of that, considering the bullet wound—but we haven’t found any overt signs of struggle. No defensive wounds, nothing unusual under the fingernails. Just a few light bruises on the victim’s right upper arm.” The doctor drew a breath, expelled it with the force of frustration. “Meaning, obviously, that somebody grabbed her—most likely, she tried to walk or run away and the assailant moved to stop her.”
“The full report isn’t finished, but as far as I know, the CSIs didn’t find any footprints,” Eli said, thinking aloud rather than imparting information. “There’s a lot of brush on that lot, but still—”
Sam opened the steaming autoclave on the far side of the room and began plucking surgical instruments from the inside, using tongs, placing them on a sterilized metal tray. “Are you open to wholesale speculation, Sheriff?” he asked. “What I have is mostly intuitive, but I have a good track record when it comes to hunches.”
“That’s true,” Alec interjected. “If I’d listened to Sam, I would have won a shitload of money on last week’s NFL game.”
Sam chuckled, shook his head.
“Right now, I’ll take anything. We’ve got eff-all.”
Sam nodded, setting the tray of scalpels and other wickedly sharp tools on a smaller table near the one where the body was laid out. “I think someone talked that girl into meeting them in a fairly remote place. Maybe they promised her drugs, or money. Maybe there was blackmail involved. It’s all guesswork, but I’d bet my custom-made gaming computer that she was there of her own free will.”