The uncertainty remained, a pall over everything. And what was Kitty’s part in this? Why would she pose for those photographs? Was she working with Johan—some elaborate plan to set Luke up?

No, that didn’t sound right. But then, nothing did.

Tera reached her car. She flopped behind the wheel and called Johan. Straight to voice mail. She swiped to her tracking app once again. Luke’s signal had gone dead, meaning the device she’d attached to the bottom of his car had been destroyed. The last recorded location was approximately ten miles west of Pale Bone. Zooming in revealed it to be in the desert proper, several hundred yards off-road. Had the job been done? If Tera went there, would she find Luke slumped behind the wheel of his Dodge Caliber, a bullet in the back of his skull?

No. The car was there, but Johan was too careful to leave the body where it would so easily be found. Besides, a bullet to the head was too quick and clean for his Viking style. He’d opt for something more . . .

“Brutal,” Tera said, breathing deeply. This was, perhaps, the only thing she was certain of. Everything else was tangled up in misery and mayhem. What she would give for something solid—a single, dependable truth.

There was small consolation in knowing that her intuition could still be trusted. She had sensed that there’d been more to all of this, and she’d been right.

His name was Ramón.

A picture began to form from the moment her flashlight picked out the two dead dogs in Ramón’s driveway. Just a sketch to begin with, but it took shape as she proceeded to the barn (with its rows of yellow flowers and lab equipment), then made her way through the empty house. It was not the picture she expected, and certainly not the picture she wanted.

“No,” she said. “Dear God, no.”

Tera stood in Ramón’s hallway with the front door open and a night breeze blowing dust across the floor. In the space of forty minutes, she had gone from an absence of truth, to having it surround her completely.

She called Adrian Kraemer, her partner on the Lisa Hayes case.

“You at work?” she asked.

“My night off,” Kraemer growled, a hint of apprehension in his voice. “First one in ten days. My fella and I just opened a bottle of wine and queued up The Crown on Netflix.”

“You’re going to wish you didn’t answer your phone,” Tera said. She closed her eyes, fighting to keep her voice even. “I’m going to need you to pull some overtime, dig the Hayes file out of the refrigerator.”

“What’s going on, Tera?”