What she really needed was a grisly murder to get things back on track. Ever since she’d closed the case of the murdered call girls, things had been freakishly slow. That had to be contributing to her odd mojo lately. Sam was always happier when she was in the midst of a complex case. All this idleness left her with too much time to brood.

Sinking into her office chair, she took a moment, just one moment to think about what might’ve been… Oh how she’d wanted that baby! For so long she’d been convinced she couldn’t get pregnant again, and she’d begun to make peace with that. After three miscarriages, one of them an ectopic pregnancy that had nearly taken her life, Sam had been told the likelihood of ever conceiving again was practically nonexistent. Certain she was infertile, the use of birth control had never occurred to her when she and Nick started burning up the sheets.

Leave it to him to prove the doctors wrong, she thought with a laugh that quickly became an ache when she remembered the joy of those few days last month after she realized she was carrying his baby. Recalling his reaction when he’d figured out what had her so freaked out and emotional… He’d been so excited. They’d barely had a chance to celebrate beating the odds when a violent confrontation with a perp led to the miscarriage.

“No sense dwelling,” Sam muttered, trying as she had over the last month to let it go, to move on, to do what she always did when the one thing she wanted more than just about anything was once again snatched away from her.

A knock on the office door startled her out of the morose thoughts, and Sam looked up, grateful for the interruption.

Her partner, Detective Freddie Cruz, and Detective Tommy “Gonzo” Gonzales stood in the doorway.

“Got a minute, L.T.?” Cruz asked.

“Sure. Come in.” The two men exchanged glances that put her immediately on alert. “What’s up?”

“We’ve been working on something—on our own time,” Gonzo said.

“Oh yeah? What’s that?”

“The guy who owns Reece’s house,” Cruz said.

Sam’s heart slowed to a crawl. She’d been meaning to get back to that, but she’d been so preoccupied that it had been hard to focus on anything. A while back they’d found items relating to her father’s unsolved shooting at the rented home of Clarence Reece, a man who’d murdered his entire family and then later carjacked Sam before taking his own life. Tracking down the owner of the house had turned into an exercise in futility.

“What’ve you got?” she asked.

“Gerald Price,” Cruz said, placing an open file folder on Sam’s desk.