Motive? Opportunistic? No link established to previous or subsequent victims except locality. Why choose EF? WHY?

Every minute of what had followed was time-stamped into the neurons of her brain, and they fired together again and again, replaying the memory until her eyes burned and her throat was dry and sore.

A ribbon of steam had been curling its way upward from her coffee cup. In the well between her breasts, sweat was clinging to her skin. The office was too hot, even with the fans on. The sound of heavy footsteps and the weight of a hand on her shoulder.

She had turned around, mouth kinked by a smile, expecting to see Adam, but it was his friend PC Simon Quick. Despite the heat, his face was the color of a winter sky. Wildeve had half risen from her chair.

“God, Si, are you okay?”

A hush had settled over the room, a collective intake of breath. On the periphery of her vision, she was aware of her colleagues huddling in twos and threes by their desks, and then the whispering had begun, like the muttering of leaves on the trees. A thought, as clear as the pealing of the bell from the church near her childhood home, popped into her head.

Something has happened.

She became aware of the knock of her heart in her chest, the flecks of gray in Simon’s beard, the grass stains on his knees, the pinch of her new suede boots. And in that slowing-down of time, her subconscious, making connections for her at dizzying speed, offered up her next question.

“It’s not Adam, is it?”

The words broke open the silence. Even if she lived for a hundred years, she would never forget the way Simon’s mask cracked and fell away.

“Wild, it’s bad,” he said.

“How bad?”

Simon pressed his palms together in prayer, cupped them around his mouth and nose, and blew into the dark space.

“Si—?” Her voice lifted in panic, that single vowel stretching into a plea, although she would not have been able to say whether she was desperate for information or the bliss of ignorance, to never know the truth of what he was about to tell her.

“There’s been a—” Simon pushed a hand through his hair, and she was struck by how much he looked like a boy and not a man, and how strange it was that the mind filled up with random thoughts, as if they might cushion the blow of his words. “Someone called in a—” His lip trembled. “I got there first. Well, me and Theo did.”

His eyes would not meet hers, and so she watched his mouth move, trying to catch each of the words as they tumbled out. She wondered where his police dog was, but mostly she wanted him to get to the point. This preamble frightened her, as if the delay meant it was already too late.