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The isolation of the farm was now in Gina’s blood. She wanted to run, to get far away from the thing sitting in her tractor, but her stubbornness wouldn’t let her.
She had to do something about it herself, otherwise whoever it was would come back again and again.
“Hey! Last warning!”
Gina reached the tractor and looked through the mud-stained Perspex. The person inside was obscured by it, blurred around the edges. But Gina could now at least see that it was a woman.
Her hand trembling, Gina pulled the door of the tractor open, gripping the knife in her other hand.
“Get out of there!” she yelled as the door opened.
There was no movement. Instead, the woman inside sat in the driver's chair. She was looking out at the world, her face pale white. Blood seeped out from the floor under the operator’s seat, thick and half congealed.
Gina stepped backwards and put her hands to her mouth. She did not scream. She couldn’t. She was too afraid.
A woman had been murdered on her farm. Her wrists were strapped to the wheel of the tractor. Two hand scythes, which Gina instantly recognized as her own, were buried deep in the woman’s chest.
Something then moved nearby from behind a bush. And Gina found herself running. Running for her life. Terrified that the farmstead she had spent all her life savings on would now drain more than her finances.
She now feared that the farm would drain her of life too.
CHAPTER ONE
Valerie could hear the slow hum of the Mesmer building all around her. It was late, but although she knew it was a cliche, it remained true: The FBI never slept.
In far off corridors, hallways, departments, and case rooms, agents were carrying out investigations, tracking down fugitives, and seeking out those the Federal government had to stop.
But as Valerie looked down at the case file onherdesk, fingering through the photographs and twenty-eight-year-old notes, she knew she was blurring the lines of professional investigation.
This case was personal.
Up until recently, Valerie had been certain that a man named Nathan Law was her father. Even though he had run out on her and her family when she was only a child, she had still felt the security of knowing he was somewhere out there, alive and still her dad. She knew who she was. At the very least, she knew where she came from.
That security was now gone.
After finally tracking Nathan down, a simple DNA test had revealed a horrible truth: He was not her biological father. There was worse to come. It was a rabbit hole with meandering twists and turns, and at each blind corner, something more devastating than the last was revealed.
Valerie rubbed her tired eyes before glaring back down at the files on her desk. The papers were strewn across the wooden surface and the photographs showed the body of a man with his throat cut. DNA testing had shown that the man, Jake Wilson, was Valerie's biological father. He had been murdered nearly three decades earlier.
She had no memory of ever meeting him, and so he must have been out of her life at an early age before Nathan Law had appeared to take up his role in the demolition derby that was her childhood history. All her life she had thought she knew her dad, but now the ugly truth had been revealed. And it meant that everyone had lied to her: her mother, Nathan,everyone.
Looking at the photos, Valerie tried to hold the bitterness of it all inside. She thought,who are you, Jake Wilson? Who were you? Why did I never meet you?
And then the worst question of all:Who killed you?
"I need to find your killer, Dad," she whispered.
Almost instinctively, she turned to the large, empty room around her, as if expecting someone to be eavesdropping. Her partners at the Criminal Psychopathy Unit were nowhere to be seen. The room should have been buzzing with activity as she and her colleagues chased down a new lead. But her boss, Jackson Weller, had been put on administrative leave pending investigation, and the team hadn't been handed a new case for a month.
One of the higher ups, a man by the name of Heinlein, had it in for Jackson. He was doing everything he could to shut them down. Valerie felt partly to blame. Heinlein was using the fact that she'd been given access to an old case, the Claw Stitch Killer, as evidence of Jackson's poor leadership. A case during which she had long ago made a critical mistake while investigating.
Valerie shook the thought from her head. There was too much buzzing inside of it from her career and personal life. She couldn't even turn to her fiancé, Tom. He was spending time with his parents and increasingly distant from her.
So, she had to focus on one thing at a time. With no case, no fiancé near, and no team at her back currently, she was going to put all her energy into finding out what happened to her father.
Valerie gazed at the photos again and then returned to the detective notes in her dad's unsolved murder case. A handwritten note stood out to her.
Robert Freeman, a friend of Jake Wilson's.
