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Jo reached for her coffee. “How are the girls handling it?”
“We haven’t told them yet. So far they just think Daddy’s on an extended business trip. I’ve been delaying as long as possible because I’m terrified of how Emily is going to respond.”
Jo winced. The previous spring, Emily had been kidnapped, and witnessed Jo shoot her captor in order to recover her. Despite some struggles dealing with the trauma, she’d been recovering steadily, but Jo knew well that psychological progress could be all too easily derailed by new stressors. “If there’s anything I can do to help, I’m just a phone call away.”
“I know.” Sophie’s voice softened as she said it, then hardened again. “For now, go ahead and tell David he can move in. I’ll figure out what to do from there.”
“Will do,” Jo said. “Take care of yourself, please.”
Once they’d hung up, she grabbed the plates and set them on the kitchen table. “Well. That’s easy then, at least for now.”
Matt slid their coffees next to their plates, then rubbed her shoulder. “Don’t worry. She’ll figure it all out.”
Jo sawed off a bite of her French toast. “I know she will. But it’s—” A text notification cut her off. She snatched up the phone, hoping Sophie hadn’t changed her mind.
But it wasn’t Sophie. “Oh God.”
Matt’s eyes snapped up from his food, and his posture stiffened at her tone. “What’s wrong?”
Jo jumped up and snatched her jacket from the back of the chair. “One of our assistant district attorneys has been murdered.”
CHAPTERTHREE
When Jo picked up Bob Arnett, her partner, he slid into the car silently. The lines creasing his late-fifties forehead and webbing his eyes were deeper than normal, and his pupils so widened they turned his brown eyes nearly black. His hands couldn’t find a place to settle; between desperate gulps from his travel mug, his hands alternated between rubbing the back of his salt-and-pepper hair and the Saturday-afternoon shadow on his chin.
“Two months from retirement,” he finally said.
Jo took a moment to control her voice before she spoke. “I didn’t realize she was so close. Isn’t she young for that?”
He stared out the windshield, thumbs rubbing the texturized plastic of his travel mug. “Early retirement. She was hired just slightly before I made detective.”
In over twenty years, she’d never seen Arnett this quiet before, and it magnified her own alarm. She gripped the steering wheel to steady her shaking hands. Yes, she’d seen more than a few officers and detectives killed during her time on the force, it was a part of the job. But never an ADA—and never a cold-blooded murder outside the line of duty. It was a violation that struck at not just the safety of every law enforcement officer, but the rule of law itself.
Steering into a turn, she shifted into compartmentalizing her emotions, for the sake of both her objectivity and sanity, and oriented herself firmly into the investigatory logic of the case. All she had at this point was victimology, what she knew about Sandra. She’d worked with Sandra any number of times, and had tremendous professional respect for her. Justice for the victims Sandra served was of primary importance to her, and she worked hard to get it for them, far beyond even the twelve-plus-hour days most prosecutors worked. In the course of that dedication, she was averse to BS, demanded respect, and demanded excellence from herself and others, but also was always ready with a smile or a joke or a positive word when someone was having a bad day.
But as Jo searched her memory, she couldn’t come up with much about Sandra’s personal life. “She was married, right? But no kids?”
“Divorced not long ago.” He continued to stare out of the window.
Jo sucked in breath through her teeth. “Divorce, then early retirement. That’s a lot of life change all at once.”
Arnett nodded.
Jo made the final turn toward the crime scene in Cheltam, off the stem of a T-shaped dirt road up the right prong. After running a few hundred yards along the shore of the lake, it dead-ended between Sandra Ashville’s house nestled into an elm-covered hillside on the right, and a dock jutting into the lake on the left. Crime-scene tape ran across the road, conveniently preventing access to the house, the dock, and the woods beyond. As Jo parked next to it, she spotted Janet Marzillo, head of the Oakhurst County State Police Detective Unit’s CSI team, and Hakeem Peterson, a relatively new hire who’d quickly become indispensable, squatting carefully around a supine figure on the dock. Two other CSIs she didn’t recognize searched the woods near the house. All of them worked in an unusual silence.
As she and Arnett made their way toward the tall, white, blond officer standing stock-still over the tape, they scanned the area.
“Hard-packed dusty road and hard-packed dusty shore. Won’t get much in terms of tire marks or footprints,” Arnett said.
“Racinsky,” Jo read off the officer’s nameplate as they reached the tape and identified themselves. “You’re the responding officer?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He noted their names on the log. “Multiple residents from around the lake called in a potential gunshot just before seven this morning. Forty-five minutes later, we received another call from the southern neighbors Marianne and Jeff Nelson. As they set out to do some morning fishing, they noticed Ashville on her pier, but when they called out to her, she didn’t respond. As they neared, they realized she was deceased.”
Arnett’s brow shot up. “Forty-five minutes later? A small, low-crime area like this and it took you forty-five minutes to respond to a gunshot?”
“No, sir.” Racinsky’s jaw flexed. “My partner and I were patrolling the area, attempting to locate the source.”
Jo glanced at the still water; her mind flew to morning sunrises over the bayou where her father’s family lived in Cajun country. “When it’s quiet, sound carries and echoes. Almost impossible to zero in on.”
