Connor stepped out of the dining room and moved through the front room toward the porch.Behind him, Matt’s camera clicked again.Arnold stayed inside, speaking quietly into his radio to Cheryl about getting the body moved.
Outside, sunlight had climbed higher over the trees.Warren’s truck sat nearby with the deer still tied in the bed.Flies had gathered now in a restless black cluster along the wound.The eye had begun to turn a cold milky color.
Connor paused at the porch rail.
From here, the woods rolled away in every direction.Harlan County looked peaceful if a man didn’t know better.Green slopes.Birdsong.Tracks cut through dirt by people who believed no one else noticed where they went.He’d get Matt to do a sweep of the soil and grass around the place.
What should he do next?Uncertainty was beginning to build in his gut.
Connor took out his phone.
For a moment, his thumb hovered over the contacts.
Selena had been in his phone once under a name he couldn’t bear to delete and couldn’t bear to see.When she came back for the Pruitt case, he had entered the number again under her full name, as if the formality could protect him from what it meant.
Selena Raven.
The contact waited on the screen.
Connor looked back at the lodge.At the men inside.At the dead man at the table.
Then he scrolled past Selena’s name.
This needed to be official.No personal call dressed up as police work.No excuse to hear her voice and pretend the case had required it.
He found another contact.
Meg Calloway.
Selena’s boss.The woman who had sent Selena home to Harlan once and, as far as Connor could tell, cared about her enough to do it again.
Connor pressed dial.
The line rang twice.
A receptionist answered with clipped efficiency.“Section Chief Calloway’s office.”
Connor watched a fly circle the bed of Warren’s truck, then land.
“Hello,” he said.“This is Sheriff Connor Chase from Harlan County.Can I speak with Meg Calloway, please?It’s urgent.”
CHAPTER TWO
The FBI’s Washington office never sounded quiet.
Badge readers clicked.Phones chirped.Printers worked beyond the cubicle rows with a tired rhythm.Voices moved through the floor in low currents, clipped and professional, all of them pretending urgency was the same thing as order.
Selena Raven stood beside Tanya Bell’s cubicle with a file tucked under one arm and no real reason to still be there except that Tanya had begun a story too ridiculous to abandon halfway through.
Tanya sat against the edge of her desk, one heel hooked on the chair base, the other foot tapping against the carpet.Brown hair fell around her shoulders in loose waves, one bright flick of blond near her temple.In her mid-twenties, she had the distracted energy of someone who might misplace her own phone while holding it, yet somehow never lost a form, receipt, travel voucher, or signature page.
Selena had always liked that contradiction.
“He dumped me over steak,” Tanya said.
Selena blinked.“Over steak?”
“Not because of the steak.Duringthe steak.Which is worse.”
