Prioritize. Pace.

Pace was hard to regulate, especially if too many elements of your life were out of your control.

But he had his priorities straight. If he’d learned one lesson these past few years, it was the importance of putting what counted first.

And Kimberly and their marriage came first.

He drained his coffee, grimacing at the bitter dregs as he set his mug aside.

Until his dying day, he would protect his wife. Care for her. Do everything in his power to ensure no one ever hurt her. Yes, she was different—but that didn’t mean he loved her any less. Life without her was unimaginable.

He couldn’t lose her.

He wouldn’t lose her.

And if that meant he had to take risks, put his own neck on the line, so be it.

Dave pulled a few bills from his wallet, set them on the table, and rose. As he zigzagged through tables toward the exit, half the people in the diner greeted him. Digging deep into his energy reserves, he managed to call up smiles in response.

But coaxing up the corners of his mouth took tremendous effort.

More so after reading about Mavis Templeton.

The coroner may have ruled her death natural, but Dave would bet his life savings—what was left of it—that there was nothing normal or routine about her passing. That it was, instead, highly suspicious.

How the deed had been accomplished without leaving a trace of evidence behind was a puzzle.

But odds were, if the coroner knew where to look, he’d find homicide.

And the police would find first-degree murder.

This was the case she’d been searching for.

Grace leaned closer to the screen of her laptop and skimmed the material on Fred Wilson from six months ago.

The eighty-one-year-old farmer in the next county had been found dead outside his barn, the only visible trauma a gash on his temple. Based on evidence at the scene, law enforcement had concluded he’d fallen and hit his head on the tractor beside him. While the death had been ruled accidental in the end, there had been an investigation because of complaints Wilson had lodged about petty vandalism and pressure tactics from his neighbor to sell him the farm.

Grace moved on to the autopsy results.

The head injury hadn’t been the cause of death. Other than red-flagging the prescription narcotic he took for persistent back pain, the tox screen had been clean.

Most other findings had been unremarkable too. There’d been sufficient enlargement and thickening of the walls of the left ventricle to justify cause of death as cardiac arrhythmia due to ventricular hypertrophy. Chronic heart disease was often the culprit in deaths of older people.

Grace pulled up Mavis’s autopsy and did a side-by-side comparison.

Except for heart issues being the cause of death for both people, there wasn’t much overlap. Both had congestion of the lungs, liver, and kidneys—but that was a nonspecific finding common in most autopsies.