Brad had never dealt with anything like this before, and despite the outward calm he attempted to project, the brutality of the murder and urgency of the situation felt overwhelming. Theirs was a small town sheriff’s office. They weren’t really equipped to deal with something of this magnitude, but unfortunately there was no other law enforcement agency to which they could legitimately pass off responsibility. This case was all theirs.

Brad looked down again at the fat man’s corpse leaning against the dirt side of the ditch.

Nothing was left of the victim’s face, but there was something familiar about his hairline, and while Brad couldn’t immediately identify the man, he knew he knew him. He just didn’t know from where.

Brad, Hank, Mitch and Bill F. started their search. They found nothing on the road or in the ditch, but in the trees and brush beyond were ample areas where a weapon could have been tossed, and they spread outward from the crime scene. Between two scrawny pines, he came across a rough path and saw, in the center of the hardened dirt, a dark spot the size of a baseball that could easily be dried blood.

“Here!” he called out.

With much trampling of weeds and snapping of twigs, the others hurried over. It occurred to him that they should have treaded more carefully, that they might have destroyed evidence. Although most of them were hunters and familiar with the outdoors, none of them had ever worked on anything like this. They should probably be a little more circumspect in their movements.

Mitch crouched down next to the spot, looked at it carefully. “Blood,” he confirmed.

“All right,” Brad said. “Proceed slowly.” He remained in the lead, moving with caution down the primitive trail. It seemed to be angling toward the refuse transfer station, though that was still a good half-mile away. The terrain at this elevation was high chaparral, and the path wound between copses of juniper, holly and overgrown manzanita. He saw no other evidence of blood on the dirt, and was about to stop and suggest that they return to the head of the trail and concentrate their search efforts in the brush around that area, when the path passed over a small rise and ended on the edge of a flat clearing.

He halted, shocked, completely unprepared for the sight that greeted him.

For it was not a weapon that he had stumbled upon but a massacre.

Bodies—he counted twelve, but the wildflowers grew high and there could conceivably be more—lay staggered along the south end of the small meadow. Unlike the man in the ditch, they were fully dressed, the men in white shirts and suits, the women in blouses and skirts. There was no path through the weeds and wildflowers, none of the grasses had been trampled, and he ordered the deputies to walk behind him single-file so as to disturb the site as little as possible.

“Go back and get those paramedics,” he told Mitch, who was bringing up the rear. “Tell them what we have here. I count twelve so far, which means we’re probably going to need more ambulances.”