THREE COLD NIGHTS

A DETECTIVE MAX GRADY THRILLER

KJ KALIS

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2024 KJ Kalis, BDM LLC

eISBN 978-1-955990-59-2

ISBN 978-1-955990-60-8

All rights reserved

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved, no part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise including technology to be yet released), without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book. The content is not to be used for AI training without permission.

The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

Published by:

BDM, LLC

ALSO BY K.J. KALIS:

New titles released regularly!

If you’d like to join my mailing list and be the first to get updates on new books and exclusive sales, giveaways and releases, click here!

I’ll send you a prequel to the next series FREE!

OR

Visit my Amazon page to see a full list of current titles.

OR

Take a peek at my website to see a full list of available books for direct purchase.

www.kjkalis.com

1

Detective Max Grady slipped out of the back of the stale-smelling room in the basement of Saint James Roman Catholic Church on Marsh Avenue, avoiding the sidelong glance of Frankie Turner, whose eyes seemed to be following Max as he slipped away. Luckily, Frankie was busy talking to someone. That was okay by Max.

As Max pushed the metal door open, using the back entrance to the church to escape outside, he sucked in a deep breath, clearing his nose of the lingering smell that was a combination of what he imagined to be decades of incense mixed with a vague mustiness that he couldn’t place. Using his fingers, he raked through his dark hair, pushing it away from his face. It had grown out and was drooping over his forehead. He knew he was due for a haircut, but like so many things in his life, it had taken a back seat to work. Looking over his shoulder, he pulled closed the jacket he’d hastily thrown on over his pants and Pittsburgh PD shirt, covering his badge and gun.

Max checked both ways and then made his way across the street to his car in long, loping strides. The church parking lot was small. He’d decided to park down the block to avoid the inevitable crush of vehicles leaving the meeting at the same time. As he made his way to his car, he reached up and tugged at the collar of his shirt. Instead of a suit, the usual garb for a seasoned detective with the Pittsburgh Police Department, Max was wearing a pair of dark work pants and a Pittsburgh PD polo shirt. Though he’d been reinstated a few months before, he wasn’t quite back to wearing suits yet. There was something about them that seemed way too confining. His Lieutenant, Jerry Williams, seemed to be okay with it, then again, Max was even less concerned about what Jerry thought of his attire now than he had been before. They were so short-staffed that it really didn’t matter what Max wore as long as he got the job done.

The reason for PPD being short-staffed was gruesome by any account. They still hadn’t fully recovered from the attack at PPD headquarters by Liam Reid the year before. Several dozen officers had been lost in the most deadly direct attack that any police department had suffered in the history of the United States. Liam had released a deadly dose of pharmaceutical-grade fentanyl into the HVAC units as retribution for a false arrest, one made at Max’s hand. A lot of officers had died that day, more than two dozen with dozens more spending more than their fair share of time in the hospital recovering.

Many of them had never come back.

Max hadn’t been a police officer at that time. He’d already been fired. Despite that fact, Max had stopped Liam, but there was not much he could do about the bodies that were strewn across the floor at police headquarters. The memories of seeing the bodies of people he’d worked with for years lurked in his mind daily. They’d been lifeless on the floor, their lips turning blue as their respiratory systems shut down. At the moment of the attack, it didn’t matter if they didn’t like him. Max knew he’d ruffled a lot of feathers in his career. What had mattered in that moment was saving them.

Saving Cassie.

As Max got to his car, he pushed the painful thoughts away. He slid inside, started the engine, and shifted his car into gear, heading down Marsh Avenue back towards the church. As he did, he saw a trickle of more people from his AA group leaving the building. That included Frankie Turner, his sponsor, who’d apparently finally broken away from the conversation he’d been having. Frankie did nothing more than give him a subtle nod as Max drove past, Frankie’s flat cap perched on the top of his head, his white beard making him look like he should be part of an advertisement for a fisherman’s association. Max’s shoulders tightened. Frankie had wanted to talk. Max was sure of it, but he didn’t have time to wait. He had other things to do that morning.

As Max had been doing for the last few months, he circled the corner and headed back towards his own house. That wasn’t his stop, though. Twelve minutes from his AA meeting—he knew the exact time because he’d driven it so often—he pulled into a square, brick office building on Syracuse Street and parked his car next to the building. At the door, he let out a long breath and pulled it open, marching toward the elevator like a man who was headed off to the gallows.

At least that’s the way that it felt to him.

After riding the elevator to the third floor, Max stepped out onto a carpeted hallway, the walls covered in aged beige wallpaper, the burgundy carpet matted and worn. He walked past two dark wood doors and opened the third, a doorway that was only marked by numbers on the outside, 316.

Inside the office, Max was confronted with the same scene he had not exactly enjoyed since the attack on the Police Department. Though everyone, from the police chief on down, had called Max’s efforts to stop Liam Reid and rescue his fellow officers heroic, especially given the fact that he was no longer with the department, it had left him a mess. More accurately, he’d been a mess before that, but a mess under control. In his mind, the incident he’d experienced with Liam had just opened a can of worms he could no longer ignore. That had landed him with a job offer to return to PPD, but only under one condition, that he seek professional psychological help at the hands of Dr. Steven Kersevich.

It had taken Max a couple days to decide, but in the end, he relented. He wanted his job. Lieutenant Williams had told him there was no negotiating. It was go to therapy and he’d be welcomed back, or no job. There was nothing to discuss.

Max sat and stared at the glass coffee table in front of him. It had a box of tissues and a few worn magazines that were from the year before, the entire setup covered in a thin film of dust, as if the cleaning company had missed it the last time they were in. Max blinked once, staring at the curled corner of one of the magazines. He heard the door click open. A man with dark hair and square, black-rimmed glasses stuck his head out. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. Max got up and walked toward the man standing in the doorway. Max had the same paltry question in his mind that he did every single time he came to Dr. Kersevich’s office— Why did they have paper magazines? It seemed like everyone was on their phone all the time. Did anyone even read magazines anymore?

2

Dr. Kersevich seemed to ask Max exactly the same questions every single time Max reported to his office. Dr. Kersevich would adjust his glasses on his nose, settle into his chair, and stare at Max. “So, how are you doing?”

Max never really knew how to answer that question.

So he didn’t.

That day, things weren’t any different. “I just went to an AA meeting.”

“How was that?”

A predictable question. Hadn’t they taught any other questions in psychiatry school? “It was fine. The guys are okay.”

“Do you feel like you are making progress?”

Max shifted in his seat. “Progress?”

Dr. Kersevich raised his eyebrows. “Yes.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if you were going to come to one of our sessions and tell me that you’d made progress, what would that look like?”

Oh boy. It’s gonna be a long session. “I don’t know. I guess I am. I’m not drinking.”

“That’s good.” Dr. Kersevich wrote something on his tablet using one of those plastic pencils that was made to write on a screen, not on paper. “Do you miss it?”

Max looked away for a moment. Dr. Kersevich was a police shrink, the kind of guy that Pittsburgh PD sent cops to who had just been through a traumatic experience or ones who were burning out from the stress. Max knew that Dr. Kersevich was reporting back to the department. No specifics, he’d been told, but the doc was on the department’s side, that was for sure. It made it hard to be completely honest. Then again, even if Max could be completely honest, would he?

“Maybe. Sometimes.” Was that vague enough to keep him out of trouble?

“That seems like an honest answer.”

Seems? Who was this guy? “It is. What am I supposed to say?”

Dr. Kersevich didn’t answer. “Are you still having the bad dreams?”

Max felt his face flush. If you shot your father, wouldn’t you be having bad dreams too, Doc? “Ah, yeah. Sometimes.”

“Are they getting any better?”

Max just looked away.

Exactly forty-nine minutes later, Max walked back out the same door that he had entered, not really feeling any better than he had when he had walked in. It wasn’t Dr. Kersevich’s fault. It was just how it was. The weight of what Max had been through had finally caught up with him. After a few unsuccessful stops and starts in therapy, Max was now going regularly. That was more due to a hearty bit of pressure from the police chief and Lieutenant Williams than anything else. Like it or not, Max now reported to the department’s shrink once a week. After hearing his initial story—how Max had managed to stop Liam Reid’s attack on PPD, Dr. Kersevich looked back at Max through his thick glasses. He crossed his legs and said the words that Max knew he would never forget. “Now, let’s start from the beginning.”

The problem was the beginning of Max’s life was probably worse than where he’d ended up.

After sharing with Dr. Kersevich during their first session that he’d had to kill his own father to protect his mother, had a disabled brother who had the same violent streak as their father, and that his mom had died the year before, Dr. Kersevich did nothing but look away at the window for a second and then back at Max. In a solemn tone, he said, “We have a lot of work to do, Detective Grady.”

In that moment, Max realized that no degree was needed in order to look at his life and tell him it was a mess.

After his session, Max stopped outside on his way to his car, sucking in a deep breath. It wasn’t just the memories that were stalking him, there were lawsuits too. As Max walked to his car, he knew that the only reason he had his job back after what had happened with Aiden Branch’s warrant service was because he’d charged into police headquarters and saved a bunch of his brothers and sisters in blue. In any other circumstance, he’d still be without a badge and would probably be working somewhere he couldn’t get into trouble—at a dry cleaner, stocking shelves, driving trucks.

As Max slid back into his car, having spent the majority of the previous hour digging through memories in his life he had no interest in reliving, Max realized he felt tired. Exhausted, really. It was the kind of tired that felt like someone was pressing on his forehead. It was more than just a physical weariness. It was the kind of exhaustion that came from deep inside, as if he was carrying something he just couldn’t put down.

After weeks of it haunting him, Max had talked to Dr. Kersevich about it. The doc had just shrugged his shoulders and shifted in his seat. He seemed to do that a lot for some reason. When he did speak, his response wasn’t particularly comforting. “Max, we’re digging around in a lot of your history. You’re gonna feel tired. It’s a lot of work to reprocess all of these memories.”

Max shook his head as he drove away. Reprocessing all of the memories had ended up giving him nothing more than a whole bunch of letters behind his name, and they weren’t exactly qualifications. The diagnoses included everything from PTSD to OCD, with depression and anxiety as the icing on top. Every time he thought about it, Max got angry. He felt himself gripping the steering wheel a little tighter as he drove. He hated all of the diagnoses. He wanted to be more than just a bunch of letters.

He just wanted to be himself again. Whatever that meant.

Max tried to ignore the thoughts that were circling in his mind as he drove. Dr. Kersevich was absolutely convinced that reliving everything from the night that he’d shot his father to the moment that he carried Cassie Reynolds, his dying partner, out of police headquarters into a waiting ambulance, her lifeless body just one of the many that Liam Reid wanted to destroy, would somehow help him.

Max wasn’t so sure.

Thinking about it as he headed to the office, he realized that it wasn’t just Dr. Kersevich that had an opinion about how Max needed to move forward. His sponsor, Frankie Turner, and the group of guys at his AA meetings seemed to have their own ideas as well. They called it “working the steps.” It was a reference to the twelve healing steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Max had gotten as far as dealing with step one, agreeing that he was powerless over alcohol.

Sort of.

But at least those guys didn’t give him a hard time about talking. Max could go to the meetings and listen, knowing that the other men in the group had used alcohol as the same kind of escape that he had. Some of them talked, a lot. Worse, they repeated themselves over and over again. Bob Fippiano was the worst offender. It seemed like he told the same story about how alcohol ruined his marriage to his beloved wife Rosie over and over again. Max had considered going to another meeting, but he liked the guys as much as he liked anyone, which wasn’t a lot. Like most people Max ran into, they were tolerable. Trying another meeting without Bob there had a distinct downside—those guys could be worse. Max’s thoughts focused on Bob. If Max could handcuff him to his chair and tape his mouth closed, the entire meeting would be better. Max sighed. On the positive side, with Bob dominating the conversation, at least Max didn’t have to share too much about his own personal life.

Not that there was much to tell.

By the time Max got to police headquarters, he was in a foul mood. In his mind, he would have rated it as a seven out of ten in terms of feeling surly. He got out of his car, leaving it in the lot across from police headquarters, locked it up, and walked in, only offering a wave to the desk sergeant. She was a new gal, brought in from one of the outlying districts. He didn’t know her name.

Max paused as the elevator doors opened, then changed course and took the steps upstairs to the detective bureau. The last thing he wanted to do was be stuck in an elevator with someone who wanted to chat with him or thank him again for what he did the day of the attack. He was tired of it. Real tired of it. He pushed the door to the detective bureau open and paused, taking in what was in front of him.

The attacks on PPD hadn’t changed the décor in the office at all. It was still all gray—gray tile, gray walls, gray desks grouped in pairs facing each other, framed by a large office at one end of the space and a set of interrogation rooms on the other. The only punctuation to the grayness were the black trash cans and the semi-colorful prints of semi-notable landmarks around the city. Max walked toward a desk at the far edge of the cluster, eyeing Lieutenant Williams’s office. Per usual, the door was closed. Lieutenant Williams seemed to be on the phone with someone, his hands flailing in the air, his face wrinkled into a scowl. Max didn’t know who Jerry was talking to. To be honest, he didn’t care.

Max shoved his hands in his pockets as he walked across the floor, staring down, feeling the weight of his pistol on his hip. At least when he’d come back, Jerry had been nice enough to give him a desk in the back corner, away from the flow of people in and out of the office with all of their questions and pats on the shoulder. He sat down at his desk and caught his reflection on his computer screen. The temples of his hair were getting grayer. The rest was dark, but the cluster of hair near the sides of his face looked like they’d been painted the same color as storm clouds. Dr. Kersevich had commented on it. Said he’d had a patient early in his career who had developed a gray streak near his forehead, a reaction to childhood stress, the body’s way of protesting what it had been through. The doc had followed up by asking Max if it bothered him. It didn’t.

Max hunched over his desk and logged into the Pittsburgh PD database, focusing on the unsolved files that he and Cassie Reynolds, his long-term partner, had open. Their relationship was holding on by a string, yet another one of the casualties of Max’s life. Though Max had saved her life, and she had said thank you, their relationship hadn’t been the same. Why, Max wasn’t exactly sure. But like most things in his life that he didn’t understand, he just ignored it and moved on.

Max shifted in his seat. There was paperwork to complete on two of their cases, long forms to be filled out with every bit of minutiae that the prosecutor’s office required in order to charge someone with a crime. Normally, Cassie filled out the paperwork, but since he’d been back, things had changed. He was making an effort. It was small, but still an effort, nonetheless. Max used a single finger to tap on the down arrow on his keyboard, noticing all of the blank spaces in a report on a restaurant theft. The situation was the same in the other cases they had open. He sighed. Everything in Max wanted to get up and run out the door, preferring to work on a case out in the field. Biting the inside of his lip, he forced himself to sit at his desk and stare at the paperwork.

It was miserable.

After reading through the update to the case they were working on, Max was just about to get up and retrieve a cup of coffee from the break room down the hall when Cassie crossed the floor. She was wearing one of the many suits she had, a navy-blue jacket and matching pants paired with an orange blouse that seemed to set her strawberry-blonde hair aglow like a flame. Next to his hand that was resting on the edge of his desk, she set a cup of coffee. He looked up at her. She gave him a nod, her expression blank. She didn’t say anything. “Thanks,” he offered. Cassie turned on her heel before he had a chance to say anything else, retreating to her desk. Max wrapped his fingers around the cup of coffee. He could already tell that it wasn’t particularly hot. The old Max would have gotten up and dropped it in the trash can, but the new Max, the one that spent a lot of time drinking bad coffee at AA meetings and who was trying to improve, took a sip. He tried not to grimace. It wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t hot. He stared at it for a moment. Like most things in his life at that moment, it was disappointing.

Max glanced over his shoulder at Cassie. She only blinked in response and went back to staring at her own computer. As he looked back at his computer, he felt a twinge of guilt. She felt saddled with him, the brilliant but troubled detective that the Pittsburgh Police Department couldn’t seem to get rid of and couldn’t seem to live without. He feels a little bit sad about that, as if part of him wanted to rise to the occasion, to be a better man, to be a better detective and a better friend to people like Cassie. But every time he thought about it, the whole process seemed way too complicated.

A second later, Cassie approached his desk, her body stiff, as if she was walking toward a lion’s den. “We need to talk about the case.”

“Which one?”

“The car theft ring.”

Max jiggled the mouse on his desk, his monitor coming to life. Those were the notes he had just been looking at in the pile of cases that weren’t closed. “Something happened?”

“Didn’t you see the message from Williams?” Cassie crossed her arms in front of her chest.

“Nope. I just got here right before you.”

There was a pause. It was a silent acknowledgment of two things: one, that Max had once again ignored messages from their boss, and two, that Max had seen his shrink that morning. He cleared his throat. “What happened?”

“Three more cars got ripped off. This time, whoever these guys are, they broke into a dealership. Took three custom Mercedes sedans right out of the showroom.”

Max shook his head. “I guess we need to go and take a look, huh?”

“Yeah. I guess we do.” There was an awkward silence between the two of them. Neither of them moved. Max shifted in his chair. He felt unsure. The feeling surprised him a little. Did Cassie just expect him to jump up and follow her out of the office? Did she have something else she needed to do before they left? The uncertainty startled him. He glanced down at his desk and then up at Cassie. “How’s Happy doing?”

Max saw a slight shift in her expression. Happy was Cassie’s dog, a yellow lab who perpetually had a smile on his face, hence the name. “He’s good.”

“Did you do the dog park this weekend?” It was a question. He was trying.

“No.”

“Well, it was nice weather for a walk,” Max said, his voice strained. “I hope you were able to get out with him. I know that makes you happy.”

Cassie stared at Max for a minute, her mouth open as if she had no idea what to say, then turned on her heel and walked away without any comment.

What did you do that for, Max? Could you be more awkward?

Max straightened the pencils on his desk, pulling them out of the cup and lining them up next to each other. He kept five pencils on his desk, the old-fashioned kind that had to be sharpened, along with two red pens, two black pens, and two blue pens. He carefully put them back in the cup, the pencil points down, the pen tips up so he could easily see the color-coded caps. He glanced over at Cassie, who had her bag slung over her shoulder. I guess we are going somewhere. She looked at him, as if she had watched his entire pen-checking process and gave him a wave.

It was time to go. Max stood up, dropped the now cold coffee Cassie had brought him in the trash and walked toward her. “Let’s go do some detective stuff,” he muttered under his breath.

When she didn’t answer, he stared at the ground. Part of him wondered if that was the only thing that would make him feel better.

3

Adam stepped away from the podium that was at the front of the classroom where he had just been teaching an introduction to statistics class. He unplugged his laptop from the projector that nearly every classroom at Belmor University had and shoved it into his backpack. Staring at the now empty room, the students scurrying away like rats leaving a sinking ship, he shook his head. He zipped his backpack closed.

By their last test scores, he knew his students weren’t absorbing his teaching. Plainly said, they weren’t getting it. Adam slung his backpack onto his shoulders, then sighed. How many ways could he explain a standard deviation to undergrads? Frustration rippled through him. His faculty advisor, Dr. Jasmine Johnson, had told him over and over again that if he couldn’t manage to explain the most basic concepts in statistics to undergraduates, he had a very limited future in terms of teaching.

He grimaced. While he had a complete aversion to failing at anything, maybe this would be the one exception. He had only one thing in common with his students: he didn’t want to teach them either.

As far as Adam was concerned, his stint at Belmor University wasn’t his last stop. He was in the last year of his PhD program in Statistical Science and Quantitative Analysis. Teaching was a requirement for his degree, but it wasn’t what he was passionate about. That was covered in his research for his dissertation. He’d been working on a program that would accurately predict the rate at which new gamblers would reach their financial saturation point and break away from the game. It was a practical pursuit as far as he was concerned, both from the point of view of the gambler and the many casinos that peppered the nation. Casinos wanted their gamblers to continue to gamble and feel good about it, even if they lost money. Losing money, Adam had discovered early in his PhD research, was inevitable. At the same time, people that were gambling and losing didn’t necessarily want to lose everything they owned. It had taken some complex equations and boatloads of data to test, but Adam had discovered there was a predictable sweet spot where someone could gamble, enjoy themselves and win enough to offset the majority of their losses, leaving both the gambler and the casino house happy customers.

The development could make him millions. He was sure of it.

But, distracting from his pursuit was the requirement to teach undergrads, some of whom had never even heard of a probability, a regression analysis or confidence intervals. Teaching was a necessary evil, not part of his overall career plan.

But then again, the things that had happened in the last few weeks weren’t part of his plan either.

As Adam walked out of the classroom he’d occupied for the last hour and a half in the Drackett Building on the north side of Belmor’s campus, he checked his phone, preparing for the walk across campus. His stomach fluttered a little bit. He was hoping to see a text from his now ex-girlfriend, Brooke Sloane, in his notifications. He stopped and stared at the screen, thumbing through the notifications. There were two texts from Dr. Johnson asking him to stop by her office when he had a minute, a text from his mother, reminding him that it was his aunt’s birthday, and a text from his buddy Jared that he’d gone to undergraduate school with at Penn State, mentioning something about a trip he wanted to take now that Adam was single again. Adam scowled.

Nothing from Brooke.

Adam felt a surge of sour bile in the back of his throat and stopped in the hallway, watching a threesome of young coeds, two blondes and a brunette, walk past, giving him the side eye. Were they checking him out? Before Brooke, he wouldn’t have hesitated to follow them and try to strike up a conversation. But things were different now. He’d found the love of his life and lost it.

As the girls moved out of his view, Adam looked out at his phone again. He shrugged the backpack up higher on his shoulders and shuffled through his texts again, going back to the last one he’d sent to Brooke. It had been three days before. It was nothing more than a single question. “Can we meet?” Just looking at it made his stomach clench. She hadn’t bothered to respond.

Part of him knew that the best option would be to delete the entire string of texts, the entire record of every conversation that he and Brooke had over the last two years since their first date. Adam looked up at the ceiling and then down at the floor, his thumb hovering over the string of texts. All he’d need to do was hold it down for an extra second and select delete and their entire history would be gone.

All of it.

But that wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted Brooke. A memory of her flashed into his mind. She was only five-three, with long blonde hair and green eyes, a nursing major. They’d met when Brooke was required to take a statistics class in order to graduate. She’d been a sophomore at the time. She was now a senior. Adam hadn’t pursued her right away, concerned about compromising his position in his PhD program.

Once the semester was over and grades had been submitted, he’d made his move. He’d planned it carefully, starting by accessing her schedule and taking her a cup of coffee when she was on her way into class. She’d always come to his statistics class with a cup in hand. Luckily, he’d seen her at the coffee bar in the student union a few times. She was such a regular that the barista, a dark-haired woman with broad shoulders and a tattoo of a frog on her neck, knew exactly who she was. “Oh her? Yeah, she always gets the same thing: a vanilla latte with an extra shot.”

When Adam had given Brooke the coffee, she’d seemed surprised by the action, her green eyes wide, her pink lips parted in a smile. A few days later, he waited by her car when she came out of the library and gave her flowers. That was when he asked her out on a date. They’d been inseparable for almost the entire two years since then.

That was, until the last three months.

Adam started walking down the hallway, shoving his phone into his pocket. He could barely think about what happened without wanting to punch his fist through a wall. As he pushed open the door to the Drackett Building, he sucked in a breath of fresh air, hoping it would quell the fury that was eating away at his gut like a nail dropped in a bucket of acid. All he could see in his head was Brooke’s father, Joe Sloane.

It had taken Brooke a while to introduce Adam to her family. Adam had never been sure why but hadn’t pressed the issue, just enjoying his time with his beautiful blonde girlfriend, honestly not wanting to share her with anyone, even her family. Brooke was close to them. Brooke’s mom and dad and younger brother, Tyler, who had just turned fourteen, lived only about a half hour from campus. Adam had asked her one time why she hadn’t gone farther away. She looked down and then looked back up at him, her big green eyes watering with tears. “It’s just that I love them so much. I want my independence, but they mean the world to me.”

At the time, Adam had thought it was endearing, just another reason why Brooke would make an amazing nurse.

But then after dating for about a year, Brooke started taking Adam home. It was for short visits at first, just stopping by to drop off something or to pick up something to take back to campus, then a quick stop at a family event. It seemed to him that she was definitely testing the waters. Why, he wasn’t sure. Then, things changed. In the middle of the previous semester, about six months before, Brooke had started taking Adam home for Sunday dinners. Brooke’s dad, Joe, had the same blond hair as Brooke did, cut close to his head. He wasn’t much taller than Brooke, but outweighed her by probably at least fifty pounds, all of it muscle. He was an electrical contractor and had built his business from the ground up. They lived in a nice home in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. Brooke had told him that the house had been built about ten years before. It was her mom’s dream house and had everything, including an enormous deck in the back where Brooke’s mom could keep her bird feeders.

The first dinner went fine. Adam had taken a bottle of wine, one a bearded guy with small black eyes at the liquor store had recommended. Brooke’s mom had received it graciously, but her dad had eyed it suspiciously, as if Adam was trying to offer them a poison pill. “You’re not the kind of guy that drinks beer?” he asked as they sat outside in the early spring weather.

“I like a good beer from time to time,” Adam remembered replying. “There’s a brewery near campus that has a good selection of microbrews and IPA’s.”

Joe did nothing but sip his Miller Lite and stare straight ahead.

Things had only warmed marginally from there, the two of them talking about going hunting. Joe was an avid hunter. “I’ve gotten a hunting license every year since I was fourteen. Nothing better than a good venison steak.”

Adam nodded. He wasn’t currently a hunter. “I used to go hunting with my dad.” The memory tightened his stomach. Those weren’t good memories. Nothing much about his childhood was. He straightened, trying to appear calm and in control, quickly changing the subject. “I was on the rifle team in high school.”

Joe’s head jerked back. “I’m surprised those folks in California had a rifle team. Thought they were against guns.”

Adam ignored the comment. Lots of people in the Midwest were suspicious of Californians. Joe Sloane wasn’t the first. “Rifle is an Olympic sport. Thought I might try out for the team, but I wasn’t good enough to compete at that level. It did get me a full ride to USC, though. Was the captain of my team.”

Joe had done nothing but grunt.

Things had gotten worse at a family picnic. Adam had tried to get Joe to talk, but it was as if a glacier had driven its way between the two of them. Brooke blew it off. “That’s just how he is. It takes time for him to warm up.”

Adam didn’t believe it at the time, and he definitely didn’t believe it now.

Adam made his way across the quad, which at Belmor was nothing more than a giant stretch of lawn intersected by a few sidewalks, only large enough for a single game of ultimate frisbee. He headed back for his office on the other side of campus. Normally he enjoyed the walk, but on that day, the only thing he could think about was Brooke.

His Brooke.

4

The trouble had started innocently enough. Brooke and Adam, holding hands, had walked into the backyard of the Sloane house for a family picnic. It was early spring, just a month or so after the fated conversation about beer between Adam and Joe.

On the way over, Brooke and Adam had stopped to purchase a strawberry rhubarb pie at a local farm market that Brooke’s mom liked. Jody, who looked exactly like Brooke but with dark hair, received it with a smile and a thank you. As soon as she disappeared inside, Adam spotted Joe. He already had the burgers on the grill. Adam walked over to shake Joe’s hand. The response was friendly but not overly so. Adam just chalked it up to typical dad behavior. After all, no dad wanted to think about what a young man either was doing or wanted to do to his beautiful daughter. In that moment, Adam remembered wondering if someday he’d feel the same way. Surely, the kids he and Brooke would have would look just like her. The thought made him smile.

The afternoon had generally gone off without a hitch, the conversation light, Adam and Tyler talking about video games, Brooke teasing her mom about her outfit. Everyone had finished their food, and Jody had just served the pie. She left for a moment, disappearing inside, returning the vanilla bean ice cream to the freezer. Adam sat with Brooke, her younger brother Tyler, and Joe as they dug in.

Before Adam could even chew his first bite of pie, Joe narrowed his eyes and looked at him. “So, Brooke tells me you have a few years of school left.”

Adam wiped his face with a paper napkin, not wanting to have strawberry pie goop smeared all over his beard. He nodded. It was the first time that Joe had asked him any questions about his future plans. “Yeah. I do. I’m just about to finish my master’s degree and then I have two more years when I’ll be a PhD candidate. I’ve got classes to do for the first year and then I’ll do research and write my dissertation in the second year. I should be done with my doctorate the year after Brooke graduates.” He looked over at Brooke. She smiled, grabbed his hand, giving it an encouraging squeeze. Adam looked back at Joe, whose expression was blank. Adam continued, trying to rescue the conversation. “Seems like that would be good timing for us. Brooke will have passed her boards. She’ll be a nurse by then.” It was the first time he had alluded toward making their relationship more permanent.

Brooke seemed surprised, but her expression was bright. “Can you believe that? I just might be a nurse by then! Just like Mom!”

Joe waved her off. “Oh, honey. You’ll pass those state boards with no trouble. You’re just as smart as your mama.” Then Joe looked at Adam. He threw a hand in the air, his face suddenly as wrinkled as a Shar Pei. “You really need all that schooling? I mean, I get it. Things are different now than they used to be. But a PhD? Can’t you do what you want to do without jumping through all those hoops?”

On the face of it, it seemed like a reasonable question. Adam straightened. “There are some areas of statistics where I can make do with a master’s degree. But for what I want to do, I need the credibility that a PhD brings. It’s a pretty rigorous process⁠—”

Joe interrupted. “I just don’t get it. Me, I’m a simple guy. You need power in your building? That’s what we do. Couldn’t imagine being huddled over some computer all day long. Doesn’t seem like a real job.” He held up his hand. “No offense intended.”

Thinking through the conversation now, Adam was still furious. How had he not seen what Joe was doing? After that, he and Brooke had hardly gone to the house at all, and if they did, it was when only Tyler and Jody were home. He’d asked Brooke about the shift, first gently, then pointedly, wondering out loud if there was a problem that Adam didn’t know about or if Joe had something against him. Brooke said little, only defended her father. “He just doesn’t understand, Adam. You have to give him time.”

Months passed with no real change.

As Adam pushed the door open to the Barnes Building, named after Jeremy Barnes, who had donated ten million dollars to Belmor University in order to have a building named after him, Adam felt his stomach sink once again. He’d spent countless hours over the last two weeks trying to figure out what had driven Brooke away. The breakup had been sudden, with no warning. One day she and Adam were fine, the next day they were done. Brooke had met him for dinner one night, clutching her purse to her chest. She’d slid into the booth never putting it down and not offering him a hug or a kiss. “I can’t stay,” she’d said, sounding out of breath.

“Why? Did something happen?”

“I can’t do this anymore, Adam.”

“Do what?” Adam answered, hoping it wasn’t what he thought.

“Us. I just don’t love you the way I thought I did.” She glanced at the door as if someone was waiting for her. “I gotta go. I’m sorry.”

And that was it.

He’d wracked his brain for reasons why they’d broken up, frustrated that there wasn’t a quantifiable way to figure out what had happened to them. The only thing that Adam could think of was Joe and the comments he’d made months back. Had Joe ended the relationship between Adam and Brooke? Was he responsible?

Adam shrugged as he stepped inside the Barnes Building, hearing the dull, faraway conversations of students in a classroom nearby. Joe had a reputation as a nice guy. Brooke had always spoken highly of him. But he didn’t understand the world that Adam traveled in.

Worse yet, he’d made no attempt to understand.

Standing in the Barnes Building, Adam knew this wasn’t a new revelation. Adam had realized this the night after Brooke had broken up with him. He’d been looking in a drawer where he’d kept the things that Brooke had given him—a Valentine’s Day card, a gold bracelet she’d gotten for him the previous Christmas, and a pen inscribed with his name—and it hit him like a ton of bricks. How he hadn’t seen it sooner, he had no idea.

They’d broken up because of Joe. Joe was the root cause, the common variable, the causation of his pain.

In the two weeks since, Adam’s hatred for Joe had only grown. Couldn’t he see the love that Adam had for Brooke? Couldn’t he see an alternative life where Adam could provide well for his daughter, and they’d be happy?

Apparently not.

Adam walked down the hallway in the Barnes Building, his shoulders stooped, tension tightening his jaw. He stopped in front of one of the doors, his, just one in the long line of small offices set aside for the teaching assistants. Thoughts churned through his mind, running like a train out of control. What was Joe’s problem?

Adam shoved the key in the lock for his office, shoving the door open so hard it rattled in the frame. He slammed it behind him, not caring whether it echoed in the hallway or not. He was supposed to have office hours right then, but luckily no one had shown up. Maybe if he kept his door closed, no one would.

Adam started pacing in the small space, feeling his stomach churning. There wasn’t a ton of room in the office to do so, the closet-like room stuffed with an old desk, a whiteboard that had been mounted to the wall by the previous owner, and a single, metal framed chair with worn burgundy upholstery. Adam ran his hands through his chocolate brown hair, the blood rushing to his cheeks. Why had Brooke let her family get to her? Were they that much more important than the love that he and Brooke shared?

He stopped pacing after a second, tugging his pants up over his hips. He tightened his belt another notch. He’d lost weight. Since Brooke had broken up with him, he hadn’t been able to eat much of anything, everything tasting tinny and sour. It was the stress, he kept telling himself.

But it was something else.

Fury was eating away at the inside of him. He stopped and stared at his desk. There was a snow globe on the corner of it, one that Brooke had bought for him the Christmas before. They had gone to an outdoor festival in Chesterfield. They’d spent the day skiing, had dinner in an inflatable igloo, and then spent the evening at a bar, listening to a band neither of them had ever heard of. Brooke had appeared at his office door the next week with a small package in her hand. It was just before the holiday break. She was going on a family vacation, leaving Adam alone for the holiday. “Open it!” she’d squealed.

“No,” he protested, still hurt that she wasn’t staying with him for the holidays. “I want to wait for Christmas.”

“Don’t be silly. Open it now. I want to see the look on your face.”

Unable to resist her encouragement, Adam had opened the small box after pulling off the red ribbon Brooke had tied around it. He gently pulled a few layers of tissue paper away and stared inside, then gently lifted the glass globe out.

Brooke smiled. “See! It’s a little ski hill. It reminded me of our ski trip last weekend. I thought every time you looked at it, you would remember what a fun night we had.” It was one of the last things he’d left out after they’d broken up. Part of him wanted to hold onto the hope that they’d get back together.

And he had, until now.

Adam stared at the snow globe, feeling his chest clutch into a knot. In a single motion, he picked it up and launched it at the wall, watching as the glass shattered into sharp shards all over his floor, the water inside splashing onto the wall, the little white plastic crumbs that made the snow floating in the little puddles of water. His relationship was no different than that snow globe, he realized. It was all a fantasy. Staring at the mess on the floor, the glint of the shards of glass getting caught by the ray of sunlight coming in through the window in his office, he realized that there was only one person to blame for the way that his relationship got shattered.

That was Joe Sloane.

5

Adam hardly slept that night. He tossed and turned in his bedroom in the house he rented on the edge of campus. He swore that he could still smell Brooke’s perfume lingering in the air from the nights she’d stayed with him.

When he woke up, his body still felt exhausted. Though time had passed into a new day, how much sleep he’d actually gotten, he had no idea. He lay in his bed for a minute, staring at the ceiling, feeling the thin sheet covering him. He blinked, willing the headache that was clustered at the front of his forehead out of the way. If he was already feeling this way, it was going to be a long day.

A very long day.

A half an hour later, after taking a scalding hot shower, nearly gagging on a piece of toast he forced himself to eat so that he could take some ibuprofen for his headache, Adam walked out of his house, locking the door behind him. Normally, he walked to campus, but on that day, he got in his car and started the engine, his body feeling listless and tired. He looked at his watch. It was still early, and given the fact that it was a Tuesday, he knew he wasn’t expected to be in class until nearly lunchtime. Normally, he would go into his office, work on his own studies before reviewing his notes for the classes he had to teach later that afternoon and into the evening. He was starting to think about his dissertation and had initial notes due to Dr. Johnson in two weeks with an outline of his ideas. Life was a grind as a PhD student. Brooke had made it all seem worth it. Now he wasn’t so sure.

Adam gripped the steering wheel a little tighter. He got on the I-30 and followed the signs out of Pittsburgh proper, headed southeast out of the city. Thirty minutes later, he got off of the freeway, nearly hitting a black SUV in front of him as he drove down the off-ramp. He knew where he was headed, the anger fueling him. He looked down, checking his phone. If Brooke would just text him and tell him everything was all right, that she wanted to see him, that it had all been a big mistake…

Adam shifted in his seat, a rush of emotions running over him so strongly it nearly made him feel like he was losing touch with reality. He swallowed, trying to calm the storm inside of him, then focused on the road, following the traffic.

He rolled down the window, taking a deep breath. Since their breakup, Adam had wondered what Brooke had been doing. Had she come home? Was she devastated about losing him?

Adam drove slowly past the Sloane’s house, noticing every detail—the way the grass needed to be trimmed, the way Jody left her car at a slight angle in the driveway, the new sunflower-themed wreath on the front door. This was a home that he should feel comfortable coming back to. It should have been his home too, one that he and Brooke could have shared with Joe and Jody.

But that was all over now.

When Adam had first visited Brooke’s parents’ home, he was sure he and Brooke would want a house just like that sometime in the future. Now, all he could see was the little bits of disrepair that Joe and his wife had ignored—the faint haze of peeling paint near the peak of the roofline, the hose Jody used to water her front flowers haphazardly coiled near the side of the garage, the way the wreath on the front door hung just slightly crooked. Brooke had made her home life seem so perfect. It wasn’t. Adam half expected that Brooke would be at home, grieving and trying to get her life back together. Wasn’t she upset about breaking up with him? It had only been two weeks. How was she not devastated?

Adam circled the block a few times, anger building within him, then sat up straight. Brooke didn’t know what she’d done. She’d made a mistake. A big one.

He headed his car back towards campus, surprised that he didn’t have that long before his class started. Where had the morning gone? There was just enough time to get back to campus, get his car parked, and get over to the computer lab to work with his upper-level undergraduates on programming for statistical surveys.

Adam felt his head clear for a moment, like clouds parting in the middle of a storm. That was it. He needed to go back to his first love. That was his work. If Brooke didn’t want him, then he needed to shift gears. He needed to focus on what meant the most to him, and that was his career. He would show her what she was missing. He didn’t need her. He didn’t need the Sloanes.

Suddenly starved, Adam pulled through the McDonald’s drive through on the way back to campus, ordered himself a Quarter Pounder, a large fry, and a Coke. He scarfed it down, feeling like he hadn’t eaten in weeks. He got back to campus in record time, brushed a few crumbs off his pants, and got out of his car, dragging his backpack with him. He locked his car and strode towards the computer lab feeling the best he had in two weeks, when he saw group of women emerge from the Hamilton Building, the home of the nursing school at Belmor University. Adam stopped dead in his tracks, seeing a shock of blonde hair out of the corner of his eye. He turned and stared. Sure enough, Brooke emerged from the building, her blonde hair lit up in the midday sunlight, laughing and joking with her friends.

Adam bit the inside of his lip and looked down at the ground for a moment, tasting blood. He felt his stomach knot. When he looked up again, Brooke had moved off with two of her friends, never noticing him, never seeing the hurt on his face as he stood across the campus from her. She walked along, her backpack over her shoulders, a broad, beaming smile on her face. She jokingly shoved one of the girls she was with. They all laughed.

They all laughed.

Adam turned and strode toward the computer lab, his jaw set, his lip curled. He wasn’t laughing.

Brooke shouldn’t be either.

6

Max made his way into the office that morning, hoping that the day ahead of him wasn’t as frustrating as the day before. The day before, he and Cassie had gone down to the Mercedes dealership, where three high-end Mercedes had been taken. That wasn’t the worst of it. The owner, Mr. Rogan, a rotund man who was no more than four feet high with a shiny bald head, was irate. His cheeks were crimson, the blood pulsing near the surface of his skin. To Max, he looked like one of the Oompa Loompas from Willy Wonka, except that this Oompa Loompa was about to explode.

“As if this isn’t bad enough!” he boomed, flailing his hands in the air, as if Max and Cassie were supposed to know what he was talking about.

Max shook his head and glanced at Cassie. She raised an eyebrow and looked away. “Bad enough?” Max asked.

“Don’t you people do your jobs?? The three Mercedes weren’t the only thing that the thieves took!”

“What do you mean?” Cassie had asked. Max admired how calm she stayed.

“They also took two Challengers, a Camaro, and a Mustang from my other dealership. What is going on here? What are you people doing to protect my inventory?”

Max narrowed his eyes. “It’s not our job to protect your inventory,” he said slowly.

From the startled look on Cassie’s face, he could tell that once again he hadn’t said the right thing. He knew he was a good detective. He also knew he wasn’t necessarily a good communicator.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Mr. Rogan’s face reddened to the shade of boiling tomato sauce.

Max decided to change his line of questioning. “Where were the other cars you mentioned? The Challengers, Camaro, and Mustang? You said it was at another location?”

“They were in the warehouse of my dealership over on East 72nd St,” he huffed out.

“They weren’t here?”

“No. They weren’t.”

“And, let me guess, you have the same flimsy security system at that building that’s at this one, right?”

Maybe flimsy wasn’t the right word to use.

Cassie laid a hand on Max’s arm as if bracing him for the attack. Max didn’t flinch, only feeling the muscles across his jaw tighten. Max knew something Mr. Rogan didn’t: the Oompa Loompa was now just one of the hundreds of people that had yelled at Max during his career. What was one more?

Mr. Rogan started to yell even more. He edged closer to Max, shaking a fist under Max’s nose. “So you’re saying this is my fault? How is that even possible? If you people would just do your job and patrol the streets like you should, I wouldn’t have this problem!”

The conversation went downhill from there. Mr. Rogan proceeded to scream and yell at Max and Cassie about how his tax dollars were going to waste, how he wasn’t a cop but he could do a better job running the Pittsburgh Police Department than apparently their own chief could, that it didn’t matter what kind of security system he had at his dealerships, that Pittsburgh PD needed to do their job and if that meant stationing someone in front of his dealerships to protect his property, then that’s what would have to happen.

As Max and Cassie walked out, the dealership owner leveled the final blow. “And you’re going to hear from me! I know the mayor. Play poker with him every Tuesday night! You’re gonna lose your jobs—I promise you that!”

Max didn’t feel like he could get a break. There wasn’t a single area of his life that wasn’t a grind at the moment—his AA meetings, his sessions with Dr. Kersevich, work, and trying to keep up with his house. Nothing was interesting. Nothing was even close to being fun, even if Max could figure out what that might look like for him.

All he was doing was going through the motions.

He and Cassie had ridden back to the office together. Max had sulked off to his desk and stayed there for the rest of the day, not bothering to look up or to talk to Cassie. There was no point. She was understandably angry. But why he kept getting the blame, he wasn’t sure. Mr. Rogan was a jerk. She knew it and so did he.

So, the next day when Max showed up at work he was understandably edgy, the sour feeling from the day before hanging with him. He stopped by Cassie’s desk. She had her strawberry-blonde hair caught up in a clip at the nape of her neck, a few strands curling against her shoulder. She was wearing a blue Pittsburgh PD T-shirt and a pair of jeans, her badge and gun attached to her belt. Max frowned. That was unlike Cassie. She was always dressed in a suit. “You have training today?”

“Gotta go qualify.”

Max just stood there for a second, not saying anything. Twice a year, all of the officers in the Pittsburgh Police Department had to go to the range with their service weapons and prove that they were still competent enough to carry them. Though he understood the requirement, in Max’s mind, it was a ridiculous proposition. Every police officer should know how to handle their weapon. It shouldn’t require testing. And yet, time and time again, he was surprised at the number of officers that had to go back and get retested. With the current shortage of officers, the range had been doing more qualifying and more training, working night and day to get new officers up and running and on the streets. Max had been supposed to qualify when he started back with a department but hadn’t gotten the notice to show up yet. He didn’t care. “Well, good luck with that,” he said awkwardly.

Cassie looked up from where she was sitting. “Thanks. Did you discover anything about the case?”

Max stumbled over his words. “The cars?”

“Yeah.”

The truth was, Max hadn’t. He’d been so distracted by the noise in his own mind that he hadn’t really taken the time to figure out anything more about the string of car robberies. Dr. Kersevich was forcing Max to relive parts of his childhood that he’d long buried. His father had been angry and abusive. It didn’t help that, like Max’s dad, Mr. Rogan was a mean little man. He wasn’t the kind that Max actually wanted to try to help. “I mean, I think we can work under some pretty safe assumptions about who’s behind it, don’t you?”

Cassie frowned. “Like what?”

Max folded his arms across his chest. “Well, first of all, there has to be more than one person involved. Otherwise, how else would they have gotten all of the vehicles out at the same time?”

“Yeah, I thought of that too.”

“And then you have the fact that two of Mr. Rogan’s warehouses got hit on the same night? That means it’s either an inside job, has insider knowledge or someone that has a vendetta.”

Cassie nodded. “I thought of the first part, but not the vendetta part.” She scratched a couple notes onto a sheet of paper. “Anything else?”

Max wanted to say, “Mr. Rogan needs to work on his manners,” but he didn’t. Instead, he looked at Cassie. “I’m just wondering what they’re doing with the cars. I mean, these aren’t run-of-the-mill cars that some drug dealer’s gonna grab so he can make a delivery. These are high-end cars that are hard to miss.”

“So, what are you suggesting, that the thieves have a buyer or seller in mind?”

Max nodded as Cassie looked away. She pressed her lips together, the color draining from them. “Maybe. I’m not sure yet.”

All of a sudden, with the pursing of Cassie’s lips, Max felt like something between them shifted. It was as though any camaraderie he’d developed with Cassie seemed to evaporate in thin air. Their relationship had always worked because he had an uncanny way of pulling pieces of the case together out of thin air, seeing connections that others didn’t. He and Cassie did well together because she was able to navigate his issues and knew how to read the room. “That’s all I’ve got.”

Cassie shook her head, seemingly disappointed. “That’s all good in theory, Grady, but we need some suspects. Have you looked at the video yet?”

“No. I haven’t.”

The truth was, Max hadn’t looked at the video because he’d spent his lunch hour at another AA meeting, going to another one right after work. That was three in one day. Not that it was required, but for people new to the program or who were struggling with their sobriety, more meetings seemed to be the way to solve the problem.

Like most things in life, he wasn’t sure that was the case for him.

The next morning, after having gone to yet another AA meeting where Bob Fippiano had once again recounted his story of how he had disappointed his wife while he was still drinking, Max went back to the office. He logged into the computer, sat at his desk, and stared at the screen again. The details of the car theft case dangled themselves into his memory like puppets on strings. Nothing was sticking out to him. He decided to finally do what Cassie had suggested in the first place—watch the close circuit video.

As he pulled up the images, the graininess of the feed reminded him of the video files he’d watched of the day that Liam Reid had poisoned the police headquarters. A pit formed in his stomach. His brain was quick to make associations with things that had happened to him. Part of him thought that was what gave him a gift as a detective, the other part of it felt tormented by it. He didn’t want to think about what had happened at the police department, all the lives that were lost, all the grieving families and funerals to go to. He also didn’t want to think about when he had to shoot his father or when the hospital had been blown up and nearly collapsed underneath Jerry Williams, killing hundreds of people all because some guy was mad that his wife hadn’t gotten a heart transplant when she was supposed to.

He blinked and looked away. He didn’t want to think about those things.

Max continued to watch the closed-circuit video that had been sent over by the car dealership’s security company. For one thing, Max wasn’t impressed by the coverage. They pretty much only had cameras pointing at each of the doors, not at the interior of the building, and certainly not the exterior, just the angles that he needed in order to figure out what had happened. Max stopped and started the videos over and over again, trying to see something that might be helpful, something that would give him an insight into who was responsible. The reality was that the only thing that he could see was what looked to be a man in black clothing and a ski mask making his way up to the doors of the dealership. Max narrowed his eyes as he watched the man pick the lock, open the door, and snip a couple of wires on the alarm. That done, a couple of friends joined him to hotwire the cars and drive them away.

It had been a simple plan, exactly the kind that worked best. Contrary to popular opinion, simple crimes were often the most successful. The ones that had too many steps or too many variables often fell apart.

“That was smooth,” Max muttered under his breath.

Max stared at the videos one more time. He couldn’t see anything. Nothing. Frustration ripped its way through his gut. What had happened to his ability to pick up details that no one else had seen? Had he lost it, along with everything else in his life? If he could no longer solve crimes, he was absolutely sure that Pittsburgh PD wouldn’t keep him, no matter how grateful they were for all of the officer’s lives that he had saved. He would be useless to them, a nobody, no different than any other beat cop that just wandered around waiting for something to happen.

The worst part of the whole thing? He knew what he’d been like when he’d been drinking. He’d been special, someone who had a lot to offer.

And at that moment, dry and sober, he felt like nothing but the sum of all of his bad experiences.

7

The memory of Brooke happily running along with her friends the day before ate at Adam like a vulture nipping at a rotting carcass. It was all he could think about as he walked into class, facing down a room full of overly happy undergraduates who couldn’t care less about what he had to teach them.

Adam arranged his computer on the podium and looked out into the lecture hall. The students were happily chatting with each other, their coffees and water bottles clustered at the edges of their tables. The scent of perfume and cologne tickled his nose. Some of it smelled a bit like what Brooke used to wear. He glanced at one of his students, a girl named Anita. She was more dressed up than usual, red lipstick carefully highlighting her full lips. When Adam saw her flirting with one of the guys in the class, he knew why. Everything in him wanted to go up to them and tell them to knock it off. He knew better than anyone that romance wasn’t worth it.

The tendons in his neck tightening like cords, he picked up his phone for what felt like the hundredth time, everything in him wanting to send Brooke a scathing, nasty message. How dare she just move along with her life like the two years they had been together never mattered?

Adam ignored his urge and started in on the topic of the day—regression models and hypothesis testing. Halfway through the class he decided he didn’t care. None of them were paying attention anyway. He didn’t care if they failed the class. Heck, he didn’t care about anything at that moment. He dismissed the class early, telling them he didn’t feel well. He followed that by canceling his office hours and his afternoon computer lab, sending a message to his advisor, Dr. Johnson, saying that he had food poisoning or some other virus.

Of course, it was a bald-faced lie.

As Adam walked to his car, he felt his hands ball up into tight fists. He shoved them in his pockets. Part of him was half tempted to cut across the lawn where he’d seen Brooke the day before, wanting, no daring, her to come out of the nursing building with another grin on her face as if her life was perfect. She was a liar. If she had recovered this fast, then she hadn’t loved him or something had gotten in the way of their relationship that was more important. That was the truth. Adam paused on the sidewalk and looked over his shoulder, thinking about their time together and her family.

Her family.

That was the straw that broke the camel’s back of their relationship. He knew there had been nothing wrong with the relationship between the two of them. They’d been in love. They were planning their future. They talked about the places they’d want to visit once they were married, the house they’d have, the number of kids they’d want. And then she broke up with him out of the blue. And there was only one explanation for her quick recovery and obvious relief at not being in a relationship with him.

Her father.

As Adam got into his car, he felt like all the pieces clicked together in his mind, like an engine finally turning over after long being stalled. He understood what had happened. More importantly, he realized there was only one path forward if he had any hope of getting Brooke back.

He had to eliminate the enemy.

Coming to this understanding was a strange experience, Adam realized. He felt a sense of relief and a sense of tension all at the same time, as if a boa constrictor was wrapping itself around his chest, tightening and loosening. Was he feeling the same way as someone in the military who had just been handed a target?

Something in him knew that until he took action, he wouldn’t be able to breathe. He knew his own personality. Every I needed to be dotted, every T crossed. It was what made him a talented statistician and had made him a crack shot on his rifle team. Some people might call him obsessive, but in his mind, things needed to come full circle to be finished, resolved. Brooke’s family had ruined his life. He knew Brooke loved him. But her father had interfered and that couldn’t be allowed if they were going to have a future together. Joe needed to be dealt with one way or another.

Adam would have to win him over or…

Adam made a few stops on the way home from campus, getting a six-pack of Joe Sloane’s favorite beer, a bag of Peanut M&Ms for Tyler, and a pie for Jody, playing the probabilities. If researching statistics had done nothing else for him, it had made him aware of how many actual options there were at any given time.

And he would give Joe options. That was the least he could do for the father of the woman he wanted to be his bride.

Adam carried the bags into his house. He hiked his pants up over his hips then decided to change them anyway. He went into his closet, pulled on a pair of black joggers, ones with an elastic waist that would stay up, grabbing a pair of tennis shoes. He added an old T-shirt and a zip-up jacket that he saved for his infrequent workouts. Walking back into the kitchen, he checked the bag where he’d assembled the rest of the items that he’d need for the evening after making a stop in the laundry room where he’d stashed a few things he’d been saving.

By the time he was done preparing for the journey ahead, the sun was setting over the edge of Pittsburgh, the air starting to cool. From an open window in his house, he could hear the rustle of the breeze in the leaves of the trees next to the building. He stared outside, hearing the call of a lonely bird off in the distance. He set his jaw, narrowing his eyes. With any luck, he’d have Brooke back in no time. He felt his face relax. That’s all he wanted. Just Brooke.

And he’d do anything to get her back.

8

The tension in Adam’s chest surged as he pulled down Westwood Road, the street where Brooke’s family lived. Thoughts ran wild through his head, options spiraling like water spilling through a washing machine. Maybe all he needed to do was have a conversation. Maybe Joe Sloane needed to see Adam for who he was, not just Brooke’s boyfriend, but a man, an equal, a man willing to love and provide for his daughter.

Other men had made the mistake of underestimating him in sports, academics, and in his job. It couldn’t be allowed. Not in this case. His future—his future with Brooke—hung in the balance.

The homes in the Sloane’s development looked picturesque in the darkness, like something from a Christmas card, the glow of golden light spilling out from the windows of the homes on the street. Adam imagined what the families were doing inside—cleaning up after dinner, helping kids with their homework or baths, starting a load of laundry. There were a few cars parked in the driveways, most of them already tucked safely in the attached garages each of the homes had. The streetlights overhead illuminated a couple out walking their dog, the two of them holding hands.

That’s what Adam wanted. Joe Sloane had prevented it. Adam was sure he was to blame.

Adam parked in the driveway and walked to the back of his car. From inside, he grabbed a black duffle bag out of the trunk. From inside, he put on a pair of skin-colored latex gloves, tugging them down his wrists. He hoped he didn’t need them.

Hope was a fickle thing.

As he slammed the trunk closed, he stopped and narrowed his eyes, looking at the house. That was when it hit him—it had become a house of horrors. There was nothing positive left in his relationship with the Sloanes. They had taken away the one thing that had meant the most to him. They’d destroyed his life and the future he wanted with Brooke.

He strode to the front door, knocking on it, then stepping back and waiting, his fist clenched in a knot around the handle of the bag. The tension gathered even tighter throughout his body, the breath shallow in his chest. He glared at the wreath on the front door, the trail of a twisted cobweb wiggling in the wind. In that moment, he knew the thing he wanted most was to be part of her life, of her family’s life. He’d plotted the options carefully, the same way he’d work through a statistical anomaly that had him troubled. Peace was his first option. But if Joe Sloane couldn’t bring himself to accept Adam, then Adam would have no choice. He needed Brooke, with or without Joe’s approval.

After a minute he heard the lock click open in the door frame. He saw the door crack open. In front of him was Joe Sloane, a beer in his hand. He looked at him, his expression blank, then turning into a scowl. “What are you doing here?”

Adam swallowed. What kind of way was that to address the man that had taken care of his daughter for the last two years? “I thought maybe we should talk. I brought beer for you and some stuff for Mrs. Sloane and Tyler.” He held up a bag with the things he’d bought for Joe and his family.

Joe shook his head. “No. I don’t have anything to say to you.”

That was all the confirmation that Adam needed to hear.

Fury gripped Adam, heat running to his cheeks. Joe put a hand up, pushing the door closed. Adam set his jaw. He braced his hand on the door, pushing back. “Maybe you don’t think we need to talk, but I think we do.”

Joe stepped forward, cocking his head to the side. “Really? You’re just some nerd from Brooke’s college. All you do is play with numbers all day long. What is it that you think you wanna say to me, young man? You think you’re gonna change my mind about you and Brooke being together? That’s not gonna happen. Now, get out of my face.”

Adam dropped the bag that was in his hand and reached around to the small of his back and pulled out a Beretta pistol, a nine-millimeter, jamming it into Joe’s gut. Instinctively, Joe held his hands up, his eyes wide. He dropped the bottle of beer, the glass shattering on the floor, the beer foaming on the beige tile. “What are you doing, Adam?”

Adam scowled. Now who’s in charge? “Like I said, I think we need to talk.”

Joe did nothing but blink. By the expression on his face, Adam could tell that he was completely unprepared. Not only had Adam shown up uninvited at his house, but he’d pulled a gun on him. Adam tried not to smile. It was just one of the many probabilities that Adam had rolled around in his head as he planned his visit to Joe Sloane. Joe had one opportunity to straighten out their differences. According to his calculations, there was only a small percentage chance that Joe would agree to talk to him without being forced to do so. He’d brought beer in his duffle bag on the off chance that Joe received him cordially. He hadn’t. The gun was part of plan B.

Joe stumbled backward as Adam prodded him forward with the muzzle of the gun. “What is this, Adam? Let’s at least take this outside. Jody and Tyler don’t need to see this.”

The negotiating had begun. Adam could hear the mix of anger and fear in Joe’s voice. He had calculated that it was the likely outcome if he had to draw his gun. That was fine with him. Joe hadn’t given him a choice. “I want to talk to you about Brooke and what you did to us.”

“I’m telling you, we need to take this outside.”

Still no apology, no acknowledgement that Joe had ruined his life.

Joe had backpedaled away from the gun far enough into the house that they had made it all the way into the kitchen. Jody had a knife in her hand, cutting carrots. On the stove was a pan, a mix of some sort of vegetables cooking, the scent of garlic and frying food in the air, the burner off. Jody had her back to them. Tyler’s face brightened when he saw Adam, then drooped, when he saw the gun and the look on Adam’s face. Even at his young age, it was clear that even Tyler knew things were serious.

“Oh my God!” Jody screeched. She dropped the knife, her eyes wide. Adam could feel the buzz of adrenaline in his system. It felt good. His breath was ragged. He stared at Joe. “You. You destroyed the relationship between me and Brooke.”

Joe set his jaw; his hands balled into fists. “And by the looks of it I was right. Now, why don’t you get out of here before something bad happens.”

Adam felt the blood in his veins turn to ice, his skin tingling with the rush of adrenaline. I’m the one holding the gun, buddy. I’m in charge now. Not you.

“Something bad already happened, Joe. You took Brooke away from me. You don’t understand what we had. You’ve stolen something from me, and now I’m going to steal something from you.”

Without saying anything more, Adam turned the gun towards Tyler and pulled off a single shot, the round entering Tyler’s forehead right between his eyes. His knees buckled out from underneath him, his body hitting the ground with a thud. Jody screamed, “No!” As she ran towards Tyler, Adam shot her in the back. Her body fell on top of Tyler’s. Out of the corner of his eye, Adam saw Joe start to lunge for him, then stop as Adam turned toward him. Joe uttered a guttural yell, the voice one of rage and hurt. To Adam, he sounded like an animal that had gotten his leg caught in a metal trap. He charged towards Adam. It took a fraction of a second for him to close the distance between the two of them. As he did, Adam dropped the gun and pulled a knife from a sheath behind his back. He extended it, steadying himself, leaning his weight forward. Bellowing after watching his wife and son murdered in front of him, Joe charged Adam with such force that he ended up impaling himself on the sharp blade. Adam wrapped an arm around Joe’s waist and drove the knife up through his gut, giving it a twist before pulling it out.

No different than gutting a deer. Adam stepped back and watched as Joe Sloane looked down at his gut, his hands still balled into fists as if he was going to punch Adam and knock him out. Joe’s expression was one of shock, his mouth drooping open. He looked at Adam as his left leg buckled underneath him. His right followed a moment later as he landed on his back, his eyes wide.

Adam knelt down and picked up his gun, sticking it back where he’d hidden it in the first place. He let out a deep breath and walked towards where Joe was slowly dying, wiping the blade off on Joe’s pant leg and sticking the knife back in its sheath. A bubble of blood and saliva had mixed in the corner of Joe’s mouth as he lay sprawled on the floor, his shirt stained with crimson blood. He stared upward, his eyes unfocused, as if he was waiting for a heavenly staircase to open and take him home. A pool of blood gathered underneath Joe’s body. Adam took a step back, watching, waiting. He stared at Joe’s face as his chest rose and fell twice more, and then…

Nothing.

Adam walked over to where Tyler’s and Jody’s bodies had collapsed. As Jody had fallen, her arm had swept over a few picture frames that lay now shattered on the ground. Adam eyed them. One was a picture of Jody and her parents, each of them smiling, their arms wrapped around each other. The next one was of the Sloane family on a vacation in the mountains a few years before. Brooke had told him all about it. It had been the summer before he and Brooke had started dating. There had been a picture of Brooke and Adam on the same table. He’d seen it the last time he was at the house, but like everything else with his relationship, it was gone. He picked up the final frame that had fallen on the ground. He recognized it. It had held a picture of Adam and Brooke together at the State Fair the year before. Adam remembered the moment. He and Brooke had gotten ice cream, and they had asked a stranger to snap a picture of them, the ice cream dripping down their fingers as he stood with his arm around her, their grins wide and silly. His heart ached seeing her. She looked so happy. That was the Brooke he remembered, the one he wanted back, the one that would complete his life.

Adam flipped the frame over, expecting to see their faces. His stomach lurched. It was no longer the picture of Adam and Brooke. It had been replaced by a picture of Tyler in the Sloane’s backyard. In the fall, the frame had gotten damaged, the back popping off. Adam tugged at the back of the frame, staring at it. Inside, behind Tyler’s picture was the original picture of him and Brooke. Seeing what had been done, he clenched his teeth and quickly put the picture frame back together, Tyler smiling once again through shattered glass. Adam looked away for a moment, the small realization hitting him like a ton of bricks. His relationship with Brooke had been covered over, effectively erased. Adam stood up, dropping the frame on the floor. With one swift kick, he sent the frame and pictures careening across the floor.

Adam walked over to where Joe Sloane was flat on his back. He stood over Joe looking down at the lifeless body staring up at him. On the floor next to where Joe’s body had fallen, his phone had clattered onto the floor. It started to ring, the ringtone sounding like a bird chirping. Adam looked at the screen. A picture of Brooke had popped up on the screen. Adam narrowed his eyes, blinking once. “Sorry, Brooke. Daddy can’t talk right now.”

Adam bent over him and was just about to whisper something when he heard a faint whining over his shoulder. He stood up, pulling his gun, his eyes scanning the area. In the corner of the kitchen was the Sloanes’ dog, a Pitbull mix named Patch. He was brown and white with a bullseye of white fur around his brown eye. The dog. It was a complete miscalculation. Adam had forgotten about the dog. He lifted his gun aiming for his head. The dog cowered in the corner, his tail pinned, his legs huddled underneath him. His body shook in terror as if he knew what Adam was about to do.

Adam narrowed his eyes, staring at the dog. Patch was probably the only one in the Sloane household that was innocent of destroying his future with Brooke.

Licking his lower lip, Adam lowered the gun and walked out.

9

It was only seven in the morning, but Max felt like he’d been up for hours. In reality, it had only been an hour and a half.

He’d gotten up at five-thirty, taken a quick shower, and then was out the door by five forty-five to make his 6 a.m. AA meeting at Saint James church. It was the same old, same old—bad coffee, stale doughnuts that one of the guys managed to pick up for the meeting, and Bob Fippiano, telling yet another variation on the story about how his wife had left him because he was a drunk.

Max decided it was like the movie called Groundhog Day where the guy lives the same day over and over again until he can get it right. Was Max facing the same thing? Was he stuck in a cycle of AA meetings, sessions with Dr. Kersevich, and working on boring cases trying to figure out how to navigate Pittsburgh PD now that everyone knew what a mess he was? Cops were the worst gossips. He was sure there wasn’t a soul carrying a gun for PPD that didn’t know all of his history. Max shook his head as he left the meeting. The only thing compelling in his life at that moment was the questions he had concerning the car theft ring. But even that wasn’t exactly exciting.

Max had just stepped outside into the fresh air when he heard someone call behind him. “Max?”

Frankie Turner edged his way past a guy who Max was pretty sure was named Richard and made his way toward Max. Max didn’t stop walking, but he slowed enough for Frankie to catch up. Frankie was wearing his normal garb—a flat cap, jeans, and a button-down shirt that hung over his waistband. As they crossed the street, Max stopped and looked at him. “What’s going on, Frankie?”

“I was going to ask you the same thing. Haven’t talked to you in a while.”

Max knew that, as his sponsor, it was Frankie’s job to check in on him and keep him in line, so to speak, being there to support him and help him with his sobriety. In Max’s mind, sobriety was an on-off thing, like a switch. He was either drinking or he wasn’t. Max had gotten his six-month sober chip a few weeks before but hadn’t done much else other than shown up at meetings and keep himself busy. It wasn’t hard now that he was back with Pittsburgh PD. There might not be anything exciting going on, but there was a lot of work to keep him occupied.

Or at least Lieutenant Williams made him think so.

Max looked down at the ground, kicking up a loose piece of gravel on the sidewalk with the toe of his boot. “Not much. Just coming here, going to see my shrink, and going to work. That’s about it.”

“And you’re staying sober?” The words came out slow and even, as if he’d asked the same question a million times.

Part of Max wanted to ask Frankie if that was all he cared about, like he was tallying the points he could accumulate for lives saved, but he didn’t. “Yeah. I mean, it would be nice to have a drink but⁠—”

Frankie shook his head. “That’s a dangerous way to think, Max. At least for me, that first drink might as well be my last. It would destroy my life.”

Max blinked. A little dramatic, wasn’t it? “Yeah, well.”

“Are you working the steps?”

The “steps” as they were called in AA, were a set of twelve life guidelines that had been developed by the guys that had started Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935. The founders were named Bill W., a stockbroker, and his buddy, Bob S., a surgeon. They were from Akron, Ohio, only a little over a hundred miles away from Pittsburgh.

“Which one?”

“Any of them?”

“Tell me what they are again?”

Frankie sighed and then handed Max a plastic card he kept in the pocket of his shirt. Max read over them quickly. There was a lot about power and God and apologizing and humility. “Oh yeah,” Max grunted, handing the card back to Frankie.

“You know, the steps don’t work if you don’t work them.”

Another AA platitude.

It wasn’t that Max didn’t believe AA worked. He was sure it did. He just wasn’t sure it would work for him, at least not the way that the true believers in the system might think.

He was different. He’d been different his whole life.

Frankie didn’t say anything for a second as if he was waiting for the gravity of what he’d just said to Max to sink in. When Max didn’t say anything, Frankie finally spoke, resting a hand on Max’s arm. “Let’s get together soon. Very soon. I wanna hear more about where you are and how things are going.”

Max shrugged away from Frankie’s hand and shook his head. Just what he needed, someone else who wanted him to talk all the time. Had Dr. Kersevich put Frankie up to this? “I don’t know, Frankie. I’m all right. Just doing what I gotta do.”

As Max started to walk off, Frankie called behind him. “Max, life is supposed to be about more than ‘just doing what you gotta do.’ Let’s get together soon. I mean it.”

Max held up his hand and gave him a wave as he walked off.

He’d only made it a few steps down the sidewalk as he headed for his car when his phone rang. “Grady.”

“I’ve got a case for you,” Lieutenant Jerry Williams’s gravelly voice said.

Max stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. He glanced to his right where he’d left Frankie. Frankie was talking to someone else but was looking in Max’s direction.

“Grady? Are you there?” Jerry’s voice sounded impatient.

“Yeah. I’m just leaving a meeting.”

“AA?”

You darn well know that’s what I meant. What other meeting would I be at leaving at seven AM? “Yes. What’s the case?”

“Multiple homicides. Not exactly sure what happened, but it’s bad. I’ll text you the address. Cassie’s on her way.”

Max didn’t say anything, he simply hung up. A second later, he got a text with the address. He stared at it. It wasn’t far.

Max didn’t bother speeding to the house. That was one of the benefits of his job as a detective—by the time he got the call, the damage was done. His job was just to figure out who had committed a crime and why, at least most of the time.

He braced himself as he drove. Multiple homicides were very different than just a few missing cars. These were lives, lives that had been snuffed out by someone who had decided that certain people no longer deserved to live.

It was time for Max to go on the hunt for someone just like him.

A murderer.

10

It didn’t take long for Max to make his way over to the address that Jerry had provided on Westwood Road. The full complement of Pittsburgh PD’s crime investigative prowess hadn’t arrived yet. In the driveway was one cruiser plus Cassie’s blue detective unit parked against the curb. He met Cassie at the door. She handed him a set of blue gloves.

“What do we got?” he asked, tugging the gloves on.

“Homicides.” Cassie stared at him. From the looks of her, she’d been called before she was ready to start her day. Her strawberry-blonde hair was up in a ponytail. She had on black leggings, a pair of black boots, a Pittsburgh PD T-shirt and windbreaker with her badge slung around her neck, her pistol in a holster on her hip.

“Homicides? Like plural?” Jerry had said it was a multiple, but if Max had a drink for every time Jerry told him something inaccurate, he’d be floating at the bottom of a barrel somewhere.

Cassie nodded. “Come this way.”

Max followed her through a small foyer as a Pittsburgh police officer brushed his way past the two of them, his face as pale as a sheet. “The cleaning lady found them this morning. From what I can tell, it’s a family. I’ve got a uniform sitting with the cleaning lady in the backyard. He’s giving her some water.”

Max looked over his shoulder. “And that other officer that just ran out the front door like he’d seen a ghost?”

Cassie shrugged. “He’s a rookie.”

Cassie didn’t need to say anything more. Rookies could be a twitchy bunch until they saw enough bad things that they weren’t surprised by the darker side of life anymore.

As he made his way into the kitchen, Max could smell the scent of food cooking mixed with the metallic smell of blood and gunpowder. He glanced at the stove. “Somebody was cooking?”

“Luckily the stove was off, so the house didn’t burn down. Don’t know who turned it off though.”

“If it was the killer, whoever it was is considerate.”

Max wasn’t sure the killer was actually considerate. For all he knew, whoever had been cooking might have shut off the stove prior to the incident, which was the more likely scenario. What that did tell him was a general idea of the timeline. If they were cooking, the murders would have likely happened near dinnertime.

Walking past the kitchen cabinets, he saw the bodies—a man off to his left and a woman and a boy to his right. Jerry was right. It was gruesome. There was blood everywhere, but Max looked at the scene coolly, as if it was a drawing or a picture someone had taken. He looked toward the front door and then back towards the bodies. Questions started to form in his head. He walked towards the man on the floor first. Max squatted near him. From what Max could tell, the man looked to be in his late forties to early fifties with short blond hair and a strong jaw. His stocky body was covered in blood. There was a sharp slice in the shirt he was wearing. Max pointed. “That’s no bullet hole, Cassie. Looks like a stab wound.”

Cassie blinked and cocked her head to the side. “You’re ahead of me on that one, Grady. I just saw all the blood. Was busy checking on the cleaning lady.”

Max put his hand on the man’s arm. Through the glove he could feel the coolness of his skin. “He’s been down for a while. The body is room temperature.”

Cassie turned and walked to the two bodies that were piled a few feet away. “Yep, these two feel room temperature as well. I guess we’ll know more when the medical examiner arrives.”

Max stood up, frowning. “So what do we think we have here?”

Cassie glanced at her phone, not looking up. “Three dead bodies.”

“You are ever insightful, Reynolds. No kidding.” Grady moved slowly over to the two other bodies, not wanting to disturb anything that was left near the crime scene. He stared at what was left of the young boy’s face, the sharp puncture of a bullet hole through his forehead. “Well, this is interesting. This is a gunshot wound, not a stabbing like the other victim.” He glanced back at the man with the knife wound and then studied the woman who had fallen on top of the boy he guessed was her son. “She got shot in the back.”

Cassie scratched a few notes in the notebook she was holding in her hand. “Multiple methods? That’s unusual.”

“It certainly is.”

Faced with the crime scene in front of him, Max started to feel a little bit more like him himself as if his mind had something to focus on other than his past and the next drink that would numb him. He felt settled, at peace, as if he had something to do that would make an impact on others. He chewed his lip and glanced from body to body, furrowing his eyebrows. It was unusual to have more than one method of murder in a multiple homicide like the one in front of him.

“This doesn’t look like a murder-suicide, does it?” Cassie asked.

“Nope, it doesn’t. If it was, we’d see a murder weapon.”

“We don’t have that.”

“Correct. That means someone came into this house and took out this entire family.” A chill ran down Max’s spine as the words came out of his mouth. Killing one person was bad enough, but three, including a child? Whoever did this had some serious issues. Max almost chuckled at the thought. They might have more issues than even he did.

Max walked toward the front door, wanting to see if there were any signs of forced entry, when he heard soft whining. He stopped, listening. The noise disappeared then started again a few seconds later. Max turned, trying to figure out where the noise was coming from. He walked down a hallway and stopped, listening. He heard it again. It wasn’t the noise of a child, or at least he didn’t think so. He called over his shoulder. “Cassie? Did the uniforms clear the house?” Max put his hand on his gun.

Cassie yelled down the hallway. “Yeah. They did. What’s going on?”

“I don’t know. Give me a minute.” Max continued on, walking down the hallway towards what he thought was the master bedroom. From what he could tell, the other bedrooms were upstairs. He opened a closet door as he passed that was filled with perfectly folded linens, everything organized as if it was part of a Pottery Barn catalog. Nothing there. He closed the door and stopped at a half bathroom, decorated in grays and blues. Nothing there either. The whining continued. Max made his way into the bedroom.

Stopping in the doorway, Max noticed the master bed was still made, the dark green comforter left untouched. Clearly the people that lived here had never made it to bed the night before. Or they had, Max realized, raising an eyebrow, but had experienced the sleep that only death could bring. Max listened. The whining happened again. It was closer this time. He turned to his right, walking into the bathroom, looking around, trying to find the source of the noise. The bathroom was white from top to bottom. It looked like it had been recently remodeled. There was a walk-in closet nearby. He flipped on a light and saw some of the clothes move. He stopped, calling out. “Pittsburgh PD. Come on out.”

Nothing happened.

Max took a few steps further into the closet. Whoever or whatever was in there was terrified. They hadn’t responded to his call. Max walked closer, seeing the clothes move again. Whatever it was had barricaded itself behind a line of sweaters that probably belonged to the woman of the house. Max got close and used his left hand to push the clothes aside, keeping his gun side away from whoever was hiding on the floor. “Come on out,” he said quietly.

Once again, there was no response, but from between the clothes, he spotted a single eye. He stopped, frowning. It was a dog. By the boxy shape of his head, Max could tell it was a pit bull or a pit bull mix. His stomach lurched. Had the dog been in the house when the crime happened? Max didn’t know much about dogs. He almost called for Cassie, but something in him made him stop. The dog was huddled in the corner, curled into a ball, a wary expression on his face, his eyes wide, his mouth open and panting like he’d just run a mile at a full sprint. If he had to guess, the dog was probably traumatized from what had happened the night before, not to mention the noise of the police in the house. The smell of dead bodies alone had to be horrifying for the animal who was used to having its owners there to love and care for him.

Moving slowly, Max knelt down on the ground. It was a risk. He felt his heart thud in his chest, hoping the pit bull didn’t lunge at him. He held out a hand. “It’s okay,” he said quietly. “You are okay,” he repeated. Max realized the dog was a victim too. The worst part was Max knew the dog couldn’t possibly understand what had happened. A wash of sadness ran over Max. The feeling surprised him a little. He whispered, “You can come out now.”

After a minute of some coaxing, the dog took a few steps forward and then reached its nose out. Max realized he still had on his blue crime scene gloves. He pulled them off quickly and shoved them in his pocket, holding his now bare hand in front of the dog’s nostrils. The dog sniffed it and then dropped to his belly, crawling forward toward Max. He was shaking like a leaf. Max’s heart broke. It was an extraordinary amount of effort for the dog to get over its terror enough to come forward.

Max put his hand on the dog’s head and felt the quivering for the first time. He’d never seen anything so sad before. His heart sank. He had to get the dog out of the house. Max stood up and looked around. He needed a leash or something so he could keep the dog with him.

On the wall near the door there was a hook that had men’s leather belts on it, probably formerly owned by the man that had been stabbed. Max grabbed one and looped it around the dog’s head and stroked the dog’s fur for another second. The dog was beautiful, brown and white with a bullseye patch around one of his eyes. Max stood up, suddenly feeling unsure. What was he going to do with the dog? He didn’t know anything about dogs. That was Cassie’s area of expertise. He stopped, taking a breath. He’d read somewhere that animals knew how you were feeling. He needed to be calm for this poor animal. Adding Cassie into the mix might be overwhelming.

“Let’s give this a try,” he muttered as he gave the makeshift leash a little tug. The dog walked forward tentatively, hanging behind Max. They made it out of the walk-in closet and into the bedroom. Max looked down the hallway toward the front door. If he took the dog out that way, the poor animal would be exposed to the commotion that was starting to accumulate around the dead bodies, not to mention the smell. The dog had been through enough.

Max angled his way toward the bed. On the back wall was a set of sliding glass doors. He opened the door and walked the dog outside onto a deck that was built off the master bedroom. He could see the dog visibly relax as soon as he made it outside, pulling on the belt and Max’s hand and trotting as quickly as he could for a patch of grass where he relieved himself. Once done, the dog stood next to Max, his head hanging, his mouth still open. Max looked down at him. “Come on. Let’s walk around the front of the house.”

The dog walked slowly next to Max as they made their way around the side of the house and back to the front door. The dog walked like it was exhausted. Max couldn’t blame him. Max tugged on the makeshift leash and made it to the front door. The dog looked at the door, then sat, staring wide-eyed at the front door as if he was afraid to go inside. Max couldn’t blame him. Max pushed the door open and yelled. “Reynolds?”

“What?” she answered impatiently as if she was in the middle of something.

“I need you out here.”

“Grady, I’m in the middle of something.”

It was his turn to be impatient. “Reynolds, I need you out here now.”

Finally, Cassie stomped her way down the foyer, her strawberry-blonde hair bobbing behind her. Her expression was stiff. “What do you need, Grady?”

Max didn’t say anything. He only pointed.

Cassie drew in a sharp breath, her mouth dropping open. “Oh, my God. Was this the noise we were hearing?”

Max nodded. “He barricaded himself in the walk-in closet attached to the bedroom. Was hiding behind some sweaters.”

Cassie knelt down and set her notebook on the ground, pulling off her gloves and reaching for the dog. He allowed her to scratch under his chin but stepped closer to Max. Cassie looked up at Max, her eyebrows furrowed. “Well, it looks like you made a friend,” she said, standing up. “He’s definitely not interested in me. The poor thing. I can’t imagine what he’s been through.” Cassie looked back into the house. “Do you want me to call Animal Protective Services? They can come and take him away for us.”

Max responded without thinking about it. “No.” He looked down at the dog, who had positioned himself behind his legs. “He used the bathroom when I took him out through the sliding glass doors in the master bedroom. Does he need some food or something?”

Cassie nodded. “Yes, yes. Of course. Let me go get food and water for him. Just stay right here, okay?” Max nodded.

A second later, Cassie came back with the dog’s bowls, one of them filled with water, one of them with a little bit of dry kibble in it. She set them down. The dog looked at the bowls, then looked at Cassie, then looked up at Max. Max looked at Cassie. “I think you should go back inside.”

“Why?”

“I don’t think that Patch likes you.” A little part of Max really hoped that was the case. Reynolds was always the one with the people skills. She got along with everyone. Max was exactly the opposite.

Cassie raised her eyebrows. “Patch? Did you just make that up? Not that creative given the bullseye on his face.”

Max’s face reddened. “No. That’s actually his name. It’s on his tags.” While Cassie was in the house, Max had looked at the dog’s collar. Max straightened, suddenly feeling more confident. He waved Cassie back inside. “I’ve got this. We’ll just hang out here for a few minutes. I’ll be back in in a minute.”

Cassie shrugged, clearly put off that the dog favored Max over her. She disappeared inside.

As soon as the front door to the house closed, Max knelt down in front of Patch, stroking his head. Patch was still shaking a little bit, though he seemed calmer now that he was outside. Max pulled the bowl of water closer to Patch and spoke softly. “Now listen, I don’t know anything about dogs. To be honest, I can barely manage myself, but it seems like you might need some water. What do you think?”

Part of Max couldn’t believe he was having an actual conversation with a dog, but then again, stranger things had happened. Patch stared at him for a moment as if curious about the new human that was in front of him, then looked at the bowls. He took a step forward and lowered his boxy head, drinking some water. He took two bites of kibble and then turned away. Max stood up, glanced at the front door and then looked back at Patch. What was he supposed to do now? He had a dog and three dead bodies to deal with.

Max sighed, then tugged on Patch’s leash. Patch couldn’t go back into the house. It wasn’t fair to him, and he could contaminate the crime scene. Max walked toward his car. He put Patch in the back seat, closed the doors and headed for the house. Five feet in, he stopped and turned back. Walking around the front of the car, he turned on the engine and rolled the windows down enough so there was a nice cross breeze in the car but not so much that Patch could jump out and run away. Staring at the car for a moment, Max felt satisfied. At the AA meetings, Frankie Turner always talked about small wins. Maybe this was one of them.

By the time Max walked back inside the house, Cassie had written a full page of notes in her notebook. She looked up at him. “What did you do with the dog?”

“Patch.”

Cassie eyed Max suspiciously, as if she didn’t know him. “Sure. Patch.”

“He’s in my car.”

Cassie arched a single eyebrow. “In your car? Did he drink some water?”

Max nodded. “I opened the windows too.” As the words came out of his mouth, he felt like a four-year-old dragging their newest crayon drawing to their mommy.

“That’s good.”

Max cleared his throat and reached into his pockets, pulling out a new set of gloves. He sighed. “All right. What do we got?”

Cassie shook her head. “Nothing different than before the dog. I got three dead bodies and a pan of burned carrots.”

11

If anyone had asked about how he was feeling after his visit to the Sloane’s house, Adam would probably say he felt a sense of relief. Joe Sloane was out of the picture. There would be no more family dinners or picnics or reasons for Adam to have to go with Brooke over to the Sloane’s house to suffer through more misery.

Finally.

A sense of peace covered him as he packed for class that morning, grabbing his laptop, a notebook, and a paper copy of the textbook he’d be teaching from, Introduction to Statistics. He was only carrying it out of habit. Adam knew more about the topic than pretty much anyone else on campus, save for his advisor, Dr. Jasmine Johnson. He’d been up a good part of the night cleaning. His plan had been simple. Go to the Sloane’s house. Have a chat with Joe. Win him over. If that didn’t work, go to plan B.

The problem was, plan B required a lot of work once he’d gotten home. Adam had brought his clothes into the house, immediately stripped down and threw them into the washing machine on hot. He’d taken a shower, then went out to his car and wiped it down with a bleach-based set of wipes, double-checking that any errant drop of blood had been removed.

He used the same wipes to clean his tennis shoes and the knife he’d saved for Joe Sloane. There was no gun for him to deal with. He’d stopped on the way back from the Sloane house on the pull-off near a bridge that crossed the Ohio River and dropped it, plus the bag of beer, pie, and candy he’d bought for the Sloanes into the murky darkness. He’d thought about getting rid of the knife too, but it was one of the only things he had left from his family. His grandfather had given it to him when he was a kid. They’d gone out to the barn on his farm one afternoon and his grandfather had taught him how to use it, stabbing a straw bale until the baling came off, the precision required appealing to Adam’s analytical side. It was his one good memory from childhood. That, and having picnics at the beach with his mom and sister.

His dad had been a tyrant, for lack of a better phrase, a harsh man with a harsh manner and a difficult personality. No matter what Adam had done, there was no way for him to measure up. Born with a natural talent for numbers and theory, Adam loved to spend time working on puzzles, video games, and chess—anything that had to do with strategy.

But his father would have none of it.

By the time Adam was eight, he was going out on hunting trips with his father, sitting in a tree stand just south of the Oregon border in Bridgeville, California, miserable, freezing to death, his fingers and toes numb from the cold. They spent days on end waiting for herds of deer to come out of the Trinity National Forest. His father would sit and drink beer, sharpening his knife until he saw a deer coming. His hands would move so quickly that Adam never saw the rifle going up to his face until the shot was already gone. At ten, Adam had killed his first deer using his father’s rifle. He’d gotten nauseous, nearly throwing up the ham and cheese sandwich he’d just eaten. Getting a disappointed look from his father, he swallowed the bile that had collected at the back of his throat.

At twelve, his father upped the ante. Adam had gone through a tough time at school, ending up in the principal’s office after telling his teacher, Mr. Salica, that he was stupid. In Adam’s mind, his teacher was. He was painfully bored. The visit to the principal’s office required Adam’s dad to leave work. That was unacceptable.

For his punishment, his dad dragged him out of school and drove their rickety truck the whole way to a private hunting ground in northern Nevada, land that belonged to a guy that Adam’s dad had met through his work at the truck dealership where he spent every day repairing transmissions. Adam had spent a grueling week camping out with his father, who expressed his disappointment in Adam’s behavior by forcing him to gut everything they caught. Some nights, his father made a fire. Most nights, he didn’t. Adam was forced to lay on the cold ground of their tent with only a thin blanket, kept awake by his shivering. By the time he’d gotten home, he could barely look at his father. He’d had to throw away everything he’d worn on the trip, the smell of the blood and guts and feces never coming out.

He never went hunting again.

Over the years, his family had disappeared. His grandfather had a stroke the year after he gave Adam the knife. His mom and dad had never married. They’d had him and his sister, Molly, then his mom took off, marrying a guy she’d met at work when Adam was fourteen and Molly was thirteen. His mom had ended up moving to Hawaii with the promise Adam and Molly could follow once she got settled.

It never happened.

Adam was in his sophomore year of college at USC, the captain of the Union Rifle Team, when he heard that his dad died in a motorcycle accident on some winding roads in a canyon near Santa Monica. Adam’s dad and his girlfriend had both died. Molly, just a year younger than him, was doing her freshman year in London.

She never came back, and he never heard from her again.

That was okay by Adam. His family had been an abject disaster in his mind. There was no point in dredging up the past, a past that had bonded him, his sister, and his mom in a house led by a man who was nothing but an angry, frustrated bully.

That man, like Joe Sloane, had destroyed lives.

Adam carefully cleaned the knife and then hid it in the house. He’d get it out again once the furor over the Sloane’s deaths ended. By then, he’d be back with Brooke and all would be well.

Now it was time for him to do one thing… get back to work.

And get his girl back.

12

“Okay, Reynolds. Let’s start from the beginning.” Max crossed his arms in front of his chest. The fact that Cassie said she had nothing was unacceptable. There were always leads at a crime scene. Always.

“All right, if you wanna play it like that.” The words came out of Cassie’s mouth with a hint of resentment. Was it about the dog or something else? “We’ve got three DOA’s, two males and one female. According to the title records, the house is owned by Joe and Jody Sloane. If I had to guess, this is their son.”

Max was listening, thumbing through a stack of mail that was on the kitchen counter. He found a school schedule buried at the bottom of it. “No need for a conjecture.” He held up the report card. “Meet Tyler Sloane, age fourteen. Freshman at Regency Jesuit High School.” Max glanced at the printout. Poor kid was stuck in all of the classes Max hated as a kid—physical education, biology, and math.

Max handed the schedule to Cassie who looked at it and then folded the page, holding it with the same fingers that held the notebook. She looked up. “Not to retread old theories, but this doesn’t look like a murder-suicide me.”

“Basis?”

Cassie shifted her weight as if his line of questioning was uncomfortable. “We talked about this already.”

“Humor me,” Max said, walking stiffly toward the body of Joe Sloane. He needed to reset, to start from the beginning. Seeing Patch so traumatized had churned up something in his gut, something he didn’t have a name for.

“Well, there’s no murder weapon, Grady. In a murder-suicide, we’d find some sort of weapon. Especially in this bloody of a case.”

“Agreed.” Max pointed to Joe’s body. “It’s also worth noting that there’s two different methods of death here—stabbing and shooting. That’s unusual.”

Cassie widened her eyes. She gave him a look like Grady was her annoying little brother. “You said that earlier.”

“That was before I got distracted by the dog.”

“So that’s the problem,” Cassie muttered.

Max ignored her.

Max moved from the kitchen where the bodies were still on the floor over to the family room, his head on the swivel. “You know what I don’t see?”

Cassie turned to face him. “What’s that, Grady?”

She was really using his name a lot. “Any destruction.”

Cassie blinked, as if Grady had finally hit on something significant. “So you don’t think this is a burglary gone wrong?”

Why are you surprised I found something? “No, I don’t. Do you, Reynolds?”

She paused for a moment. “No, I don’t.”

At least they could agree on something.

As Max turned back toward the kitchen, he caught a glimpse of the side of the father’s face. He was looking up at the ceiling, an arm flailed out to one side. Max studied it, when in a split second, it shifted. The man’s face was replaced by Max’s dad’s face. A wave of nausea ran over Max. His mouth went dry, panic running through him. What was happening? He glanced at the other two bodies. From where he was standing, he couldn’t see their faces, but the two bodies could have easily been his mother and his brother if Max hadn’t stopped his father on one of his drunk tirades.

Max reached for the edge of the couch to steady himself. His vision swam in front of him, Joe Sloane and his father’s face mixing together in a grotesque vision. He heard Cassie calling him. It sounded far away. “Grady? Are you okay?”

Max managed to mumble something and then ran outside, sitting down on the front step. He looked down for a second, then looked up in time to see Patch lift his head and stare at him from the back seat of his car. He put his head between his knees, fighting off a wave of dizziness. What had he just experienced? How had his memories managed to take over his reality? He swallowed hard, remembering the way that his father’s face had looked after Max had shot and killed him. His body had been lifeless on the ground, the only noise in the room after the report of the shot was a hollow cry from his mother. Grady had known the reality at that moment. She was grieving the loss of her husband even though he had been trying to kill her and her two young sons. The cry haunted Max. It was the sound of someone who knew their choices had destroyed the life they wanted the most.

Lifting his head, Max realized his hands were shaking. He sucked in a couple of deep breaths and blew them out, the way that Dr. Kersevich had taught him. It was supposed to drive off the need for a drink. At that moment, all Max thought was that Dr. Kersevich was a fool. He heard Cassie’s voice from over his shoulder. “Max? Are you okay?”

He stood up, sucking in a deep breath. “Yeah. I’m fine. Just got a little lightheaded. Didn’t have time to get breakfast this morning,” he lied.

“Are you sure?” Cassie looked concerned.

He brushed by her. “Yeah, I’m sure. Let’s get back to work.”

13

They stayed at the scene for another twenty minutes and then decided it was time to go. He glanced at Reynolds, who was talking to the medical examiner, Dr. Jordan Hamadi, and his assistant, Cameron. “I’m gonna head out. I’ll meet you back at the office in a bit. Gonna make a stop first. When you call BFS, make sure the crime scene techs look for stray rounds. Either whoever did this is an excellent shot or there may be more rounds stuck in the walls somewhere. Given the fact we don’t have a murder weapon, we need everything we can get.” The techs at the Bureau of Forensic Services had pretty much taken over any complicated crime scene investigations, collecting and logging any evidence, leaving the detectives to run down the suspects.

“Okay, yeah. That’s fine.”

What? No attitude? Maybe Reynolds was actually cutting him a break? Max cleared his throat. “I’ll see you back in the office.”

Cassie didn’t answer. Max couldn’t tell if that was because she was relieved to have him leave or if she was concentrating on the scene. If he had to guess, she was secretly relieved that he was getting out of the way.

Truthfully, so was he.

As Max strode out of the house, he knew he needed time to think. Seeing his father’s face superimposed on a dead body at a crime scene was probably one of the things that Dr. Kersevich would like to get a call about. Max glanced at his phone and then shook his head.

No way. Max didn’t need anyone else looking at him like he was crazy.

He passed a bar called the Wild Goose on the way back across town. He glanced at it for a second longer than he normally would have. It was early and they were certainly not open yet, but a drink might actually taste good at the moment. If nothing else, it might steady his nerves. The image of Frankie Turner, his AA sponsor, popped up in his head. In Max’s mind, Frankie’s face was calm and serene, his flat cap perched on his head. Max frowned, dismissing Frankie from his mind. He knew what Frankie would say about thoughts about drinks. “Gotta rein them in, Max. They’re like wild horses. If you let them go too far, they’ll get completely out of control.”

Max raised his eyebrows. Frankie was filled with all sorts of practical commentary like that.

Max tapped his fingers on the steering wheel as he drove, heading for the Oakview Center, the residential facility where his brother Ben lived. Given the fact that their mom and dad were both gone, Max was the only one left who could go visit Ben. Not that he was sure Ben even cared.

When Ben was born, the doctors had immediately known that he was disabled. Though it wasn’t the accepted term at the moment, “retarded,” was the word they’d used at the time. He was the firstborn in Max’s family. In fact, he’d been originally named after their father, but when their dad got wind of the fact that Ben had issues, his father, ever the epitome of kindness and grace, had insisted that they change his name to Ben.

Ben had lived with Max and his mom for a while after their dad’s death, but unfortunately Ben had been cursed with the same temper that their father had had. Though Ben didn’t drink—he had been too young at the time—with his cognitive issues, anything that went wrong drove Ben crazy. Literally. He’d started getting physical when he was a young child, doing everything from throwing toys at their mom to trying to tackle Max, biting and pulling his hair. Things only got worse the older Ben got. Max was convinced it was because he’d seen what their father had done to them, the way that his dad would come in drunk after a long day of work. Add in a few hours at the bar and he’d take his unhappiness out on Max and their mom.

As Ben had gotten older, with Max out of the house, the violence had only gotten worse. By then, Ben was a grown man, with grown man’s strength, attached to a mind that had the cognitive capacity of an eight-year-old. There were days that Max guessed that was a generous assessment based on the way that Ben was acting.

Finally, Max and his mom were able to get Ben moved into the Oakview facility. It wasn’t fancy, but it was clean. It was ideal for people like Ben who couldn’t be cared for at home, complete with therapy, medication services, and even job training. Max tried to stop by once or twice a week, though with his own troubles it wasn’t as often as he would have liked. In one of his few very honest moments with Dr. Kersevich, Max had told him that being around Ben dredged up a whole bunch of bad family memories. As the words came out of Max’s mouth, he realized those were the only memories he had.

Dr. Kersevich had looked at him coolly through his black framed glasses. “You feel like you should go, but it hurts to do so. The knife cuts both ways, doesn’t it?”

His sentiment was far from soothing.

Max pulled up at the Oakview Center and glanced in the back seat. Patch had laid down and curled up on top of a jacket that Max had tossed in the back seat a few weeks before. At least he was no longer shaking. Max reached his hand back, rubbing the top of Patch’s head. He slipped out of his car, making sure the windows were left open so he had some fresh air. Max locked his car and headed for the front door.

The reception desk at the Oakview Center was empty. It didn’t matter. Max had been there so many times he knew exactly what to do. He signed in and then walked down the hallway. The Oakview Center wasn’t a nursing facility, but it smelled like one some days. Today was one of them. The scent of disinfectant hung in the air, as if the strong hospital-grade cleaner they used had just been spilled on the floor and masked something worse. Most likely, someone had had an accident, had spilled something, or had thrown a plate of unappetizing food at one of the caregivers. That was the reality for the residents at the facility.

Max ignored the smell and made his way to the dining room where the scent changed from cleaner to food cooking. Checking the time, he knew Ben would have abandoned his post in the game room and moved to the dining room. One thing that had been so good for Ben at the Oakview Center was the schedule. The psychiatrist on staff had explained to Max that keeping a predictable schedule was one way to help Ben keep control of his emotions. “Unpredictability leads to instability in many cases,” she had said.

Max lifted an eyebrow remembering what she’d said. How true, and not just for Ben.

Max found Ben sitting in the back corner of the dining room. The tables had colorful paper name tents for each of the seats where the residents sat for each of their meals, each of them decorated with stars and stickers they could earn for good behavior. Ben was no exception to this. Over the few years that he’d been there, he’d had his seat changed a few times when scuffles had emerged over food, who sat next to him, or if the social strata among the residents shifted. Max stopped and watched Ben for a minute. There was definitely a family resemblance between the two of them. Ben had the same dark hair and the same face shape. The one thing that separated them was that Ben was missing the gray temples. Max lifted a finger, touching the gray hair. Ben had been through the same abuse as Max, but there was one difference—Ben hadn’t pulled the trigger. Max had.

Either way, they both had suffered.

Max made his way across the room, giving another one of the residents, a guy named George, a high five and waving to one of the caretakers, a big guy named Michael. Michael had been there for years. He looked like he spent every waking minute he wasn’t at the Oakview Center at the gym. The first time George asked for a high five, Max wasn’t sure what to do. Luckily a caregiver, a woman named Lucy, was standing nearby. “George likes to high-five everybody,” she said enthusiastically.

So now, if Max saw George, he gave him a high five. There was no reason not to play along.

Approaching Ben’s table, Max held his hand up in greeting. Ben didn’t even look his way. He was sitting next to someone new, a woman quite a bit older than him, her hair cut very short, a broad smile on her face. She was giggling at something that Ben had just said. He scooted a few potato chips from his plate to hers. Max nodded slowly. This gal was the flavor of the week. Recently, it seemed that every time Max went to visit Ben, there was a different woman sitting next to him. Max’s stomach sunk. Maybe, like so many other places in his life, it didn’t matter that he showed up at all.

“Hey Ben, how are you doing?” Max said, putting a hand on Ben’s shoulder.

Ben brushed it off, like a bug had landed on him. He didn’t say anything, only giving Max a quick glance. Ben didn’t talk much, despite years of speech therapy. The experts had told Max that the trauma from when he was a child had pretty much shut off that part of his brain. Max frowned as he watched Ben smile and point at the woman who was sitting next to him, her name tent declaring her name was Joyce. It was decorated in reds and pinks, with a bunch of smiley face stickers clustered in the corner of the card stock. Max sat down in an empty chair that happened to be next to Ben on the other side of him. Staring at the two of them for a moment, he started to wonder how they were communicating since Ben didn’t talk. Impatient, Max tapped Ben on the shoulder. “Are you having a good day, Ben?” Ben didn’t say anything, not even a single word. He just shot Max a look as if Max was interrupting his time with Joyce.

Max felt his chest tighten. He stared at Ben, watching him push another pile of potato chips toward Joyce. Everything in Max wanted to look at Ben, tell him about how he was struggling, that he was finally trying to come to grips with what their father had done to them, and more importantly, what Max had had to do in order to end the abuse. He wanted to tell his older brother that he was an alcoholic, that he’d managed to lose the only job he ever wanted as a detective of the Pittsburgh Police Department, only to regain it but lose the trust of his partner, one of the only women he’d ever met that understood how his mind worked. He wanted to have an older brother that would look at him, with knowing eyes that would understand the journey they’d been on together without having to explain anything.

But that wasn’t reality.

Max sat there for another minute feeling completely isolated even though he was sitting in a room full of people. He stared at the tablecloth, poking his finger at a tiny thread that had come loose. He didn’t say anything for a long minute then looked up. Ben and Joyce were still wrapped in their silent communication, Ben’s body turned away from Max. His stomach tightened into a knot. Why had he even bothered to show up? If Ben was gonna do nothing but ignore him, why even make the trip over to the center?

Then Dr. Kersevich’s voice rang in his thoughts. Who was he there for? Was it for him or for Ben?

At that moment he didn’t know.

Frustrated, Max got up and walked out of the dining room. He didn’t bother saying goodbye to Ben. If Ben even realized Max was gone, he apparently didn’t care. Max stopped at the desk on the way out, asked the woman who’d come back to the registration desk if she could look up and see if Ben needed anything. A second later she shook her head. “Nope. He’s all good, Max. We’ll give you a call if we need anything. You have a good day now.” Michelle turned away to work on paperwork for the other residents.

“Yeah, you too.”

14

Max walked out of the building, staring at the ground as he made his way to his car, his hands shoved into his pockets. Max slid inside, surprised to see Patch sitting in the back. The dog lifted his head when Max got inside. Max blinked. He’d completely forgotten about Patch while he was inside. Part of him felt bad about that. As Max started the car, he turned on the air conditioning just in case Patch was hot, even though the interior of the car wasn’t warm. It was a relatively cool day. Max had parked in the shade and left the windows cracked open, but he didn’t know how Patch would feel about that.

In the rearview mirror, Max saw Patch get up, circle the back seat and then lay down again. Max blinked and then focused on driving. Was Patch sad about his family? Did dogs have feelings like that? It was a question he needed to ask Reynolds when he got a second.

As Max pulled the car out of the parking lot, he felt something poking his left shoulder. He glanced back to see Patch’s brown nose tapping him as if reminding Max that he was there. Max found it strange, but nice in a way. He reached up and scratched Patch’s head. “Are you okay? Do you need something?” As soon as the words came out of his mouth, he realized that there was no way for Patch to respond to him, at least in words he’d recognize.

He frowned. He found it strangely comforting to have Patch in the car. Maybe Cassie was on to something. Did she feel the same way about her dog, Happy?

Max decided to head over to the medical examiner’s office to see if there was any new information on the murders. The medical examiner’s office was a county operation. The year before, the county had built a new facility on the outskirts of the city, so it took Max a little while to navigate his way through Pittsburgh traffic to get there.

When Max pulled into the parking lot at the medical examiner’s office, he was still surprised at how modern the building was, especially given the fact that they were in Pennsylvania, one of the original thirteen United States colonies. Change came hard to him. Why did it have to be a modern building? He scowled. Wasn’t tradition part of Pennsylvania? They weren’t in California, after all.

The building itself was square and white, nothing like what someone might expect a government building to look like. Max parked out front and looked at Patch. Patch looked up at Max, his eyes hopeful. The poor dog had been in his vehicle for the last several hours with no opportunity to do anything other than lay down. Max had no idea if dogs got car sick or anything, but boredom he could relate to. Max reached into the back and found the belt he’d used as a makeshift leash. He waved Patch forward. “Come here,” he said awkwardly. He suddenly realized he had no idea how to command a dog to come toward him. It was another question for Reynolds.

Patch jumped into the front seat on the driver’s side and sat and waited while Max fished the belt around his neck. Max gave the leash a little tug encouraging him forward and Patch jumped out. After shaking his head, a shake that ran the entire way down his back, Patch looked up at Max as if to say, “Okay, now what?”

Max headed for the front door, noticing that Patch walked right next to him. Max blinked. Someone must have spent some time training this dog, Max realized as he pushed open the door for the medical examiner’s office. Rhonda, the receptionist for the medical examiner’s office stood up. “Max? What are you doing? You can’t bring a dog in here.”

Max stood and stared at her for a second, his expression blank. “It’s not my dog, Rhonda. He’s a witness. I need to take him back to go see Jordan.”

“What? A witness? I can’t let you⁠—”

Max didn’t wait to hear any more of what Rhonda had to say. He opened the door, taking Patch with him. Rhonda met him in the hallway, her arms waving. “Honestly, Max. Didn’t you hear me? You can’t have a dog in here!”

Max kept walking. He held a hand up in the air as he left her behind.

Max found Dr. Jordan Hamadi in one of the back examination rooms. The new building was big enough that they had five separate exam spaces, an improvement that even though Max didn’t like the building itself, he agreed with. Though Pittsburgh wasn’t anything like Chicago in terms of violence, it was still a sprawling metropolitan area with its share of death every single day. Dr. Hamadi and his colleagues covered the entire county. They needed to be able to have multiple areas where they could do their examinations.

Max!” Jordan said, looking up. He was one of the few people left in Max’s life who seemed to be excited to see him.

“Hey,” Max muttered. Max glanced past Jordan’s smile and looked around the room. Jordan was working in one of the larger examination rooms, one with four separate stainless-steel tables lined up in parallel rows. There were no mortuary refrigerators, what cops called body lockers, in this particular room. The new medical examiner’s office in Pittsburgh was big enough that they had an entire room just dedicated to the cold storage of bodies between their delivery to the medical examiner’s office and the release to the funeral home of the family’s choosing. For some reason, no body lockers brought Max comfort. Why, he wasn’t sure.

Along the wall to his right was a bank of humming equipment set on stainless steel counters. There were matching cabinets, both above and below, all stainless steel. All of the metal gave the room a harsh, industrial feel, somewhere between a factory and a surgical suite.

Max glanced to his left, seeing movement. Cassie had beat him to Jordan’s office. She was leaning against the wall, her arms crossed in front of her chest. Her expression somewhere between irritation and concern.

It’s probably the dog.

Three of the tables in front of Max were occupied. Though he couldn’t see them, Max knew it was the Sloane family. The bodies were completely covered with thin blue surgical sheets. The room had a faintly deodorized smell, definitely not as strong as what he had smelled when he stopped at the Oakview Center to see Ben, but it lingered in the air, nonetheless.

“Max?” Jordan asked, his expression slightly confused.

By Jordan’s face, Max could tell Jordan had said something and Max had completely ignored him. “Sorry. Was busy thinking.”

“Who’s your friend?”

“He’s a witness. His name’s Patch.”

“A witness, huh?” Jordan walked over, stripping off his blue gloves, tossing them into the wastepaper basket from a good ten feet away, the two of them hitting dead center. Jordan held up two fingers and grinned. “Two points.”

His hands now bare, Jordan squatted down and held his hands open for Patch to sniff. Max watched as the dog wagged his tail just a little bit, more of a quiver than anything else. Part of him wondered if he could smell his family just feet from him. Jordan scratched his chin and looked up at Max. “I don’t normally allow dogs in the lab⁠—”

“He’s a witness,” Max repeated.

Jordan raised eyebrows. “Well, that would explain why there’s a belt around his neck instead of a leash. I take it the belt belongs to Mr. Sloane over there?”

“That would be my assumption,” Max said flatly. “It looks a little too big for the wife.”

Cassie pushed her away off of the wall and walked over to the Patch, rubbing his back. “He needs a proper leash.”

“I realize that, but I didn’t exactly wanna take the time to hunt around the Sloane’s house to find it. And that’s not what I’m here about anyway. Have you had a chance to look at the bodies, Jordan?”

Jordan folded his arms across his chest, spreading his feet apart a little bit and adapting a stiff stance, but not answering. He glanced toward the three draped bodies in his examination room as if remembering why they were there. Jordan had skin that looked to be perpetually tan, an angular nose, and the brush of thick dark hair mottled with just a few silver strands. He was tall, at least six feet, and kept himself in good shape. He looked like the kind of guy who ran or did the elliptical, tall and lean.

“I haven’t had a chance to do a full exam, but I figured you guys would be poking your heads in. We got them cleaned up and did an initial assessment.” He cocked his head to the side. “Wanna take a look?”

Max shrugged.

Cassie nodded. “Yes.”

Jordan dropped his hands and walked over to the first table. He lifted the surgical sheet enough just to expose Tyler Sloane’s face. Max studied it for a second, holding Patch’s leash in his hand, noticing the dog lift his head and sniff the air. Tyler looked young and serene, his eyes closed, his face pale. He looked as if he was resting, minus the fact that the upper half of his face was marred by a hole between his eyes.

Jordan cleared his throat. “Meet Tyler Sloane, age fourteen, according to the report card information that you gave me. You guys are working on getting more information for me?”

Cassie nodded and pulled her notepad out. She was scratching down information. Max didn’t take notes. He relied on his memory or Cassie’s. “We’ll get that for you.” Max glanced at Cassie. “Can you text whoever is at the house and have them see if they can find next of kin or any medical records that might be there?”

Cassie looked at him coolly as if she was slightly offended that he was barking orders at her. Why it was a problem all of a sudden, Max was unsure. “Sure.”

When Max looked back to Jordan, Jordan’s face was still, his expression slack. He blinked as if he noticed there was something going on between the two of them. Max ignored his reaction. “Go on.”

“I won’t show it to you now, however there’s a significant amount of damage to the back of Tyler’s head. It’s to be expected with an injury like this.” Jordan pointed without touching the body. “The round destroyed tissue and then shattered the back part of his skull. He died instantly.”

“Whoever pulled the trigger either got lucky or was a very good shot,” Max commented.

Jordan moved on to the next examination table after covering Tyler’s face. As he uncovered it, Max realized that it was Jody Sloane. She was face down on the table, her skin tan in the spots where her bathing suit hadn’t covered her, the cleft in her buttocks exposed for all of them to see. Jordan pointed to a single hole in the back of her left shoulder. “I haven’t opened her up yet, but based on the entry, the round looked like it slid between the spine and one of her ribs. I’m guessing we’ll see significant damage to her heart. What’s most notable here is that it was a posterior entry.”

Max nodded, thinking the same thing. He knew what that meant. The wife had been turning away from the shooter when the trigger was pulled. She’d been shot in the back with no chance to defend herself. He played the scene in his head, then sucked in a breath, remembering how his mom had tried desperately to get away from his dad, the noise of her cries and screams echoing in his mind. For a second, Max couldn’t breathe. He pressed his lips together, feeling perspiration on his forehead. What was happening? Dr. Kersevich had warned Max about the possibility of uncontrolled memories happening as they dug into his background. “Intrusive thoughts,” he had called them. Max blinked and refocused on the wife’s body.

Come on, Grady. Let’s go. Think.

Shooting someone in the back was the work of a coward or someone who simply didn’t care. Max cocked his head to the side, trying to fit the wife’s movements into the crime scene. As of yet, he couldn’t quite make it work.

Jordan moved to the third table, pulling the drape down further this time on a fully disrobed Joe Sloane. “Our last contestant,” Jordan said with a tight smile, “is the dad. Joe Sloane.”

Max blinked. Medical examiners had a funny sense of humor. For that matter, so did police officers. He’d always figured it was just part of the job for anybody who saw as much tragedy and death as they did. Humor was the only way through it. Otherwise, they’d all go crazy with what reality really looked like. “He wasn’t shot, was he?”

Jordan pointed, the skin across his face tight as if having a killer on the loose that was proficient with both knives and guns was a reality he’d hoped to avoid. “Nope. You were right about that, Max. He was stabbed. You can see the entry wound here.”

Max took half a step forward, urging Patch along with him. He glanced down, noticing the dog lifted his nose in the air again as if he could smell the family that he’d lived with. Max looked away. He felt sad for Patch. Swallowing, he realized that wasn’t like him.

Jordan continued. “You can see the slice here. The knife entered the abdomen just below the diaphragm. Again, I haven’t had time to do the autopsy yet, but usually in these cases the blade nicks one of the arteries. If that happens, it’s a maximum of two minutes before death. Based on the amount of blood we found at the scene, I’m guessing that’s what the case is going to be. Also, I found a little blood around his mouth. That generally means that a lung has been punctured or that blood has infiltrated it somehow. The body tries to get rid of it by coughing.

Cassie was the next to speak up. Her expression was stony. “We don’t see too many situations where there’s more than one cause of death.”

Jordan nodded, covering Joe’s body again. “Meaning knife wounds and gunshot wounds in the same crime scene, I’m assuming?”

Cassie nodded.

Jordan licked his bottom lip. “Yeah. It’s pretty rare. Usually when we see multiple victims like this, they’ve all died via the same method, except in the case of close-quarters combat, like in the military when someone runs out of ammunition and can’t reload, then turns to their knife to do the work.” He paused for a moment. “In this area, though, we usually see gunshot wounds.” Jordan crossed his arms in front of his chest, his face suddenly serious. “Whoever did this had a lot of anger in them. They were also either exceptionally skilled or exceptionally lucky. Killing someone with a knife has a higher chance of ending someone’s life, but it’s also a lot riskier. With a gun, somebody can stand back and not get their hands dirty, but with a knife⁠—”

“You gotta get up close and personal,” Max said, setting his jaw. “And see the whole thing right in front of your eyes.”

“Exactly.” Jordan looked away.

15

After Jordan finished giving them a tour of the bodies with the promise that he would call as soon as he had something more definitive, Max, still holding on to the makeshift belt-leash for Patch followed Cassie outside.

Cassie stopped just outside the entrance to the medical examiner’s office to study her phone. “I just got a text.”

Max pivoted to look at her. “About?”

Cassie looked up at him, her gaze expressionless. “Next of kin. The Sloanes have a daughter named Brooke. She’s a student over at Belmor.”

“I guess that’s our next stop.”

Max walked to his car, Cassie trailing behind. He hadn’t actually asked her if she wanted to ride with him. To him it was a no-brainer. They were both in the same location. There was no reason for them to take multiple cars everywhere. Belmor University wasn’t far from the medical examiner’s office, less than a ten-minute drive. Max looked at Patch as he walked to the car, realizing the poor dog hadn’t had any water in a few hours. That wasn’t good, was it? How often did dogs need water?

Max opened the back door to his car and watched Patch jump inside wondering what to do. Chewing his lip, he leaned over, grabbing a trash bag he kept in his car so everything was neat and tidy. From inside, he pulled out a Styrofoam cup. He ripped the top off and then went to the trunk of his car.

Cassie glared at him. “What are you doing?”

“Getting Patch some water.”

Max always kept emergency supplies in the back of his car. There was no telling when there was going to be a flood, a blizzard, or construction that would keep someone stranded in traffic for hours. With his upbringing, he’d learned it was good to be prepared for the worst.

From a bag in the back of his trunk, he pulled a bottle of water, cracking it open, making a mental note to replace it. He poured a little bit in the bottom of the makeshift Styrofoam cup bowl for Patch and held it up for the dog. The dog sniffed it for a second and then started to lap it up. Max didn’t know anything about animals, but he expected that keeping them hydrated was as important as it was for humans.

But then again, he didn’t know.

After giving Patch a little water, Max got in the car and started it up. Cassie was alternately thumbing through her phone and looking at Patch, who had curled up on the back seat, his head resting. As Max pulled out of the parking lot, he looked at Cassie. “Where are we going?”

Cassie read off an address.

“I know approximately where that is. You’ll have to guide me as I get closer.”

Without saying anything, Cassie tapped the screens for the onboard navigation in Max’s car. “I think this will handle that problem.” Her voice was dry, as if Max was the biggest idiot in the world.

Right. Max nodded. “Yep. It will.”

Max was surprised that he was that rattled. Cassie’s voice interrupted his thoughts. “You’re not actually thinking about keeping Patch, are you?”

Max frowned. Did Cassie think he wasn’t capable of having a pet? He’d saved her life. He couldn’t manage a dog? “Well, what if the daughter doesn’t want the dog? It’s not like I’m just gonna shove him out the car door and hope for the best.”

Cassie rolled her eyes. “Of course not. We would take him to the shelter. There’s a lot of pit bull rescue organizations that would probably come and get him.”

“But doesn’t that mean he’d be going from house to house until he found a new family?”

Cassie nodded. “Maybe. Unless the daughter takes him.”

“If she takes him.”

Max stared straight ahead. The thought of Patch going from place to place settled in Max’s gut like he’d swallowed a handful of gravel. He had a flashback to being rushed out of his parents’ house the night he shot his father. The detective had stood by as he packed a few things into a bag and then walked him solemnly out of the house to join his mom and his brother. He’d never forgotten that night. It was the night when his home was no longer his home anymore.

And now Patch was having the same experience.

“Max!” Cassie interrupted his thoughts.

He glared at her. “What?”

“You missed the last two turns. Where are you going?”

Max glanced at the onboard navigation. The word rerouting was blinking at the top of the screen. “Take the next right,” it announced in an automated, overly friendly voice.

Grudgingly, Max complied. Stupid GPS.

Two minutes later, after skirting the Belmor University campus, Max pulled down West 4th Street. A second later, the onboard GPS announced, “You have arrived!” It was amazing to Max that as sophisticated as technology had become it was unable to discern context at all. There should be a way to have a more somber voice. What if someone was going to a funeral? They wouldn’t exactly want an enthusiastic voice accompanying them there, would they?

Max pushed the thought away as he got out of the car. He cracked the windows again for Patch, realizing he couldn’t take the dog in to do the notification. There was no telling how Brooke Sloane would react. For now, Patch would have to be content with staying in the car until they could figure out what to do with him. Cassie motioned to Max and led the way.

In front of him was a row of beige brick townhomes, each of the front doors painted a different color. Cassie pointed. “She’s in unit D. The one with the blue door.”

Max nodded but didn’t say anything. There was something going on. Cassie wasn’t herself around him, about as friendly as a bill collector who knew they weren’t getting their money. Even Max, with his limited emotional range, as Dr. Kersevich put it, noticed. She seemed to be all business. He had no idea what was going on with her. Then again, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

As they approached the door, Cassie knocked on it then stepped back. A young woman with long blonde hair opened it a second later, a confused expression on her face. She didn’t say anything, just blinking in the bright sunlight.

“Are you Brooke Sloane?” Cassie asked.

The young woman looked at Cassie and then at Max. “Yeah. Who are you?”

Cassie flashed the badge that was on the waistband of her pants. “I’m Detective Cassie Reynolds. This is Detective Max Grady. Can we come in for a second?”

“I guess.”

Max followed Cassie inside the townhome. Outside, he’d seen three stories. If he had to guess based on what he saw in front of him, the bedrooms were on the upper floors. In front of him was a small living room and a small kitchen. On the wall was a poster that said “Dream!” There was an old couch chair and a beat-up coffee table in the center of the room. A big screen TV on a stand was pushed up against one of the walls. Max looked at Brooke as she closed the door behind them. “Is there anyone else here?”

“No. My one roommate is in class but will be back soon. The other two are doing a semester abroad. It’s just the two of us for now. Why?”

Cassie glanced at Max. He gave her a nod. Cassie looked at Brooke. “I think you should probably sit down.”

Max watched as Brooke’s face flashed through a range of expressions—curious, suspicious, and lastly, afraid.

“What is it?” she blurted out.

Cassie held a hand up as if apologizing for what she was about to say. “Brooke, I’m sorry to tell you, there’s been an accident.”

Two gunshots and a knife wound were not exactly an accident. Max blinked. “Your family is dead.”

Cassie shot him a furious look.

Oops.

“What? What are you saying?” The color drained from Brooke’s face. “I just talked to my mom yesterday afternoon. This can’t be right. She said she was getting ready to make dinner.” She froze where she was standing, searching both of their faces as if they were playing a cruel joke on her. She started to wobble, her face ashen.

Max shook his head. “We told you to sit down,” he muttered under his breath.

Another horrified look from Cassie. Max looked down. He deserved that one.

Cassie walked over to Brooke and guided her over to the couch, helping her sit. “They were found a few hours ago by your cleaning lady. We don’t know what happened but⁠—”

“Wait. What? All of them? My mom? My dad? My brother?” Brooke read off the list as though she was making sure that they were all accounted for.

Cassie nodded, shooting a glare at Max as if that would keep him from speaking.

It did, for the moment at least.

As Brooke began to cry uncontrollably, her body doubled over on the couch, Cassie looked at Max. “Why don’t you go find her some water and some tissues?”

Dutifully, Max got up and wandered into the kitchen. He rooted through the cabinets over the wails and cries of Brooke Sloane.

In the refrigerator, he found a case of water. He wandered into the bathroom and grabbed a box of tissues and brought those back as well, setting the two of them on the nicked-up coffee table in front of Brooke. When they had arrived, her face was porcelain, the kind of fragile beauty that men loved. Now, Max noticed, her face was red and blotchy, her eyes already swelling.

“What happened to them? Was it a car accident?”

Cassie laid a hand on her arm. “I’m sorry, Brooke, we don’t know exactly. They all died at home.”

Brooke blinked. “Like a burglary?”

“Not exactly,” Cassie answered. She waited for a beat. “Do you have any other family you’re in contact with that can help you?”

Brooke sat up, her mouth slack. “My aunt, I guess. I just don’t know. They are all gone? Even Tyler?”

Max nodded.

“He was only fourteen. I don’t understand what happened.”

Cassie sucked in a breath, but Max interrupted her. “It looks like someone broke into the house. Tyler and your mom were shot. Your dad was stabbed.”

“Max!” Cassie hissed. “She’s just a child!”

Max narrowed his eyes. “No, she’s not, Detective Reynolds. She’s an adult of legal age. It is our responsibility to provide her with a true and honest rendering of the facts as we know it right now.”

From the look on Cassie’s face, it was a miracle she didn’t punch him.

“Will your roommate be home soon?” Max asked.

Brooke wiped her eyes and looked at her watch, sniffling. “Yeah. Amelia should be back any minute now, I think. She’s at class. We are both nursing majors.”

Max sat down on the chair across from where Cassie and Brooke were sitting close together. Brooke was calm for the moment, but he knew there were more hysterics coming. They came in waves. He needed to get his question in before they started again. “There is one other issue we need to discuss with you. Your dog.”

Brooke’s eyes widened. “Patch? Is he okay?” There was a new round of sobbing.

“Yes. He’s fine. We have him in the car. Do you want me to get him?”

Brooke blew her nose. “I can’t! I can’t!” She started to cry again, as if the memory of their family dog was too much to bear. “Is he okay?”

Cassie rubbed her arm. “He’s fine. You can see for yourself. We just don’t know what you want us to do with him?”

Hearing about her dog sent Brooke off into all another round of hysterics, her body flopping over on the couch. Max shifted in his seat. All he needed to know was what Brooke wanted them to do with Patch. He opened his mouth to say something but then stopped, hearing Dr. Kersevich’s voice in his head. “When you feel like doing something, sometimes it’s good to just take a minute and stop and assess.”

Maybe Dr. Kersevich had a point.

Instead of saying anything, Max shoved his hands into his pockets. Though everything in him wanted to get this part of the job done so they could get back to the investigation, he watched and waited.

For a second, he realized it felt good.

Brooke continued to cry. “It’s not that I don’t want Patch here. I do. I love him. But we can’t. I can’t have dogs here. I’d have to move. I just don’t know. Can someone take care of him for me?” She looked up, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue.

The door rattled. Max stood up. The roommate. He pulled a business card out of his wallet and handed it to Brooke. He didn’t feel like dealing with two crying girls. “We’ll take care of Patch while you figure out what you want to do.” She took the card from him. “Just let me know what you decide. You can reach me at the number on the card day or night. The medical examiner’s office will be in touch once the autopsies are done.”

Cassie handed Brooke her card with a solemn nod as the door popped open. Max stepped to the side as a short brown-haired girl with her curly hair knotted on the top of her head walked in the door. She carried a giant water bottle with a plastic straw sticking out of it. “Brooke? Who are these people?”

Max stepped back. These kinds of situations Cassie handled way better than he did. Cassie leveled her gaze at the roommate. “I’m Detective Reynolds. This is Detective Grady. We’ve just given your roommate some bad news. She’s gonna need your help.”

“I’m Amelia. What is going on here?” The words came out sharp and defensive.

Cassie held up a hand. “Amelia, it’s nice to meet you. We’ll let Brooke tell you the story. She has our numbers. If she needs to reach out to us, she has both of our cards.”

As the exchange finished, Max watched as Brooke flopped over on her side on the couch, crying hysterically. That was his cue to go. He beelined for the door.

Max got himself settled in the car, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. His stomach was tight. He hated the crying. It was like nails on a chalkboard to him. He heard his father’s voice in his head. “Crying don’t change anything, Max.”

Cassie emerged a second later, talking to Amelia, Brooke’s roommate. Her arms were drooping at her sides, her cheeks flushed. Max kept the windows rolled up. He didn’t need to hear the conversation. He knew what was going on. Brooke was hysterical. Amelia was concerned. Cassie did her Cassie-thing and smoothed things over. Cassie joined him in the car a minute later. She had a frown on her face. “You bolted on me.”

“We said what we needed to say.” Max shrugged, checking in the back seat on Patch. He seemed to be fine. “She knows her family is dead, she knows how to reach us, she knows I have Patch.”

Cassie shot him a look. “You aren’t seriously considering keeping him, are you?”

Max looked over at her. “Why?”

“You don’t even like animals.”

“Who said that?”

“Well, you don’t.”

Max threw a hand in the air. “Maybe I like him.”

An uncomfortable silence settled in the car. Max was annoyed. Cassie had actually suggested that he wasn’t capable of taking care of a dog. Did she think that little of him?

He turned on the engine to the car and pulled out of the parking area, then glanced at Cassie. “I think there’s a pet store on the other side of campus. How about if you help me figure out what I need.”

“Seriously, Grady?” she huffed.

“Seriously.”

16

After an expensive trip to the local pet store that made him rethink his position on liking dogs, Max loaded four bags worth of canine gear into his car. The only thing that he hadn’t agreed to buy was a metal crate. It looked like jail to him. “Patch doesn’t want to live in a crate,” he told Cassie.

After a few objections he ignored, Max agreed to purchase Patch a dog bed instead, plaid with thick tufts of padding. Along with the dog bed, there were two bowls, one for water and one for food, and a twenty-pound bag of dry dog kibble. They had to guess what kind Patch ate because no one had looked at the house. In addition to the food, bowls and bed, Max bought a leash, three different toys, one that squeaked, one that Patch could chew, and a frisbee for him to chase after, plus a box of dog treats, the same brand that Happy liked.

As they lugged all of the things out of the store, Cassie suggested that they go back to his house and get Patch settled before they continued on with their day. Max agreed, dropping her off at the coroner’s office to pick up her car on the way.

Half an hour later, he was back in the driveway at his own house. From the trunk of the car, he dug through one of the bags and pulled out the brand-new leash, ripping the tags off and sticking them back in the plastic bag where the rest of the toys were. He walked to the side door of the car and clipped the leash onto Patch’s collar. “That’s much better,” he mumbled to himself.

From the look on his face, Patch seemed as relieved as Max was.

Cassie pulled up a second later and took Patch from Max as he grabbed the bags from the trunk. As Cassie entered the house, she stopped and looked around, nodding. “This is a lot cleaner and more organized than last time I was here. It looks good, Max.”

“Is that a compliment?” Max stiffened.

She narrowed her eyes. “What does that mean?”

He cocked his head to the side, raising his eyebrows. “You haven’t been all that friendly recently.”

Cassie looked away. “No comment.”

Max knew it. There was something wrong. She was just holding back on him. He changed the subject. He wasn’t sure he was ready to hear what Cassie had to say. “Do I give him food now?”

Cassie nodded. “Poor guy’s probably hungry.”

Max got the two bowls out of the bag from the pet store, took them to the sink and washed them. He filled one with water and dried the other one carefully with a paper towel, tossing it in the trash when he was done. He reached into a drawer, pulled out a kitchen towel and stood looking around his house. He quickly decided that a spot in the kitchen near the door was the best place for Patch’s food and water.

Cassie shook her head. “What are you doing?”

Max scowled. “I’m washing his dishes. They’re brand new. There might be manufacturing residue on them. I don’t want him to get sick. He’s had a bad enough day.”

Cassie arched an eyebrow. “Okay if I let him off the leash.”

Max froze. He hadn’t anticipated having an animal loose in his house. But that was part of having a dog, wasn’t it? “We can try it, I guess.”

Patch stayed in place for a second then eyed up the two of them, finally wandering over to the food and water. He finished the bowl of kibble in less than two minutes, by Max’s count, drank a bunch of water, and then lay down on the floor. Max frowned. “I told you. He doesn’t even want a bed.”

Cassie held a finger up. “He will. I’m gonna take him outside and walk him so he can use the bathroom before we go back to work. Why don’t you get his bed and toys set up? Where are you going to put him?”

“What do you mean?”

Cassie’s shoulders drooped. “This is why I suggested the crate. He has to stay somewhere while you are gone. You want him loose in your house?”

“No.”

“Are your extra bedrooms still pretty much empty?”

“Yeah.”

“Why don’t you put him in there for right now until you know a little bit more about him?”

“What else do I need to know?”

Cassie sighed. “Like, is he a chewer? Will he try to get into your food? Will he rip the toilet paper off of the roll? You don’t know him, and he doesn’t know you. He’s gone through something horrible. This is gonna take some work, Grady. Dogs don’t just show up with house manners. And even if he has them, he doesn’t know what you expect.”

Max folded his arms across his chest. Lock the poor dog in a room all by himself? That sounded horrible. Did Cassie do that to Happy? He pressed his lips together. Max was beginning to wonder how much Cassie actually knew about dogs. “Won’t he be bored in the room by himself while I’m gone?”

“He’ll be fine.”

Cassie disappeared outside with Patch. Max used the next few minutes to cut the tags off of the toys, washing them carefully. He wanted to wash Patch’s new dog bed too, but there wasn’t time. He walked the toys and the dog bed down to the extra bedroom in his house, surveying what he saw in front of him. As Cassie had remembered, it was, for the most part, empty. There was a twin bed covered by an old bedspread in the corner flanked by a four-drawer dresser Max had gotten from his neighbor. That was about it. It wasn’t like Max had houseguests. He didn’t.

Max quickly set the dog bed on the floor with the toys on top of it, taking a minute to square it next to the wall so that the edge was touching. He put the toys at one end, but not the frisbee. That, he put on the dresser so that he could get to it when Patch wanted to run.

He retreated into the kitchen, grabbed the food and water dish, put another scoop of food in it and put clean water in the dish again, setting it up in the bedroom in case Patch got hungry or thirsty while he was gone. He frowned. Was that everything Patch would need?

Turning, he walked out into the hallway and opened a closet door. From inside, he pulled out an old radio. He walked it into the bedroom and plugged it in, turning on some rock music. Not metal, though. Though that was Max’s choice, it might be too much for the dog.

A second later, Cassie appeared at the door with Patch. “Mission accomplished. He peed.”

Max frowned. “Do I need to clean that up?”

Cassie shook her head. “No. Can’t really clean up pee on the lawn, Grady.” She glanced around the room. “Looks like things are all set up here. What’s with the radio?”

Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion” had just come on the radio. It was a classic. “I thought he might like some music while I’m gone.”

Cassie shook her head. She unclipped the leash from Patch’s collar. Patch, sensing he was free, walked around the edge of the room sniffing it. He found a dark brown Nylabone on his bed, picked it up tentatively after looking over his shoulder at Max and Cassie, laid down on the floor, holding it with his two front paws. He started to chew. Max raised his eyebrows, surprised it worked. “He likes it.”

Cassie grinned. “It’s bacon-flavored. They all do.”

“But he’s not on his bed.”

Cassie shot Grady a look. “Let go of the bed thing, Grady. We gotta go.”

“All right, fine. But I told you.”

Cassie pressed her lips together. “This is what I love about dogs. They aren’t mouthy.”

“And I am?”

Cassie grimaced. “No comment, again.”

Max shifted his weight to one hip. She’s definitely mad at me. Definitely.

17

With Patch settled at Max’s house, Max locked the door as he left and followed Cassie out to the car. She looked over her shoulder. “I was doing a little bit of research on the family that we found this morning.”

Max pulled the car out of the driveway. “The Sloanes. What do we know?”

“Well, Dad’s an electrician. Owns Sloane Electric. Mom’s a nurse.

Original name for a business. “Did anybody pull financials on them yet?

“I asked one of the new detectives to pull financials for us while we were at the medical examiner’s office. You know, that new guy. What’s his name?”

Max wasn’t sure that he liked the idea of other detectives doing their work for him. “Do you mean that guy named Ron?” Max had no idea of the guy’s last name.

“Yeah. He’s the one. He’s pretty good. Got the stuff right back to me. The Sloanes don’t have any significant financial issues. House is paid off, looked like Brooke’s tuition is being paid, though she’s carrying a few student loans. The only real debt is attached to Joe’s business. He has a couple car payments on some new work trucks.”

“Let’s head there next.”

The drive to Sloane Electric was uneventful, though silent. Max put on some Metallica, the guitar riffs of “Seek and Destroy” thumping in the background as they drove. If he was alone, he’d have the volume the whole way up. It was that kind of a day. But he knew Cassie wasn’t exactly a fan.

“Do we really have to listen to this?”

“Yeah.” He needed a little stress relief.

Cassie shook her head and played with her phone as they drove.

A lot had happened that morning: a triple murder, notifying the only person left in the family, and now a new dog at his house. He was feeling a little frayed around the edges, though he would be the last person to admit that to Cassie. She had enough she was holding against him at the moment.

Eighteen minutes later, Max pulled his car up in front of Sloane Electric, staring at the building. Sloane Electric occupied a building that looked to be a small, converted house with pristine landscaping, a large work building in the back, and surprisingly, a wishing well in the front yard. The grass was so green it looked like it had been painted. A sprinkler system was dousing the thirsty blades with water, the sprinkler heads carefully adjusted to not waste a drop on the concrete driveway. If Max had to guess, someone was a golf fan. The grass was the same quality as the turf at Augusta.

As Max got out of the car, he walked toward the wishing well. It was taller than him, round, covered in shingles, the pulley covered with a small, peaked roof. There was a sign that read, “Toss a coin, make a wish.”

How creative.

Reaching in his pocket, Max flipped a quarter into the wishing well. Cassie looked at him. “What’s your wish?”

“Not telling.”

She’d probably make fun of him anyway.

The side door to the converted house was open, only a screen door in use. Max pulled it open and stepped inside, hearing the floor creak underneath his feet. The house smelled like a combination of lilacs and burnt coffee. It was a strange combination. There were two steps in front of him. As he put his foot on the first riser, he overheard a woman talking. She sounded irritated. “I don’t know. He didn’t show up this morning.”

Max rounded the corner and spotted the source of the voice. It was a woman, blonde with her hair piled on top of her head, black glasses perched on her nose. She was seated behind a desk and had on a pale pink T-shirt with a droopy beige sweater over it. Her skin was pale and wrinkled, only a smear of red lipstick giving her any life. She glanced up at Max.

Max flashed his badge. “Who’s in charge here?”

There was a man standing near the door, his arms crossed in front of his chest. His lips were wrinkled in disgust. “That’s the problem right now.”

The woman shot him a look and then addressed Max. “Can I help you?”

“Is this Joe Sloane’s business?”

The woman straightened. “Yes. I’m Liz, the office manager. How can I help you?”

Max looked at Cassie and then sucked in a breath. “If you’re looking for your boss, he’s not going to be coming in. He passed away this morning.”

The woman sitting behind the desk blinked, her mouth dropping open, her hand rising to meet it. “What? I knew there was something wrong when he didn’t call in. He always calls in. Never misses a day. Oh my God! I need to call Jody and see if she needs anything. She’s got to be heartbroken! What happened?”

Max closed his eyes for a second and glanced at Cassie. There was no easy way to tell them that their boss and his family were dead. Cassie flared her nostrils and looked away. It was as much of a green light as he was going to get, though he wasn’t really asking. He looked at the woman. “I’m sorry. She’s not gonna be available either.”

The man standing by the door took a step forward, his arms dropping to his sides. “What are you saying?”

Cassie held her hand up, giving him a silent warning to stay back. She adopted a formal tone. “We are sorry to inform you that Joe Sloane, his wife Jody, and his son Tyler were found dead this morning in their home. We need to talk to whoever the manager is of this business.”

The woman sitting behind the desk looked at the man, her face pallid. “Doug, can you run out to the back building and get Jared? Have him come in here right now.”

Doug, who a moment ago had been complaining about Joe being AWOL, ran out of the back door of the building. Max heard it slam behind him. A second later, a guy with brown hair, wearing a baseball cap, a pair of jeans, and a Sloane Electric T-shirt ran back into the building, out of breath, his face red. “What happened? Doug said Joe’s dead?”

Liz, still seated at her desk, reached for a tissue, dabbing at her nose. “Jared, these are the detectives.”

Cassie pointed. “Detectives Reynolds and Grady. Pittsburgh PD. I’m sorry to meet you under this circumstance.”

Max cut to the chase. If they allowed too much emotion, they’d be there all day, not to mention that emotions were confusing. The facts were much easier to deal with. “Listen, was there anyone here that had a reason to want Joe dead?”

Jared furrowed his eyebrows. “What? You’re saying this wasn’t an accident?”

“Correct.”

“What happened to them?”

Max closed his eyes and sucked in a breath. People always wanted an explanation. Just because they wanted one didn’t mean they were entitled to one. He opened his eyes trying to sound at least professional. “I can’t discuss any of the other particulars of the case. It’s an ongoing investigation.”

It was police language for “none of your business.”

Jared looked out the window for a moment and then looked back at Max and Cassie. “People that might have wanted Joe dead?”

Max noticed that Jared looked at Liz as he answered. He shook his head. “I don’t even know how to begin to answer that question. Joe was a nice guy. A gem. Sure, he had his ways of doing things, but it was his business, after all.”

Cassie pulled her notebook out of her pocket. “Let’s start with this. What kind of work do you do here?”

Jared sighed as if it was a more palatable question to start with. “This is an electrical firm. We’re contractors.”

“What kind of projects do you work on?”

“Generally residential and small commercial.”

Max scratched his chin. No red flags at the moment. “So nothing large. No enormous commercial projects?”

“Not really. Joe built his business working with local contractors and developers. We have a team of eighteen different electricians. It’s a good group of guys. A couple of them are already out working.” Jared glanced at Liz, who blew her nose loudly. “They are going to be devastated about Joe.”

Cassie scratched a few notes in her notebook. “What kind of projects are you guys currently doing? Anything big that you finished in the last six months or so, anything that caused Joe any problems?”

Same question. Another angle.

Max waited to see if Jared would answer Cassie differently. That happened sometimes. Getting information from people was like peeling an onion. That was one of the things that made them good partners. They had different approaches. Sometimes his questions worked, sometimes Cassie’s did.

Jared sighed. “Nothing that’s really remarkable.” He glanced at Liz. “Can you think of anything?”

Liz dabbed at her eyes. “I can’t. I mean, like any business, we’ve had a few struggles.” She looked at Cassie and Max, her voice wobbling. “I’ve been here for the last twenty years. Most of my career. Over the last six months we wired that new development out there on route two, then rewired a sports complex in the same area. Those are the big projects. Those just wrapped up in the last few weeks. Yeah, we’ve had problems with customers, but it’s all the same sort of stuff. Scheduling. Billing. Staffing.”

Max shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “So nobody made any threats then?”

Jared shook his head. “No. Why would they?”

Cassie sighed. “How about employees? Any issues with employees?”

Liz started to shake her head no, and Jared interrupted by holding his hand up. “There was that one guy a couple months back. You remember him, Liz?” She blinked. Jared continued. “You know—that guy that worked with us for a couple months and then he just got angry one day and then took off?”

“Oh, him. Yeah, that was weird. The guy’s name was Declan Crow.”

Cassie walked toward Liz’s desk. “You have a file on him?”

Liz straightened, her voice suddenly professional. “Yes, we keep formal HR files on all of our employees with detailed records. I got my HR professionals certificate a few years back. Joe paid for it. He wanted to make sure that we were running the company the way we should.” She sniffled again. Looking at her computer, she adjusted her glasses on her nose and then began to type. A moment later, she looked at Max and Cassie. “Yeah. We automated everything. We’ve gone completely digital. I’m printing a copy for you right now.”

She said it like they’d just won a gold in HR management from the Olympics.

Cassie nodded. “Thanks.”

Max milled around, waiting, while the file kept on Declan Crow printed. He looked at the secretary and Jared. “There’s no one else you can think of that was unhappy about the work that Sloane Electric did?” Max was having a hard time believing that everyone was happy with Joe’s work. No one was that lucky… or that good.

Jared lifted the baseball cap off his head and rubbed his forehead. “Everything’s pretty run-of-the-mill here, Detective Grady. I don’t know what to tell you. Joe was a good guy. He ran a tight ship. He was a stickler, but he gave a lot of guys jobs. His work feeds a lot of families.” He shot a look at Liz. “I don’t know what we’re gonna do now.”

Liz twisted her chair and pulled a stack of papers off of the printer bed without getting up. They were still warm when she handed them to Max. “Here’s the guy I told you about. His name is Declan Crow. He was only with us for a couple months. Kind of a troublemaker. Showed up late or didn’t show up at all. I documented everything. You’ll see it in the file. After a few weeks of that, Joe called him into his office and had a talk with him. Then the guy disappeared. Never did collect his last paycheck if I remember correctly.” Liz typed on her computer. “No. We still have it noted here in payroll. We actually sent the information over to the attorney that we use to try to figure out what to do about it. He looked for the guy, sent him a couple certified letters to let him know he had money waiting for him, but we never heard back.” Liz blinked. “You don’t think he did this to Joe and his family, do you?”

Max started to say, “It’s an ongoing investigation,” when Cassie interrupted. “We don’t know.”

Liz started to cry, giant tears running down her face. “I’m sorry. I just don’t know what we’re gonna do without Joe. I mean, he’s everything. He’s this whole business.”

Max took a look at the papers in front of him. His gut told him that the killer wasn’t this guy. He didn’t have a big enough beef to take out an entire family, especially if Joe had offered to pay him. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out. His one daughter is still alive. Maybe that’s good news.”

With that, Max walked out of the office.

“That was a little harsh, wasn’t it?” Cassie mumbled as she slid into the car next to Max. She held the printout on Declan Crow in her hand. Max grimaced. “What?”

“The part about how Brooke Sloane is still alive. Those poor people in there. They were in shock.”

“Well maybe then they won’t remember what I said.” Max made a mental note that Joe Sloane liked to help guys who didn’t have a path forward in life. Maybe he was the kind of guy who didn’t have much of an education of his own—a real pull-himself-up-by-his-bootstraps kind of person.

No matter what kind of person he was, someone had wanted Joe Sloane dead.

And they had succeeded.

18

After leaving Sloane Electric, Cassie and Max made a stop at Pembroke Pines Medical. According to the police database, Jody Sloane pulled a paycheck as a pediatric nurse at a busy practice.

Cassie walked into the reception area, striding to the desk. Max stopped in the doorway, leery of all of the babies in carriers, the diaper bags, and the parents with worried expressions on their faces. He made eye contact with a young boy who was sitting on his father’s lap, a tuft of red curly hair hovering above bright green eyes. The young boy, who couldn’t have been more than about two in Max’s mind, instantly burst into tears.

Max looked away. Grady, you’ve sure got a way with people. They cry as soon as they see you.

Cassie, who had been speaking to the receptionist in hushed tones, waved Max forward. Max lurched ahead like he was walking through a minefield. The woman Cassie had been speaking to, who was wearing a set of pink scrubs with a white-flowered jacket over the top, walked briskly down the hallway, past two doctors and three nurses who were cycling through examination rooms like bees in a hive.

The woman from the reception desk opened a door at the back of the office. A woman sat inside, huddled over her computer. “Ava,” the receptionist asked.

“Yeah?”

“The police are here. They need to talk to you about Jody.”

“The police?”

Cassie stepped forward. “I’m Detective Reynolds. This is Detective Grady. Jody Sloane works for you?”

The woman cocked her head to the side, a flicker of confusion running over her face. “She does. What’s this about?”

Max looked at the receptionist, who was hovering near the door. She had a nametag on that read Victoria. “We’ll handle it from here,” Max said, closing the door.

“Who are you?” Max asked.

Cassie shot him a look.

“I’m Ava Bramlett. I’m the office manager.” She glanced between the two of them like she was watching a ping-pong game.

Cassie cleared her throat. “We need to get a little information on Jody Sloane.”

Ava bristled. “I’m sorry, but I can’t divulge personal information unless you have a warrant.”

Max felt annoyed. Everyone played amateur attorney these days. “That’s only if the person is still in your employ⁠—”

“She is⁠—”

“And they are alive.”

There was a heavy pause in the small office. To Max, it felt like the temperature instantly went up ten degrees. Ava put her hand in front of her mouth. “Oh my God. What happened?”

Cassie shot Max another look. Apparently, she didn’t like his notification strategy. Max shrugged. “She was found dead this morning.”

At least he could be vague about that.

“Oh no! Her family has to be so upset!”

After that, they had much of the same response that they experienced at the electrician’s office—no enemies to speak of, Jody was amazing and was always helping people—only there was a lot more crying and wailing among the nursing staff than there had been among the electricians. Max couldn’t quite understand it. He hadn’t even cried when his own mother had died, let alone his father. Part of him wondered what all the drama was about. Death was a natural part of life. Everything died—the leaves on the trees, the fish in the Allegheny River, and people. He understood them being sad at the loss, but it seemed to require a lot of drama, at least a lot more than he was capable of exhibiting.

He and Cassie had a similar experience at Tyler’s high school. Tyler had only been there for a short time. He was a freshman. The headmaster, a Jesuit priest named Father Andrew, crossed himself and said he would be praying for the souls of the family. He offered Max and Cassie his card in case they needed someone to handle the funeral. As Max and Cassie left, the priest stood up, putting his hand on Max’s arm. Max wasn’t sure he liked it. The priest gave it a squeeze and said that he was always available to take Max’s confession. Max ignored him.

Max sulked as they walked out to the car. Cassie glanced at him. “What’s the matter?”

“That priest. He said I need to go to confession.”

Cassie shook her head. “No, he didn’t. He said he was available to take your confession. That’s different.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Yes, it is. That’s actually a compliment.”

“How do you know?”

“I’m Catholic, remember? When a priest offers to take your confession, it’s his way of helping.”

“I didn’t ask for his help. I don’t need any help.”

Cassie snorted. “Clearly.”

By the time they got back to the office, Max was rattled. Whether it was from the triple homicide or the priest, he wasn’t sure. They’d picked up Cassie’s car enroute. She was lagging behind, said she needed to stop and get something to eat.

After the day they’d had, Max wasn’t hungry.

As he walked into the homicide division at Pittsburgh PD headquarters, he surveyed the workspace around him. It was an oasis of empty surfaces. Most of the detectives seemed to be out in the field. There was the quiet hum of the printer fan running in the background. The smell of burned coffee, likely from someone making a pot in the break room and leaving it on the burner for too long, hung in the air. Jerry’s office was abandoned and dark, the lieutenant likely out at a meeting.

One of the detectives, a guy named Harris, looked up at Max and gave him a nod.

As Max lifted his hand, he swallowed. Hard. To Max, he didn’t look like Harris. Max stood frozen in place for a moment, feeling the sheen of sweat gather on his brow. Harris’s face had been replaced by the face of Max’s father. Max’s heart skipped a beat. What was happening to him? Why did everyone look like Max’s long-dead father?

Without saying anything, Max riveted his eyes on the floor, striding out the back of the homicide unit to where the emergency stairs were. He hit the metal bar on the door with such force that it clattered loudly as it gave way. Max ran up the stairs two at a time to the floor above him. Inside, he stopped, his chest heaving, absorbing the darkness.

The floor above the homicide unit was an abandoned playground of things the police department’s administrative side no longer needed but hadn’t gotten rid of—old desks, chairs that were worn, but not broken enough to throw away, towers of metal file cabinets that had been relegated to collecting dust as more and more of the department’s files had been digitized.

Max kicked a stack of black metal trash cans that were near the door. They clattered as they skittered over the floor. He stood, staring at the ground and then walked to the window.

The best part of the storage room? The view. It was perfect in his mind. From where Max stood, the three rivers that intersected in downtown Pittsburgh—the Allegheny, the Monongahela, and the Ohio—could be seen. Had the police department not occupied the land for generations, he was sure that some ambitious real estate developer would have loved to put up expensive condos now that downtown living was coming back into fashion.

Max put a hand on the glass, the warmth soaking into his skin. The only downside to his upstairs refuge was that the window didn’t open. In some respects, that was probably good. At least it would keep Max from crawling out onto the roof to get some fresh air.

Max rested his fingertips on the windowsill, the cold metal chilled from the air conditioning a stark contrast to the warm glass. He moved his face to the side of the window where a gap in the trim let a little bit of fresh air in. This was the spot where Max retreated to when things became overwhelming, when the questions and the rattling in his mind became too much.

Max walked over to the stack of trash cans, suddenly disappointed in himself that he’d made a mess, quickly picking them up and organizing them. He’d been cataloging the items in the upstairs storage area since he’d started back with the department, allowing the motion of organizing to calm his thoughts. It was the only way he knew to banish the face of his father.

He started moving furniture, putting the desks that matched together, rolling the chairs all with black seats in one section and the ones with brown seats to another section. Then he decided that particular organizational system wasn’t good enough. He took the ones with the black seats that were uncracked and left them in one group and moved the damaged black seated chairs to another group. He did the same with the brown ones.

Someone else, like Reynolds, might feel like Max was being silly. But to Max, it was either organizing furniture or a trip to the bar.

Max felt perspiration gathering on his forehead. It was quieting the noise in his mind. He looked at the back wall of the storage area. There were five different types of file drawers he could see—beige lateral files with two drawers, black lateral files with four drawers, battleship gray file towers with four drawers, and black towers with four drawers. The outliers were a couple sets of two-door drawer white file towers. Who had ordered white? No one would want white file drawers. Max grunted. That was probably the reason they were in the storage unit in the first place.

He moved a few of them around, bringing them closer together. He stood back, his stomach clutching. Was it good enough? It wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t bad. The silent judgment of his past rose in his mind. He saw the face of his father. The image made his head ache. Max grabbed the sides of his head and yelled, “No!”

“What are you doing up here?”

Unbeknownst to him, Cassie had arrived upstairs. She was standing in the shadows near the door. How long she had been watching him, he had no idea. Max turned away, blood rushing to his face. “How long have you been standing there?”

“Long enough to know there’s something weird going on in that head of yours.”

Scary would be more accurate, Reynolds. Maybe even terrifying.

Max didn’t say anything. He walked to the window, turned to face her, desperately wanting to tell her what was going on. He couldn’t make the words come out. Max slid down the wall to the floor in a heap, covering his face with his hands.

A drink. I need a drink.

Frowning, Cassie reached for a chair, one of the black ones without a cracked seat that he’d put in a group. He closed his eyes and held his hand up. “Please, no. Please grab the red chair from over there.” He couldn’t deal with any more chaos.

Cassie turned her head to the side, not arguing, and then calmly walked over and retrieved the red chair. She dragged it to where he’d collapsed on the ground, sitting down and staring at him. “I’m not going to ask about the chairs. I just want to know if you’re okay.”

Max kept his face cradled in his hands. At that moment, he didn’t know if he should be more embarrassed that Cassie had caught him hiding in the storage unit or that he was in a full-blown OCD meltdown.

Max stood up, dusted off the back of his pants and glanced out the window. The sun was high, not a cloud to speak of, the blue sky crisp and clear. “I’m fine.”

Cassie shook her head. “Nice try. You’re not. You’re up here arranging and color-coding all of this old equipment. Tell me what’s going on.”

Max didn’t say anything for a minute, his mind swirling. It was one thing for him to know what was going on in his head. It was another thing for Dr. Kersevich to have at least a little glimpse, but Cassie? She was his partner. He needed her to have faith in him. Letting her into his world somehow didn’t seem safe or smart. He felt his lungs tighten, preventing him from taking a deep breath. “It’s nothing. Just been a stressful day.”

“I know. But it’s been stressful for me too, and I’m not upstairs hiding from everyone rearranging the furniture, am I?”

The words cut through him. Max blinked. He’d been so wrapped up in his own head he hadn’t bothered to consider how Reynolds was feeling. She’d seen the Sloane’s house, felt the death lurking in the room as much as he did. Max didn’t answer. He waited.

Reynolds cocked her head to the side. “Is it Patch?”

Max looked over his shoulder at her, grimacing. She thought a dog in his house would throw him off like this? “What? The dog? No.” He pressed his lips together. Truthfully, that was probably a little bit of it.

“Was it the bodies this morning?”

Max waved her off, staring outside again. “No.”

“Grady, this isn’t a multiple-choice test. I’m not gonna keep asking you questions. What’s the problem?”

“I told you. I’m fine.”

“Right.” She threw her hands in the air. “I don’t believe that for a second. You can’t be up here doing all this weird stuff and expect me to just walk away and act like it’s normal.”

Max felt his face redden. He turned to her. “Well, it’s normal for me!” he shouted. He turned back to the window, raising his hand in the air dismissively. “Listen, why don’t you just leave me alone. I have my own ways of dealing with stress. It might not look like yours, but it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with it.”

That was a good argument, wasn’t it?

“All right, fine.”

Max heard the chair squeak as Cassie got up from it. He heard every single one of her footfalls—all thirteen of them—as she walked toward the door. His chest tightened, the breath caught in the back of his throat. Was he really going to let her walk away and break their trust down even further? Yes, he’d saved her life during the fentanyl attack at headquarters, but she’d also seen him at his worst—drunk, out of sorts, not caring about anything.

She’d stuck with him through thick and thin. She was the only one.

“It was my dad,” Max whispered just loud enough.

He heard the footsteps stop.

19

“Your dad?

“Yeah. I keep seeing his face, okay? I didn’t see Joe Sloane. I saw him. My dad.” As the words came out of Max’s mouth, he realized he sounded more like a hormonal teenager than a seasoned detective. What was happening to him? Was he losing it?

Cassie’s expression was answer enough. Her mouth hung open. Max didn’t wait for her to say anything else. He charged out of the room and ran down the steps. Instead of going back to the homicide unit, he darted down to the first floor and charged outside into the sunlight, walking away from the homicide division. He didn’t bother to look back.

He had no idea if he’d ever return.

Outside, the day was bright, only a few wispy clouds cluttering the otherwise clear blue Pittsburgh sky. Max walked, his head down, hands shoved into his pockets, staring at the cracked sidewalk beneath his feet. An old bus passed, leaving Max in a wake of exhaust, the smell from the bus followed by the grease and garlic smell of the open door of Mrs. Mae’s Chinese restaurant. He shouldered his way past a few people, his long loping stride carrying him away from Pittsburgh PD, the noise in his head, and hopefully the face of his father.

A few minutes later, he found himself at a park down the block from headquarters. He had his phone in his pocket. It kept rumbling. He checked it. It was Cassie. She couldn’t leave well enough alone, could she? He shut his phone off. She was the last person he wanted to talk to.

She knows too much.

After walking a full lap on the trail, trying to calm himself down, he found himself on the swing. There were kids playing nearby. He could hardly stand to look at them, afraid that one of their faces would turn into his dad’s too. Was it the medication he was taking to help his depression? He thought about calling Dr. Kersevich but decided against it. The last thing he wanted was Dr. Kersevich to see him in a full-bore meltdown. That would do nothing when it came to Max keeping his job.

At that moment, no matter how bad it was, work was the only stable thing in his life. Ben wasn’t interested in him anymore, his mom and dad were both dead, he’d made a few of what he’d consider acquaintances at AA, but nothing worked. Like, really worked.

Max started pushing himself back and forth a bit more, not high, just enough that the toes of his boots dragged on the ground. To anyone watching it probably looked ridiculous, a grown man sitting and sulking about the state of his life on a swing, but the rhythm of it going back and forth was somehow soothing. He closed his eyes, thinking about the murder scene from that morning. In that moment, he realized something. There was only one thing he was good at. Solving crimes.

Max looked up at the sky, suddenly feeling his soul settle. He started thinking about what he’d seen at the Sloane house. There were two main questions in his mind at that moment. The first one was who was killed first? The second one was more basic, why?

If there was anything that Max knew, it was that the why a crime was committed usually led to the who. Motive, then suspects. And if he hoped to catch who had killed nearly an entire family, he’d have to put everything else behind him and answer that question and fast.

That meant everything—even the ghostly memories of his dad. His dad might not have been a good person, but the Sloanes seemed to be as good as anyone could be.

They deserved justice.

20

Honestly, she couldn’t take it any longer. Cassie had found Max upstairs doing whatever he was doing in the old storage room on the floor above them at police headquarters. She’d tried to help. At least that had been her intention. And yet everything she tried to do to help Max was met with nothing but a bunch of flack. He’d run out, she’d tried to call him, but he hadn’t answered.

I feel more like his mother than his partner most days.

Back downstairs in the homicide unit, she threw herself down on the chair at her desk, stared at the black screen of her computer for a minute and then drummed her fingers on the edge of the desk. She glanced toward the other occupied desks in the unit. Damon and Laura were hunched over their computers, working on something, probably follow-up paperwork on cases they were trying to close. Cassie had collaborated with them on cases in the past. Everything seemed so normal when they worked together, or at least as normal as working with crime could be. It was a normal pace, there weren’t any weird triggers to worry about. And neither of them, though Cassie realized she could be wrong, seemed to have any issues with alcohol.

Cassie pushed herself away from her desk, glancing at the door to the homicide unit. She expected Max to come blasting through it at any second, ready to get back to work.

Or at least that’s what she hoped for.

Did she?

Cassie stood up and walked down the hall to the break room. Though it had originally been an office, someone along the line had turned it into a break room. Along one wall was a coffee bar, and a full-size refrigerator-freezer combination was stuffed in the corner, the lingering smell of coffee hung in the air. Cassie looked down. Something smelled distinctly fishy. In the trash there was a half-consumed sandwich. She wrinkled her nose. Tuna. Her stomach flipped.

At least, for once, it wasn’t Grady that had that effect on her.

Walking over the coffee pot, she stared at it. Per usual, someone had made an entire pot and then abandoned it. Normally, Cassie didn’t have any problem at all taking the trash out, or dumping the old coffee, scouring the pot and getting it set up for the next person. But today felt different. She was tired of cleaning up the messes left by other people, especially Grady.

Definitely. Especially Grady.

Cassie glanced at the trash and at the coffee pot and walked over to the Keurig single-cup brewer. It was an older model, but still worked well. Jerry had brought it in when he got a new one at home instead of throwing it away. At that moment, she was intensely grateful for the lieutenant. At least he was considerate. She found a vanilla bean coffee pod in the drawer beneath the machine and stuck it in the top of the coffee maker, snapping the lid closed, adding her mug underneath.

A second later, she heard the machine groan and sputter as the water began to pulse its way out of the machine and into the mug. She stared at it, her arms crossed. A single curl of steam escaped from the side of the machine. Cassie shook her head. The coffee machine wasn’t the only thing that was steaming.

She was.

There was no question in her mind that Max Grady was a brilliant detective. They’d solved cases that no one else had any idea what to do with—the disappearance of Macy Chandler, finding the man behind the collapse of Spring Valley Hospital, and arresting serial killer Scarlett Sandoval.

That said, there was a reason he’d been let go from the department and seemed to be perennially on thin ice. He’d gotten rough with Aiden Branch on a warrant call. Was it because of his history or because of his issue with alcohol? Cassie had no idea. She’d spent several years as his partner, covering for him, helping him, all because she genuinely liked him. Moreover, she respected how talented he was, even if he was quirky. And, she knew, like Lieutenant Williams and many other members of the brass for the Pittsburgh Police Department, that talent like Grady’s only came along once in a generation. His ability to see the way that details in a case fell together was uncanny. He could draw broad inferences that led them to criminals and actionable intel like no one else she’d ever met. Grady was like a bloodhound. He couldn’t tell you why he was on a scent, but he could find it, nonetheless. There was something else, too. Lieutenant Williams had also taken notice of the fact that Grady was willing to do whatever he needed to do in order to save the people around him.

A wash of guilt ran over Cassie as she picked up her mug and blew at the steam. She’d been one of them. When Liam Reid attacked headquarters, she’d been inside. She’d been one of the many officers that had been nearly overcome by the fentanyl floating in the air. But Grady had charged into the building when others wouldn’t. He’d come to get her when other first responders failed to do exactly that—respond. He’d risked his life to save her.

Cassie grimaced as she walked back to her desk. But that didn’t account for the fact that the everyday grind with Grady was exactly that—a grind. Even in recovery, he was moody and unpredictable. Worse yet, without the ability to lean on alcohol, his temper had gotten shorter and shorter. His quirks, too, had swung to the extreme. It used to be he’d just go upstairs and sit and stare out the window, cooling himself off from his latest temper tantrum. But now? Now, he was upstairs reorganizing things into some categories that no one could understand except for him, short-tempered and irritable if anyone moved the things that he’d arranged.

Cassie’s stomach churned. She felt a mix of feelings for him. She felt sad for him and what he’d been through, and at times, even judgmental. She knew he had problems. Everyone did. But why was she always saddled with dealing with him? Sure, she had a way with him, helping him navigate the people that were inevitably connected to each of their cases, but she was tired. Couldn’t one of the other detectives take a turn? Cassie had her own career goals. The last thing she wanted was Max to hold her back from being able to climb the promotion ladder.

Cassie shook her head. Something had to give. Soon.

Taking the mug back to her desk, Cassie noticed that Jerry was, for once, not on the phone in his office. She walked to the door and knocked on it.

“Enter!” he boomed.

“Lieutenant, you got a minute?”

Jerry Williams looked up from a pile of papers on his desk. He pushed a set of glasses above his eyebrows, letting them hover on his forehead. “Sure, I guess. What do you need?” He sounded grudging, as if he had better things to do.

“Gotta talk to you about something.”

Lieutenant Williams shook his head as if that was obvious. “If you’re coming in here to bellyache at me about the way that vacation time is being handled, I don’t wanna hear it. You’re not the only one who can’t get time off. We’re still short-staffed. Nothing I can do about it. You can march yourself upstairs and go whine at the chief, though I’m sure that’s not gonna do anything.”

Cassie looked down, frowning. She paused for a moment, conflict tightening her gut. Did she really want to complain to the lieutenant about Grady? She knew he’d been through a lot, but everyone had limits. Cassie wondered if she’d hit hers. “No, that’s not it.”

“Then what is it?” Jerry pulled the glasses off of his forehead, folded the stems and set them on the desk at a right angle to his blotter, leaning back in his chair, waiting. The way he placed them made Cassie think of Grady. She shivered.

Cassie took a sip of her coffee and then set the mug on the edge of his desk. Lieutenant Williams’s office always had the faint smell of cologne. Not in a bad way. He was nearly old enough to be her father.

Cassie glanced around the office. It was relatively well organized and neat. Everything about Jerry was by the book, at least for the most part, at least until it came to Grady.

Cassie sucked in a breath, hoping for the best. “I gotta talk to you about Grady.”

“What did he do now?” Jerry threw his hands in the air.

“He was just upstairs again.”

“Reorganizing things again?”

Cassie had briefly mentioned her concerns to Jerry before. Jerry had waved her off, seemingly either not concerned or he’d already known, saying there was a protocol in place, but not being more specific. She’d found out later from Grady himself that Lieutenant Williams and the chief had sent him to department-mandated therapy. “He’s just hard to handle, Jerry. I’m getting worn out.”

Jerry looked away from her for a second. Then he turned back, his dark eyes and the shock of clipped gray hair giving him the look of a retired drill sergeant. He wasn’t, but he certainly had that vibe. “Listen, Reynolds, I know Grady can be a pain. But you also know he’s one of the best we’ve got. Hell, he even saved your life.”

Here comes the guilt trip. “I know, but that doesn’t mean he’s not hard to work with.”

“Okay, lemme guess, you’re thinking about that sergeant test that’s coming up?”

Cassie swallowed. “That? Not sure.” It was a bald-faced lie, one that Cassie was sure that Williams could see right through. She not only knew there was a sergeant’s test coming up, but she’d been studying for it already. With a promotion, she could lead a unit of her own. She could even stay with the detective bureau but move to another specialty.

More importantly, if she wanted to, she could get away from Grady.

She shifted in her seat. It wasn’t that she had something against him as a person. He was quirky. That was a fact. She was fine with that. The part that was frustrating was trying to work with him. She thought back to how he’d behaved with Joe Sloane’s employees and his daughter. It’s not that he didn’t tell the truth, it was the way he delivered it. “Yeah, I could consider it.”

Jerry nodded. “And you should. But until that point, you’re here. And until that point, your partner is Grady.”

“But he’s become a liability!” she blurted out, quickly covering her mouth. Part of her couldn’t believe that she’d actually said the words out loud.

Jerry scowled. “What? What do you mean?”

Cassie jumped up out of her chair. “I’m sorry, Lieutenant, but he’s hard to deal with, and there’s still all those lawsuits pending with the Aiden Branch investigation. And now we have three dead bodies, and I need him to focus, to help me figure out what happened to the Sloane family, and he is upstairs organizing the old chairs by their colors.”

The lieutenant swung his head from side to side, then held up a hand. “Listen, we all have things that we do when we get stressed. Grady’s are just a little different than the rest of ours. Me, I eat peanut M&M’s. One time, I bought so many my wife threw them away. Said my breath always smelled like peanuts.”

Cassie felt her stomach churn. He could pretend otherwise, but Lieutenant Williams knew exactly what she was saying. “This isn’t the same, Jerry,” she said, using his first familiar name. “This isn’t the same at all. I don’t want this case to get messed up because Grady’s not right.”

“What do you mean ‘not right’?”

“You know what I mean. He’s bad this time.”

Lieutenant Williams stared at Cassie for a second, then folded his arms on the desk. “Detective Reynolds, are you asking me for a reassignment?”

Cassie stopped pacing for a minute, stared at the mug of cooling coffee on the edge of Jerry’s desk, and stared at the floor before answering. “Yes,” she whispered. “It’s not personal. I hope you know that.”

Jerry narrowed his eyes and leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms in front of his chest. “Oh no, this is completely personal, Reynolds. Don’t you pretend like it’s not. And like I said, I don’t blame you. In a normal situation, I might even agree with you. But this is far from a normal situation.”

Cassie wasn’t sure exactly what to feel. She stopped, stared at him, her mouth falling open. “What do you mean?”

“You know exactly what I mean. Have you been so focused on your issues with Grady that you’ve forgotten to do your job? We’ve got three dead bodies from the same family that are sitting in the morgue. I’ve got no leads, no motive, and no one to pin the murders on. Let’s try to keep the first things first, okay? The first thing is, let’s figure out who killed the Sloanes. Once you and Grady clear the case, we can finish this conversation. But until then, Detective, your partner is Max Grady. Get the job done.”

Cassie looked at the floor, feeling like she was back in Catholic school being yelled at by one of the nuns. “Yes, sir.”

21

Adam bolted out of the computer lab where he had been helping a very confused freshman named Brianna who was trying to figure out the difference between a standard deviation and a standard error. It was useless.

Finally telling her he had to go, he ran to his car. Checking his watch, he knew that Brooke would be home. After all, where else would she be? He was sure by now the news had reached her that her family was gone. His heart ached—for her, not for them, the very people who had tried to prevent them from having a future. She would have to adapt to a new way of life.

He would help her.

Adam stopped at the corner grocery store near campus run by a guy named Alberto. Adam ran in, bought a bottle of wine and found a bouquet of white lilies—Brooke’s favorite. He paid for them in cash and ran back out to his car carrying his purchases.

It didn’t take long for him to drive over to Brooke’s townhouse. The entire way, he felt tension gathering in his chest. She would know that he would show up, wouldn’t she? They’d been together for two years. He knew that she still loved him. The only thing that had gotten in the way had been eliminated.

Her family.

Adam could barely contain his excitement as he drove over to Brooke’s townhouse. He’d gone over what he wanted to say a million times in his head—how he’d heard about her family, how he was so devastated for her, and how he was there for her. It didn’t matter that they’d broken up, it didn’t matter what had happened in the past. All that mattered was that they were together.

Adam counted it as a stroke of good luck when he pulled in front of Brooke’s townhouse building and saw one of the prime spots near the blue door to her townhome open. He parked his car, smiling, feeling like everything was right in the world for once.

As he reached for the door handle, he saw a dark mark on the steering wheel. He stared at it for a second. From inside the center console, he pulled out a travel pack of antibacterial wipes. Opening them up, he rubbed at the dark stain, seeing the residue come up red.

Blood.

He grimaced, the heat rushing to his cheeks. There was always something pushing back at him, trying to ruin the good mood he was in. It felt like something was out to get him. What exactly it was, he had no idea. Bad luck? Fate? Adam didn’t believe in God. He was a scientist after all, someone who dealt in facts and facts alone. He had no time for belief in something that couldn’t be seen or measured. It was just one of the many things that Brooke’s family, a bunch of devout Catholics, had against him.

Or, more specifically, that Brooke’s dad hadn’t liked about him.

Adam gave the rest of the steering wheel a quick wipe, making sure no other blood residue was left behind. What had happened was in the past. It was done. He and Brooke would move forward. Together.

As he pulled the bottle of wine and flowers out of his car, he dropped the blood-stained wipe onto the ground. If anyone saw it, no one would give it a second thought. It was just another piece of trash on Belmor’s campus. Adam felt a satisfied smile tug at his cheek. Even if someone realized what it was, they wouldn’t connect it to the Sloane family, Least of all Brooke. As he strode towards her townhome, he knew that nothing was gonna spoil that evening for him.

Nothing.

Walking under a tree as he made his way to her front door, he realized it was the spot where he’d kissed Brooke for the first time. They’d just come back from the movies and had stopped at Alberto’s to get the ingredients for a quick dinner. As they’d unloaded his car, one of the bags had broken, tomatoes and avocados rolling all over the sidewalk. The two of them had bent over at the same time to pick them up. Their faces had been so close together that Adam couldn’t resist. Brooke was beautiful, her blonde hair dancing around her shoulders, her eyes bright and welcoming. He’d never forget that kiss.

Walking to her door, he could feel Brooke’s warm lips on his again. He missed the sensation, the gentleness her life brought to his own. The thought only made him walk even faster.

As he got to her door, he slowed a little. Brooke had always said that he walked so heavy-footed it was like an elephant was arriving at her door.

Adam gathered himself for a second before he knocked, drawing in a deep breath. As excited as he was to see Brooke, he knew she was grieving. He had to approach her gently and compassionately, being sensitive to her feelings. As much as Adam wanted to use the key on his key ring to open Brooke’s door—it was one she didn’t know about, a copy of a copy that she’d given him so he could let himself in, he stood at the door dutifully, knocking twice.

A moment later he heard the locks click in the door frame. Brooke opened the door, her blonde hair hanging in a tangle around her shoulders, her eyes swollen, her face red and blotchy. Adam took a step forward. “Brooke. I’m so sorry. I just heard about your family.”

Brooke looked at him without saying anything, her chin quivering, her eyes filling with tears. She took her hand off the doorknob and turned away, retreating inside. Adam took that as his invitation to enter. She looked worse than he could have imagined.

He closed and locked the door behind him and walked toward Brooke, gently laying the bouquet of flowers on the table, setting the bottle of wine next to it. Brooke had thrown herself down on the couch. She pulled a tissue out of the half-used box, dabbing at her eyes. Adam reached over and gave her a hug. He wanted to feel her melt into his arms, but there was something stiff and awkward about it. The heat rushed to his face. He looked away, trying to ignore the anger that had bubbled up inside of him. As Adam smelled her shampoo and felt the warmth of her body, he realized it was probably just the grief.

He leaned back. “I’m so sorry, Brooke. Your family were all good people. Do you know what happened? Was it an accident?”

Brooke stood up, her face getting red. “Someone killed them, Adam. I have no idea why. I just can’t believe they’re gone.”

Adam studied Brooke for a minute. He was surprised that she was as upset as she was. To him, she looked angry. Her fists were balled, her arms tight against her body. He pressed his lips together. Brooke had always complained that her mom and dad were slowing her down. She’d told him over and over again that she had hopes and dreams that were important to her—taking a semester abroad to finish her nursing degree in Europe, maybe even do some travel nursing so she could get out of the area and hike the Grand Canyon with friends of hers from school. Everything that seemed even marginally uncertain had been struck down by Joe Sloane. In his eyes, his daughter’s dreams were risky, something that would take her away from the family. They had been summarily batted away like a pesky fly. Adam was still mad about it. No one had the right to take away someone else’s dreams.

Especially Brooke’s.

Sitting on her couch watching her, Adam fought the urge to get up and go to her. He knew how she was. He knew better than anyone else. When Brooke was upset, she needed her space. He knew if he waited for a minute, there was a high probability she would come back and sit near him like she had done a million times before.

Sure enough, a minute later, Brooke sat down, but not right next to him. She’d chosen a spot at the other end of the couch, like he was some stranger. Adam frowned as she looked at the flowers. “These are pretty. Thank you.”

He tried to relax his face. “You’re welcome.”

Brooke looked down at her lap. “How did you hear about—” the words drifted off. Brooke sniffled again but didn’t finish her question.

“About your family? It’s all over campus, Brooke. Everybody knows. It’s a tragedy.” He shifted in his seat. “The faculty got an email too.” That wasn’t exactly the truth, but then again, what Brooke didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.

“I just don’t know what I’m gonna do without them.”

Adam scooted a little closer to Brooke, leaning toward her. “I’m here for you, Brooke. That’s what I came over here to tell you. How about if I get you a glass of wine? We can just sit and relax for a little while.” He held his breath while he waited for her to answer, feeling a lump in his chest. If she sent him away, then everything he’d done would be for nothing.

Brooke nodded. “That would be nice. Maybe some wine will calm my nerves.”

As Adam got up, he briefly grabbed Brooke’s hand and gave it a squeeze. She didn’t pull away. Another good sign. He picked up the bottle of wine and walked into the tiny kitchen, fishing around in the drawer where he knew the corkscrew was kept and opened the bottle. From the cupboard, he retrieved two glasses, setting them on the counter. They were in exactly the same spot as the last time he’d been at Brooke’s townhouse. Adam poured two healthy-sized glasses of wine, the scent swirling around him. It was Brooke’s favorite, a dry red that they’d found together shortly after they met. Brooke hadn’t been exactly legal to drink at that point, but she’d had wine with Adam anyway. All the kids at Belmor drank, no matter what year they were. Belmor wasn’t any different than any other campus, except for one thing.

Brooke went there.

Adam grabbed the bottle and the two glasses, pinching the cups between his fingers and carrying them over to where Brooke was sitting, setting them down, then offering her a glass. She took a tentative sip, then a bigger chug. Adam nodded.

That was a good sign as far as he was concerned.

He took a sip and then another, not wanting to drink too much too fast. He and Brooke needed to have a conversation, a serious one. He needed to tell her how he felt. How he really felt. How empty his life had been since they’d broken up and how he knew they needed to be together no matter what.

Adam licked his lip and set his glass down, his palms starting to sweat. He looked at her, extending his arm across the back of the sofa. It wasn’t quite like he had his arm around her, but it was definitely a move in the right direction, even if she was still at the other end of the sofa. “Brooke, I’m so sorry about what happened to your family. I don’t know what to say. I just don’t want you to go through this time by yourself.”

Brooke sat, both of her hands wrapped around the glass, staring down. “Thanks.” She looked up at him with a tear-stained face. “It’s been hard, actually. I realized a little while ago that all the people I would call for help, they’re all gone. I can’t call my dad, I can’t call my mom. I can’t even have a laugh with Tyler anymore. There’s no one to help me. I’m all alone. I’m an orphan.”

The mere mention of Joe Sloane made Adam’s blood boil, but he kept his expression calm. “I’m here for you, Brooke. You aren’t all alone. You’ve got me.”

Brooke looked at him. He could tell by her expression that she was calculating what his words meant through her grief and the wine. “I appreciate that. But you know, I’ve got Amelia, she’s been great.”

The roommate? She’s better than what I have to offer?

Adam sucked in a breath, then scooted a little bit closer to the end of the couch where Brooke was sitting. “I know. Amelia is great. I love her, but she’s got other things going on. She can’t be there for you the way that you need right now.” Adam reached for Brooke, trying to pull her towards him. Her expression shifted, her eyebrows furrowing, a flash of confusion crossing her face. She shot up out of her seat and stepped back, her eyes wide as if she’d just had a realization in her heart he didn’t know anything about.

Moving slowly, she set her glass of red wine on the table. Crossing her arms in front of her chest, a tissue dangling out between her fingers, she said, “Adam, I’m glad you came over. I know my family really liked you.”

That was a lie.

“And as much as what you and I had was special, what I really need now are friends. Lots of them.”

What did she just say? Friends?

Adam’s head snapped towards Brooke, his mouth hanging open. He felt his heart pounding in his chest. “Yes, Brooke, you need people that are good friends, but you need other people in your life too. I can be there for you in ways that other people can’t.”

Brooke narrowed her eyes. “Adam, if you came over here because you wanna get back together again, now isn’t the time. I appreciate the flowers and wine, but I just lost my family. I mean, we just broke up. As if that wasn’t hard enough? And now they’re all gone.” She picked up her glass of wine and walked toward the kitchen, her body stiff.

Adam sensed an opening. She just wanted him to give her more reassurance, right? He stood up and followed her toward the kitchen. “I know you are going through a lot, but this isn’t something that requires a lot of thought. I love you and you love me. I know we broke up because your family didn’t really like me. I get it. I’m not the kind of guy that your dad had in mind. But I’m here now. He’s not.”

“He’s not because he’s dead, Adam!”

Adam reached toward her. Brooke blew by him, walking back to the living room. Adam shook his head. Was this really happening? He felt like he was stuck in some sort of bad soap opera, the characters pretending to not want to be together when they really did.

“Adam, I just can’t.” Brooke stopped by the couch and held her hand up, turning her head away. She sat down, burying her face in another tissue she pulled out of the box.

Adam paused for a second, his chest tightening. Everything he’d done, he’d done for her. Everything. There was no doubt about that. Brooke was his entire life, his entire existence.

And she was telling him no?

A ripple of fury ran through his body. He charged towards Brooke, grabbing her by the shoulders, staring into her startled eyes. “You don’t understand what you’re saying, do you?” He held his breath. All she needed to say to him was that she didn’t. He’d accept any excuse—she was confused, she was tired, she was grieving. Anything but ‘no’.

Brooke shook her head. She shrugged away from him. “No. Adam, I don’t want this. I can’t be in a relationship right now. I can’t even take a shower or brush my teeth without Amelia reminding me.”

“You don’t need Amelia,” he said slowly. “I can do that for you.”

Brooke looked up at him, her expression suddenly serious. “Are you serious? Is that what all of this is about? You want to get back together again? What’s wrong with you? I just lost my family!”

And I did it for you, Brooke, so you can be free. “I understand that it’s a difficult time but⁠—”

Brooke’s expression hardened. Adam hadn’t expected that. “No, I don’t think you do. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here asking me to get together before I’ve even had a funeral for my entire family. Don’t you get that?”

Standing next to the coffee table, she pointed, like a second-grade teacher sending a child to the office. “I think it’s time for you to go.”

Adam didn’t move. He balled his hands into fists, his jaw set. He’d risked everything for a life with Brooke. His career, his freedom, his own happiness. She’d done nothing but hold the same party line that Joe Sloane preached in life. Even in death, Joe Sloane and his iron-clad opinion won.

Fury overwhelmed him, a surge of adrenaline running hot through his body. In one swift move, Adam grabbed the neck of the wine bottle and smashed it down against the coffee table where he’d set it, splattering red wine all over the table and the white flowers, staining them red, the wine dripped over the edge. Adam held the neck of the cracked wine bottle in his hand, narrowing his eyes. “Don’t you see?”

Brooke stood back, her eyes wide, a cry erupting from her lips. “See what? Adam, what are you doing?”

“Can’t you see? I did this for you.” He didn’t give her a chance to answer. Adam charged towards Brooke, grabbing for the back of her head with his left hand, the two of them ending up in the kitchen. He held the razor-sharp glass up underneath Brooke’s chin. “You still don’t get it, do you?”

Brooke started to scream, trying to struggle away from him, her eyes wide, tears pouring out of the corners of her eyes. “What are you doing, Adam? I thought you loved me. Let me go!”

Adam’s next words came out measured and slow. “I did it all for you, Brooke. Don’t you see that? I did all of it for you!”

“What are you saying? Just let me go!” She fought against him, but his grip held.

Adam was furious. Was Brooke stupid? Did he have to spell everything out? “I killed your family, Brooke,” he hissed in her ear. Part of him wanted her to know the truth. “You think they loved you. They didn’t. I loved you. I still love you.” He pulled her closer to him.

Brooke froze, the truth sinking in. He felt her body stiffen, as if every one of her muscles tightened at the same time. She was still for a fraction of a second, then she screamed again and tried to struggle away, twisting and thrashing. “You killed them! You’re sick! How could you do that?!”

A wave of rage rose up inside of Adam, the likes of which he had never felt before. His eyes were fixed on her face as he jammed the broken glass into the side of her neck. As the blood mixed with the tinges of red wine left on the bottle, he dropped her and the bottle, not bothering to break her fall, leaving her writhing on the floor, a puddle of blood from her severed carotid artery shooting out of her neck and spraying all over the floor and cabinets. He leaned over her, a sour feeling in his stomach. “I did everything for you,” he hissed. “And you have the nerve to reject me? I don’t think so.”

22

Amelia Hunter had gone through one of the longest days of her life. No matter what anyone said, the nursing program at Belmor University was grueling. It seemed like she was constantly on the move.

Though she felt bad about it, Amelia had continued on with her normal routine that day after hearing about Brooke’s family, which included an afternoon class, followed by a study group, only after she’d recruited a friend of theirs to stop by at dinner time. She’d promised a bereft Brooke she’d do everything she could to get back to the townhouse.

But, despite her best efforts, it was nearing nine that night by the time she made it back to the townhouse she shared with her best friend since freshman year, Brooke Sloane.

Amelia brushed the dark curly hair out of her face as she wrestled with her keys, pausing for a second at the door before she unlocked it. It was one thing to hear that someone had a significant loss. It was something else to live with them as they went through the stages of grief. Amelia was more than a little concerned about Brooke. It wasn’t as though she’d lost just one person in her family—she’d lost all of them.

Amelia checked her phone. There was a text from Natalie, a friend that lived in one of the other townhomes, that she’d stopped by to check on Brooke, but she hadn’t answered. Amelia wasn’t too concerned. Hopefully that meant that Brooke was sleeping. She knew from her nursing studies that sleep was one of the best things for the body, especially a body experiencing injury or trauma.

But standing outside that evening, Amelia hoped Brooke was up. Rattling the door, no one came to answer it. Normally, getting inside was no big deal, but she’d stopped at the grocery store on the way back from her study group to get Brooke some of her favorite snacks in the hopes that she could get her friend to eat at least a little something. She hadn’t really wanted to leave after the detectives had shown up, but Brooke insisted. “Go do your thing, Amelia, I’ll be fine. I have some phone calls to make. And I’m not really in the mood for company anyway. What are you going to do, just sit here and watch me cry?”

Amelia still wasn’t sure it had been the right decision, but a psychology professor had told her class the previous semester that people grieve in different ways.

Maybe Brooke just preferred to cry in peace?

As Amelia finally opened the door, she steeled herself for what she might find inside.

Brooke had been a mess since she’d found out that her family had died, not that Amelia could blame her. It was one thing to lose one person, but to lose three all at once?

Unthinkable.

Part of Amelia wanted to just sit and hold Brooke’s hand, but Brooke had been right. Amelia needed to go on with her life.

While Brooke had been in the bathroom, Amelia had quickly called her nursing advisor for advice. “She told me to go to my class this afternoon. I don’t know what to do,” Amelia had whispered.

“Then go. Sometimes being in the healing profession means that there is nothing you can do. It’s a tough lesson, Amelia, but it’s better that you learn this earlier in your career than later on. Getting better from things can take faith and time. We’re just here to walk along the road with people who are hurting both mentally and physically and help give them the space to get better. All you can do for your roommate is to be there for her and to remind her, through your own example, what a normal life looks like.”

Amelia had taken the words to heart after giving Brooke a fresh bottle of water and a box of tissues. She’d gotten her backpack and gone to class. But now it was time for her to step up and be there for her friend.

As she pushed the door open, Amelia listened. There was no noise from inside. Amelia hadn’t bothered to look to see if Brooke’s car was in the parking lot. She’d been too concerned about her friend to check.

Amelia stood in the doorway for a second, pausing before stepping forward. She braced, felt like she was entering a war zone. Brooke had been through a lot in the last few weeks—first she broke up with her boyfriend, Adam. They had been inseparable for the last two years, then her family was killed. Amelia pressed her lips together. She didn’t feel bad about the breakup. There was something about Adam that Amelia was never really sure about, but losing her family? That was a different issue entirely. The Sloanes were good people. They’d always included Amelia when they’d come to campus, buying her lunch or dinner along with Brooke. Guilt nipped at her gut again. She should have ignored what Brooke had said and stayed at the townhome with her. Amelia blinked. She would do better the next day. She wouldn’t leave Brooke’s side even though she had a full day of clinicals. She would sacrifice. That was what being a nurse was all about, wasn’t it?

Feeling resolute in her decision to help her friend, Amelia pushed the door the rest of the way open. She called out. “Brooke! I’m back!” She didn’t call out too loud in case Brooke was upstairs resting. Brooke was known to be a light sleeper, while Amelia was not. Amelia turned back to the doorway and picked up the groceries, dragging them inside the door and dropping them on the floor next to the coat rack they kept by the door, then closing the door and locking it.

Amelia sighed. The townhouse was dark. She flipped on a light. Where was Brooke?

Glancing toward where their couch and coffee table was, Amelia frowned. What was all over the carpet? It was dark red. She walked closer, seeing what looked to be like a cracked bottle of wine, smelling the alcohol hanging in the air. The red from the wine had soaked into the beige carpeting underneath their coffee table. She looked at the glass bottle, frowning, a wave of confusion washing over her. What had happened? Had Brooke wanted some wine, and it got broken somehow? She’d never seen a glass bottle get cracked like that except one summer when she was visiting her grandparents in Erie. They’d gone to the lake, and she found the base of a bottle of wine washed up on shore, the edges soft and the glass cloudy from what were probably years in the waters of the Great Lakes, rubbing against water and sand. Amelia bent over carefully and picked up the bottom of the bottle of wine, her heart skipping a beat. How would they ever get that wine stain out of the carpet? Better yet, was Brooke okay? Had she gotten drunk and fallen? “Brooke! Are you okay?”

No answer.

Amelia walked back toward the door, the broken base of the wine bottle in her hand. She scooped up two of the grocery bags as she went, making her way to the kitchen, turning the corner around the cabinets that stood between the door and the kitchen. As she moved past the couch, she saw a set of feet. Staring at them, she started to shake. Brooke was on the floor, lying in a pool of blood. Amelia was so shocked she nearly dropped the glass bottle, but quickly put it on the counter. “Brooke!” she screamed. “Brooke!”

Brooke’s eyes were staring up at the ceiling, not seeing anything. Amelia knew that look. She’d seen it in the anatomy lab, the wide-eyed stare of a body that had lost its soul. Amelia began to cry and shake. She put two fingers on Brooke’s neck, feeling for a pulse just like she’d done in class, then tried her wrist. She did it reflexively, the movements practiced at the hospital where she was helping with the patients. Nothing. “No!” Amelia screamed, then put two hands on Brooke’s chest and did a round of compressions, the blood on the floor soaking into the knees of her scrubs. “Come on! Come on!”

A second later, Amelia stopped, closing the eyes of her dear friend. No amount of nursing education was going to save Brooke. She was dead. It was too late.

23

“That’s a good boy,” Max said awkwardly.

Max was sitting on the carpeted floor of his family room. He never sat on the floor at home. That’s what the chairs were for. But, then again, things were different now.

He was rolling a ball at Patch. Patch would wait, then pounce on it and bring it back to Max. They’d already repeated the cycle by Max’s count thirty-seven times. Max was going for an even fifty. It seemed possible, too. Patch didn’t look any worse for the wear.

After the forty-third time of rolling the ball on the floor and Patch pouncing on it, Max stood up. Even if Patch hadn’t had enough, he had. Achieving the fifty mark would have to wait for another day.

Max walked into the kitchen, rooted through the last bag of dog paraphernalia that he hadn’t put away and got out a box of dog treats. He ripped open the box, about to call Patch, when he looked down to see the dog sitting right next to him, looking up expectantly.

“Oh, you knew what I was doing? You’re pretty smart, aren’t you?” Max asked.

He pulled the miniature dog bone shaped treat out of the box and then wasn’t exactly sure what to do with it. Was he supposed to hand it to Patch, lay it on the floor, put it in his dog bowl? There were too many options.

Max ended up tossing the treat onto the carpet near where they’d been rolling the ball. Patch trotted over and ate it up. Watching him eat it with such gusto gave Max some confidence. He got another one out of the box and waited. Patch trotted over and sat again. This time, Max held his hand down, letting the big dog take it out of his fingers. For all of the notoriety about pit bulls being fighters with powerful jaws, Max decided that Patch couldn’t have been more gentle. Max scarcely felt the treat move before it had already disappeared into Patch’s mouth.

Before he had a chance to get another treat out of the box, he stopped. He realized he had no idea how many he was supposed to give Patch, which encouraged him to scrawl on a piece of paper that he needed to find a veterinarian and get Patch looked at if he was going to keep him. Max’s phone rang. He looked down at it and frowned. It was dispatch.

“Grady.”

“Hey Detective, this is Camille over at dispatch. Got one for you.”

“Oh, goody.” There was a drip of sarcasm in his voice. He made a mental note to talk to Jerry the next day to see where the hiring process was. They needed help.

“Well, this one should be slightly easier than the last murder call you got. At least this one’s only one body.” Camille read off the address. “I already notified Reynolds. She’s on her way. Said she’d meet you there.”

Max wasn’t terribly surprised. Cassie had been a little bit colder towards him recently than she had in the past. Why that was the case, he wasn’t exactly sure, though she had witnessed him upstairs rearranging the furniture. He shrugged. That was nothing new, was it? Didn’t she know he was going through a hard time? Sure, there were the obvious mess-ups, his attempt at sobriety and his slightly erratic behavior.

Max frowned. He wasn’t that erratic, was he?

“Send the address to my phone, please. Show me as responding.”

“Will do,” Camille answered. “You kids have fun.”

Grumbling under his breath, Max picked up his keys, cell phone, wallet, and badge and then looked at Patch, who was still sitting on the floor, watching him. “What am I supposed to do with you?”

Patch wagged his tail just slightly, his eyes bright.

“Oh, all right. You can come.”

Max grabbed the leash from where it was hanging near the back door to his house, clipped it on Patch’s collar, and led him out to the car. Max waited as Patch jumped inside, then closed the door, walked around the car and got in, checking his phone. Camille had already shot the address over to him. He started the engine and pulled out of the driveway, heading for Belmor’s campus.

By the time Max pulled into the parking lot, he found Cassie standing outside waiting for him, leaning against her car. “You waited? How did you know when I was gonna get here?”

“I called Camille. She told me you were on your way. I figured it wouldn’t be too long.”

Max stared down the road. “Notice anything about the address?”

Cassie shook her head. “Nope. What about it?”

“We were here already today.”

“What?”

“Yeah. This is Brooke Sloane’s address.”

“I didn’t notice. You drove.” Her tone was dry.

As they walked toward the townhome, Cassie glanced over her shoulder. “You brought Patch with you?”

Max nodded. “He seemed bored. Thought I would get him out of the house a little bit. It’s better than him sitting at home alone.”

“That’s nice.”

Cassie didn’t seem quite as cool towards Max as she had been. Maybe it was the time of night? Maybe she’d had a good dinner. He didn’t know. He glanced behind him after locking the car, making sure that the windows were cracked open. Max stopped and went back to the car. He wanted to make sure that Patch had fresh air while he waited. Patch had laid down on the back seat, his head resting against the upholstery.

Max met Cassie at the front door of the town home, a uniform posted outside, giving them a nod. “Where are we going?” Cassie asked.

The uniform nodded. “Kitchen. It’s a doozy.”

“I don’t like it when people say things like that,” Grady said evenly.

Reynolds shot him a look. “Me either.”

For once, they seemed to be on the same page.

Neither of them talked as they stepped inside the townhome. Max looked down at the ground and stared at the dirty, faded carpet, wondering how many feet had stepped on it over the years. Given it was a college property, probably hundreds… at least.

Cassie following, Max met two more uniforms just inside. They were deep in conversation, though Max had a hard time believing they were talking about anything that was pertinent to law enforcement. Officers could have a lot of downtime on the job. They were either going full force or they were just hanging out, waiting for something to happen, for someone to issue an order.

The two of them stepped aside as Grady and Reynolds stopped just inside, one of them raising his eyebrows in a silent warning. Max ignored it. He’d pretty much seen everything in his career.

The first thing that Max noticed in the townhome was the smell of wine. It hung in the air, the acrid smell of a cheap red vintage. How it had gotten spilled was the question. A second later, Max had his answer. He stared at the small family room in front of him, a large red stain on the floor. Questions began to form in his mind. Had someone gotten into a fight? Had the wine been spilled in the process? He frowned. He knew something serious must have happened for him and Reynolds to get called out at night. Otherwise, the shift on duty would have just taken the report and referred it over to them in the morning. No, he could feel it in his gut. Something bad had happened.

Max took in the scene around him. Though he hadn’t looked carefully earlier in the day, the townhome in front of him wasn’t particularly remarkable. If anything, it was only memorable because of how orderly it was. Whether that was because of how few people lived there, or their personalities, or something else entirely, he had absolutely no idea.

Max completed a silent inventory in his head. There was the old couch where Brooke had thrown herself earlier that day when she got the news about her family, the dusky green fabric faded. It was positioned in the center of the room with an old coffee table in front of it and a television on the other side. Max reached into his pockets and pulled on a set of gloves. He noticed there was a dark red stain on the beige carpet. It was the kind of carpet that rental companies used—neutral, short pile, easy to replace. And based on the giant red wine stain he saw, they would have to replace it, that was for sure. Questions started to mount in his mind. But before he had voiced any of them to Cassie, he saw a head pop out of that kitchen. It was Jordan.

Max glanced at Cassie. “Looks like Dr. Hamadi beat us here for once.”

Cassie didn’t respond. Max frowned. The glacial coolness had resurfaced. At some point, he knew he’d have to have a conversation with her, but he was sure that even Dr. Kersevich would tell him now wasn’t the time.

Max walked toward Jordan who was looking at something on the other side of the kitchen cabinets. Jordan glanced at Max and Cassie as they made their way into the kitchen, his face serious, his lips thin and pressed together. “Something horrific went down here.”

Max tilted his head to the side, rubbing his chin, something like sadness bubbling up inside of him, though the feeling wasn’t that familiar. In front of him was Brooke Sloane. She was sprawled on the floor, a pool of blood underneath her, her eyes closed. Her hair, loose, was suspended in the pool of blood. She had on the same T-shirt and a pair of shorts she’d worn earlier that day when they’d notified her about her family.

Max moved two steps to the left, closer to her head. In addition to the pool of blood that she was laying in, there was a gash on the right side of her neck, the entire shoulder area of her T-shirt soaked through. Max leaned over and noticed that there were bloody knee prints and bloody handprints on her chest.

Jordan interrupted Max’s observations. “The roommate found her. I guess she’s a nursing student. Tried to do CPR, but it was no use.”

Max took another look at the gash on the side of the young woman’s neck. He knew that an injury to the carotid artery like that one would be nearly impossible to fix unless you had a trauma team standing by with the necessary equipment, including a surgical suite and ample units of replacement blood. CPR wouldn’t do it. If anything, it would just pump the blood out of her body faster. “Is the roommate here?”

Another voice from behind him answered. It was one of the uniforms, a guy with tightly curled black hair and matching ebony skin whose name placard read Hall. “Yeah. We stashed her upstairs until you guys got here.”

Grady looked at Cassie. She gave a single nod. Another cool breeze from her. Grady looked at Officer Hall. “Good. Thanks. We’ll go up and talk to her in a second.”

Cassie took a step closer to Jordan. “Any idea about the murder weapon? It would have had to be something really sharp.”

Jordan pointed to an evidence bag on the counter. “Yep. Glass fits that description. Cracked wine bottle.”

“That explains the gargantuan red stain on the carpet by the couch over there,” Max said.

Cassie furrowed her eyebrows. “I thought that was what it looked like! The smell is really strong.”

Max walked back over to the stain, sticking a gloved finger into the carpet pile, noticing a bouquet of white lilies on the table. The carpet was soaked. “This isn’t just a glass of wine, Reynolds. This is probably nearly half a bottle. The carpet is completely soaked through. The wine’s leaching up around my thumb when I push down on it.”

“Noted.”

Max scowled. Noted? Couldn’t she think of something at least slightly friendlier to say? Max got up from where he was kneeling near the couch and walked back into the kitchen where Jordan and Cassie were standing. Cassie looked at Jordan. “Time of death?”

“I can tell you it hasn’t been long. I don’t have an exact time. I’d have to do a liver temp, and you guys caught me on my way home. Didn’t have time to go back and get the van. Cameron’s bringing it.”

“She was alive and good when we gave her the news about her family.” Max shrugged.

“What?” Jordan glanced between the two of them, taking a step back. “What do you mean?”

“This is Brooke Sloane. The daughter of the family we found this morning.”

24

“Brooke Sloane, like the second child from the Sloane family? Like the murders we had this morning?” Jordan asked. He rubbed his throat as if the news was hard to swallow.

A second later Cameron, Dr. Hamadi’s assistant, arrived. He was a tall, gangly guy, all arms and legs, with a flap of brown hair across his forehead. From his outward appearance, he looked like a guy who couldn’t hold a serious conversation about anything, but Max had asked him a question about buying a computer, and ten minutes later, Cameron had given Max every particular option that was available, including pros and cons and resources where Max could do more research. He set down the equipment they needed for the scene. “Wait, what are we talking about?”

“The victim,” Jordan said.

“Why?”

“She’s from the same family as the bodies from this morning.”

Cameron didn’t answer. Max took his silence as an opening. “Can you guess on TOD?” Max knew she was alive earlier that day, but knowing actual time of death would be helpful.

Jordan shrugged. “If I had to guess, within the last hour or two. She’s still warm.”

“Where’s the roommate?” Max asked impatiently.

Officer Hall looked at him, rolled his eyes and threw his hands in the air. “Upstairs, like I said.”

“Which room?” Max glared at him. Hall needed to be more precise.

“Bedroom on the right. You’ll see Danbrot up there with her. We kept her on ice for you.”

Max grumbled a thank you. His mood had descended rapidly when he realized that it was Brooke Sloane who’d been murdered. His mind raced. What was going on? First, her father, mother, and brother had been killed, now her? Who had gone after the entire Sloane family?

And most importantly, why?

Max ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time, Cassie following. He heard her call to him from behind, but he ignored her, quickly seeing the room where the other officer was. A young woman with curly dark hair was sitting on the edge of the bed, a female officer sitting next to her. In the doorway was an evidence bag, sealed with signatures on it. Max frowned, looking at the officer. “What’s in there?”

“Well, hello to you too, Detective Grady. This is Amelia. She’s Brooke’s roommate. She had blood all over her so I told her she could change. I collected her scrubs as evidence. Thought you might like that.”

Max narrowed his eyes. He was there to do a job, not get a lesson on manners from an officer he outranked. He especially didn’t need Danbrot talking to him like that in front of a witness, though she was being nice, nicer than Reynolds had been. “What’s your name?”

“Amelia Monterey,” she said quietly, looking at the floor.

Max’s mind was ticking. Amelia had found Brooke and was soaked in blood? Was it possible she was the murderer, then tried to save her? With how crazy this case was, anything was possible. “Stay here for just a second.” Max stepped into the hallway just as Cassie got to the top of the steps. “Can you do me a favor?”

“Maybe.” Cool again.

“The roommate had access to the Sloane family and to Brooke.”

“Are you seriously suggesting?” Reynolds whispered.

“I can hear you!” An angry shout came from behind them.

Max turned in time to see Amelia standing in the doorway, her shoulders tensed, her hands in fists. “I don’t care who you are, but I can hear what you are saying. And if you think I killed the Sloanes or killed Brooke, then you’re crazy! I loved Brooke!” She turned and sat down on the bed in a huff.

Max froze, his shoulders drooping. Foot in mouth again.

Cassie shook her head just slightly. “I’ll take this one,” she said, walking toward Amelia’s room. She shut the door behind her. It felt like a chastisement.

I feel a cold breeze. The gulf between Grady and Reynolds seemed to be growing by the moment, like Grady was somehow standing on an ice flow that was drifting away. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

Ten minutes later, Cassie emerged. Max had done nothing but pace back and forth and run up and down the steps, checking on Jordan’s progress.

As the door cracked open, Max stepped forward. “Well?”

Reynolds shook her head, closing the door behind her. She waved Grady away from the door and out of earshot. “She’s not your killer. If her alibi checks out, she was gone all day long at a class and then study group. You’ll have a ton of people who can verify she was there, plus video cameras. She’d have to be pretty stupid to try to fool us with that one.”

Grady grimaced. “It’s been done before.”

“Sure, but not this time, Grady.” Reynolds seemed sure of herself.

Officer Danbrot was standing nearby. “Hey, Patricia?” Cassie called.

“Yes, Detective?”

“Can you run this down for me? Miss Monterey said that she was in class this afternoon and then at a study group. She gave me a couple of names I could use to verify her whereabouts. Would you mind making those phone calls for me and documenting them in the system?” Cassie paused. “You can let me know what you find out too, please.”

“No problem, Detective Reynolds. Happy to help.” Officer Danbrot stared at Max and held his gaze for a second. “Max,” she said as she walked away.

Max wrinkled his nose. “I wanna talk to her.”

“I don’t think she’s gonna wanna talk to you.”

Max shot Cassie a look. He wasn’t asking permission.

Without saying anything else to Reynolds, Max opened the bedroom door, seeing Amelia exactly where he’d left her, perched on the edge of the bed, her face tear streaked and drawn. It didn’t take a genius to know that Amelia would be scarred by seeing her friend dead on the floor of their townhouse. Something like pity collected in Max’s chest, though he wasn’t sure if that was actually it. There were lots of things that were easy for people, natural talents, things they were good at. Then there were the hard things. Emotions were not something that came to Max naturally after the way he’d been raised.

Amelia was sitting on the edge of the bed, her legs pressed together, just the toes of her feet touching the floor. Max noticed she seemed like she had shrunk in just the last few minutes, huddled under the pressure of fresh grief. Her dark hair hung in a curtain of curls next to her face.

“Amelia?” The young woman looked up and nodded but didn’t say anything.

“I’m Detective Max Grady. I know you already met Cassie.” Max looked over his shoulder. Cassie stood in the doorway, her arms crossed, a single shoulder leaned against the frame. He could feel her eyes on him. It felt like a warning to be careful around Amelia. “I’m sorry about your friend,” Max started.

Amelia sniffled.

“Can you tell me what happened? Start from the beginning, please.” At least I said please.

Amelia looked up at him, her dark eyes angry and sad. “I already told her everything. Why do I need to do it again?”

“You want the easy answer or the hard one?”

Max glanced at Cassie. She glared at him.

“Both,” Amelia challenged.

Max cocked his head to the side. At least Amelia was a straight shooter. “The easy answer is because the brain remembers things in stages after a trauma. You may have told Detective Reynolds everything you knew at the moment. But now that you’ve had a chance to settle down, you may remember some details. Those details are ones that might make a huge difference in being able to figure out who did this to your friend.”

“And the hard answer?”

“Because I’m asking you to.” Max didn’t want to play hardball. He had no intention of doing that, but Amelia had asked the question. Whether she liked it or not, that was the answer. Sure, she could stonewall him, refuse to answer his questions and ask for a lawyer. He’d have to drag her down to the homicide division, put her in a room, wait for her lawyer to come, wait for them to talk, and then finally get the information he needed. Reynolds would object the entire time, but Grady would hold firm. He would get the information, one way or another.

Seemingly convinced by Max’s honesty, Amelia relayed what she’d seen one more time to Cassie and Max together. Max stood, listening, his hands shoved in his pockets. When she was done, he looked at her. “Any idea who would do something like this?”

“Kill Brooke and her entire family?” Amelia looked back and forth between the two of them. “That’s what this is about, isn’t it?”

Smart girl. Max looked down at a spot on the carpet, then back at Amelia. “Yes. It’s likely that whoever killed Brooke’s family came here to finish the job, but we don’t know that yet.”

Amelia stood up, throwing her hands in the air. “What do you mean you don’t know that yet?” She stood, staring at them as if they had just told her that the sky was green and not blue. “How obvious does it need to be?”

Cassie pressed her lips together. “Listen, Amelia, I know this is hard⁠—”

Amelia stiffened. “Don’t try to baby me.” Amelia yelled, leaning forward. “I just had to walk in and see my best friend’s blood spilled all over the floor. I’m supposed to be a nurse. I’m supposed to be able to help people like her and there wasn’t anything that I could do. So don’t try to make this look all pretty.” She held her hands up. “I still have blood under my fingernails. Her blood.”

“We need to go over this one more time, Amelia,” Max said.

He watched her body stiffen.

Cassie started again, even more gently. “Amelia, maybe you should sit down.”

“Get out!” Amelia yelled.

Max raised his eyebrows. He looked over his shoulder. Cassie had moved toward the door, waving him forward, urging her to placate the young woman. He looked back at Amelia, his expression cool. “No.”

Amelia took two steps toward him, staring up at his face. She started screaming, her shoulders tense, her face red. “Get out!”

Max stared down at her and didn’t move even though he could feel a spray of spit on his face. He stood there for a second as Amelia screamed and yelled and threw her arms in the air, demanding that all the police officers get out of her townhouse.

A minute or so later, Amelia, having drained all of the energy out of her body, stopped. Max stared at her as another wave of tears started running down her face. “Are you done?”

She didn’t answer.

Max glanced at Cassie. “That was embarrassing,” he muttered under his breath.

“Max,” Cassie cautioned.

Max sighed. “Okay, Amelia. Let’s start this again. Could you please, without any screaming, tell us everything that you saw.”

Amelia, exhausted by grief and her own hysterics, did so. Once she was done, Max walked over and sat next to her on the bed. “All right, one more question. I won’t promise it’s my last because it probably won’t be. Is there anything new or different or any major changes in either Brooke’s life or in anyone in her family’s life over the last few weeks or months? Major job changes, new friendships, break ups, new friends that Brooke was hanging around with?”

Amelia shook her head, knitting her fingers together in her lap. She sniffled. “No, nothing really. I mean Brooke broke up with her boyfriend, but that’s kind of normal stuff. It wasn’t a big deal. We all saw it coming.”

Cassie frowned. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. They seemed pretty good together, but Brooke didn’t seem to have like a real spark for Adam, if you know what I mean. The strange thing was, after they broke up, she didn’t really want to talk about it. All she said was it didn’t work out. Things went back to normal super-fast. They broke up a couple of weeks ago, I think.” She looked away for a moment. “It was a little strange how fast she moved on, given the fact they were together for two years, but I was okay with it. Brooke could have done better.”

“Was there someone else in the picture? A new boyfriend, maybe?” Cassie probed.

Amelia shook her head. “No. Brooke said she kind of wanted to be on her own for a while. She was so pretty. She could have had any guy on campus. Why would someone do this?” Amelia started to cry again quietly. “I mean, it has to be something with the dad’s business, doesn’t it? I know he’s a big electrical contractor. It has to be something tied to him. No one would want to hurt Brooke. No one.”

Max frowned, his gut sinking. He looked at Cassie. He knew what they were facing. The reality was they had nothing. All Amelia was doing was just speculating. He and Reynolds had done exactly the same thing. “Okay, Amelia, thanks for your help. Officer Danbrot will walk you through what happens next. Sorry about your roommate.”

It was the best he could do.

25

As Max walked out of the room, he felt proud of himself. He hadn’t lost his temper, and he hadn’t said anything too stupid. And he’d managed to at least try to commiserate with the victim.

As they stepped outside the bedroom into the hallway, waving Officer Danbrot back in to deal with Amelia and the cleanup, Max stopped, waiting for Cassie. She stood next to him, the two of them facing away from the room where Amelia still was now talking to Patricia. “Thoughts?”

Cassie shrugged, her voice professional, her posture stiff. Cool Cassie. “I still don’t feel like we have anything significant.”

“Neither do I, but we do know one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Whoever killed her has some serious issues.” As the words came out of his mouth, Max couldn’t escape the irony. Here he was, plagued by his own issues, investigating someone who clearly might have even more to deal with than Max did.

Max looked away for a second. Using the wine bottle almost looked like a crime of opportunity, not one that was intricately planned. And what was the deal with the flowers on the table? Had someone brought those to Brooke given the loss of her family? Had the killer done that, or someone else? “We need to have a look in her room.”

“Danbrot said it’s upstairs. This way.”

Max followed Cassie up a flight of stairs to the third floor. As they got to the door, Max saw a strip of red crime scene tape had been stretched across the wall in the doorway. He frowned. “Anybody been in here yet?”

Cassie shook her head. “No. I asked Danbrot that while you were talking to Amelia. She said they asked Amelia which room was Brooke’s and just cordoned it off. Didn’t wanna go in and disturb anything.”

At least for once someone was doing their job, Max thought to himself. All in all, things seemed to be better since he was back at the department. More organized, like everyone had finally gotten the idea that following procedures mattered. Maybe it was just his perception, nothing more than an opinion and they had been doing that all along. Max felt a flush of frustration. Dr. Kersevich had talked to him a lot about perception recently, which left Max with a lot of questions about the way that he’d viewed his life and the lives of the people around him. He looked away for a moment, feeling the tangle of confusion wrapping around him. Was he seeing things clearly? He looked back at the red tape. No, it wasn’t his imagination that procedures were being followed tightly. It was reality.

Max stripped away the tape from the door and turned the knob. It was unlocked. Not a surprise given they were dealing with college kids. He pushed it open.

Inside, Brooke’s room was crammed with more things than the small space looked like it could hold—a twin bed pushed up against one wall, a small closet, a dresser that had a television monitor on top of it, and a desk pushed up against the opposite wall. There was a colorful floral rug on the floor, a pile of books on the edge of her desk, and a laptop, the lid closed. In Max’s mind, the room was a bit of a mess. The bed had been left unmade, the blankets and sheets and bedspread kicked off to the side, the pillow dented from where Brooke’s head had been. There were pale green flowered throw pillows on the ground nearby, as if Brooke had been too exhausted to make her bed. A stack of papers was strewn across her desk and the closet doors were open, most of the clothes hung neatly inside, only a few pieces just tossed on the floor in a pile in the corner.

The room had the funny air of being suspended between being well organized and being a mess. Max pulled a new set of blue gloves from his pocket and started looking at Brooke’s bed. In his regular life, the disorganization would have made him crazy, but this was a crime scene. It was totally different in his mind. He lifted the sheets to see if anything had been hidden inside. There wasn’t. He dragged the mattress to the side to see if there was anything between the mattress and the box spring. Again nothing.

What he was expecting to find, he didn’t know.

Max looked over at Cassie. She was digging through Brooke’s closet, feeling all of the pockets of her jackets, pants, and sweatshirts. He saw her pull a business card out of the one of the pockets and toss it on the desk. “What’s that?”

Cassie didn’t stop her search, her back turned to Grady. “A business card for a nail place.”

“That’s probably not connected to our case,” he said blandly.

“Probably not.”

Satisfied that there was nothing hidden in the bed, Max looked underneath, only to find a series of shoeboxes that held footwear that ranged from three-inch silver platform heels to several pairs of tennis shoes in a range of colors and styles.

He stood up, brushed the front of his pants off and walked to the dresser. He started pulling open the drawers. In the top drawer were panties, bras, and socks. Brooke was a thong kind of a girl. The next one down held T-shirts and leggings, the third drawer had sweaters, and the bottom drawer had jeans. Max had just lifted a set of pants out of the drawer when he heard a clatter of something dropping onto the hard bottom of the drawer. He leaned forward. “Hey, Reynolds, take a look at this.”

“In a minute. I’m just about to finish this closet.”

It was a put-off. Another blast of glacial air from Reynolds. From the bottom of the drawer, Max pulled out a stack of framed photographs that had been jammed in the back behind pants, jeans, and scrubs. He sat on his heels, looking at them. They were all pictures of Brooke with one man. A guy with dark hair, tall and thin. If Max had to guess it was the now ex-boyfriend. Amelia had said Adam, or something like that. As Max looked at the pictures, it occurred to him that maybe Brooke wasn’t completely done with Adam. If she was, why would she have held on to the pictures and hidden them in a drawer?

Max stood up, lifting the pile of pictures with him. He set them on the edge of the desk. Cassie finished with the closet, turning toward him. “Find anything?” she asked.

Sort of, but you know that. “Nope. You?” He’d let her answer first.

“Nope.”

Max pointed at the stack of pictures on the desk. “The only thing hidden in this half of the room were these pictures.”

“But that kind of makes sense if Brooke and her boyfriend just broke up.”

Max knitted his eyebrows together. “How? Why wouldn’t she have just gotten rid of them?”

Cassie rolled her eyes. “Max, you’re never gonna understand, so I don’t know why I’m even gonna bother to try to explain this to you. But the reality is, when a girl breaks up with a guy, it’s very rare for her to just throw away everything that he gave her. Girls always hold out hope. If she throws everything away and he comes back, then she would have thrown away all of the pictures she had of the two of them.”

Do you need to talk to me like I’m five years old? “That’s not very realistic.”

Cassie sighed, changing the subject. “We don’t have anything, do we?”

“We don’t.” Max decided to play on Cassie’s self-acknowledged expertise about breakups. “Think there’s anything to Brooke breaking up with her boyfriend?”

Cassie considered Max’s question for a minute. Not glacial. “If she was the only one that died, then maybe. But Amelia didn’t seem to indicate that it was that rough of a breakup. She said that Brooke told her about it, hadn’t spent much time worrying about it and had gotten right back on with her life. I don’t know. Maybe Brooke had a new guy on the side? Or maybe she was kind of over the boyfriend, so it wasn’t that big of a deal?”

Max sighed. “We should probably talk to the guy, though. Maybe he knows something. Can you reach out to him?”

Cassie didn’t say anything, just nodding.

Max scanned the space around him. There was something about the way that the pictures of Brooke and her ex-boyfriend were hidden in the back of the bottom drawer of her dresser that caught his attention. What it was about it, he wasn’t sure. Then again, Cassie was a woman. She would obviously know more about how females dealt with breakups than he would.

Max shook his head. He felt his gut tighten. There were now four dead bodies, all from one family, sitting in the morgue. He looked at Reynolds. He knew they were good detectives.

But were they good enough to find the killer before anyone else died?

26

Max said goodbye to Cassie outside with nothing more than a wave. Dr. Hamadi was still inside, along with Officers Hall and Danbrot. Jordan and Cameron were finishing up. Though Cameron was a talker, he too, only offered a wave. Apparently, everyone felt exactly the way that Max did—no one wanted to be out late at a murder scene, especially one this gruesome.

Max got back in the car and looked at Patch. He realized that Patch was now more of an orphan than Max was. None of the people he’d lived with were still alive. They’d all been ripped away from him within twenty-four hours of each other. Max reached over and scratched the dog’s big head behind his tiny, pointy ears. Patch closed his eyes halfway, seeming to enjoy it. Max’s stomach clutched. “It looks like it’s gonna be just you and me for now.”

Max drove home, thinking about what he’d seen over the course of a single day. All four members of Joe Sloane’s family had been murdered in cold blood. There was no doubt in his mind about that. A chill ran down Max’s spine just thinking about it. He couldn’t help but think that the scene at the house on Westwood Road and on Belmor’s campus were linked. They had to be. The odds that they weren’t was much smaller than the odds that they were.

He cracked his neck and then focused on the road, staring at the red taillights in front of him. The brutality of Brooke’s murder was really hanging with him. His mind flickered back and forth between seeing the broken bottle with blood on the edge of it in and the pool of blood underneath Brooke’s back. The amount of force it would have taken to slice her neck caused a round of nausea to rumble through his gut. Who would do something like that to a young girl?

Only someone very angry or someone very crazy.

As he drove, Max decided he didn’t want to think about the murders anymore. Before he’d started with AA and Dr. Kersevich, work was all he thought about. Now things were different. Work wasn’t the only place he had to face the brutal truth about life. He was being forced to look at his own life along with the crimes around him. The whole thing was making him tired.

He turned on some metal music from a playlist he had on his phone, but as he glanced in the back seat, he realized he couldn’t turn it on too loud. He didn’t know a lot about dogs, but he knew that they had sensitive hearing. The last thing he wanted to do was make poor Patch deaf listening to Metallica. As the base thrummed, the guitars screaming in the background, Max drummed his fingers on the steering wheel.

He looked around him as he drove home. There weren’t too many cars on the road given how late it was, their headlights cutting through the darkness like sets of sharp knives. A little rain started to patter against his windshield. Max flipped on the wipers, seeing the water on the roadway start to create a reflection. In his mind, he kept seeing the faces of his mom and dad. Not when they were alive but when they were dead, their blank stares etched into his memory. Max realized they both had shared a surprised expression, as if the knocking of the grim reaper had come at an inopportune moment. Max thought back to when he’d found his mom dead from an accidental overdose. There had been a look of peace on her face along with surprise, the kind of peace he hadn’t ever seen on his mom’s face while she was still breathing. It was something he wanted in his life. He wondered for a second if he would ever be at peace. Given his history and his work, he wasn’t sure.

Max pulled in the driveway, opened the back door and grabbed Patch’s leash. He waited for Patch to jump out of the back seat then slammed the door. The rain, however brief, had already stopped. He unlocked the back door of the house and led Patch inside. He was just about to take off his coat when he heard whining. He turned, only to see Patch still standing right next to the door. “Oh. You want to go out, don’t you?”

Max hadn’t anticipated this. He’d been so caught up in the case he forgot that Patch would need to be walked again. Sliding his feet back into his tennis shoes, Max clipped the leash back on Patch’s collar and headed outside. His initial plan had been to just walk him into the front yard and let him relieve himself and then go back inside and try to get some sleep, but as Max stood there, he realized that he was way too restless to sleep. The faces of the Sloane family kept popping into his memory.

After Patch relieved himself, Max tugged on the leash, heading down the driveway. “Come on, Patch. Let’s go for a stroll.”

The neighborhood that Max lived in was filled with older, box-like homes. His was no exception, not much more than a rectangle covered in dull white vinyl siding. It was one of those neighborhoods that had been built all at the same time, every fourth home looking the same as the others. The ones in between had slight variations—the garage door on the right instead of the left, shutters or no shutters, a different color of roof. It wasn’t fancy, but then again, he didn’t need fancy. The house was just for him, and now Patch.

Over the years, the variations had gotten wider as people replaced the original siding with touches of stonework, new front patios, or painted it a different color. Some of the homes had even added a second floor. Max had considered that at one point, but then changed his mind. What did he need the space for? It was just him. And given how messy of a life he lived, he wasn’t sure that it would ever be anything more than that.

He swallowed as he walked. There was a reason that the divorce rate among police officers was nearly sixty percent. With those odds, marriages were doomed to fail. The ones that did survive, according to his analysis, took a partner who was either very secure, very independent or, better yet, both.

Max hadn’t dated that much, but he knew the kind of women who could tolerate the hours and the stress of being married to someone in law enforcement were nearly impossible to find. Lieutenant Williams had managed to keep his marriage intact. He was the only one Max knew except a guy that worked in the lockup.

Max looked down at Patch as they walked. Patch happily trotted next to Max, stopping to sniff every few driveways, giving a snort here and there.

Maybe having a dog wasn’t a bad idea after all.

A half hour later, Max made it home, successfully burying the memories of his mom and dad’s dead faces somewhere in the back of his mind. He let Patch in, started to head for bed, then realized he should give Patch food and water. He refilled Patch’s bowl of water and then put a scoop of food in his bowl. Patch drank half of the bowl as Max watched, then ate a few mouthfuls of kibble, the expression on his face saying something along the lines of, “Okay, what’s next?”

Max scowled. If he was going to keep Patch, he’d have to learn more about being a good owner, that was for sure. But, given the fact he had four dead bodies on the ground, his education about being a good dog owner would have to wait. Max went into the bedroom, changed into a T-shirt and a pair of shorts and then came out, turning on the television. Patch had curled up nearby, his eyes almost completely closed.

That was fast.

Max stretched out on the couch, feeling the tension of the day hovering over him like a storm front on the horizon. It wasn’t normal for them to have two cases so tightly connected within twenty-four hours. He closed his eyes for a second, hearing the television on in the background, a reporter talking about the Pittsburgh Pirates’ odds of making the World Series. Apparently, by his tone, it wasn’t good.

Max stayed on the couch, dozing on and off for the next hour. When his back started to ache, he got up and wandered toward the bedroom. He glanced at Patch. Cassie had suggested closing Patch up in the extra bedroom at night, but he seemed perfectly comfortable. After what the poor dog had been through, Max didn’t want to disturb him.

Max wandered down the hallway, deciding to leave Patch where he was. He stopped in the bathroom, brushed his teeth and then swung his legs up underneath the cool sheets. A second later, just as he closed his eyes, he heard the jingling of Patch’s collar. Max stared at the ceiling and then looked at the doorway, where he could see Patch’s silhouette. Where was he going? Max closed his eyes again. He was too tired to deal with Patch. He listened. The jingling got closer. Max was just about to sit up when he felt the bed jiggle. Startled, he moved away stiffly. Patch was on his bed.

Max sat up, reaching for Patch, trying to shoo him off the bed. Patch ignored him, circled twice at the end of the bed and then flopped down with a grunt, his back toward Max. “Come on, dog. Get off. Get off.”

Patch didn’t move. Max flopped onto his back, frustrated. He had realized there might be dog fur on his sheets and blankets. That wasn’t part of how he kept his house. Maybe in the past, but not now. He lay in bed staring at the ceiling, feeling his heart pound in his chest. Things were happening too fast. He felt his heart skip a beat. Too many bodies had dropped, he had a dog living in his house that he hadn’t planned for, and now it was sleeping on his bed.

Max blinked. What should he do? Get up? Put Patch in the extra bedroom? Or maybe he could go sleep on the couch? What if he got Patch’s bed and dragged it into the bedroom? Would that work?

As Max stared up at the ceiling in the darkness, he could hear Patch breathing softly. It was then that it hit Max full force—the poor dog had lost everyone he knew and loved. The family he’d depended on to feed him, care for him, and love him was completely gone. Who was Max to throw him off of his bed? Max reached over and stroked Patch’s back, feeling the short fur underneath his fingers. Patch grunted, shifted and went right back to sleep.

Max looked at Patch, then whispered, “You can sleep up here for one night. One night and that’s it.”

Who was he kidding?

27

By no means had Max slept well the night before. Between waking up with a strange dog at the foot of his bed and dreams that left him in a cold sweat—a mixture of the day his father had died and the murder scene at the Sloane’s house, Max woke up feeling like he hadn’t slept at all.

Max sat up on the edge of the bed, his head hanging, his arms bracing himself as he sat, his legs dangling over the edge. Max walked out of his bedroom and down the hallway, Patch following. Max slipped his feet into a pair of tennis shoes and took Patch outside then brought him back in, giving him fresh food and water.

Leaning his elbows on the countertop, Max watched as Patch ate his food. There was something so serene about him. Certainly, Patch had been through a lot of trauma but he was acting normal, or at least normal in Max’s mind. He ate, he drank, he went for a walk. He was living in the moment. It was a simple way to approach life, nothing like the mess that Max was in. Max nodded, realizing that maybe that’s one of the things that the guys at AA had been talking about. Many of them had said that living in the moment was the way they’d kept sober for as long as they had. They didn’t think about the past and they didn’t think about the future. They just stayed exactly where they were.

Max shook his head. With his history, he wasn’t sure if that would ever be possible for someone like him.

After showering and getting dressed, Max combed his dark hair away from the sides of his face, the gray hair at his temples even more pronounced with his hair damp from the shower. He pulled on a pair of jeans and a Pittsburgh PD T-shirt. Lieutenant Williams used to be particular about the way that his detectives dressed, but ever since the Spring Grove Hospital collapse and the fentanyl attack, Jerry head lightened up, at least about certain things.

Then again, it seemed like everything in life had become more casual.

Max got Patch settled in the guest room again, carrying his water and food bowls and setting them down against the wall. Going into the bathroom across the hall, Max refilled the bowl of water in case Patch got thirsty while he was gone. He even turned on the music again. “I’ll be back to check on you later,” Max said to Patch. Patch looked up at him, wandered to his bed, picked up a ball and carried it back to Max, dropping it on the floor.

Max scowled. “No. I can’t play right now. You go lay down. I’ve got work to do.”

Patch grunted but turned and went to his bed.

Max closed the door behind Patch as he left. Max smiled a little. At least someone wanted to spend time with him, even if it was a dog.

As Max got in the car, his phone buzzed. Cassie. “What’s going on today? Are you headed into the office?”

“I’m just leaving the house now. Had to feed Patch.”

“I’m relieved to hear that he’s still alive,” she said dryly.

“Very funny.”

“Me, funny? I was actually being completely serious.”

Max narrowed his eyes. Glacially cool Cassie had shown up again. “Thanks for your concern, but he’s just fine. We took a nice walk last night and I gave him food and water already this morning. How about if we concentrate on work.”

“Exactly what I was thinking.” There was a pause. “I just got a call from Jerry.”

Max furrowed his eyebrows. “Why did Jerry call you?”

Overall, Max had been with Pittsburgh PD longer than Cassie, but when he’d gotten fired, Cassie had somehow assumed more seniority. Either that or Jerry simply didn’t want to deal with Max. It seemed to be a theme recently, even after everything he’d done to save his fellow officer’s lives. That said, he didn’t know why Jerry wouldn’t have called. Maybe he would rather talk to Cassie, maybe it was nothing.

“Probably because he didn’t want to talk to you.” Then: “He wanted an update.”

Max gripped the steering wheel a little harder. “Why the need to be so harsh, Reynolds?”

Cassie didn’t say anything for a minute.

Gotcha.

They were both silent for a minute. Reynolds was the one that spoke first. “Where do you wanna start today?

Max grunted. The reality was that the way that Cassie was acting, he would prefer to work on his own. “I think we should go back to Sloane Electric, then hit the rest of the places the family frequented.”

“I mean, we can, but we already went to Sloane Electric.”

“Right, but that was before Brooke was killed.”

“And you think that Joe’s business has something to do with all of their deaths?”

“Do you have a better hypothesis?”

Cassie was silent again. “No. I don’t.”

“Did you hear back from the boyfriend?”

“Nope.”

“Then Sloane Electric it is. I’ll meet you there.”

As Max headed to Sloane Electric, he started to think about Cassie. Yeah, they’d gone through some tough times. If she didn’t trust him entirely based on his daily behavior, he couldn’t exactly blame her. Then again, he had saved her life. And even more importantly, he hadn’t hidden his quirks from her. He was who he was. That said, his normally happy partner seemed to be exploring her dark side. Things worked well when she was happy. Not so much when she wasn’t. What was bothering her?

Max didn’t have time to try to figure out what was eating at Detective Cassie Reynolds. That wasn’t part of his job description. He’d been hired to do a job. At that moment, it was to figure out who had killed the Sloane family, not be Reynolds’s personal therapist or life coach.

Not that he was qualified, anyway.

Max pulled up in front of Sloane Electric, noticing that he’d beaten Cassie there. Max charged into the office, startling Liz, who looked up, her eyes wide behind her glasses. “Detective? I didn’t expect to see you back here today. Is everything okay?”

Max shook his head. “It is most certainly not. Brooke Sloane was murdered last night. I need an explanation, and I need one now.”

Liz’s mouth dropped open. “Oh my God! What? Brooke is dead?” A look of shock washed over her face. “I’ve known her since she was a child. How is this even possible? What is happening?” She stopped for a second and put her hand on her chest. “Are we all in danger? Does this have something to do with the company?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. You tell me. The last time I was here, I was polite. Now I’m irritated.” Max leaned over Liz’s desk. “I need to know who would have a motive to kill Joe Sloane and his entire family. Who did he owe money to? Who did he not get along with? Who had a vendetta? You have to know something, Liz.”

“No one!” she stuttered. “I mean, Joe had his differences of opinion with people, just like anybody in business. But he didn’t really owe anybody anything.”

Max knew this to be true. Liz was telling the truth about that. One of the other detectives had done a deep dive into Joe’s financials. As far as they could tell, the only person that Joe owed any money to was the company that he bought his trucks from.

“Come on, Liz. I need you to think. How about someone that owed him money?”

Liz sighed. “Well, that’s a completely different issue. Lots of people owed Joe money.”

Now maybe they were getting somewhere. “Any of them get angry recently? Any of them concerned about paying off their bills?”

Liz typed something on her computer and then turned it around. “I don’t know. I can print these off for you. These are all the people that owe Joe, I mean owed Joe money.”

“Do that.”

Cassie walked into the office just as the words came out of Max’s mouth. She had a look of concern on her face as if she’d have to protect Liz from Grady. “What’s going on here?”

I don’t need you to double-check what I’m doing, Reynolds. “Liz was just getting us a list of people that owe Joe Sloane money.”

Cassie arched an eyebrow. “We missed that yesterday, didn’t we?”

Max didn’t answer.

Liz’s eyes got wide as she handed Grady a sheaf of papers. “I would have been happy to give it to you when you were here before. You can dig around on the computer all you want. I don’t have anything to hide. But I don’t think any of these people killed Joe. I mean, why would they?”

Max frowned. “What do you mean? They owe the company money.” It was a simple calculation in Max’s mind. Money equaled motive.

Max stared down at the papers Liz had handed to him. Some of the amounts were small. Some were in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. “There was no problem because Joe Sloane was a good guy. That’s why. That’s why I worked here for so long. Lots of people owe Joe money. Sometimes they pay him off in other ways. They’ll do work on his house, and he’ll take some money off of their bill, or around Christmas time, he’ll cut somebody’s bill back by ten percent as a Christmas gift.” Liz looked down, sniffling.

Max shook his head. In his mind that was no way to do business. People either owed money or they didn’t. “That’s a lot of loss. Somebody had to get mad about their bill.”

Liz sighed. “The only one I can think of who got angry recently was Chad Nowicki. He’s a real estate developer. Was doing a bunch of strip centers on the outskirts of town. He pays kinda slow. Joe called him about it and the guy got crappy with him. Said they were still trying to finish the project. I know Joe wasn’t happy.”

Cassie glanced over Max’s shoulder at the print-off. “It looks like Chad owes Joe half a million dollars.”

Max glanced at Cassie. “Think that’s enough to kill over?”

Cassie cocked her head to the side. “I guess we should find out.”

Nice Cassie.

28

It didn’t take long for Max and Cassie to find their way to Chad’s office. It was prominently placed in downtown Pittsburgh in a high-rise building. Max and Cassie rode their way to the top floor, neither of them saying anything, where they were greeted by the initials CN etched into a glass door. As they walked inside, they approached a reception desk with a sign behind that read in large letters, “Chad Nowicki Real Estate Development.”

A young woman with slicked-back black hair tied in a perfect knot at the nape of her neck wearing red lipstick looked up from her screen, a headset over her ear. “May I help you?” she asked tersely.

“We’re here to see Chad Nowicki,” Max answered, resting his forearms on the desk.

The young woman looked confused, but in a way that seemed overly acted, like she was auditioning for a role in a television series. Max immediately wondered if it was an expression she’d practiced. “I’m sorry, do you have an appointment? Mr. Nowicki is very busy.”

Cassie laid her hand on Max’s arm just as he sucked in a breath to answer. He stopped. It was probably for the best. Cassie held up her badge. “I’m Detective Reynolds and this is Detective Grady. We’re with Pittsburgh PD. We just need a moment of Mr. Nowicki’s time. I understand that he’s busy, but this is of grave importance.”

Max furrowed his eyebrows. Cassie had just basically told the woman to get Chad, but it had taken her way too many words to get it done in his mind.

The young woman looked startled. Max decided that was a good thing. “Of course. I’m sorry, I had no idea.”

Cassie held up a conciliatory hand as if all was forgiven. Max scowled again. He wouldn’t have been that nice, but then again, maybe that was why Cassie had taken over.

Max stepped away from the receptionist’s desk while they waited. He walked over to a map on the wall showing the city of Pittsburgh. It had tiny gold stars on it in every location where Chad Nowicki had a property. Max raised his eyebrows. It seemed a little too self-congratulatory to Max. There were a lot of gold stars on the map. Okay, so Chad owned a bunch of the city. So what? Did he need to brag about it? Max shrugged. From what he could tell, it looked like Chad owned about half of Pittsburgh and the surrounding area. Maybe they should change it from Pittsburgh to Nowickiburg.

The receptionist came out from behind the desk and waved Cassie and Max forward. “We’re going to squeeze you in between meetings this morning. I don’t want you to have to wait. Mr. Nowicki is in his office. It’s straight down at the end of the hall, the one with the glass doors.” She pointed, raising her eyebrows. “It’s hard to miss.”

Max appreciated the crack in her professional veneer. “Thanks.” Clearly, he wasn’t the only one that thought the office was pretentious.

Max followed Cassie down the hallway, his head on a swivel as they walked. The office looked like many others that he’d seen. There was a bank of private offices on the left-hand side, a cubicle farm in the middle, nearly every desk occupied, people hunched over their computers or on their phones. What exactly they were doing, Max had no idea, but if this was what their everyday life looked like, he was glad he didn’t have that job.

Max followed Cassie as they walked to the end of the hallway. The receptionist was right. It wasn’t difficult to find Chad’s office. It had glass doors that matched the ones at the entry with a small black engraved nameplate next to the door that read “Chad Nowicki, Founder and CEO.”

No ego here, for sure. Max grimaced as he passed it.

On first glance, Max realized that Chad Nowicki was far younger than he expected him to be. Probably mid-forties if he had to guess, right around Max’s age. That explained some of the decor and the ostentatious nature of the reception area. Chad’s office was no exception.

The office itself was overdone in Max’s opinion, but then again, many people would probably think his house was underdone. The office of the Founder and CEO of Chad Nowicki Real Estate Development had a broad dark wood desk that faced the glass doors, giving Chad the ability to glance out into his kingdom where his workers were busily executing his orders. There was cool marble flooring underneath the desk, covered by an enormous oriental-style rug in blues, creams, and beiges. Two beige leather chairs sat in front of Chad’s desk each of them with a view of Pittsburgh through the plate glass windows that were behind him, a reminder to anyone sitting in them that Chad owned nearly every piece of land they walked on.

Chad had dark hair and tanned skin the color of an old saddle. There was a set of golf clubs in the corner of his office, as if he could be ready to go out and hit the links with just a moment’s notice. Max winced. He probably could.

Chad looked up from his desk as they walked in, setting his pen down on the desk. “Lizette said you needed to talk to me about an urgent matter?” Chad stood up from his desk and extended his hand. “Chad Nowicki. Have to say I’m a little surprised to have a visit from the police today.”

As opposed to any other day?

Max fought off the urge to say, “Well, we’re surprised to be here.” He cleared his throat. “I’m Detective Grady.” He pointed to Cassie. “This is Detective Reynolds. We are working on a case, and we have some questions for you. Your name popped up in our investigation.”

Chad motioned for them to sit, but didn’t offer them water or coffee. Apparently, the hospitality of the Chad Nowicki Real Estate Development company only went so far. “Really? I’m surprised to hear that. I assure you, we do everything above board here. What’s this in regard to?”

The sudden shift to formal language made Max wonder how quickly Chad Nowicki would be calling his attorney. “Does the name Joe Sloane ring a bell?”

Cassie held up her hand. “Let me interject here. Mr. Nowicki, it’s come to our attention that you’ve done some work with Sloane Electric. Is that true?”

Max looked down at his lap and blinked. It wasn’t the tactic he would have taken, but he’d give Cassie a minute to try to smooth-talk the guy.

“Joe Sloane? Sloane Electric? Yeah. We’ve used them on a bunch of projects. I’d consider Joe a friend.”

A friend? Your so-called friend is now dead.

Cassie sucked in a breath to continue. It was Max’s turn to hold his hand up. “You owe Joe a bunch of money.”

Chad nodded slowly, as if he suddenly realized how serious things were, his eyes becoming narrow. “That’s correct. Is that what this is about? Somehow the police are involved with this?”

“Not exactly,” Max responded. He paused for a moment. If Chad was focused on the money, did he not know about Joe’s death? “Chad, let me ask you a question. Have you watched the news in the last few hours?”

“No.” He shrugged. “Can’t say I have. I run a multimillion-dollar business here, Detective. I don’t always have time to keep up with what’s going on in the local area. I know it sounds bad. I just have a limited amount of time. You know. Too much to do and not enough time. That kinda thing.”

“Then you have no idea that Joe Sloane is dead.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Max saw Cassie shift in her seat.

“What? What are you talking about?”

Max paused and stared at Chad. He narrowed his eyes. People’s nonverbals told a lot more truths than the words coming out of their mouths. Max had learned that over the years. The slack way that Chad was looking at Max told him that either Chad honestly had no idea that Joe Sloane was dead, or he was a really good liar.

At that moment, Max wasn’t sure which one.

Cassie cleared her throat. “Just a standard question, Mr. Nowicki, can you account for your whereabouts over the last few days?”

Chad’s cheeks suddenly got pink. “Are you asking me if I have an alibi? Do I need my attorney?”

“If you feel like you need your attorney to answer a simple question, then sure, but this isn’t a big deal,” Max said. “Where have you been, Chad?”

Chad’s face reddened even more. “Well, I can tell you, Detective,” he spat, “I just returned from a trip to Los Angeles last night. This is my first day in the office since last week.”

If Chad thought that Grady was just going to accept that at face value, he was wrong. “I’m assuming you have hotel confirmations, boarding passes, and other information that would corroborate that?”

Chad leaned back in his seat, his face stony. “I don’t fly commercial. I fly privately. And I’d be more than happy to put you in contact with my pilot so he can verify that I was on the plane. You can get that information from Lizette on your way out. Now, is there anything else? If not, I have a lot of work to do.”

“Actually, there is.” Grady leaned back in his chair. He wasn’t gonna be rushed out of anybody’s office until he was done with the questions he had to ask. “What about the half million you owe him? That’s a lot of cash, don’t you think? Do you have any feelings about that you’d like to share?”

Chad narrowed his eyes. “A half million dollars in my business? That’s nothing.”

No need to brag, Chad.

He continued. “First of all, it’s normal for there to be a lag between when a project is finished and when we distribute the final funds to our contractors.” He typed something on his computer and then looked back at Max and Cassie, his expression even. “I can see every aspect of my organization, Detectives. I built this business from the ground up. I know what goes on. And I can tell you that that the strip center project Joe worked on was a massive one. We just got the certificates of occupancy from the city. That’s the trigger for payment. All of the inspections have to be done and approved. The funds have been authorized and will be released to Sloane’s company next week.” He blinked. “Perhaps you need to do a little more investigating before you make accusations.”

“So, you weren’t intentionally holding back the funds to Joe Sloane then?”

Chad shrugged. “Why? We had the money. We have the deal. There was a contract in place. I pay my bills. Do I feel bad that he’s dead? Sure. But he’s a business associate, not my best friend. I work with a lot of electrical contractors. Life will go on, I promise.”

Max narrowed his eyes. This guy was as cold as they came.

Cassie interjected. “Chad, I have a quick question. Have you ever met Joe’s family?”

He shrugged, then looked back at his computer screen. Max imagined he was checking his email or his schedule or something. “Maybe once. We used to have celebrations with our contractors when our projects opened. They were kind of fun. We haven’t done that in a while. I think maybe his wife came along with him one time. What was her name again?”

“Jody.”

“Right. I’ll have Lizette send some flowers.”

Max whispered under his breath. “She’s dead too.”

“What did you say?” The way the words came out sounded like a challenge.

Max stood up, slapping his hands against his thighs. He’d had enough of the case, of Chad, of everything. “The entire family’s dead, Chad. You might not have known Joe very well, or maybe you did. I’m still trying to make up my mind. But you could show at least a little compassion.”

Max got up and walked out of the office. He had no idea if Cassie was following him. He didn’t really care. He stopped at the reception desk. Cassie met him there. She held up a finger telling him to wait. Apparently, he’d done enough damage. She approached the receptionist. “Lizette, here’s my business card. Could you please forward to my office your boss’s travel records for the last week?”

Lizette nodded, her lips pressed together.

As they walked out of the office, Max had the sinking feeling that they were just looking at a guy who was busy and cold, not necessarily someone who had killed the Sloane family.

Max ran his hands through his hair as they rode down in the elevator together. If Chad Nowicki didn’t have a motive, then who did?

Grady closed his eyes for a second, the image of his father’s face rising in his mind. He felt the burn of bile at the back of his throat. He still had four dead bodies on the ground, and no one to blame.

29

By the time Grady and Reynolds left Chad’s office, it was the end of the day. After heading back to the office, Cassie left, telling Max that she was heading home for the evening.

“I’m gonna stay here for a little bit and go through the case file again. See if we missed anything. Did you ever hear back from the ex-boyfriend?”

“Nope. I’ll call him again.” Reynolds called after him. “Do you want me to stop at your house and let Patch out?”

Patch. He’d almost forgotten about his dog. Change in plans. “No. I won’t be long.”

Max sucked in a breath as Cassie drove away. Maybe this whole having a dog thing wasn’t a good fit for him. Maybe Cassie was right. He stood up a little straighter and then decided he could handle it. He would just have to make a few adjustments.

Max decided to print off the pictures from the crime scene. Maybe if he took a better look at them, he’d see something. That was usually how it worked. He and Cassie would collect all of the data. He’d look at it for a while and then walk away. Right after, he’d notice something that someone else had missed. Those were the things that usually unraveled the cases right in front of him, like a loose thread in a blanket that turned the entire thing into a pile of yarn.

Grady walked over to the printer. It was humming in the background. A minute later, the pictures started to roll off, the bloody bodies of Joe, Jody, and Tyler coming off first, then Brooke just after. Max picked them up and shuffled them, walking back to his desk. He’d just give them a quick look before he left, he decided.

He looked around the office. No one else was there. Jerry’s office was dark. If Max remembered correctly, it was bocci night. The other detectives were either out in the field or they were done for the day. He felt his shoulders drop. The quiet felt good. He could think without interruption. Max walked to the conference room and spread the pictures out on the table, walking around them a few times. There was blood and gore in every single one of them.

It was a lot to digest. A lot of violence, a lot of anger and a lot of death.

He narrowed his eyes and stared at Joe Sloane’s dead body. Jordan had said that the knife wound had likely nicked Joe’s lungs. Max’s stomach flopped, realizing how much force it would have taken to plunge a knife that deep into another man’s body. That was someone who had fury buried deep inside of them, someone who had a personal vendetta against Joe Sloane.

Someone who needed to be stopped.

As Max looked at the picture again, he blinked, sucking in a sharp breath. A cold sweat gathered on his forehead. The face he was looking at in the picture was no longer Joe Sloane’s. It was his father’s. Max closed his eyes for a second, resting his hands on the chair in front of him, his chest heaving, his breath shallow.

It was happening again.

A moment later, Max opened his eyes, blinking. He moved away from the picture of Joe Sloane and moved over to Tyler. The poor kid had his entire life in front of him. Max circled the table looking at pictures of Jody and Brooke. He used a single finger to push a picture of Brooke to the edge of the table away from the rest of the group. He stared at it. There was something strange. The murders of Joe, Tyler, and Jody had a whisper of planning around them. Max cocked his head to the side. Whoever had killed the family had planned it enough that they’d brought a gun and a knife. Why both? Was the knife a backup?

Grady looked again at Brooke’s picture. It wasn’t the same with Brooke. Certainly, glass as a weapon had been used in many crimes throughout the years, especially in a pinch when nothing else was available, but that just spoke to the fact that whoever had attacked Brooke hadn’t planned to do it.

Max blinked. Were they even looking at the same killer? Had he and Cassie been looking at the crime completely wrong?

As Max looked back at the picture of Brooke again, his vision started to swim, her face replaced with the face of his mother. It hit him so hard that Max nearly fell to the ground. He recovered at the last second and turned away from the pictures, staggering for the door, the breath knocked out of him. All of a sudden, he had only one urge—to get out of the building.

Grady darted for the stairs. He slammed the door open and ran down the steps as quickly as his body would take him. The breath was ragged in his throat, his vision swimming. A wave of nausea hit him as he emerged outside. He swallowed, tasting bile in the back of his throat. Not wanting to attract any attention, he walked down the street, shoving his hands in his pockets, staring at the ground. Why was he having these visions of his mom’s and dad’s dead bodies? What was happening to him? Max cursed under his breath. It had to be the counseling he was going to. It wasn’t doing anything to help him. All he was doing was dredging up his past.

And as he thought, it was better left buried and undisturbed.

Twenty minutes later, Max found himself sitting on a bar stool, beer and a shot in front of him. He downed the shot and sat staring at the beer, feeling the warm liquid going down the back of his throat. It had been six months and seventeen days since he’d had a drink. He pushed the shot glass towards the bartender. “Another.” The bartender happily obliged, sliding a new glass toward him.

Max felt a vibration in his pocket. It was his phone. He pulled it out and stared at it. The last thing he wanted to deal with at that moment was anything from work.

Max sighed when he saw who it was. There were two texts. One was from Reynolds. “I stopped at your house and took care of Patch.” The second was a text from Frankie Turner. “Max? You’ve missed a couple of meetings. You okay?”

Grady whistled under his breath as he felt the alcohol hit his system. It was like Frankie had a sixth sense for when people were careening out of control.

Max didn’t answer. He took a couple sips of the beer and sat there. A minute later, he felt someone cross behind him and then sit on the barstool next to him. Max set his jaw. The last thing he wanted to do was to have a conversation. He looked over his shoulder, about to tell the person to go find another place to sit when he realized the face was familiar. It was Frankie.

Max looked away, staring down at the empty glasses in front of him, then muttered, “How did you find me?”

“It’s not too hard given the fact you gave me permission to track your cell phone. Remember that?”

Max looked away. It was the one request that Frankie had when he agreed to be Grady’s sponsor. He’d said it matter-of-factly as they stood outside of Saint James church. “You’re gonna do what you’re gonna do, Max. I get that. You can call me day or night twenty-four/seven. Doesn’t matter if it’s Christmas, Easter or your mother’s birthday. The only thing I ask is that you let me track your phone.”

Max had thought it was a strange request at the time, but now he knew why. Frankie pulled a twenty-dollar bill out of his pocket and set it on the counter. He looked at Max evenly. There was no judgment in his eyes. “How about if we go take a walk?”

“I can pay my own bar tab,” Max said stiffly.

“I know you can.”

Max looked down for a second and then nodded, sliding off of the bar stool.

For the first few minutes they walked, neither of them said anything. Finally, Max looked at Frankie. “It’s been a bad day.”

Frankie smiled. “I can tell. Wanna talk about it?”

Max considered the question. He was working on an open investigation. How much could he actually say? “I caught a homicide. A multiple.”

“Multiple?”

“Yeah, an entire family got killed. I’ve got no leads.”

“And that’s what drove you to the bar?”

Max didn’t say anything for a second, shoving his hands in his pockets. It wasn’t that simple, but he didn’t know what to do. He glanced at the ground. For some reason it was easier to talk to Frankie than it was to Dr. Kersevich. Why that was, he wasn’t sure. “Nope.”

Frankie shrugged. “You ended up there for some reason. What was it?”

A flicker of fear ran through Max’s body. What if he told Frankie about the flashbacks he was having, and Frankie thought he was nuts? Then again, he probably was.

“It’s just that recently, every time I see a body, I see my dad’s face. It’s freaking me out.”

“What do you mean?”

Max felt his shoulders tighten. Hadn’t he been clear? “Like I’m seeing a ghost or something.”

“That’s what drove you to the bar?”

Max nodded, suddenly realizing that he’d bolted out of the office so fast that he never logged off his computer or picked up the pictures. Not that he really cared.

They walked another half a block before Frankie said anything else. “You know, Max, maybe police work isn’t the place for you if you’re trying to move on in your life.”

Grady bristled. “I’ve been a detective for a long time, Frankie. I can tell you it’s the right job for me.”

Frankie held up a hand. “Obviously, it’s up to you. I’m just here to make observations and to support you in your sobriety. What you choose to do with them is up to you.” Frankie stopped at the next corner. “Listen, I gotta get back. Whether you stay a cop or try something different, I’ll be here to help you. I’m just saying that if it’s bringing up that many bad memories, then maybe it’s time for a change.”

Without saying anything else, Frankie disappeared around the corner as quietly as he had arrived, leaving Max standing alone under the yellow glow of a single streetlight. Max didn’t move, the breath shallow in his chest as he thought about what Frankie had said. Had Frankie actually suggested that Max give up law enforcement? The thought seemed impossible to him, and yet part of him wondered if that was the end he was careening toward.

Other than ringing in his ears, the only thing Max could hear was the occasional vibration of tires on the road as they passed him where he stood. The cool air of the night descended over him. He turned back toward the parking lot where he’d left his car, feeling much calmer than the way he’d left the building. Grady stared at the front door to the precinct from across the street as he walked by, seeing the golden glow of the lights, a few dark shadows passing through the lobby.

Maybe Frankie was right about how being a detective was dragging up memories from Grady’s past. Maybe he wasn’t.

Grady pressed his lips together and reached for the badge on his belt. The reality was, he had a killer to find first.

30

The minute Max rolled out of bed the next morning, he dubbed the day, “Day One.”

After just over six months being sober, Grady was starting over. Again.

He was just over twelve hours sober and there was work to do. As soon as he rolled out of bed, Patch jumped to the floor. Max had been so exhausted the night before, either that or buzzed from the shots he’d had at the bar, that he hadn’t even really noticed when Patch had jumped up to join him.

Max pulled on a light jacket over his shoulders and slipped his feet into a pair of tennis shoes, grabbing a leash for Patch. He checked the time. It was just after five a.m. “Let’s go,” he said to Patch, who trotted after him, his tail wagging as if it was the best day ever.

Grady took Patch outside and decided to walk down the block. It wouldn’t take him long to get ready. The drive to Saint James to get to his six a.m. AA meeting would only be about ten minutes. And if he was a minute or two late, that would be okay. At least he would show up.

He felt his stomach tense. Part of being in AA was being brutally honest with himself and others. That meant that he needed to go into the meeting this morning and tell everyone what happened. Frankie already knew. There was no point in lying. He walked down the sidewalk, hanging his head. Did he really want to do that? Did he want to expose himself that way? Grady shrugged to himself. He could just as easily go straight to work and catch up with everyone at the meeting when the case was over, couldn’t he? By then, he’d be at least a few days into a new round of sobriety.

A garbage truck on an early morning run passed him, backfiring right in front of Patch. The poor dog gave a yelp and then threw his body on the ground, shaking. Max stood, surprise washing over him. “Patch? You okay?” He bent over to look at the dog to see if he was injured. Max went to touch Patch and Patch pulled away from him, his entire body shaking. As the truck rumbled away, it occurred to Max that the backfire sounded just like a gun going off.

The last time a gun had gone off near Patch, he’d lost his whole family.

Max squatted next to a quivering Patch, running his hand over the dog’s short fur, trying to calm him. “It’s okay, boy. I understand.” As the words came out of Max’s mouth it occurred to him that he really did understand. In fact, he probably understood better than most. Max and Patch shared that in common. They’d both been traumatized.

Max moved his way around the front of Patch’s body, lifting the dog’s head into his hands. “It’s okay, boy. I promise you. Everything’s gonna be all right. I’m going to protect you.”

All of a sudden, a flood of emotion washed over Max. As he stood up early that morning, he remembered all the details of the night that he had killed his father, the way he felt protective over his mom and his brother, the way he was absolutely sure that if he didn’t do something, his father was going to kill at least one of them and maybe all of them. He felt like someone punched him in the gut. He bent over, putting his hands on his knees, his heart pounding in his chest. He’d been so young. There was no other solution, no other way for him to protect his family. That had been his only goal. It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t vengeance. It was all about Grady protecting the people he loved the most.

And that’s what he’d been attempting to do ever since, albeit in a broken and awkward way.

Max waited for the waves of emotion to subside. When he opened his eyes, he noticed that the rims felt wet. Was he crying? He had no idea, but he hadn’t ever cried, at least not since his father had died. As he closed his eyes again, taking a deep breath, his hands still on his knees, he heard Patch get up, the jingle of his collar signaling he’d just shaken his head. A second later he felt a lick on his face. Startled, Max opened his eyes. Patch was nose-to-nose with him, staring. He didn’t move for a second, then sniffed Max’s cheek giving it another lick. Max stood up, rubbing the back of Patch’s head. “So that’s how it’s gonna be, huh? I help you and you help me?”

Then they walked home.

By the time Max made it to the office, he had a whopping headache. Whether it was from the alcohol the night before, the unsolved murders and the nightmares he was having, or the fact that he’d finally remembered everything about the night he shot his father, he didn’t know. Exhausted, the only thing he did know was that other people might not understand—they never seemed to anyway—but he’d done what he could to protect his family.

Walking into the homicide unit, he wanted the revelation to give him some peace, but it didn’t. It just seemed to dig like sharp nails at the scars that had been built up in his soul. Every part of him felt beaten and battered.

As Max approached his desk, he looked towards Jerry’s office. Jerry was seated, having a conversation with Cassie, his posture stiff as if he didn’t like what he was hearing. The door was closed. Max glanced at his desk. There was no coffee on it. He glanced at Cassie’s. She’d brought herself one. “That’s different,” he muttered under his breath. It wasn’t that she needed to bring him coffee. In fact, he’d brought her coffee plenty of times, but it was one of the ways he measured their relationship over the last few months. Coffee meant things were fine. No coffee, not so much.

Max narrowed his eyes. He couldn’t see the expression on Cassie’s face from the way she was positioned with her back to the door of Jerry’s office, but he could tell by her posture she was upset about something. She kept waving her arms and pointing as if something had really upset her. Max grimaced. She hadn’t told him about anything specific. All Grady knew what that she’d been moody toward him.

Without thinking, Max charged towards the door. He opened it as Cassie finished her sentence. “You just don’t understand, Lieutenant. It’s not the same as it used to be. Grady is just so hard to deal with!”

Jerry raised his eyebrows and looked at Cassie, shaking his head. “Well, now that the cat’s out of the bag, how about if the two of you have a seat and we’ll figure this out.”

Max felt a combination of disappointment and anger. Had they been having an entire conversation about him? At least Cassie could have called him or talked to him privately before she dragged the lieutenant into the middle of whatever was going on. Max felt his jaw tense. “Is this about the case?”

Jerry rolled a pencil between his fingers. “Not exactly.”

Max turned to look at Cassie. “Reynolds?”

Cassie looked at the ground. “I just can’t do this anymore, Max.”

“Do what?”

“This,” she waved her hands back and forth, like she was directing an orchestra, “this smoothing things over deal. Me trying to help the two of us get through a case without ruffling any feathers.” She looked at him and blinked. “I told the lieutenant I don’t think we should be partners anymore.”

Grady’s stomach dropped. Not be partners with Reynolds? What was she talking about?

Jerry held his hands up. “Before the two of you get ahead of yourselves, remember that this is my decision, not either of yours.”

Cassie let out a long sigh. “But haven’t you heard anything I have said?”

Jerry lowered his chin. “Detective Reynolds, I have heard all of your concerns, but now is not the time for us to make any changes and, quite frankly, none of your concerns seem to amount to anything other than a personality conflict.”

Cassie looked away, folding her arms in front of her chest. “I can’t. How am I supposed to do this day after day?”

Jerry leaned forward. “Reynolds, that’s entirely enough. You’ve made your point. We all know Max is quirky. Grady, would you agree you’re quirky?”

Max gave a single nod. This was no revelation. He’d heard it so many times that the words didn’t even land anymore. You didn’t have to be a genius to figure that out.

Jerry continued. “The reality is I’ve got four dead bodies, and you two were assigned to figure out who did it. Last time I checked, that has not happened. Am I correct?”

Max didn’t say anything. Cassie mumbled, “Yes, sir.”

“So, as far as I can tell there’s nothing functionally wrong here, which means the two of you are going to continue to work together until at least until this case is solved. At least. Once I have someone behind bars with a solid case behind it, then we can reapproach this conversation. In the meantime, do you have any leads? Where are we on this case?”

Max responded blandly. If Reynolds wanted to lead, he’d let her. “Nowhere. We’ve got nothing.”

Cassie closed her eyes, holding a single hand up as if she wanted a chance to soften Grady’s response. When she opened them, she appeared to have gathered herself. “We have explored a few leads, Lieutenant. Nothing has panned out as of yet.”

“If any of my detectives can get this solved, it’s you two. You’re gonna have to work together, though. I don’t wanna see either of you back in my office until you have something significant to tell me about the murders of the entire Sloane family. Is that clear?” It was more of a statement than a question.

Max nodded. “Copy that.”

Cassie added. “Copy.”

Grady was the first to stand up and walk out of the door. He looked back at Jerry as Cassie brushed by him. Jerry closed his eyes and shook his head. Max wasn’t exactly sure how to interpret it, although he gathered that Jerry didn’t like the drama.

That made two of them.

31

Max walked over to Cassie’s desk and rapped it twice with his knuckles, like he was knocking on a door. “Reynolds?”

“What?” she said impatiently.

“Listen, I don’t know what the problem is, but⁠—”

Cassie’s mouth hung open. “Seriously? You don’t know what the problem is? You’re impossible, Grady. And I’ve had it.”

Max frowned. “But I saved your life?”

Cassie turned away for a second, then looked back at him. “And I’m grateful that you did. I will always be grateful. But dealing with you on a daily basis, the trips upstairs into the storeroom, your attitude, the way you treat people—it’s making me crazy.”

Since when did Reynolds become pristine? He looked down, away from her glare. “I’m working on it. You know that.”

“Well work a little faster,” she said with a huff.

There was a pause between the two of them for a second. Cassie finally looked up. “We have to get some traction on this case, or the lieutenant is gonna fire both of us.”

Max shrugged. Oh well. He’d been fired once before. It was nothing new to him. “I think we should go back to the house.”

Cassie shook her head. “Why? We’ve been over it already.”

Max looked away for a second. “That’s where it all started, Reynolds. I feel like we need to go back there. Maybe there’s something we missed.”

Cassie got up from her desk and mumbled under her breath. “You missed. I didn’t miss anything.”

For once, Grady held his tongue. As he followed Cassie out the door, he suddenly wondered if this was what it would have been like to argue with Ben if they had been normal siblings. Ben hadn’t spoken much after the night their dad had died, the trauma and his disability causing him to withdraw into himself. Maybe that’s what sibling banter was all about.

Maybe.

Twenty-eight minutes later, after a brief argument as to which vehicle they were going to take, which Cassie won, they drove over to the house that had been formerly occupied by the Sloane family. Neither of them said anything while they drove. Pulling up in front of the house, Max saw that yellow crime scene tape still covered the front porch. Max got out of the car and went to the side door. Cassie called after him. “Here. You’re gonna need these.”

Max looked at her as she produced a set of keys from her pocket. “Where did you get those?”

“The desk sergeant. When the crime scene techs finished up the other day, they locked the house up and took the keys into evidence until Brooke could come and get them. I think they’re still trying to find a next of kin now that Brooke is gone.”

Max stepped aside as Cassie unlocked the door to the house. With the door open, Max tugged at the red and black tape that had been put across the door, ripping it away from the frame. He stepped inside, the house smelling stale after being closed up for a few days.

Leaving Cassie at the door, he walked through the house again alone, running the crime scene through his mind like it was a film, frame by frame. Part of him just wanted to work alone, part of him needed to.

He went upstairs, walked through the bedrooms, touching the clothes that were still hanging in the closet, looking at the towels that had been left to dry after the family’s most recent showers. What would they have thought if they realized it was their last?

As he went downstairs and back into the kitchen, he spotted Patch’s dog bowls. Grady’s stomach sunk. The water had a couple of bugs floating on the top of it. He walked toward the family room where he saw a basket with dog toys in it. Leaning over, he fished through the collection, putting a couple in the pocket of his jacket.

“What are you doing?” Cassie asked from behind him.

Grady turned around slowly. He was getting tired of her being so judgmental. “Grabbing a couple of Patch’s toys. I thought he might like them.”

Cassie shook her head. “You know we shouldn’t be taking anything out of the house, but if you are going to, you should probably take this.” She bent over and picked up Patch’s dog bed dragging it towards the door where they’d come in. She called over her shoulder. “It’ll help him to adapt. The smells will be familiar.”

Max tried not to smile. Reynolds was coming around. He could feel it. “Thanks.”

Grady and Reynolds spent the next hour walking through every room multiple times, having short conversations, but generally working the scene independently. Max preferred it that way. He didn’t need the constant interruptions of someone asking him questions. In that respect, Cassie was a perfect fit for him. She was strong-willed enough to know that she could figure things out on her own.

Maybe that was the problem. Maybe she thought she could do it all by herself. If there was one thing that Grady was learning, it was that he couldn’t do it by himself. He needed people like Reynolds and Frankie in his life.

Grady found himself standing in the kitchen near where the bodies had been found. Someone had come in and cleaned up the floor. Max wasn’t sure who, but he knew that leaving blood like that on the floor was considered a biohazard, so he was sure that Jerry had authorized the clean-up on the city’s dime until they had a chance to sort out who owned the house now that the entire family was gone.

Max ran through the details of the scene in his mind. In order to solve the case, he had to have an idea what happened and in what order. He focused on what was in front of him, feeling tension build in his gut. He remembered seeing Joe Sloane on the floor between where the cabinets ended and where the kitchen table started, as if he had launched himself out of the chair and charged the attacker. That made sense. If Joe was the person that his workers had described him to be, then he would have been protective of his family. He would have done anything to save them, even if it meant sacrificing himself.

Max looked to his right. There was a small table where Tyler’s and Jody’s bodies had been found, the pictures that were on top skittered all over the floor having gotten knocked down in the melee. He picked them up, pictures of Tyler, the Sloane family on vacation and a shot of what looked like Jody Sloane and perhaps her parents. Max tapped on the frame with the picture of Tyler. The image was off kilter. It seemed the least he could do would be to straighten it.

Setting the picture down, Max played through the options in his head. He assumed when Tyler got shot his mother ran to him, the same way Grady’s mom tried to protect him and Ben from their dad. Max pushed the thought out of his mind. He swallowed, looking at the scene again. Grady realized that there were only two ways that things made sense: either Tyler was shot first and Jody ran to him, getting shot in the back as she did, or Joe got knifed first.

But which was it? Moreover, did it matter? There were still three dead bodies from that house alone.

As he ran through options in his mind, it occurred to him that it was no wonder that his own family didn’t seem normal. He hadn’t had a dad who was willing to protect him, and his mom simply couldn’t. She was just fighting for her own survival.

Grady glanced at the small family room that was next to the area where the kitchen table was. There were pictures on that table too. He walked over and looked intently at them. The end tables had drawers in them. He sat on the floor and opened the top drawer after putting on a set of gloves, fishing around inside of it.

It had all the typical things you’d expect to find near a family room—a flashlight, an extra set of batteries, and three remote controls for a variety of equipment that Max assumed the family didn’t use anymore.

He opened the bottom drawer, finding a stack of instructions on how to knit scarves and hats. Maybe Brooke or Jody was into those kinds of projects. By their location in the bottom drawer, Max guessed it had been a hobby they’d set aside. Otherwise, they would be in the top drawer. He lifted up a skein of scratchy burgundy yarn, looking underneath. At the bottom of the drawer, he stopped. He cocked his head to the side.

Reaching in, he retrieved a single framed picture. He stared at it, sitting back on his heels. The photo was of Brooke and her boyfriend. It was the same picture that he’d seen in Brooke’s room at her townhouse on the day that she died. The glass was cracked, as if someone had gotten angry and then decided to stash it in the drawer. Max looked at it for another second, remembering what Amelia, Brooke’s roommate, had said. She had mentioned that Brooke had recently had a breakup, but that she didn’t really want to talk about it and that she’d bounced back quickly.

In Amelia’s mind, it was nothing.

But was it? The boyfriend still hadn’t returned Cassie’s call.

Max stood up, carrying the picture with him. He set it on the counter in the kitchen. Cassie walked in a second later. “Anything?” she asked.

“Maybe. Do you remember we saw this picture at Brooke’s?”

Cassie nodded. “So? The roommate said that Brooke and her boyfriend had broken up.”

Max looked at the picture again, feeling something shift. “But she didn’t say why they broke up.”

Cassie shrugged. “Amelia said it was no big deal. They’d been together for a while, but Brooke kinda went on with her life. I asked her a bunch of questions about that while you were doing other stuff. I know he hasn’t called back, but I don’t think there’s anything there. He’d moved on from the family.”

Max shook his head. “I don’t know. Something doesn’t seem right. I found this at the bottom of a drawer. It wasn’t a casualty of the scene, Reynolds. It seems strange to me that the glass is broken.”

“I think you’re grasping at straws, Grady. Stuff gets broken. Maybe Jody just stuffed it in the drawer and meant to deal with it but forgot. Happens all the time.”

“But why not throw it away? It’s cracked glass. Could cut someone.”

Cassie walked away without answering. Max had the distinct suspicion that he had frustrated her.

A few minutes later she called after him. “Grady, I wanna get over to the ME’s office before the end of the day. You ready to go?”

“Yeah.” He followed Cassie outside. She waited with a set of keys, quickly locking the door behind her.

As they walked to the car, Max toting the dog bed, Patch’s toys safely in his pocket, he looked at Cassie. “Hold on. You have those keys?”

Cassie nodded. Max jogged back to the door, unlocked in and went inside, retrieving the entire basket of toys. He didn’t know why. He just felt like Patch needed them.

As he loaded them in the back seat of Reynold’s car, he realized they all needed something to hold on to, even if that something was part of their past.

32

Cassie ended up dropping Max off at headquarters while she continued back to the medical examiner’s office. Max wasn’t in the mood for Jordan. Jordan was nice enough, always pleasant and professional, but sometimes he was just a little too cheery around the dead bodies. Max just wasn’t in the mood to deal with it that day.

Before going inside the Pittsburgh PD and back to the homicide unit, Grady transferred the toys and bed dog bed from Cassie’s car into his own. He had the urge to go home and check on Patch. He stopped in the parking lot, watching Cassie drive off. He frowned for a second, then ran inside, taking the steps two at a time upstairs. He got to his desk and went to the conference room where he’d left the pictures the night before. Jerry stuck his head out of his office. “Grady? You looking for these?” He held up a manilla file folder.

“I don’t know. I can’t see through the file folder.”

Jerry shook his head. “Good point. Crime scene pictures from your case?”

“Yep. That’s what I was looking for.” Max ran over and grabbed them from Jerry’s hand.

Jerry looked at him. “Find anything?”

Grady stopped, feeling the weight of the folder in his hand. It had done a job on him the night before. Was he really sure things were better now? Did he feel safe looking at them again? “Maybe.”

Max ran out to the car with the crime scene pictures in hand. One of the best parts about being a detective was the flexibility. Yes, they worked a regular nine-to-five shift, but with the number of late nights and early mornings they had to cover, they could pretty much come and go as they pleased. Max jumped in his car and headed home, suddenly excited to give Patch his toys.

The day had turned clear and bright. Any early morning clouds that had gathered over the horizon had quickly blown away into the Allegheny Mountains and away from the city. The day was cool and comfortable. Max preferred it that way. Sweltering hot weather was not fun for him. It was warm enough that he didn’t need a jacket and cool enough that he didn’t feel like he was sweating with every step.

As he pulled in the driveway at his house, he opened the garage door and strode toward the back door, opening it up. He went to his car, retrieving the basket full of toys and the dog bed and dragged them inside.

As soon as he closed the back door, he angled for the guest bedroom where Patch was resting after their early morning walk. Max went and opened the door where Patch was staying. He found Patch resting in the middle of the floor, his entire body flopped over to the side. He opened his eyes and perked his head up when Max came in, jumping to his feet and wagging his tail as if he’d just spotted his best friend. Max squatted down in front of him. Patch gave him another lick on the cheek as Max scratched his back. “I brought you something,” Max said.

Grady walked out of the extra bedroom to the back door. Patch made it to the kitchen and then stopped and stared at Max as if he could smell something. He gave a little whine, a quiet one as if he was uncertain.

“It’s all right.” Max frowned. He hadn’t anticipated that Patch would be sad. He thought Patch would be happy. Max walked to the back door and tugged the bed and the toys closer to Patch. Patch walked over to the bed, sniffed it then looked up at Max with sad eyes. Without making a sound, he lay down on the floor next to it, just his chin resting on the soft fabric. Max pulled the toys out of the out of his pocket and set them on top of the bed. “Don’t you wanna play with these?”

Max felt confused. He thought that Patch would be happy, that he was doing something nice.

Once again it appeared he’d made the wrong choice.

Defeated, Max sat down on the couch. He couldn’t do anything right. Cassie was mad at him, Patch didn’t like the toys and the bed he brought back, Ben pretty much ignored him during his last visit, and he still had an entire family’s deaths to account for, not to mention he’d broken his sobriety.

Grady sat for a second, closing his eyes. Everything in him wanted to get in the car and go to a bar and spend the next couple of hours drinking to try to forget what was in front of him. He could easily solve the problem of Frankie trailing him by rescinding access to his location. It would take two taps on his phone, and he’d be done. He’d be free. Max was just about to stand up to grab his phone when he heard the jingle of a Patch’s collar.

As Max looked up, he saw that Patch was holding one of the toys Max had brought home in his mouth. Patch walked toward him slowly and then lay down on top of Max’s feet. Max reached down to stroke Patch’s back. It was as if Patch was just telling him to sit tight for a minute.

And maybe he was right.

33

Grady stayed put. After a few minutes of rubbing Patch’s back and calming himself down, feeling the warmth of Patch’s body against his feet, Grady decided that he agreed with Patch. Probably going to get a drink wasn’t a good idea. Max looked down at Patch. He cocked his head to the side, brushing his hair away from his face. Frankie would probably like Patch. Maybe he’d bring Patch to one of the AA meetings. Maybe the guys would like to meet a dog like him.

Max stood up, got himself a glass of water and saw the manila folder that he’d left on the kitchen table. He flipped open the folder and removed the photos, bracing himself. The last time he’d looked at them, he’d had a complete and utter meltdown that had ended up with him in a bar. But this time, as he looked at the pictures, he didn’t feel anything. There were no weird apparitions of his father lurking in front of his eyes. Max let out a breath. That was good.

Grady placed the pictures out on his kitchen table and walked around them the same way that he had the night before. There was something about the pictures that he knew was being processing in the back of his mind, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. He stopped, staring at them, cocking his head to the side, rubbing his chin. He looked over the pictures much as an art buyer might survey a gallery full of paintings. Max realized in that moment that there were two things that were remarkable about the case—the fact that it was an entire family that had been killed at two separate locations, and the fact that, in the original scene, there was more than one murder weapon.

Max scowled, looking at the pictures of Brooke. Certainly, the pictures of the murders of Brooke and her dad, one with a knife and one with the glass from a broken wine bottle spoke more of rage and impulse than they did the same the calculated nature of gunshot wound. Max licked his upper lip, feeling the pieces of the case start to click together for him. It was interesting to him that Brooke and her dad had shared the same violent death. Were they central to the case? It seemed to him it would have been more normal if it had been Joe and his wife. Why Brooke and her dad?

Max moved all the pictures that had to do with Tyler and Jody over to the other side of the table, lining up only the ones that had to do with Joe and Brooke. They looked surprisingly similar, even in death, the shape of their faces and their noses almost identical. The injuries done to both of their bodies were the result of the same upward thrusting motion. At least, that’s what Max guessed. He’d have to ask Jordan to be sure, but in order to sustain the damage that each of their bodies had, the knife would have had to travel upward, and the glass would have to as well. It was the uppercut motion of a boxer.

Max rubbed his chin, continuing to stare at the images. Both of them had suffered a tremendous amount of blood loss because of their injuries. Max knew from experience that Jordan’s report would likely read homicide due to exsanguination. In layman’s terms, it simply meant that they’d bled out, as if someone had drained the life out of them.

Who would want to do that?

Max crossed his arms in front of his chest and circled the table once again. Yes, he could see a scenario where Tyler and Jody were collateral damage. As he stared at the pictures again, he was more sure of it than ever.

Joe and Brooke were the focus.

But why?

Max sat down at the kitchen table, taking another sip of water, staring at the pictures. What did Joe and Brooke have in common other than the fact that they were father and daughter? Max frowned. That they were related was everything and it was nothing at all at the same time. If the crimes circled around Joe and Brooke, that would also exonerate Chad Nowicki. Max, though he wasn’t sure he believed that Chad was completely on the up and up, also wasn’t sure he was a murderer either.

No, there was something else.

As Max got up and started pacing, he accidentally kicked one of Patch’s rubber balls and it skittered across the floor, making a squeaking sound as it did.

He glanced at it and then thought to himself about how he’d found the picture of Brooke and her boyfriend. The frame itself had been badly damaged. And it had been the only thing he’d found in the house that had been damaged, other than the people themselves.

Could the boyfriend be in the middle of this? Grady picked up his phone and texted Cassie. “Did Amelia Monterey happen to say who Brooke’s boyfriend was? What’s his name?”

It took a second, but Max’s phone buzzed with a terse text from Cassie. “A guy named Adam Duffy. I guess he worked at the school.”

“Belmor?”

“Yes.”

“Has he called back?”

“No. I’ve called him twice. No response. I called the head of his department. Dr. Jasmine Johnson. She hasn’t called back either. Since they are both employed by the university, I’m sure their lawyers are telling them to ignore us.” There was a pause. Cassie texted again. “I’m still with Jordan. Gotta go.”

Maybe there was another option for a motive, one he and Reynolds hadn’t considered.

Love.

34

“Who was that?” Jordan asked, tugging at the black nylon thread he was using to close Joe Sloane’s chest after his autopsy.

“Grady.” Cassie knew her words had come out sounding like a disappointed mother, not a friend and partner.

Jordan paused for a beat. “How’s he doing?”

Reynolds paused before answering. She knew that Grady had been struggling. She’d seen the disaster at his house, the evidence of alcohol abuse and his erratic behavior was impossible to miss. She’d tried to keep it quiet from the brass, particularly from Lieutenant Williams, who had little patience for anything. Unfortunately for Grady, word had gotten out. Not from her, of course, but as part of the investigation into the Aiden Branch mangled arrest, which caused him to lose his job. Grady had been making an effort, though, now that he was back with the department. She knew that. It was just hard. They’d been partners for long enough that she was worn out. Getting Grady to play nice was like rolling a boulder uphill on a slick of mud.

“Grady is Grady,” Cassie answered.

Jordan frowned. “What does that mean?”

Cassie looked away for a second. “Grady is a good cop, probably the best detective I’ve ever worked with. He has a way of finding the thread that pulls the cases apart, like what he did with Scarlett Sandoval, but he’s⁠—”

“Challenging?”

That’s probably the nicest thing I could say. “Yes. Challenging is a good word.”

“I thought he was doing better?”

“He is. I guess.” Honestly, Cassie didn’t know. “He just kind of does his thing, you know? He shows up when he’s supposed to most of the time, does the paperwork, but he leaves a lot of stuff to me. He’s the kind of guy that has to be managed. I never know exactly what he’s going to do.”

“That’s got to be hard.”

You have no idea. “It can be.”

Cassie wasn’t exactly sure what else to say. More specifically, she wasn’t exactly sure what else she should say. Jordan didn’t work for the department, but he might as well have. Nearly every case he worked on had some sort of link to Pittsburgh PD.

“What are you going to do?” Jordan asked as he tied off another one of the black stitches.

It was a loaded question. Williams knew she was having trouble dealing with Grady, but as of yet, he’d ignored it. Classic tactic for Pittsburgh PD. They’d done it over and over again, ignoring the red flags within their own walls. The problem was, she was getting tired. Cassie had looked at other options—other departments, the FBI, even moving to a private security company where she could easily triple her salary, work the hours she wanted to, and have unlimited vacation time. She loved Pittsburgh PD, though—the city, the people, the feeling of closing a case.

Just not Grady.

Jordan held a hand up, not giving her a chance to answer. He stripped the gloves from his hands and started typing on a tablet that was on a rolling cart next to the autopsy table. “Subject’s autopsy is complete. Cause of death is exsanguination.”

Cassie furrowed her eyebrows. “What did you find?”

Jordan crossed his arms in front of his chest and glanced at the dead body of Joe Sloane next to him. “It’s exactly as I expected. The knife nicked his mesenteric artery and his left lung. With an injury like that, there’s no coming back. Joe Sloane was a dead man.”

Cassie felt a lump form in her gut. Four people—an entire family—was dead. The brass wanted answers, and she was saddled with Grady trying to get them. There was an old African proverb that said, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

She’d gone far with Grady. Now she wanted to go fast.

35

There was one question that had been plaguing Max: Why hadn’t Brooke’s ex-boyfriend bothered to call them back?

After a little basic research using a remote link to the department’s database, Max had discovered that Adam Duffy did indeed go to Belmor University. He was a PhD student in the statistics program from what Max could tell. Also telling, was that Adam had no real family. He’d started at Belmor when he applied to get his PhD after receiving his undergraduate degree from USC. How he ended up at Belmor in the middle of Pennsylvania all the way from California, Max had no idea, but it seemed to be worth finding out. What was interesting to Max the more he thought about it, was that Adam hadn’t shown up on the scene at all. He hadn’t appeared at the parents’ house or at Brooke’s house. If he was truly that dedicated to Brooke, why hadn’t he shown up? Wouldn’t he have wanted to see if there was anything he could do?

In the database, Max had been able to pull an address for Adam from his Pennsylvania driver’s license. He definitely didn’t have enough to go to a judge for a warrant. A hunch wasn’t actionable. And given the state of his relationship with Reynolds, he didn’t even bother letting her know that he was out doing a little hunting that night.

After taking Patch for a walk, making sure he was fed and watered, and spending a little time playing with him, Max locked up his house. This time Max left Patch loose so he had a full run of the place. It seemed like the right thing to do.

The air had turned crisp that night, the first hint of fall coming. It still wasn’t enough for a jacket, but Max could feel the end of summer on the horizon. He drove to Belmor’s campus, humming “Crazy Train” under his breath as it played on the radio. This time, he turned it up as loud as he could since Patch wasn’t in the car.

A dog. He had a dog.

He shook his head as he drove. If someone had told him the week before that he would have a dog living in his house—correct that, that he’d have a dog loose in his house while he wasn’t home—he would have told him they were nuts.

He shook his head. It was amazing how quickly things changed. He blinked. In this case, he decided it was for the better.

It wasn’t difficult to find Adam Duffy’s house. According to the records he had accessed, Adam was renting a house on the edge of campus. It was a small white bungalow, not that much different than Grady’s in design and only a short walk from the buildings where Adam worked.

If Adam didn’t want to talk, then it was likely there was something Adam didn’t want to talk about. Grady needed to know what that was. There were too many lives hanging in the balance to just stride up to his door and try to interview him. No, Max’s gut told him that there was something else going on.

He needed to know what that was.

Grady circled the block, making sure he wasn’t being followed or watched, and then pulled up in front of Adam’s house, but down the block just a little bit. It was close enough that Grady could see what was going on.

Over the next couple of hours, Max watched as lights went on and off at Adam’s house, the final result being that Adam left about an hour and forty-five minutes into Max’s stake out. Max sat in the car for a second, then stared at the house, thinking. He had a theory about what had happened, but no evidence. The one thing he was missing was evidence of the murder weapons. If Max could just get a look inside Adam’s house, he might be able to find something that would tie him to the murders of the entire Sloane family.

Grady had absolutely no idea how long Adam was going to be gone. Reynolds would have told him not to go in, that they didn’t have a warrant. It didn’t matter. Grady slipped out of his car and walked toward the house, sticking to the shadows. The lucky thing was that on a college campus, people were always coming and going. It was likely that no one would make any connection between Max and something happening in Adam’s house no matter the time of day or night.

Max hurried around the side of the house and tugged on a pair of gloves. He found the back door, twisting the doorknob. It was locked. From his pocket, he pulled out his wallet, fishing out a credit card. He jammed it between the lock and the door frame, giving the door a shove with his shoulder. It popped open.

“You should get better locks, Adam,” Grady whispered under his breath.

Walking inside, Max closed the door behind him, staring into the darkness, waiting for his eyes to adjust. His gut told him that the killer had been right underneath their noses the entire time. His pulse quickened. Maybe Adam was who they’d been looking for all along. Grady stiffened, listening for any noise from inside the house. He’d seen Adam leave, but was there anyone else inside? He hadn’t found any evidence of a roommate on Adam’s lease, but anything was possible.

Max started forward, not willing to risk turning on the flashlight on his phone. Ahead of him he could see the dark outlines of kitchen cabinets. As he made his way through the house, he saw a small family room area with a couch, a blanket neatly folded over the back of it. Max blinked. All of a sudden, he could almost see Adam and Brooke snuggling on the couch watching television after eating take out. Brooke. Max sucked in a breath, thinking again about how she’d been killed. It had been violent and sudden.

Was Adam Duffy capable of that kind of act?

Pushing the thought aside. Grady kept moving. He made his way through the house, moving silently toward Adams bedroom.

Unlike Max’s house, Adam’s had only two bedrooms. Grady made a quick pass through each of them. The main bedroom had a double bed, a dresser and a wooden chair in the corner. The secondary bedroom had been outfitted like a study. It had a desk with a lamp and a stack of books on it. Max felt around in the darkness, grateful for the fact that the clear skies meant the moon was sending light in through the window. There were three textbooks on Adam’s desk—Generalized Lineal Models, Convex Optimization, and Enumerative Combinatorics. The books and their lengthy titles, which meant nothing to Grady, matched the background information that Max had on Adam.

Max’s heart skipped a beat. He couldn’t afford to slow down as he moved through the house that Adam occupied. There was no telling how quickly Adam would return. Max moved smoothly and quietly into the hallway then went back into the main bedroom. He looked around, spotting a single silver picture frame on the nightstand right next to the lamp. Max picked up the frame and walked it over to the window trying to see who it was. Not surprisingly, it was a picture of Adam and Brooke together.

Max scowled. Amelia had said that Adam and Brooke had broken up. As Max thought about it, he realized that Amelia hadn’t said who had broken up with who. Given the fact that the pictures were put away at Brooke’s townhouse and her parents’ home and still out at Adam’s house, the only conclusion Max could draw would be that Brooke broke up with Adam. Max felt his stomach tighten. An old saying popped into his head, one that Bob Fippiano said over and over again at AA—“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

Maybe the same applied for men too.

Grady knew he was running out of time. Adam would return to his house at some point to go to bed. Max lay down on the floor next to the bed, flipping on the flashlight from his cell phone. “What other secrets are you hiding, Adam?” he whispered. He hopped up a second later. There was only darkness underneath the bed.

Grady focused on the closet next, opening the cheap wooden louvered doors. From what he could tell, the clothes were arranged neatly. He felt the nip of frustration in his gut. He might have his suspicions about Adam Duffy, but he needed something concrete, something that would tie Adam to the murders, something that he and Reynolds could work off of.

Max saw some tennis shoes lined up at the bottom of the closet. He looked around, making sure no one had snuck up on him, then flipped on the flashlight on his phone. Kneeling down, Grady stared at the shoes, examining them closely. There were maybe eight or ten pairs of shoes in total. They ran the gamut—both black and brown dress shoes, a pair of hiking boots that looked like they’d been relatively unused, a few pairs of tennis shoes, plus two pairs of flip-flops. Grady passed over the dress shoes and the flip flops quickly.

First off, there was no guarantee that if Adam was the killer he’d even kept the shoes. He could have tossed them in a garbage can somewhere on the other side of the city and there would be no way that they would ever be found.

But, if Adam fit the profile of someone who could kill an entire family, then he was also someone who thought he was a clever killer, smarter than anyone else. He might just try to keep the things he’d used, figuring no one would ever suspect him of killing the Sloanes.

Which one are you, Adam? Are you innocent or guilty?

Max picked up the shoes one by one. The first pair was clean, save for some dirt on the tread underneath. The second pair was the same. Max picked up the third pair of tennis shoes and looked at them carefully. They were navy blue, a model that was popular a few years prior. Max turned them over, looking at the tread. They were clean. Max cocked his head to the side. Maybe a little too clean.

Grady scanned the top and sides of the shoes holding the flashlight beam close to them. Near the heel on the outside of the left shoe was a red mark. Max looked at it closely. He licked his finger, tasting the rubber from his glove and then rubbed it onto the spot. He looked at his finger again. It came back a reddish-brown color. That wasn’t dirt. His stomach clenched. That could be blood.

He put the shoe back down exactly where it was and then stood up looking around. Both a gun and a knife had been used in the murders of the Sloane family. If Adam was the murderer, they could be somewhere in the house. And if Adam was cocky enough that he would try to the clean shoes he’d worn to a murder scene and put them back in his closet, thinking no one would ever find out, then it stood to reason the weapons were probably close by.

Grady looked on the top shelf of the closet, running his hands along the edges. Nothing. From the background he had done on Adam, Max knew he was a smart guy. Anyone who was a PhD student in statistics would have to be. The weapons had to be close. Grady sucked in a breath, feeling like he was in Adam Duffy’s head. Grady swung his head from side to side, looking around the room. Adam would hide them somewhere. He’d probably keep them nearby in case he needed them.

But where?

Max stood in the darkness and stared. Adam didn’t strike him as the kind to take a risk hiding things outdoors. No, Adam would want to keep things close by, within reach, hidden, but easy to access, someplace unexpected.

Grady walked back out in the hallway. He looked around. There was a set of doors he hadn’t explored yet. He opened them up to find a washer and dryer inside. It was a standard variety, both units white. Max could smell the detergent. He was just about to close the doors when he saw that there was an access panel built into the wall that seemed to be slightly ajar. Max cocked his head to the side. He took a gloved finger and poked at it. The access panel came loose, nearly clattering to the floor. Max caught it at the last second. He stopped, frozen for a moment, listening.

Nothing.

Max took half a step into the closet and looked around, poking his head into the hole. He flipped on the flashlight on his cell phone. Inside the box was the hose attachment for the washing machine. He was about to put the door on the recessed area back when something caught his eye. It was black and oblong with rounded corners. It didn’t look like it belonged there, the object wedged between the hose and the wall. Stretching as far as he could reach, Max leaned to the side and fished it out, nearly dropping it behind the washing machine. As he stared at it, the breath caught in his throat. He knew exactly what it was. He pressed a button on the side and a silver blade flipped out.

It was a knife. Probably the knife that killed Joe Sloane.

Max closed the blade, replaced it where it had been and put the access panel back on the hole in the wall. Adam Duffy had to be the killer. There was no other explanation for the reddish mark on his shoes and the hidden knife.

Grady blinked, frustration filling his gut. The killer had been right in front of him the entire time, hiding in plain sight, like a chameleon changing colors against the landscape. Except, this time, the landscape had been Belmor University. Grady clenched his jaw. He was angry, partly at himself and partly at the situation. He needed more, but at least now he knew what he had to do next.

Max took two steps forward and was about to start down the hallway to head for the door to leave when he heard the garage door open. Max cursed under his breath. The house was too small. He couldn’t stay there and wait for Adam to leave again. He’d be there all night.

Patch needed him.

Glancing quickly from side to side for an escape route, Max ran back to the bedroom. There was a window. It wasn’t ideal, but at least it was a way out of the house. He quickly opened up the window and felt the night air rush into the room. The back door creaked open, then Max heard it slam. He heard footfalls coming. Adam was getting closer. Max knew he was running out of time as sweat gathered on his brow. He boosted himself up into the window opening and swung his leg over, dropping down into a thick row of shrubs with thorns that poked through the fabric of jeans. Max ignored the pain, reaching up and pulling the window down. He couldn’t lock it from where he was on the exterior of the house, but at least he was outside.

Not more than a second later, light erupted from the same window that Max had escaped from. Adam turned a lamp on inside. Max ducked lower. He didn’t move from his position in the shrubs, hunching down as close as he could to the ground. Adam was home. Worse yet, Adam was right on the other side of the paper-thin wall where Max was hiding outside. He looked down, trying not to breathe, staring at a twig that was near the toe of his boot. As long as he stayed where he was, it was unlikely Adam would find him. A minute later, the light went off again, footsteps retreating to the other side of the house. Max did a quick mental calculation and then realized his best opportunity to escape was to angle towards the sidewalks on that side of the house where Adam wasn’t. By the time Adam spotted Max, if he spotted him, Max would look just like some other person taking a walk at night on a busy college campus.

Grady slowly made his way out from the shrubs, using his hand to blend away any of his footprints in the dirt. There would be nothing he could do about any footprints left in the grass. Hopefully by the time the sun came up, they would have disappeared, or better yet, Adam wouldn’t even think to look for them. Once clear of the row of thorny shrubs, Max ran across the grass towards the neighbor’s house and then stepped onto the sidewalk, slowing his pace and ripping off his gloves, shoving them into his pockets. Checking over his shoulder, he quickly crossed to the other side of the street and made his way to his car. Grady glanced back at the house. He knew in his gut that Adam Duffy was the killer.

Now the question was how to prove it.

36

“You did what?” Cassie leaned close to Grady.

As soon as Grady had gotten to the office, he’d found Cassie and waited for her to join him upstairs in the storeroom. Only this time it wasn’t for a meltdown.

“Last night. I broke into Adam Duffy’s house.”

Cassie closed her eyes for a minute. “Max, I just can’t.”

He held his hands up. “It’s okay. It’s okay.” He tried to sound reassuring. “I didn’t take anything, and I wore gloves. I just needed to know.”

Cassie shook her head. “Do I want to know what you found?”

Max nodded. “You do. I found a pair of blue tennis shoes that looked like they had a blood stain on the back. Left shoe, left outside heel. Can’t be sure. The BFS crime scene techs would have to test it to be sure. But, better than that, I found the knife. If I had to guess, the gun is probably close by.”

“Are you kidding me?”

Max couldn’t tell if Cassie was mad or happy. “No,” Max deadpanned. “I’m not.

She held a hand up. “I realize you’re not kidding. But the thing is, Max, we can’t get a warrant based on an illegal break in.”

“I know, I know.” Max ran his hand through his hair. He knew what he’d done was impulsive. He also knew that it had to be done and had he told Cassie he was gonna do it, she would have tried to talk him out of it. He would have also made her an accessory to an illegal break-in. For all the troubles they’d had over the years, Max still valued her even if she no longer felt the same way about him. Why relationships had to be so complicated he had no idea. All he wanted to do was find the killer. He shrugged. “Well, we have a suspect and at least you didn’t know ahead of time.”

Cassie stared at the floor. “Let me think for a second.”

“I mean, come on, Reynolds, he’s our killer. He’s been right in front of us the whole time. This is the whole reason he never called you back.”

“I get that, Max, but in order to legally retrieve that knife and any evidence you found, we have to get a warrant. A warrant requires us to have some sort of evidence in order to get into his house. We don’t have that.”

Max looked at Cassie. He knew that the risk he’d taken had moved the case forward, but he’d also put them in a bind.

What else was new?

Cassie tapped her forehead as if that would dislodge a possibility. “Maybe we need to go do a canvas. See if anybody has seen Adam acting shady, if anybody has any video footage, doorbell cameras or anything like that. Maybe we can get a warrant based on that.

“Yeah,” Max answered. “Thanks.” Max leaned over awkwardly and planted a kiss on Cassie’s cheek.

She had saved him. Again.

37

“There he is again,” Cassie said, pointing over Grady’s shoulder. They were huddled at his desk, pulling up street camera video footage. They’d gotten access to it just the hour before, Cassie calling the campus security office at Belmor University.

Surprisingly, the university had installed a wide net of video surveillance both on the campus and around the perimeter, probably due to increasing concerns about liability. With Cassie’s credentials, the campus security office had given them an all-access pass to every camera at the college, including some of the side streets nearby.

“All we need to do is get enough documentation on Adam’s connection to Brooke. Judges don’t like domestic violence. If we can suggest that he’s a viable suspect in her murder, we can pivot off of that and deal with the crimes against her family later.”

Cassie tapped her fingers on his desk. “You’re talking about how we can get a warrant for Adam’s house?”

“Yep.”

Max knew in his gut that Adam Duffy had killed the entire Sloane family. There was no doubt in his mind. According to the law, though, Max only needed to tie Adam to one of the crimes, not all of them in order to get a warrant to search Adam’s house. Once one of the doors was opened to one of the crimes and he produced evidence, he could easily get a judge to issue warrants so that he could follow the trail of the case as far as he wanted to.

Unfortunately for one of Belmor’s finest statisticians, Grady knew it would all lead back to one spot. Adam Duffy.

Cassie put her hand on Max’s shoulder. “Here, let me get in there and help you with this video.”

Max grudgingly got up from his desk. “I need a sec anyway.”

Cassie glanced at him. “You okay, Grady?”

He gave her a single nod. “Yes. I’m fine. I just need a minute.”

Max walked to the break room, not the storeroom, poured himself a coffee and pulled his phone out of his pocket. He sent a text to Frankie. “Might need to talk at some point.”

The reply came back almost immediately. “Name the place and time and I’ll be there. You square?”

Max knew it was Frankie’s way of asking if he was still sober. He thought back to the version of himself that would have made an excuse, left the office and found something to drink and then came back. That wasn’t him. Not anymore. More precisely, not at that moment. “Yeah. I’m square.”

“Keep the faith, man. Reach out when you’re ready to chat.”

Max shoved his phone back in his pocket and walked back into the squad room standing a little bit taller. Cassie was sitting at his desk, her eyes riveted to the computer screen.

Max stopped, watching her work, taking a deep breath and letting it out, just the way Dr. Kersevich had told him to. Maybe there was something to this whole having a sponsor thing after all.

Max strode back to his desk. “Anything?” Max asked. He set his coffee down on the desk. He took a sip, the bitter liquid stinging the inside of his mouth.

Cassie pointed. “Well, I’ve gone back to the day that Brooke was murdered. By triangulating what we know of Adam’s most frequent locations, I have him leaving work then making a couple stops that look like they are off the video grid the university provided.” She shifted in her seat, pointing to the screen. “As we get closer to the time of her murder, Adam pops back up about an hour before Jordan estimates that Brooke was killed.”

Max sat down next to Cassie. “Show me.” He paused for a second then added. “Please.”

Grady, you are on a roll.

Cassie cocked her head and looked up at him as if he had uttered a word in a foreign language. She didn’t say anything, only raising a single eyebrow then turning back to the screen. “Sure.” She clicked on the screen and pointed. “Here. About an hour before her murder, I have Adam in his car heading off campus in that general direction.”

“Can you follow him any closer than that?”

“No. He disappears off the Belmor cameras. He’s headed in that general direction, though.”

Max stood up, running his hand through his hair. Did it make sense? Would Adam know about the video surveillance on campus and then intentionally avoid it, circling the university just to get back to Brooke’s to kill her? To use Adam’s statistical bent, it was highly probable. Max shook his head. “This isn’t enough for a warrant. The judge is going to say he could have gone a million other places.”

Cassie replayed the video again, leaning toward the screen. “True, but we know it was him.”

Max nodded. At least he had Cassie on board with his theory. Then again, it was much more than a theory when you found the murder weapon and blood at someone’s house. He shook his head, pressing his lips together. They couldn’t let Adam get away with it. He might still not know why Adam did it, but Max knew Adam was guilty.

Max looked at Cassie. “I don’t want to overplay our hand, but maybe it’s time we have a conversation with Mr. Duffy.”

Cassie nodded. “I’d like to have more on him before we go and talk to him or at least more than we can actually use,” she half whispered, glancing toward Jerry’s office. “But yeah. I agree.”

Max nodded. “Then I think it’s time to head over to Belmor. Let’s see what kind of probabilities Mr. Duffy is working with today.”

38

Adam had woken up in a bad mood. He hadn’t slept well the night before, dreams of Brooke and her family haunting him. Things hadn’t turned out the way that he wanted them to. Brooke, in her grief over losing her family, was supposed to go rushing into his arms, so grateful he was back in her life. He gritted his teeth. Statistically, that was what should have happened. Her grief should have been so overwhelming at losing all three members of her family that she should have rushed back to something that was familiar and comforting to her. But she didn’t.

And she paid for her mistake.

As Adam walked into the Barnes Building to teach his class that morning, he shrugged his backpack up a little higher over his shoulders. Rounding the corner, he smelled perfume. The scent seemed familiar to him. He looked up and stared down the hallway. At the end, he saw a female student with curly dark hair standing at the end of the hallway, her backpack dragging down her small frame, two textbooks held against her chest, surrounded by two of her two friends, a smile on her face.

Amelia.

Adam frowned. She and Brooke had shared perfume, but it had been Brooke’s, one that he had given to her. Amelia must have swiped it out of Brooke’s room after they broke up. Worse yet, Brooke may have given it to her. It was yet another rejection.

Anger rose up inside of him. Amelia was part of the problem. He was sure of it. She had to be the one that had influenced Brooke to not come back to him when she should have. Maybe she’d said something to Brooke about Adam after they broke up. He could hear Amelia’s voice in his head talking to Brooke—“He’s not good for you.” “You’re better off without him.” “There are tons of guys that want to spend time with you.”

Adam started down the hallway walking purposefully, his head down, the breath shallow in his chest. Halfway down the hallway, closing the distance to where Amelia was standing, he looked up. She was staring right at him, her face pale. Was it just because she was grieving the loss of her friend, or something else?

The thought hit him: Did she know?

Questions pounded through Adam’s mind, the start of a migraine forming at the back of his neck. If she knew he was responsible for what had happened to the Sloanes, Adam would have to do something. Amelia couldn’t tell. He couldn’t let her. She’d already ruined everything by helping Joe Sloane poison Brooke against him.

The more the thought about it, the more it made sense. Amelia and Brooke had been inseparable before Adam arrived on the scene. They’d taken all their classes together, lived together and hung out with the same friends. But when Adam had started dating Brooke, that all ended. Brooke had given him her time, not Amelia.

So, it wasn’t just Joe that was jealous, was it?

Amelia needed to explain herself. She needed to pay for what she’d done to ruin Adam’s life.

Adam gritted his teeth, staring at her. Not only did Adam know Brooke’s schedule, but he knew Amelia’s. Every good boyfriend knows when the roommates were home and when they weren’t.

On top of that, he might not be a full PhD yet, but he was a professor. He knew everything about Belmor, especially what happened in the Barnes Building. He knew where Amelia was going—her anatomy lab. Either lucky for her or unfortunately, the statistics department, chemistry and biology departments all shared classrooms in the same building at Belmor University.

Before Adam could completely close the distance and grab her, Amelia darted into a classroom, disappearing out of view. Adam charged down the hallway and followed her into the room. She was standing just inside the door looking down the hallway when he crossed the threshold. He grabbed her arm, leaning close to her, tightening his grip. “I think we need to have a talk,” he hissed in her ear.

As Adam looked up, he saw that several of the other students already in the classroom had seen what was going on, eyeing him suspiciously. One of them raised their cell phone slowly as if they were about ready to take a video of what was going on. Adam’s skin tingled. Worse yet, maybe they already were.

Anger boiled in Adam’s chest. He tugged on Amelia’s arm, his jaw set. “Come on. Let’s go.”

Amelia didn’t move. “No!” Amelia shouted loudly, trying to struggle away from him, but he tightened his grip even more. She tried to pull away, but didn’t have any luck, his fingers pinching the skin of her arm. He was much stronger than she was.

Adam looked up, the blood whooshing in his ears. He looked at her other classmates and tried to adopt a casual expression. He held a hand up. “Nothing going on here. It’s no big deal. I just need to talk to her for a second.”

One of the girls in the back of the room, likely emboldened by the fact that she was with her friends called out, “Let her go. Get your hands off of her!”

Just then, the professor for the class, an athletic looking woman wearing pants and a sleeveless sweater, her brown hair in a ponytail, stepped into the room. She eyed Adam, who hadn’t released his grip on Amelia. She grimaced. “What’s going on here? Let her go.”

Stay out of my business, lady.

Adam stiffened. They weren’t giving him a choice, were they? From out of his pocket, Adam pulled the knife, the same knife he’d used to kill Joe Sloane, twisting Amelia around and holding the blade to her neck. “No.” He pointed the tip of the knife toward the woman. “Close the door,” he said, his voice gravelly.

“Okay,” the woman said, her face pale. She didn’t take her eyes off of the blade.

Adam looked toward the pack of students huddling in the back of the room. He did a quick count. There were five. He stared at them. “Put your phones down on the floor and kick them toward me right now, or I’m going to cut her throat.” His voice was hollow and calm. He was in control now.

Cooperation wasn’t an issue. Adam heard the clatter of the phones skittering across the floor a second later. The instructor had joined the students in the back of the classroom. He looked at all of them, his face a mask of fury. All of them had interrupted his plans. All of them. “Now sit down and keep your mouths shut.”

Adam dragged a struggling Amelia to the front of the classroom. He looked out of the windows and then scanned the room, trying to see what he was working with. There were four large tables in the room, each of them empty. Each of them with a plastic tarp covering a dead body on the table. Adam shook his head. It was just his luck. He’d tripped into a cadaver day. He searched his mind. What was the plan here? What was he gonna do? Kill all of them?

He felt a buzz of adrenaline in his system. He had no plans. He was in the room with six hostages and nowhere to go. In a way it felt good, the same way he’d felt when he’d walked into the Sloane’s house and killed them all.

Adam narrowed his eyes. When would people understand they couldn’t stand in his way?

39

Rick Stang, the head of maintenance for the Barnes Building, pushed a wheeled cart down the hallway stocked with tools, cleaning supplies, and most importantly, trash bags. Always the trash bags.

The best time for him to do his work was while classes were in session. Unlike the high school that he used to work at, there were no bells. Classes met and dismissed silently. For that, he was grateful. After a while, the ringing of buzzers and bells had gotten to him. His wife said he was too sensitive. He didn’t know about that.

Under his breath, Rick hummed a Bruno Mars tune he’d heard on the radio early that morning when he’d been driving to work. He pushed the cart along, trying to figure out which one of his duties that day he wanted to do first, now that his first pass of cleaning bathrooms was done. It had taken hours. Glad that was done, there were two new items on the agenda—emptying the trash and checking for burnt out light bulbs.

Rick pushed the cart over to the side of the hallway, the wheels grinding and clattering on the tile. Settling the cart against the wall, Rick stopped for a second looking up. He realized he’d have to do light bulbs first. There were too many classes in session to do trash at that moment. It would make trying to remember who had trash taken out and who hadn’t a nightmare. And to be honest, he wasn’t ready to deal with the piles of coffee cups, wrappers from egg, bacon, and cheese sandwiches, and discarded cartons of yogurt that were left in every single classroom after the early classes had dismissed. The food smell was overwhelming for his delicate stomach. That was another thing that his wife said he was too sensitive about.

Rick walked to the end of the hallway passing a couple of the classrooms. He kept telling himself that someday he might take a class or two. Being an employee of Belmor, he could audit any class he wanted to at any time. Auditing sounded like the way to go. A buddy of his that worked over in the Lafayette Building had audited an astronomy class. Didn’t have to do any homework or anything. Just showed up when he felt like it and enjoyed the lecture. That was definitely Rick’s speed.

He hummed under his breath while he considered his options. Where would he start—Economics? Spanish? He didn’t know.

Carrying a tablet in his hand that had a digital maintenance checklist on it, Rick walked down the hallway, staring up at the light bulbs, ticking off the ones that were operational. When he got to the end of the hallway, he turned around and came back, glancing into the glass window of the last classroom on the right-hand side.

He stopped, not seeing anyone in it, though the lights were on. He looked again. He knew Nancy Feldman had her anatomy class scheduled for that slot. Where was she? Why were the lights on and both the doors were closed if there was no class?

Rick made his way down the hallway, wondering if he could see better if he looked through the second door. Usually, the anatomy lab was occupied at this hour. Maybe Nancy had canceled class? As he strolled by, Rick heard a noise from inside, a faint cry as if something bad had happened, the same kind of cry a child might offer if they were injured.

Rick peeked through the second entrance to the classroom, a door that most of the instructors kept locked. He saw a young woman, her face pale and drawn, a knife held to her throat. His heart thumped in his chest. “Oh my God!” Rick hissed, ducking out of the way and running down the hallway. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and dialed 911, his hands shaking.

It only took a second for the call to connect. “Pittsburgh Emergency Services. What is the nature and location of your emergency?” the female voice on the other end of the line deadpanned.

“Hello? This is Rick Stang at Belmor University. I’m at the Barnes Building on the first floor. There’s a hostage situation. We need help. Some guy has a knife to one of our student’s throats. I don’t know what to do!”

The woman, whose voice had sounded bored when she answered, came to life. “Okay, stay calm, Rick. My name is Joyce. You said you are at the Barnes Building at Belmor?”

“Yes, that’s right. I’m standing in a doorway about twenty feet from the classroom. You gotta get help here. That girl, she looks really scared!” His voice was raspy.

“Don’t worry. I’ve got help on the way. Where is the girl exactly?”

“On the first floor. The last classroom off the main hallway. Number one-seven-four.” Rick braced his hand against the wall, feeling the cool soak into his skin.

“Did you see who is holding her or do you know how many people are in the room?”

Rick huddled against the wall, suddenly feeling unsure. “Not really. It’s a guy with dark hair that has her. Not sure how many people. Maybe four or five others. I was so surprised⁠—”

“Nothing to worry about, Rick. You are doing great. Are you in a safe location?”

Rick looked around, realizing how close he was to the room where the student was being held at knifepoint. “Not exactly,” he whispered. “I’m in the same hallway near one of the other classrooms.”

“Thanks for telling me that. The first priority is that I need you to get to a safe location. Is there any way you can evacuate other people out of the building?”

Rick looked around him. The building had four floors of students and professors, not to mention offices. He saw a fire alarm about fifteen feet down the hallway on the way to the exit. He hurried to it and pulled it down as hard as he could, then ran for the exit, still holding his phone to his ear. “Done. I just pulled the fire alarm.”

40

Cassie and Max had been staring at the video on Max’s desk, trying to establish enough evidence that they could go to Lieutenant Williams and get the approval to go to a judge and ask for a warrant on Adam Duffy.

Max was rubbing his chin and shaking his head when Jerry came exploding out of his office. “You two! Get yourselves over to Belmor. We’ve got a hostage situation in the Barnes Building.”

Max shot a glance at Cassie. “Do you think?”

“I don’t know. I guess we need to go find out.”

Max ran out of the office, using the steps. They didn’t have time to wait for the elevator. Cassie was on his heels. He ran to one of the detective units parked in the lot across the street, Cassie jumping in on the passenger side. She leaned over and flipped on the emergency lights as Max threw the car into gear. The tires squealed as they sped out of the police parking lot.

Max gave Cassie a quick glance, his hands tightening on the steering wheel. “Can you access those videos of Belmor by any chance? Do we have a live feed or something within the last hour or so?”

Cassie frowned. “What are you talking about?”

Max’s mind was running so fast that he could hardly form the words to explain what he was looking for. “Adam Duffy. See where he was. Tell me where he is now.”

Cassie swung the MDC, the onboard computer mounted in the front seat, toward her. She started typing on the screen. “Yeah, let me see if I can access them from here.”

“Hold on.” They took a corner fast. His heart skipped a beat. Part of him hoped that it wasn’t Adam Duffy, that this was just a fluke, yet another trip to Belmor that week. But part of him hoped that it was. Grady bit his lip. If Adam Duffy was behind their newest call, then they had an even bigger problem in front of them—Adam Duffy was already a serial killer with a known penchant for sudden violence. They’d have to add their suspicions about him to the decision-making at the scene. Hostage situations like these were known to be high intensity.

Out of the corner of his eye, Max saw Cassie reach for the grab bar in the detective unit as they swung around the corner. “All right. I have the video up. I’m trying to look at it now, but the car is moving too fast.”

Max set his jaw. “Sorry, Reynolds. Gotta get there.”

“I know, Grady.”

There was a pause. Max glanced over at Cassie for just a split second. She had a frown on her face. He put his eyes back on the road. “What is it?”

“It’s Duffy. I see him. He entered the Barnes Building about forty-five minutes ago.”

Max straightened in his seat. “I knew it.”

Cassie sucked in a breath. Max blinked. “What is it?”

“Amelia, Brooke’s roommate, was just ahead of him.”

Max didn’t say anything, setting his jaw. This was Adam Duffy’s swan song, his final battle. The only question was whether he would survive it.

41

Adams’s heart was pounding in his chest. He could feel the heat coming off of his body and soaking into Amelia, the initial rush from the adrenaline slowing just a bit, the prickling of his skin diminishing. He still had her pressed to his chest, the knife blade near her throat.

He pressed his lips together, furious with himself. He’d miscalculated. Badly. Why had he even bothered to try to talk to Amelia? He knew she would side with Brooke. She was probably part of the reason they’d broken up in the first place. Amelia had been about as friendly as Joe Sloane. She hadn’t liked him. That was obvious. He should have left well enough alone.

Now he got himself into this situation. All he needed to do was be patient and he hadn’t been. He could have waited it out, played the role of the grieving boyfriend and kept his head down, but now he’d brought trouble upon himself.

Adam sniffed, feeling his muscles tight over his jaw. He tried running the probability of getting out of the situation in his head and nothing happened. He was at a loss.

He looked around the classroom. The students and professor were sitting stiffly at the back of the room, each of them eyeing him when he wasn’t looking. He could feel their eyes on his face, trying to figure out what to do. He cursed under his breath. It would have been better for him to wait, catch Amelia when she was by herself. Now he had all these witnesses and virtually no plan.

Adam pivoted himself and Amelia toward the door, staring toward the window in the door. Part of him wanted to tell the students to cover it, but part of him knew it was no use. The fire alarm, thank God, had stopped. Another miscalculation on his part. Someone must have looked through the window in the classroom and seen what was going on. There was no other reasonable explanation for the timing. Faculty members knew about fire alarm drills on campus. Nothing had been in the schedule.

Adam wiped his brow. If what he’d seen on television crime cases was any indication, he knew what was coming next.

The police.

They would show up in force. He let out a sharp sigh. A bunch of idiots. They had only a portion of the intellect that he had. There had to be a way for him to get himself out of the situation he was in. It might be a slight probability, but what people didn’t understand was that there was no such thing as a completely impossible situation. There was always at least a fraction of a chance that something could go another way.

He looked around him. How he could make that happen, he wasn’t exactly sure. He pulled Amelia tighter to him, leaning over her shoulder and whispering in her ear. “This is all your fault! If anyone in here dies, it’ll be on you.”

Amelia did nothing but whimper.

42

The minute Max saw the road barricaded in front of the Barnes Building, he knew they were in the right spot. He slammed on the brakes and turned the car off, leaving the key fob inside and jumping out. Anyone who wanted to steal a detective unit was a fool.

He took off at a run toward the building. Cassie was on his heels. Off in the distance, he could see the line of police officers and campus security huddled behind a police cruiser that was parked about a hundred feet from the building. Some of them were in regular street gear, others were in full tactical uniforms including helmets, Kevlar body armor, black field boots, and AR-15 style rifles strapped to their chests.

Adam Duffy was getting the full treatment.

As soon as Max reached the cruiser, he stopped, out of breath. The cruiser was one of three that was parked on the other side of the lot from the main entrance to the Barnes Building. Max glanced toward the building. It didn’t look all that different from the other buildings on the Belmor campus—almost a perfect square of red brick with black framed windows on each side of the four-story structure. There were wide planting beds on each side of the doorway with shrubs that looked like someone had just taken a set of hedge clippers to them. A massive oak tree’s branches drooped down near the door, but not so low that Grady couldn’t see the entire way down the side of the building.

“What do we got?” he asked.

“Grady.” The SWAT commander nodded. “Heard you were back.”

Max grinned. “Yeah, Morrison, I heard you never left. Now tell me what we’ve got.”

“From the report of a janitor, Morrison pointed to where a man was talking with an officer. Reynolds was making her way over to join them. “He was walking by, doing his job when he saw a man in the back corner of a classroom, holding a blade to a young woman’s throat.”

Max glanced at Morrison. “Other people in the building?”

Morrison shook his head. “No. Janitor set off the fire alarm. Got everybody out.”

“Not very subtle.”

Morrison nodded. “Let’s just say our element of surprise is no longer there.”

“How many in the classroom?”

Morrison shrugged. “We don’t have eyes on it yet. Just getting set up. We only got here about five minutes before you. According to the janitor, probably seven to ten. Not a huge class. Cadaver lab.”

Max shook his head. It was just his luck. “Great. You got a map?”

The swat commander flipped open his laptop that was resting on the hood of the cruiser. “Sure do. Campus security sent it over.”

“Where are they now?” Campus security officers didn’t have the same training or power as Pittsburgh PD.

“We pushed them back off the perimeter.” Morrison pointed. “You can see here the building’s basically a square. From this entry door in front of you, it’s straight down the hallway. East corner, first floor.”

“Access?”

“None without a sightline, save for the rooftop across the quad. That means we can see him, but he can see us too. I’ve already sent a couple of snipers over there to get set up. It’ll be a few minutes on them. There are windows that lead out to the quad two doors into the hallway, one at the front of the classroom and one at the back. Hostage taker hasn’t made any demands yet.”

“He won’t.”

Morrison shot Max a look. “How do you know that?”

“I have a pretty good idea who took the hostages and why.”

Cassie put a hand on Max’s shoulder. “I just talked to the janitor. He’s shaken up but cooperating. I’m gonna see if I can get him to identify Adam Duffy for me.”

“Thanks, Reynolds,” Max said evenly. He stood for a second, staring at the building. A knot formed in his stomach. He looked at the SWAT commander. “I’ll be right back. Gotta get my vest.”

Max strode back toward the car, thinking. In the past he would have just done what he felt needed to get done. At least he was taking a break and assessing the situation. That was growth, wasn’t it? Frankie’s voice rose in his head. “Maybe you should think about getting out of police work, Max.” It was at that moment that Max knew that no matter how broken he was, or what he’d been through or how hard he had to work, there was one thing he was sure of.

He was a detective. And a good one.

Max popped open the trunk of the cruiser, grabbed his Kevlar vest and shrugged it on over his head, fastening the Velcro straps tight around his waist. He checked his gun belt. His gun was loaded, and he had a set of handcuffs and three sets of FlexiCuffs on his belt as well. He strode back to where the SWAT commander was standing. “Any news?”

Morrison raised his eyebrows. “In the last minute and a half, Grady? No. I’m getting ready to send some guys in to snake the door.”

Snaking the door meant that a couple of guys would covertly enter the building and use a camera on a flexible fiber optic cable to get a look. They’d stick it in underneath the door to get a view of what was going on in the classroom, hopefully without alerting Adam.

His stomach dropped. If Adam Duffy was who Max thought he was, they didn’t have that kind of time. Max looked over at Cassie who was talking to the janitor. She looked his way and gave a single nod and a thumbs up.

Grady could take that to mean only one thing: Adam Duffy was the man inside.

A second later, Max saw Morrison whisper into his radio. Two men, wearing full tactical uniforms, took off toward the building, disappearing inside. Max held his breath. He could only hope that Adam hadn’t done anything stupid, at least not yet. Morrison glanced at Max. “Let’s see what they can find out.”

Max’s stomach clenched. Hostage situations were notoriously finicky. There were some hostage-takers that wanted action, others that just needed to calm down.

He had no idea which category Adam Duffy fit into, but he knew one thing—they needed to know how many people were in the room and what their status was. That would be what guided the rest of their tactical decisions, which came down to two options: waiting Adam out, or going in.

A moment later, the two men emerged from the building, the two of them looking at each other. Morrison keyed up his radio. “What happened?”

Max heard the response. “Couldn’t get it, boss. He’s standing right near the door. Had full view of us. We had to move back.”

Morrison threw his hands in the air. “Why do we spend so much time training if you two can’t get something as basic as a snake done? Get over here!”

Max twisted his lips. And he thought Jerry was hot-headed? Morrison was not happy, not in the least.

The two men double timed it over to where they were standing at the command post. He pulled a phone out of his back pocket. “Take this in there. Slide it under the door. Do you think you two can manage that?”

“Yes, sir,” one of them bravely answered.

As they walked off, Morrison called behind them, “And take a riot shield!”

Max cracked his neck as he watched the two men reenter the building, the two of them hunched down, huddling behind a riot shield. They disappeared inside, the door closing behind them. Max glanced at Cassie. She was still talking to the janitor. What they were talking about, he wasn’t sure. Cassie had gotten a tablet from somewhere and was staring at it, not at him. It looked like she was typing notes into it, probably for the dozens of reports they’d have to file.

All the paperwork was just another reason to be irritated with Adam Duffy.

The men emerged out of the building about a minute later, one of them shaking his head, the other one dragging the riot shield behind them. Morrison waved them over. “What happened?”

The two men looked at each other. One of them, his name badge reading Garrett, pressed his lips together. “We did what you said, boss. We pushed the phone under the door. A second later, it came back out.”

“What?” Morrison’s face reddened.

“Yeah,” the other officer, whose name was Akins, added. “It’s like he kicked it right back at us. We just got out of there. The guy doesn’t want to talk, that’s for sure.”

Max froze. Adam Duffy didn’t want to talk? That wasn’t a good sign. There was no way to negotiate with someone who was silent on the other side of the conversation. Max thought about the Sloane family’s crime scene, then what he’d seen at Brooke’s townhome. Adam was the kind of person who needed to finish things.

And now he had Amelia, another person he could blame for whatever had gone wrong with the Sloanes. Added together with the fact that he didn’t want to talk, Grady could come to only one conclusion—something bad was about to happen.

43

Without saying anything, Max took off at a sprint toward the building, hearing the SWAT commander call behind him. “Grady! Grady!” It was followed by the same words hollered over his radio. Max ignored him.

He knew what had to be done.

Grady slowed down enough to pull open the door to the Barnes Building and then walked quietly down the hallway, trying to calm his breath. Adam Duffy was smart. He was probably expecting a phone call or someone to come down the hallway to try to reach out to him.

Grady felt a single drop of sweat run between his shoulder blades. Every muscle in his body felt tense as he walked down the hallway. He bent over, keeping himself low, drawing his gun out of the holster. He tried to slow his breathing, telling his body he needed to relax. The map of the Barnes Building was burned into his mind. He knew exactly where he was going, exactly where Adam Duffy was holding Amelia and her classmates hostage.

As Max approached the secondary door to the classroom, he slowed, looking inside. He saw six people at the back of the classroom, their faces pale, fingers knitted together in their laps, their eyes wide. To him it looked like five students and an instructor. Up front, over four plastic covered cadavers, he saw Adam with Amelia Monterey pinned to the front of his body, a knife at her neck. He was staring out at the quad, probably at the mass of police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances that had arrived.

Max backed off and moved back down the hallway, whispering into the radio, “Grady to command.”

“Grady! Get back out here!” This time it wasn’t a SWAT commander, it was Lieutenant Williams.

“I have a sit rep. Looks like there are five students and one instructor at the back of the room. Perpetrator is Adam Duffy, someone we were looking at in the murders of the Sloane family. He’s got Amelia Monterey, Brooke Sloane’s roommate, at knife point.”

“Copy that. Great. Get out here,” Williams hissed. When the lieutenant had exactly arrived, Max wasn’t sure. He decided not to answer. It seemed like a better option than lying at the moment.

Grady wasn’t going anywhere.

Max walked quietly back toward the classroom. He kept his gun low. The last thing he wanted to do was to shoot anyone, but he also wasn’t willing to lose his life to somebody as crazy as Adam Duffy. Max made his way to the back door of the room and looked inside. One of the students caught his eye. Max held a single finger up to his lips. The student whipped around and looked right back at Adam as if he hadn’t seen anything at all. Max nodded. Good job, pal.

Max walked slowly, heel-toeing his boots down the hallway so he could move as silently as possible. He approached the main door of the classroom, not sure exactly what to do. He had a choice—walk back outside and wait for Morrison and Williams to do something or…

Grady knocked politely on the door. He holstered his gun and held both of his hands up.

Adam Duffy, startled by the noise, whipped around, pulling Amelia closer to him. She cried out, her eyes wide, her face pale.

Grady called through the door. “I just wanna talk.”

“There’s nothing to talk about!” Adam yelled back. “Get away from the door or I’m gonna kill her!” From the reddened, twisted expression on Adam’s face, Max could tell that he was out of his mind with rage.

“Come on, Adam. I just want to talk. That’s all.”

Adam looked back toward the door, narrowing his eyes. “You know my name?”

Don’t be flattered, buddy. You don’t want me to know your name. I promise you that.

“I know about Brooke. I know what she did to you. Open the door so we can talk.”

Adam backed away, taking Amelia with him. “No!”

Grady stood at the door and shook his head. Why do they always make it so hard? He pulled his gun out of the holster and flipped it around, holding the barrel with his hand. He used the grip to smash the glass out of the door, then reached inside and unlocked the door, holstering his gun, a disgusted expression on his face. Unlocking it would have been so much easier.

Grady walked inside of the room, holding his hands up. “It’s easier to talk when the door is open, don’t you think?” He scanned the room.

The room was long and narrow, with a whiteboard that spanned the entire end of one side. There were heavy examination tables, eight of them, lining the room in two rows of four. Only four of the tables were occupied by corpses, the sour smell of formaldehyde hanging in the air. He wrinkled his nose. It reminded him of being in middle school and dissecting a frog.

Max looked toward the back of the classroom, keeping his hand close to the grip of his gun. At the moment, the only weapon he could see on Adam was a knife. But he knew for a fact that Adam owned a gun, the same one he’d used on Tyler and Jody. Where it was exactly, Max didn’t know. He could only hope that Adam didn’t have it with him.

He could tell by the look on everyone’s faces that they were surprised that he’d broken the glass in the door. “Everyone okay in here?” he asked cheerfully.

The students and instructor in the back of the classroom nodded. “We’re okay,” one of the female students stammered.

“Good.” A feeling of calm washed over Max. He looked at Adam. “Now, here’s what’s gonna happen. You and me and Miss Monterey, we’re going to have a chat. The thing is, all these other people don’t need to be part of this.” Max waited for a beat. Adam didn’t say anything. He didn’t object or agree. Max took that to mean he understood the situation. “Good choice,” he muttered under his breath.

Without taking his eyes off Adam, Max lifted his finger, pointing at people in the back of the classroom. “All of you, get up and walk out of the room. Do it quietly. Leave all your personal belongings and get out of here. Go straight out the main entrance of the building and exit with your hands up. Got it?”

There were nervous nods and murmurs of assent.

“Good. Now go.”

Max kept his eyes on Adam as he heard the other hostages leaving. Out of his peripheral vision, he saw people moving. When he thought they had cleared the room, he glanced at where they had been. All of their bags and cups and cell phones had been left behind. There was a pile of cell phones on the desk, one of them chirping. Adam had apparently collected those. The door had been left open as well. That was good, a definite improvement over the sour smell of the cadavers that had collected in the room with the door closed.

Max shifted his weight to his right hip and looked at Adam. “So, what are we gonna do here? We need to get this resolved.”

Adam narrowed his eyes. “You said you know about Brooke.”

“I do. I think you killed her.” What Max said was distinctly against protocol. He was supposed to keep the hostage-taker calm, ask what he wanted, try to negotiate, consider their feelings.

That wasn’t happening. Not today. Not with someone as dangerous as Adam Duffy.

“She was supposed to come back to me!” Adam screamed at the top of his lungs.

Max watched as Amelia quivered. “Is that why you killed her family?”

“Her dad. He didn’t like me. Forced her to break up with me. She didn’t want to. She told me that.”

“So that’s why you killed all of them?” Max shook his head. “That’s not a great way to ingratiate yourself with the in-laws, dude, even if they are dead. Killing them can hurt somebody’s feelings.” Max’s voice dripped with sarcasm.

“And what do you know about it?” Adam spat. He hugged Amelia closer to his body. She cried out as he squeezed her tighter. “You’re just a stupid cop.”

Max licked his lower lip. He took half a step forward, his voice low and gravelly. “And I’m going to be the stupid cop that puts you in handcuffs and takes you to jail for killing four people and holding a whole bunch of people hostage.”

“Not if I kill her first.”

Max drew his gun. He somehow had to get Amelia out of the way so that he could get to Adam. He looked at Amelia’s neck, it was getting red, a trickle of blood running down where the knife had already nicked her throat. This was the same knife that had been used on Joe Sloane, the same one that Dr. Hamadi had said did so much damage.

Max stood, staring at Adam, feeling his pulse pound in his head, his gun extended in front of him. They were at a stalemate. Something needed to happen, or they’d end up staying there for hours. Max didn’t have that kind of time. He needed to get home. Patch was waiting for him.

Adam stared at the gun and then Grady, his body stiffening, a grimace twisting his expression. Max’s vision started to swim. He saw his father’s face again, contorted in rage. Amelia morphed into his mother. Max felt his gut tense. No one else needed to die. Not today.

Just then, there was the sound of a low thumping from somewhere above them, loud enough that it interrupted Max’s swimming thoughts. He looked toward Adam. Adam had heard it too. A police helicopter descended into their vision, getting ready to land on Belmor’s quad.

Drawn to the noise, Adam twisted Amelia toward the window just a little bit. The breath caught in Max’s throat. There it was. He shoved his gun into the holster and took off at a run, seeing his opportunity. He tackled Adam with the full force of his weight, forcing Adam to let go of Amelia as he hit the ground. Max locked his arms around Adam, one over Adam’s left shoulder, one under his right arm pulling him tight as they hit the ground with a thump.

Max knew the force of the two of them hitting the ground that would knock the wind out of Adam. That was the point.

As they hit the ground, the knife skittered away, the metal clattering on the floor. Amelia landed in a heap a foot away from them. Max scrambled to his knees, pulling his hands out from underneath Adam, grabbing his arms and twisting them behind his back, pushing them toward his head, threatening to dislocate his shoulders as Adam struggled. “It’s over, Adam. It’s over!”

Adam wrestled for a second and then stopped, his body still, not a sound coming from him. Max reached behind him and affixed handcuffs to each of Adam’s wrists.

As Max stood up, feeling adrenaline pumping through his body, he had every urge to shove Adam back down on the floor, but he didn’t. Losing his temper hadn’t gotten him anywhere recently. “Don’t move,” he warned Adam.

Max darted to Amelia, helping her get up off the floor. “Are you okay?”

She nodded, tears running down her face.

Max ushered her to the door, keeping an eye on Adam who was still face-down on the ground, completely silent, facing away from Max. “Go down the hallway and outside. I’ll tell them you’re coming.” Max keyed up his radio. “Grady to command. Hostage coming out. I repeat, hostage coming out. Do not shoot.” He paused. “Suspect in custody. We’re clear.”

Max walked over to Adam and was helping him get up off the ground as Jerry and Cassie ran into the room. “What the—?!” Jerry shouted as he got into the classroom.

Two other officers ran in behind him, dressed in their SWAT uniforms, rifles slung over their chests. Max handed Adam Duffy off to them. Catching Cassie’s eye, Max pointed at the knife on the ground.

Cassie nodded. “That’s it?”

Max nodded. That’s it.”

Jerry stood, his thumbs looped into the armholes of his tactical vest, shaking his head. “I don’t have the foggiest idea how you managed to get everybody out of here without anybody dying, but good job, Grady. Glad you’re back.” Jerry stuck his hand out and shook Grady’s.

Max blinked for a second, surprised by Jerry’s reaction. Grateful, Max grabbed Jerry’s hand and they shook.

Jerry turned on his heel and walked out of the classroom, swinging his head from side to side, yelling orders on his radio.

Cassie stood nearby, watching the exchange. She smiled. “Well, apparently you’ve earned Jerry’s approval.”

Max cocked his head to the side and looked at Cassie. She looked tired to him at that moment. His heart ached. He hoped he was not responsible for any part of it, though he knew he probably was. “And you? Do I have your approval?”

Cassie smirked, then broke into a grin. “Maybe.”

EPILOGUE

“Sit.” Max looked at Patch. The big dog stared up at him, his body tense. Max tossed him a treat.

“Well, look at you, Grady. You almost look like you know what you’re doing,” Cassie called out.

Max turned in time to see Reynolds come up behind him. She had Happy on a leash, the big yellow Labrador sporting a red bandana around his neck, his cheeks pulled back to reveal a goofy smile, his pink tongue lolling off to the side. Max had beaten her to the Northwoods Dog Park, where they’d met for the last three Saturdays in a row. As he looked at Happy, Max wondered if maybe Patch needed a bandana too.

“Very funny. We had our first class this week.”

“Did you go with the trainer I suggested?”

Max nodded. He was getting used to the idea of having a dog in the house. Cassie had suggested things would be easier if he had someone to help him. Not her, of course, at least not on a regular basis.

Max had agreed. Sometimes having someone who was objective, whether that was Frankie or Dr. Kersevich or now MaryAnn, the dog trainer, wasn’t a bad thing.

Max watched as Cassie unclipped the leash from Happy’s collar. After a moment of hesitation—he was still uncertain about having Patch loose—he did the same. Patch paused for a split second and then wheeled away, taking off after Happy. Cassie tossed a Frisbee in the air after them, the two big dogs racing as fast as they could to get it. Happy caught the first volley and returned it, Patch on his heels.

Cassie tossed the Frisbee again. She glanced at Max. “Any news on the case while I’ve been out?” Cassie had spent the last week at a training for advanced crime scene reconstruction and bloodstain evidence. Max hadn’t been invited to go. He knew it was Jerry’s way of placating Reynolds and giving her a break from Max.

Apparently, his tactic was working.

“Which one?” There had been no shortage of cases for the two of them.

“Duffy.”

Patch ran back to Max and sat at his feet. Cassie raised her eyebrows. Max ignored her. “Mr. Duffy is awaiting his trial in jail. The judge didn’t grant bail. Didn’t like the fact that Adam had decided to kill an entire family.”

Cassie shrugged. “Can’t say I blame him.”

“Trial is in a couple of months. Jerry already said we need to be prepared to testify.”

“Nothing new there.”

If Max had to guess, he’d think that Cassie might be called to testify by the prosecutors. Then again, he was the one who saved Amelia Monterey. “I heard from Amelia this week.”

“Really?” Cassie tossed the Frisbee again.

Max shrugged. “Nothing big. Just a text. Said she’s going back to class. Moved out of the townhome. I guess Belmor offered her and the remaining two roommates a nice suite on the other side of campus.” None of that surprised Max. It made sense that Belmor would move the students to another location, given how brutal a murder was committed there. What they would do with the townhouse, Max wasn’t sure.

“That’s good.”

“How about you?” Max stopped, surprised by his own question.

Cassie blinked. “Me?”

Max had been spending time with Frankie on the weekends. They’d talk, really talk. Max was learning from him, even little things, like better ways to manage a conversation. Frankie had even suggested that Max start sponsoring another AA member. Max had blanched, knowing that he had already fallen off the wagon once. Only a few days before, Max had agreed to sponsor a new guy in the Saint James church AA group, a guy named Justin.

Emboldened by her response, he nodded. “Yeah, you. How was the class?”

“Good, Grady. Good.”

“Are you happy with work?”

“I am. I think I really am.”

Max looked down and tried not to smile. So was he.

If you’d like to join my mailing list and be the first to get updates on new books and exclusive sales, giveaways and releases, click here!

I’ll send you a prequel to the next series FREE!

Join the KJ Kalis Facebook Reader Group here