Read on for a sneak peek at the next Violent Crime Investigations Team mystery!

Chapter One

(i)

(WEDNESDAY, 8:32 A.M.)

Annie never saw Paul drive away, her husband getting smaller and smaller until he was a speck on the horizon. Instead, all of him, every unlucky molecule, suddenly vanished, like those characters on Star Trek dematerialized by the transporter.

The ingredients, the essence, of Paul Behrens departed—his sad face, that daily uniform of Oxford shirt and khaki trousers, the sound of his Nikes on the kitchen floor, the stale paper smell he carried around with him the last few years, which was like putting your nose close to the pages of an old book. Just like that, those things no longer existed where Annie was. Here, then there. Although it was not a there she could actually name.

The way he left shouldn’t have mattered, at least not more than the fact of his leaving. But somehow it did. It seemed aimed at her, like something she wasn’t smart enough to get.

Annie could picture it. Paul full of his English teacher thing, using a literary reference to explain his departure. It would take five minutes because there would be a book or play she’d never read, and he’d have to tell her about it—like she was a slow student. He’d start by saying something about the cat in Alice, and Lewis Carroll’s writing style, and she’d stop listening after the first twenty seconds.

That, of course, became a problem later when the police had questions. For more than a year, Annie had been in the habit of not listening to Paul. She was a kind of expert at it. Her superpower was envisioning him across the kitchen table or on the other side of the family room, hearing the sound of his voice with its puking sincerity, all of it locked in her head, without being able to tell you anything specific he said.

The first thing Annie did remember about the day Paul left was that moment when she was lying on the sofa in the family room and heard her phone ping. She was covered in an afghan, still wearing her nurse’s scrubs from the previous day’s three-to-eleven shift. With the blinds closed, it was impossible to tell the time. The house was quiet and dark. Paul had already left for his job. Jesse and Claire were off to school.

Her head was pounding, her mouth dry. Did she drink a whole bottle of Zinfandel before she fell asleep?

She found her purse on the floor and dug out her phone. 8:32. Her brain immediately did the math: six hours’ sleep. On the home screen, she saw a text message from Jennifer Steeley, the principal at Brookwood Middle School: