“You were a SEAL, Melba. A woman. Isn’t being a deputy sheriff kind of anticlimactic after that?”

Melba had laughed her smoky, torch singer’s laugh. “Anticlimactic?” she’d mocked. “Isn’t it just like a man to think of everything in terms of climaxes?” She’d paused then to enjoy her own joke for a while. “I have two growing girls to care for, Eli. And getting that right is challenge enough for me.”

“Over here,” Melba said, snapping Eli back to the present moment and the lonely expanse of hard ground behind the motel.

He followed her lead, though it was unnecessary because a gang of forensics people crowded around the body.

The victim was—had been—a young woman, probably in her early twenties. She wasn’t wearing a coat, but her outfit—jeans, a long-sleeved blue T-shirt and a pair of knockoff Uggs—was intact.

A small, tidy bullet hole told the tale: she’d been shot in the throat. Her dyed blond hair spilled around her face, congealed blood nearly obliterating the color.

Eli’s stomach rolled, and he swallowed hard.

Looking at this girl, a stranger, he felt sick, not just with revulsion, but with sorrow. Sorrow for all she’d miss out on, dead at such a young age, and beneath that dark emotion lay an even darker one—a cold, quiet rage.

“We’re catching this case,” Melba informed Eli briskly. “Outside the city limits and all that. The Staters are just sharing their resources.”

Eli knew all that without being told, but he didn’t point that out. Melba was thorough, and she liked to make sure all the boxes were checked.

He stepped closer to the body and crouched, careful not to touch anything. The coroner and the state’s people were finishing up, moving away.

He studied her.

She looked vaguely familiar, somehow, and yet he couldn’t place her.

“Any ID?” he asked Melba.

“Nope,” Melba replied.

“Who found her? When?”

“Cord Hollister,” came the answer. “He and Russ Schafer came out here early this morning. Said they were thinking this thaw might hold long enough for them to get the bulldozers in. Clear some space. Maybe even dig a few foundations. They were walking around and Russ literally stumbled across this poor girl.”

Eli stood, shut his eyes for a moment, imagining the shock of that discovery. Russ, the son of two alcoholics, and Shallie Hollister’s foster brother, had been working hard over the last several months to get his act together.

Russ had never been a criminal, really, just a very depressed asshole with awkward social skills. A loner by choice.

As a kid, he’d been a bully—Eli had had a run-in or two with the guy himself—but these days, he was a decent enough dude. Or so it seemed.