He barely noticed as he drove, his wipers scraping snowflakes from the windshield, Mendoza again into whatever was so fascinating on her cell. The engine hummed, the interior warming, and Rivers’s thoughts were centered, as they had been for a couple of days, on James Cahill.

When Rivers had been a cop in San Francisco, he’d heard about the Cahill family. The Cahills’ wealth, philanthropy, and scandals had been legendary, always cropping up in the news and forever a headache for the department. There had been a little—no, make that a lot—of crazy running through the Cahill generations, and James, even living up here in Bumblefuck, Washington, was heir to a fortune that had existed for a century, or perhaps longer.

Old San Francisco money.

And now, lo and behold, the golden boy was up to his eyeballs in trouble.

Go figure.

Rivers’s fingers tightened over the steering wheel.

“Pretty out here.” Mendoza had glanced up, her gaze straying to the passenger window, where she was watching a couple of horses running through the drifts, manes flying, tails streaming like banners as they kicked up sprays of snow.

He didn’t argue. “Sure.”

She threw him a glance. “Come on, Rivers, even you can stop long enough to smell the roses.”

“Horses. You mean smell the horses.”

“Lighten up.”

He didn’t. His thoughts were dark as the encroaching night as he drove through the ever-rising hills to the Cahill estate, a massive piece of property of nearly four hundred acres that included a working ranch, a Christmas-tree farm complete with inn and restaurant, and a grouping of newer, linked, barn-like structures where Cahill designed and assembled some of those ridiculous, high-end tiny houses. Homes on wheels you could barely turn around in, the kind that made a New York apartment seem spacious. But as small and unique as those little mobile houses were, they were constructed on a vast parcel of land in the Cascade foothills, much of it forest.

Finding a body in that area would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. And the all-points bulletin for Megan Travers’s car had turned up nothing. Then again, the police might not even be looking for her except for the missing person’s report from Travers’s sister, Rebecca, and her statement that Megan had been upset and called her, told her she’d had a fight with James Cahill and was driving through a near-blizzard to reach Rebecca’s condo in Seattle.

But she hadn’t arrived.

That had been two days ago, with Megan Travers already missing nearly twenty-four hours at that time.

Coincidentally, James Cahill had been discovered unconscious and wounded, a struggle evident in his home, a note from someone, presumably the missing Megan, declaring she was leaving him on the very night she had called her sister to say she was on her way.