"I think she wants you to follow her." Jo had come to stand beside him.

Sam didn’t take his eyes off the dog, who had stopped a few feet into the woods and was now looking back over its shoulder.

"Well, if you’re not going to follow her, I am." Jo started after the dog.

Sam shrugged and followed. How did Jo know it was a girl? The fur was so long and matted, Sam couldn’t see any of the parts that might give a clue as to the dog’s gender.

The dog didn’t walk far. It stopped near another beach away from any of the campsites. It pawed at something on the ground at the base of a birch tree. A pile of clothes that contained a red tie-dyed shirt.

Sam and Jo squatted to inspect the clothes. Jo pulled a latex glove out of her windbreaker and poked through the pile. Thin cotton pants, the red shirt, and a red lacy bra.

Julie had followed them. They turned to her. "Is this the shirt?"

Julie nodded, her eyes filling up. "Those are hers. Those are Lynn’s clothes."

"She must have taken them off here and gone for a swim from the beach there." Jo nodded toward a thin stretch of sand at the edge of the river. Here the river was wider and deeper. Probably about four feet in the middle.

Sam stood and turned around, assessing the area. It was away from other campsites. Private. "If she were meeting someone and wanted some privacy to go skinny-dipping, this would be the place."

Jo squinted up at him. "If she was meeting someone, we need to find out who. He could have been the last person to see her alive."

Sam’s eyes met Jo’s. "Or the first person to see her dead."

Chapter Four

Sam drove back to the police station after interviewing the people at the surrounding campsites. They’d given a similar story. No one had been paying attention to Lynn. They’d all been busy drinking and partying it up. They’d all gone to bed around two a.m., or so they said. Since Sam had no idea when Lynn had died, he couldn’t very well be pressing them for alibis.

Not that he needed alibis at this point. The death could simply be an accident that wouldn’t require an investigation.

According to the campers, Lynn Palmer had been from Massachusetts. Too far for him to do the notification to her family. It broke his heart to think that somewhere down there the local cops would be informing Lynn’s parents of her death. He hated leaving that job to someone else, but the best thing he could do for them now was figure out what had happened in the last hours of their daughter’s life.

Downtown White Rock was your typical northern New Hampshire town. Brick and concrete buildings accented with fine architectural details lined the main street. Most of the buildings dated to the early 1900s, but the town had been kept up, so they weren’t in disrepair.

In the middle of Main Street, a grass median ran the length of the block where most of the town offices stood. In the center of the median sat a statue of the town’s first mayor, Hiram White, mounted on a horse. Little kids liked to climb on the horse. The statue was often pranked by older kids who would outfit the long-dead mayor with quirky hats and, sometimes, stick mannequins or straw dummies on the back of the horse.

It was mostly all in fun, except for the time someone put a naked blow-up doll on the back and almost caused a fit of the vapors amongst the town biddies. The police station phone had rung off the hook that morning.

Like most small towns, the government offices had to make do with what they had. The police station had recently moved from the basement of the town hall to the old post office. The post office had gotten its own fancy new building. Apparently, mail was a priority over crime fighting in White Rock.

Sam liked the post office building. The building dated to the 1930s and had somehow managed to retain the black-and-white swirly marble floors and original oak moldings with carved details. It still smelled of old paper and stamp glue, which was a welcome improvement over the musty basement of the town hall.

As an added bonus, the post office had left most of their furniture behind. Even the old bronze post office boxes still sat in their oak wall, creating a partial divider between the reception area and what had become the squad room. Each box had twin dials at the top with gold numbers on a black background. Below the dials, a fancy embossed eagle with a US shield on its chest sat proudly amidst fluted rays that extended to the edge of the box. Below the eagle, a small beveled glass window let you see how much mail was inside.

Sam couldn’t understand why the post office had opted for ugly new plain metal boxes instead of taking the old ones, but he didn’t question it. Some people had no taste. The bank of one hundred twenty boxes made a perfect divider, and Reese used them to organize the various pieces of mail, tax payments she collected, and copies of the permit applications she issued.

Beyond the wall of post office boxes was the squad room. It used to be the mail sorting area and was one open room with three oak craftsman-style desks. The desks were scarred from decades of use, but the honey-colored stained wood still glowed. They were solid wood, not like the plywood junk they had today.

He rounded the bank of post office boxes and stopped short. Jo was on the floor, hand-feeding pot roast from the diner across the street to the dog.

"You know we’re supposed to turn him in to the shelter," Sam said.

"Her."

Sam looked at the dog and raised a brow. Jo sounded sure of the dog’s sex, so he went with it.

She continued, "And technically we’re supposed to turn them in at the first available opportunity."

More brow raising from Sam.

Jo shrugged. She was used to his unspoken messages. After four years of working closely together, they could practically read each other’s minds. "I haven’t had an opportunity yet. I’ve been following up on some of the things we learned this morning."

As if to corroborate this, the dog looked up at Sam with innocent eyes.

"Seeing as we’re shorthanded now, I may not have time to bring her for a while." Jo’s words had them both glancing at Tyler’s empty desk. Sam’s stomach tightened. Not only had he lost a good friend and a damn good officer, but now they were shorthanded, meaning they would have to work extra.

He thought about Lynn Palmer. If she’d been murdered, he wanted to be able to do right by her, and that would be harder with one less officer. On the other hand, he couldn’t even think about someone else filling Tyler’s shoes right now. It was too soon.

"Where’s Kevin?" he asked.

"He left for the day. You know how he is. Doesn’t like to put in a lot of hours." Jo pushed up from the floor and dusted off her pants. She had taken off her police belt, and it lay on her desk with all the bulky accoutrements. "Are you going to bring him on full time?"

Sam pressed his lips together. The dog finished lapping up the pot roast and came over and pressed herself against his leg. He rubbed her silky ears absently. Though the dog’s fur was dirty and matted, the ears felt like fine satin sheets on Sam’s fingertips. "I suppose so. Seems like the right thing to do since he’s been here with us for a while now."

"Yeah. Don’t know if he’ll want it, though." Jo went over to her desk and plopped into the old Naugahyde-and-steel chair that had been left there when the post office vacated. Sam had a chair just like it. He thought they dated to the 1950s, but they were comfortable and still did the job. Why get new ones when these worked just fine?

Jo was right about Kevin—he wasn’t exactly ambitious, though he did do an adequate job. Truth be told, Sam wouldn’t be disappointed if Kevin didn’t want the full-time job, but he’d offer it to him just the same when he was ready because it was the right thing to do.