“Then it got dark,” Finn continued. “And he knows any of the search teams on the slopes would be pulled in. Decides to grab Simon as planned. Gets himself into position and waits. Goes after him. Disables him. And Simon is not a small man and is in fairly good shape, so it pretty much had to be a blitz attack. Stashes him maybe in a trunk because it’s easiest, quickest. Comes back up here.” He shook his head. “I’d prefer to hope he saw an opportunity and took it rather than followed a plan to grab Simon when he already had this victim in hand.”

“So would I,” Quentin said. “But I agree with Bishop; it’s more likely Simon was planned.”

“We need to establish a timeline,” Bishop said. “Dr. Easton can help with that. We need to know how this victim died, and when. And how long he could have lasted under the kind of torture evidenced here.”

Diana hoped the sudden return of her queasiness didn’t show. She had seen mangled bodies before, in the field and at the body farm. Too many. Still, it was so hard to be professionally detached from horrors. From seeing them and knowing all the terrible things that had been done to what had been a living, breathing, feeling human being. And especially so when she was very afraid more horrors were waiting.

—

SIMON CAVENDISH TRIED to wake himself up, wondering fuzzily why his alarm hadn’t gone off. Because he thought he’d been sleeping a long time. His eyelids scratched against his corneas, and his head felt stuffed full of cotton and ached. Pounded, really, right on the edge of a migraine.

Maybe that was why it was so dark.

That must be it. He had a migraine, and so he’d gone to bed and used the blackout drapes in his bedroom to make sure no light got in to disturb him. So his head would stop hurting. That was why it was so dark.

For a while he lay there, his eyes closed again, vaguely satisfied now that he understood why his head pounded and why he was lying in the dark. But then he tried to shift slightly, because he thought one of his arms had gone to sleep.

He couldn’t move.

Simon stopped trying for a bit, thinking about that. Trying not to listen to the little voice in his head that was telling him a lot more was wrong than just one of his thankfully rare migraines. He tried to remember going to bed with a migraine, but the last thing he remembered . . .

He’d left the bank. Yes. Walked home. No—started walking home. Turned off Main to walk the two more blocks to his condo. And then . . . what? And then the migraine had hit him all of a sudden, hadn’t it? It must have, because he couldn’t remember . . .

He couldn’t remember anything. Just a blinding pain in his head, and then nothing.