“Oh.” Zena sniffed loudly as the windows in the cruiser started to fog. “It’s just so weird. I finally got a text from Willow, right before I came over here and . . .” She shuddered, scrolled, then handed her phone, through the open partition, to Rivers in the back seat. On the small screen was a photograph of the dead woman, but in these images she looked very much alive, still nude, but posing suggestively with what appeared to be the same gun that took her life.

Rivers’s eyes narrowed. “When did you receive this?”

“Like an hour ago . . . maybe. Hour and a half? I don’t know.” Her voice cracked.

Only ninety minutes ago, but the woman in the bed appeared to have been dead for much longer. “Did we find Willow Valente’s phone?” he asked Deputy Taggert.

“Not that I know of.”

“I’ll call upstairs to Brown,” Mendoza said and punched in a phone number. Rivers knew she didn’t want to take the steps up to the apartment again, was trying to minimize any alteration to the snow pattern on the stairs in case the killer had left a footprint or some trace evidence.

Rivers asked Zena Wallace, “Did she ever send you something like this before? Any other suggestive pictures or—?”

“No!” Zena squeaked. “Are you kidding? It’s not like I’m a perv—or she is, for that matter. I mean, I never thought Willow would do anything like that. She’s kind of weird, like I said, a little quiet and shy. So . . . I don’t get this. I don’t get it at all. It’s just not like her.”

“. . . okay, thanks,” Mendoza said and disconnected. “No phone found yet,” and her gaze collided with Rivers’s as they both understood that the pictures of Willow with the gun were sent to Zena Wallace’s phone after Willow Valente was dead. So, no, she hadn’t offed herself, not without an accomplice. She had been murdered.

Mendoza glanced at Zena’s phone, where the picture of the nude girl gazing seductively into the camera was still in the frame. “That’s not Willow’s bed,” Mendoza pointed out. “Not the twin bed upstairs. Willow’s has different sheets too and a white headboard. This bed”—she pointed to the screen—“doesn’t have one at all. And is much larger. Check out how she’s sprawled across it.”

But the bed in the small image on Zena’s phone looked familiar. And then Rivers got it, and he felt a frisson of excitement surge through his blood.

Mendoza was asking, “You’re certain Willow doesn’t have a boyfriend?”

“I already told you: no!” Zena was shaking her head violently.

“One she might have recently broken up with?”