“I have no idea,” Earl Ray said, but it was something.

Something damned important.

Something that might just breathe some much-needed life into the Clarion. As Jeanette was picking ice cubes from the floor, Earl started for his desk when Charity texted him again. “About damned time.” But he wanted to talk to her in person and was about to punch in her number when he saw that the message was actually another picture. “What the fuck?” he said as the image filled his screen.

“Oh, shit! God.” Gerry was practically hyperventilating. “Dad! You gotta see this. It’s about Charity. Jesus, can this be right?” Jeanette had straightened and was staring at Gerry’s screen. She let out a scream.

“No, oh, no!” she cried.

But Earl hardly noticed. On his phone, he saw a picture of Charity herself. Not a selfie. This one showed her face beaten and bruised and . . . for the love of Christ . . . it appeared as if she, like Willow Valente, was dead as the proverbial doornail.

* * *

At his desk in the station, Rivers swilled black coffee, eyed his computer screen, and studied the information sent over from Detective Tanaka in San Francisco. Graphic pictures of the dead woman confirmed what they already knew: Charity Spritz had been murdered. The theory was that she’d been caught off guard at her motel in Oakland, where the attack had taken place, possibly in the parking lot—though there were no cameras or witnesses at the scene. Then her body had been taken to the airport and left. The SFPD was working with the airport security cameras and the airlines, hoping to find out if the killer had flown out on a late-night or early-morning flight, but that could take a while.

Tanaka, though, had assured him that they were working around the clock on Charity’s murder. Rivers knew firsthand how the SFPD handled homicide cases. They were efficient, but it would take time.

He wondered how Charity Spritz’s homicide connected to Megan Travers’s disappearance. There had to be a link.

He heard Mendoza’s footsteps before she appeared at his desk. With one glance at the computer screen, she stopped dead in her tracks. “Oh, jeez. Brutal.”

He agreed. No matter how many violent attacks and murders he’d witnessed, he’d never become inured to the savagery or the viciousness of what one human could do to another.

“What was Charity Spritz doing in San Francisco?”

“I’m hoping someone at the Clarion might have some insight. I’ve got a call in to Earl Ray Dansen, but he hasn’t gotten back to me yet.”

“Don’t newspaper people get in early, like hours before dawn?”

“Apparently not Earl Ray.”

“Maybe he’s just busy.”