Of the fourteen men she had chosen to share her body with over the years, Ash Castro was the first to excite her. He was a military man, eleven years training grunts at Fort Irwin, the last two in explosive ordnance disposal. Ironic, because he triggered detonations across her entire body and set timed charges in her mind, so that she would go about her everyday duties, and suddenly—BOOM—Ash would be there, blasting into her thoughts in a rising ball of fire and smoke. Tera flew headlong into devotion, a silly, schoolgirl breed of love. Unfortunately, Ash liked to discharge his ordnance on other women’s bodies, many of them, according to the emails she’d read. When Tera confronted him about this, he turned violent—strapped bombs to his fists instead. A mistake. Tera took his best, then broke his jaw and six of his ribs. She left him whimpering on his living room floor.

There followed a long and ugly tailspin. Tera drank too much, slept around, and devolved into her old, uncompromising style of police work. She moved to Vice, a better fit, because the skulls she cracked needed cracking. Still, there was not a great deal of sympathy for her methods. After several rough years, she took a position—at the behest of her captain—with the Detective Support and Vice Division, Missing Persons Unit.

The Luke Kingsley case was supposed to be the jewel in Tera’s crown. He was obviously guilty. It was simply a matter of hammering a confession out of him, or finding Lisa Hayes’s body. Then she could lock in the evidence and nail Kingsley to the fucking wall.

The fact that she hadn’t been able to achieve this burned her deeply. It felt like an insult. It demeaned her. And watching him walk free—alone and ruined, but free—was almost too much to bear.

Her work suffered again. She spent angry months chasing shadows, and hounding Luke at every opportunity. Her frustrations culminated during a routine arrest, when some half-witted perp called her a “fucken dumbass lesbo skank,” and Tera retorted by busting his cheekbone with the grip of her service pistol.

She was given a choice: immediate suspension without pay, or early retirement. She chose the latter.

Six months in Maui, reclining in the ultra-blue Pacific, riding horses across Haleakalā’s otherworldly landscape, and photographing broad, bleeding sunrises. It was the break her body and mind needed. She returned to L.A. and applied for her private investigator’s license. The work was as mundane as she knew it would be, but the slower pace was good for her mental health, and being her own boss had its benefits.