NATE WAS closest to the overdose, so he flipped his lights on and flew up the main street of Skamania, named after the nearby waterfall of the same name, and headed past the hospital where Emma worked. If he drove another twenty miles up he’d hit the pass, which cut the state in half, but instead he turned abruptly into the Mill Creek neighborhood at the edge of town.

The neighborhood had an air of quiet desperation about it, a mix of run-down houses with cracked windows and rusted mobile homes, the siding peeling in ugly, jagged strips. The yards were overgrown and neglected, choked with weeds, the faint scent of garbage filling the air.

Nate had been called here for domestic assaults, drug busts, and once a murder. But increasingly, the calls were about opioid overdoses. As such, the lieutenant had recently told his detectives to investigate both fatal and nonfatal overdoses in an effort to trace the drugs back to the dealers.

The overdose was a young woman of about twenty-five. She’d passed out as she was driving, the car coming to rest in the middle of the cul-de-sac, her little girl in the backseat. The paramedics were giving her naloxone when Nate arrived.

“Witness is over there,” said Bill Petty, one of the paramedics. He jerked his chin toward a scrawny woman with dark, unwashed hair standing next to a squirming four-year-old.

“I live there,” the witness told Nate, pointing across the street to a rusty mobile home. Her voice was scratchy, like she’d smoked too many cigarettes. “I was doin’ dishes when I saw the car sorta driftin’. She was slumped over the wheel.”

Nate took a few notes and thanked the woman before calling social services to get the girl. He noticed a familiar figure in the crowd gathering near the ambulance.

“Stevie McGraw,” he growled under his breath. The local teenage scumbag watched the events, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. His black hair hung in greasy sheets, gaze sharp behind horn-rimmed glasses.

By now Bill and the other paramedics had revived the mother.

“I have a headache,” she mumbled, her eyes bloodshot.

“Well, of course you do,” Bill replied briskly. “You weren’t breathing for a while. Your brain didn’t have any oxygen.”

“Why don’t you tell me where your dime baggie is?” Nate asked her.

Still dazed, she pointed at the glove compartment. Nate snapped on a pair of latex gloves and reached into the compartment, extracting a baggie with a couple of white pills and a lot of residual powder. He held up the pills and examined them, surprised there were any left.

“Oxy?”

She nodded.

“You could have killed your daughter.”