Chapter 1

The idea of visiting the grave still seemed unreal. It was a dreamy feeling that started when she and Malcolm parked the car just outside the wrought iron gates—at the stone wall that bordered the cemetery. The dread grew worse when Sterling got out of the car and the autumn chill bit at her cheeks.

She dug her hands into her pockets and listened to Malcolm shut the driver’s side door behind him. The trees on the other side of the gate, which would have been lush and green only a month and a half ago, were partly orange in some places and mostly dead. The branches were skeletal fingers that writhed and curled in the wind.

Malcolm placed a hand on her shoulder. It was comforting. She nuzzled her cold cheek against it and waited for him to sigh, which he did, like clockwork.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

She wasn’t, of course, but saying it out loud seemed disrespectful. If someone, somehow, was watching her from beyond the grave, they’d want her to be confident instead of what she was: horrified and scared.

Sterling Quinn had to put on a good face, so she took the first step into the cemetery.

Abigail’s grave was in the far corner across from the entrance. Behind it was a long expanse of farmland—deathly quiet at this time of day. It made a tranquil backdrop to the headstone, which was still shiny and polished.

Sterling’s breath hitched when she was close enough to read the name, the birth date, and the death date. Malcolm reached for Sterling’s hand but she’d already pressed it up against her lips to repress a whimper.

Abigail.

She stopped a mere foot or so from the grave and let the cold wind blow her hair all around her face. That dreamy sensation had only gotten worse. Apparently, in dreams, things that were written down tended to change when you looked away from them. A clock might read 3:45 p.m. one second, only to be 1:09 a.m. a second later. Same with names.

Sterling let her eyes fall upon Malcolm. She stared hard at the hunched angle of his body—the way his shoulders bowed in.

When she looked back at the headstone, the name was still the same.

Abigail.

“It’s not a dream,” she said. “Is it?”

“An elaborate one. Maybe.”

“A dream that won’t let us leave?”

“But it will. Eventually.”

“If we’re dreaming.”

His eyes glazed over. Where did he go? A memory, no doubt. But which kind? A happy one to distance himself from the moment? Or a sad one where he was forcing himself to remember?

For her, happy memories were a fictional retreat. They had happened but they weren’t what was currently happening. What was happening was pure horror. Anguish. In that way, the sad memories were more real. And to remember them was to do penance.

Abigail was, after all, her daughter.

The saddest memory played through Sterling’s mind.

She parked the car in front of the school. When she looked over, she saw that Abigail was in the passenger’s seat, as quiet and withdrawn as she’d been all morning. On the far side of her, students clambered up the stairs and into the school, their voices combined into a prolonged din.

For most kids, the next move would have been to open the door and walk up the steps to go to school. But not Abigail. She sat as still as a statue, eyes focused on some point between her feet.

“What’s her name?” Sterling said.

“Whose name?”

“The girl who’s bullying you.”

Abigail rolled her eyes. “There’s no girl.”

“You don’t think I can—”

“Why does it have to be that? Why can’t it just be—”

“Abigail…”

“Hold on. Why can’t it just be that I don’t like school? Maybe, you know, I’m flunking biology.”

“Are you flunking biology?”

“No. I’m just saying—”

“If you were,” Sterling said, “flunking biology—you’d tell me, right?”

“Probably not.”

“So, are you?”

“No.”

Sterling almost said, “So you are,” but stopped herself.

“Maybe,” Abigail said, “the teachers are creepy.”

“But you won’t tell me which one it is.”

“Which reason is that I don’t wanna go?”

“Right.”

“I mean, I’d rather not…”

“Okay,” Sterling said. “You’re afraid I’ll come after her. Is that it? You’re trying to protect her?”

“No.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s too big for anyone to solve.”

“No thirteen-year-old girl is a problem too big to solve.”

“Well, this problem isn’t a thirteen-year-old girl.”

“Then what is it?” Sterling said.

“I don’t wanna tell you.”

“Why not?”

“Because…”

“Jesus, Abigail, because why—”

“Because it’s everybody.”

There was real pain in the way she said that. Everybody. She meant it. She didn’t mean it in some exaggerated sense. She meant everybody was part of the problem.

Words failed Sterling. They jumbled up on her tongue and fell out in a kind of gargle like someone had pulled a stopper out of a drain. She could only center herself in a literal way, by facing out the front window and placing her hands on the steering wheel.

“Is it because you’re adopted?” Sterling said.

Abigail, sotto voce: “Yes.”

Middle schoolers were cruel. Insecure. They’d latch onto whatever gave the slightest appearance of weakness and drag you into the dirt with it. Most of them probably came from broken homes. Maybe they wished they’d been adopted by someone who cared for them. This was their way of diminishing someone who had the life they wished for.

But what was the point of playing psychiatrist? Sterling didn’t know what made young people tick any more than anybody else. They were a mystery— a devilish enigma.

For a second it looked as though Abigail might weep. There was a thing she did with her face. The spot between her eyebrows would crinkle. She’d bring her right hand up to her forehead and place her left under the opposite elbow.

She did that and Sterling went to put a comforting hand on her, but she withdrew when her phone rang. That wasn’t a problem. She could let it go. Abigail wanted her to. She was sneaking glances over to see what Sterling would do.

“Abigail…”

The phone continued to ring. It was annoying. Buzzing. The name on it was Wolfe, which meant some god-awful thing from work was intruding on her time with her daughter.

“I’m—”

The ringing continued.

She gripped the phone so tight she thought it might crumble. This was followed by a slight but pregnant moment of silence, during which Abigail put her hand on the door and went to open it.

“Wait,” Sterling said.

Abigail did. She held still against the endless buzzing of the phone.

“Are you okay?”

Abigail nodded.

“Can we talk about this when you get home?”

Abigail nodded again. She left the car with as defeated a posture as Sterling had ever seen. For someone so young, she looked like she was carrying an immense weight on her shoulders—heavy enough to nearly snap her slight frame in half.

Sterling pinched the bridge of her nose and answered the phone.

To this day, she couldn’t remember what the phone call from work was about. But she did remember that that was the last time she saw Abigail alive.

***

When Sterling had first adopted Abigail—only six months or so earlier, once she’d learned Abigail had been in the system her whole life and never had any takers— Sterling had made a habit of picking Abigail up from school and taking her home. Once Abigail’s desire for independence had taken over, the agreement changed. In effect, Abigail walked herself home, so long as she maintained the habit of punctuality.

Abigail had never wavered from this agreement. She’d always shown up on time unless they had agreed otherwise. So, when she failed to show up later that day, Sterling knew for certain that something was wrong.

The street she and Malcolm lived on, Beat Street, was filled with parents. Filled. All their kids went to the same school. All those kids, as seen through the front window, walked home at roughly the same time. Every single weekday.

They walked up their driveways. Their mothers greeted them. Some mothers did so with smiles. Some with their hands on their hips.

At the end of the cul-de-sac, Sterling’s driveway was empty.

Maybe something had come up. That wasn’t impossible, was it? Sterling had thought, trying to calm herself. Someone asked Abigail for help and Abigail—

But what about the conversation we had in the morning? It’s everybody. Who would have asked her for help?

An hour later and the driveway was still a ghost town. Sterling tried calling Abigail’s cell phone—probably ten or more times before she gave up. Then she called the school.

The principal gave her the runaround, which wasn’t unusual. Those sycophantic scum-suckers were always wary of a lawsuit and masters of creating sentences with no meaning. So, it made sense when he said things like: “The premises are vacated in a timely fashion, at which time the students are given the task of ensuring their arrival within an appropriate time frame, as determined by the guardians of said child.” It was like talking to a legal brief.

Luckily, Sterling had been trained to deal with such people. She broke through to him eventually, at which point he said, “I saw her heading out the back door. I’m assuming to avoid the other kids. They’ve been mean to her; I don’t know if you heard…”

Sterling got in her car and drove through every inch of road around the school. She spoke to everyone she saw, showed them a picture of Abigail, and quickly moved on when she didn’t get a positive response.

That yielded nothing. She went home to see if Abigail had shown up. She waited for Malcolm and then the two of them went around knocking on doors.

Nothing.

At that point, she filed a missing person’s report. The police opened a case and put their best guys on it. Malcolm organized his friends at the DA’s office; Sterling used hers at the FBI.

And yet, no matter the work she put in, how many hours she dedicated to finding her lost daughter, there was a quiet voice somewhere in her that told her it was hopeless. Utterly so. No wonder she tried to quiet it down. No wonder she pretended it wasn’t there.

As time went on, she couldn’t pretend any longer. It got louder, and angrier, and screamed at her in the night. The voice followed her around like a parasitic shadow, sucking the life out of her. She could be out at dinner, trying to listen to a friend or a colleague, and the voice would tell her she’d seen cases like this before. She’d known families who’d gone through what she was going through.

How many times did the kid turn up alive? How many 13-year-old girls get kidnapped by a stranger and don’t wind up in a ditch somewhere?

But, then again, maybe it was doing her a favor. Because when she got the call that Abigail had been found, at least she wasn’t surprised.

***

“Your phone’s ringing.”

The words cut through the memory as though Malcolm had hacked at them with a machete. The scene in her mind split down the middle and revealed the grave, the farmland, and the dull overcast sky.

“What?” she said.

“Your phone’s ringing.”

The wound from the hacked memory remained. She should stitch it back together. Not answer the phone and accept this new reality. Stitch it back together and return.

But Wolfe was calling. As always. As usual.

It could have been important. It could have been nothing. She hesitated, looking at the phone screen like she was staring down the length of that machete, aimed no longer at the memory, but at her and threatening her life.

“It’s okay if you need to answer it,” Malcolm said.

“Wolfe’s trying to pull me away from here. I know it. Away from her.”

Malcolm didn’t respond because she assumed he knew there was no point. She always wanted to nestle herself into that cold, unforgiving memory. But when duty called, she was helpless.

She stepped away and answered.

“Where have you been?” Wolfe said. “I’ve tried calling—”

“I’m at the grave.”

“Whose grave?”

“The grave.”

Silence. It lasted almost a full minute. No doubt Wolfe was scolding himself.

“I need you to come in,” he said. His voice sounded worn. As though something had gotten the better of him. “There’s been a murder. It’s a big one.”

Chapter 2

Walking through the doors to the FBI office was like coming back to a broken home. Some parts reminded her of finer moments in her life: cases solved, other agents consulted, friendships forged. But mostly there were memories of when things had gone wrong. And in the FBI, when you got put on a job, it was because something had gone very, very wrong.

She knew the way to Director Wolfe’s office so well that could get there with her eyes closed. As she opened his door and knocked on it on the way in, she could already see the layout in her mind’s eye. Where the desk was. Where the chairs would be. Hell, she could even remember the way it smelled.

All of these fragments came back to her as she opened the door. Nothing in that room had changed.

“Sterling,” came Wolfe’s voice. “Come on in; you’re early.”

Wolfe was sitting with his feet propped up on the desk. In that usual, “I was born handsome” way. His hair was shorter than it had been the last time she saw him. Other than that, he was the same.

Someone else was in there though. Someone sitting in one of the guest chairs, with his back facing Sterling.

She took the seat next to this strange man and snuck a look at him. About her age. Broad-shouldered. He had a square jaw that made him look like an old movie star.

“Who’s the muscle?” she said.

“This is Special Agent Jordan Mitchell.” Wolfe smiled. “I’ve been telling him all about you.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Mitchell said. “Any leads on who did it?”

Sterling shook her head and avoided eye contact with the man.

“We’ll get him,” Wolfe said. “Meantime we’ve got—Mitchell, maybe you should fill her in.”

Mitchell faced her. The way he made and broke eye contact, it seemed like he was calculating his moves. Like he was someone who’d been trained on how to be personable and appear trustworthy.

“You heard of a place called Townshend Falls?”

“East of here, no?”

“That’s right. Idyllic. Worst crime in the last fifty years was when someone poisoned a farmer’s dog.”

He grabbed a file from Wolfe’s desk and handed it to her. Inside was a report from the local police department about a homicide.

“Someone killed the judge?” she said.

“Oliver Greene was the guy’s name. Nice fella. Fair but firm. You know the type.”

“Except this report’s—what, four years old now? And it looks like nobody found the killer. So, I guess you got new evidence.”

“There’s been another murder,” Wolfe said. “Same MO. Whoever did it covered the body in rose petals.”

“Who bit it this time?”

“Local guy.” Wolfe gestured toward the file. “It’s all in there. Reggie Velmer. Last seen at the local watering hole. Was supposed to come home to his pregnant wife. They are not super wealthy but well-to-do by local standards. Anyway, he never came back and the next morning they found him in the tall grass. Nearly had his head hacked off.”

“Hacked?”

“By the looks of it.”

Sterling looked over Velmer’s picture and held it side by side with Judge Greene’s.

“What do these two have in common?” she asked.

“Well.” Mitchell shuffled in his seat. “That’s the thing. Greene was tied down, gagged, and kicked in the stomach until the goddamn thing burst. He was also found at the bottom of an outhouse.”

“So, the methods are different. They don’t have the same hair color, body shape—nothing.” Sterling thought for a second. “The rose petals could be there just to throw us off.”

“That’s why we called you in,” Wolfe said. “We were hoping you could figure this out for us.”

It would mean weeks at a motel. Eating takeout every day. Getting strange phone calls early in the morning. She’d done this long enough to know the ropes and how to live and breathe her assignment.

But despite Wolfe’s appearance of asking her permission, he was just being polite. He was the director. That meant he was calling the shots.

“Could you give us the room?” she said to Mitchell.

Mitchell registered this as a strange request. He shuffled uncomfortably in his seat. Looked to Wolfe for his cue.

Wolfe gave him a nod and he got out of his seat and quickly went through the door. Sterling didn’t say a word until she heard the click of the latch.

“I know what you’re gonna ask,” Wolfe said. “The answer is no.”

“You have no idea what I’m gonna ask.”

“‘You’re about to say, ‘If I go through with this, I want to be put on Abigail’s murder. And, I’d like to have Hoff as my partner.’”

“So, I’m guessing that’s a no? Why not?”

“Because,” he said, “we don’t let agents investigate their own family affairs. And, Hoff is not back. He’s still enjoying the Hawaiian beaches and sunshine. Last time I spoke to him, it seemed like he’s not coming back anytime soon, maybe never.”

“Family affair?”

“You know what I mean. You’re too close. You remember—what the hell was his name? Short guy. With the hair.”

“Oh yeah.”

“Dave…”

“No, no. Daniel. Last name started with an S.”

“Well, whatever,” Wolfe said. “Somebody defrauded his mother out of her life’s savings. We told him at the time we’d put somebody else on it. He decided that wasn’t good enough and nobody could get the job done as well as he could.”

“What happened?”

“What do you think? He had it in his head he knew who the guy was. Nabbed the wrong man. We had to work double time convincing a judge to let him off with a suspension.”

“Daniel Sallust.”

“Yeah, that was the guy. Anyway, you see my point.”

She leaned back in her chair. What would happen if she decided to call an early retirement? Let me run this case or I work somewhere else.

Maybe he’d grumble a bit. Wrap his fist around his thumb. Stick his tongue into his cheek and say, “Fine. But I’m gonna need you to play this straight.”

Then she’d gallivant off into battle, find the man who’d killed her daughter, and bring him to justice. Just like in a Clint Eastwood movie. Dirty Harry, or something like that.

Hell, that’d never happen. To begin with, he’d never believe her. She needed this job. Not for the money—although the money was good, of course. And didn’t everybody need a job with benefits? The benefits at the FBI were enough of an enticement on their own.

No, she needed the job because if she wasn’t doing it, she would go squirrelly. Her brain started to misfire. She got antsy.

“Look,” Wolfe said, “if it makes you feel any better, I’ll find some way to keep you in the loop. You won’t be on the team officially but you won’t just be an idle spectator.”

“And that’s the best you’re gonna give me?”

He nodded. It was a quick little thing, where he lowered his head once before setting it back to resting position.

It’d have to do. For now.

“I wanna know about Mitchell,” she said. “How’d he get a hold of this thing?” She gestured to the file.

“He’s leading the investigation. Had a bit of a mishap with his previous partner.”

“What happened there?”

“Goddamn car accident, if you can believe that. Anyway, he’s in the market for someone to ride shotgun with him. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s ready to take you along.”

“So what?” she said. “I’d be following his lead?”

Wolfe smiled. “We both know how much you like that.”

“I work better when I’m in charge.”

“Don’t we all?”

“Then maybe you should find someone—”

“Listen.” Wolfe let impatience into his voice for the first time. “I know you wanna look for Abigail’s killer and I know you wanna run this investigation, but that just ain’t gonna happen. Now I’m still Director so why don’t we just cut the—”

She smiled. “Alright,” cutting Director Wolfe off.

“Alright, what?”

“I was just thinking it might be nice to get back to work again.”

“You were, were you?”

“Yeah. So, why don’t you put me on the job?”

Wolfe looked like he’d grind his teeth down to nubs if he didn’t stop himself. Instead, he stuck his fingers into his mouth and whistled for Mitchell to come in.

But in a strange turn of events, Mitchell opened the door a split second before Wolfe produced the whistle. The seeming coincidence of their timing drew a smile on both Wolfe and Sterling’s faces. Wolfe even seemed ready to comment on it until he and Sterling noticed the severe expression Mitchell wore.

He was staring at something on his phone.

“What is it?” Sterling said.

Mitchell spoke to Wolfe, almost like he was ignoring her. “She’s in?”

“Why don’t you ask her?” Wolfe said.

“Okay because we have to—”

“Mitchell.” Sterling stood up when she said this. “What’s going on?”

“Get your things. We’re leaving.”

“Leaving—”

“There’s been another murder. Two, to be specific. And whoever did it left more roses on the bodies.”

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