“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.