"So what do you make of it?" Sam didn’t need to elaborate. Jo would know that he was referencing the campers and the body from the river.

"Could just be an accident. She could’ve gone swimming and passed out or slipped and hit her head. But I’m having Reese do some digging into the friends she was camping with just in case."

As per protocol with a death that was not natural, they’d blocked off the areas where Lynn’s body and clothing had been found with crime scene tape. They weren’t sure if it was a crime scene yet, but better safe than sorry.

Since Kevin had left before they’d discovered the pile of clothes, Sam had shot pictures of the area with his cell phone. Kevin would have to go back and take better pictures later. He used a Nikon digital camera, and the pictures came out a lot better than Sam’s blurry ones that were usually marred by a close-up of his thumb obscuring the subject of the picture.

"I got that information you wanted." Reese peeked around the corner of the post-office-box wall, and the dog trotted over to her, her burr-infested tail swishing back and forth enthusiastically.

"Good girl, Lucy." Reese bent down, scratching the dog behind her ears. The fur on the edges of her ears was matted, and the insides of her ears red.

"You named her?" Sam asked.

"We can’t just call her ’it,’" Reese pointed out.

"She’s not going to be here that long. We have to take her to the shelter." Sam didn’t like the way the dog narrowed her eyes at him, the whiskey-brown color turning to a sad shade of brown in the slanting light coming in from the windows.

Lucy switched her attention from Reese to Sam. She trotted over and pressed herself against his leg, looking up at him with those pleading eyes. Sam tried to resist the look. He was good at resisting it in women, and he figured resisting it in dogs should be even easier. It wasn’t.

"I posted her on Facebook already." Reese had sat in an empty chair, her laptop in her lap. Her bloodred fingernails clacked on the keyboard. "Hopefully, someone will claim her soon and she won’t have to go to the shelter. Jo said she helped you guys find a clue—she deserves special treatment. Anyway, check out the information I found."

"Information?" Sam tried to ignore the way Lucy was putting her head under his hand, trying to force him to pet her.

"Jo asked me to look into this gaming company that the campers work at. Lyah Games." She turned the computer screen toward him.

"And?" Sam asked. Reese was a fairly new addition to his staff, but Sam had already noticed she had above-average computer skills. Even though he couldn’t let her do field work, there was no rule about letting her use the Internet.

"The company is legit. And the people Jo had in her notes are listed on their ’about’ page. Well, most of them are." She angled the screen toward Sam, and he recognized five of the campers’ names on the list of the company’s officers:

Noah Brickey - CEO

Lynn Palmer - COO

Tara Barrett - CFO

Joshua Moore - Director, Software Engineering

Julie Swan - Director, Human Resources

"That’s most of them. Guess the others didn’t rate," Sam said.

"They do make video games just like they said, but check this out." Reese swiveled the laptop back to face her, tapped on the keyboard some more, then swung it back to Sam. The screen showed a bunch of figures that were like Greek to him.

"They’re not doing very well financially," she explained.

Sam squinted at the screen. "Is that what that means?" He frowned up at Reese. "Did you get this information legally?"

Reese rolled her eyes. "Of course. It’s a company prospectus. Public knowledge."

"That’s interesting," Jo said. "But why would that motivate one of them to kill her? Lots of companies are doing poorly, and he did say they just worked really hard to get a new release out."

"Good question. But least now we know they weren’t lying about their work," Sam said. "Whether or not they were lying about anything else remains to be seen."

Chapter Five

Sam’s office was large. It had three ten-foot-tall windows with round tops that looked out over the town toward the White Mountains. The floor was wide pine boards scuffed by decades of use. The walls were thin strips of oak wainscoting on the bottom and a municipal green paint on the top. The old oak-paneled door with smoked glass window was original to the post office. Only the gold-and-black lettering had been changed from Postmaster to Chief of Police.

His desk was a long double-wide partners desk made of oak. By the amount of staples embedded in it and the blue-ink postmark stamps that tattooed the surface, it seemed the post office must have used it to sort and stamp mail. Sam used it to spread out his case files on.

It was late in the afternoon. Sam was leaned back in his office chair with his hands clasped behind his head and his feet propped up on the desk, thinking about the girl in the river, when John called with the bad news.

"I got the time of death. Between 2:15 and 2:45 a.m. Your victim didn’t drown, though. No water in the lungs."

Sam swung his feet onto the floor, sitting upright in the chair. "It’s sounding like you don’t think she died by accident."

"Cause of death was a massive blow to the head. I don’t think she could’ve done that to herself. She could have fallen and slipped on the rocks, but she wouldn’t have hit with the kind of force needed to kill her right away. Knock her out, sure. But with no water in the lungs, she didn’t drown. That blow killed her." John paused to take a breath. "Not only that, but judging by the abrasions and contusions on her body, she was killed in one place and dragged to another. This was done post mortem. My guess is the killer was hoping she’d wash downriver, maybe even out of town, but she ended up getting stuck on the shallow sandbar instead."

As Sam digested this information, he glanced out the window to see the mayor, Harley Dupont, walking toward the building. A bad day was turning worse. There was no love lost between Dupont and Sam. Dupont had been a few years behind Sam all through high school. He hadn’t liked him back then, and he’d liked him even less when Dupont had returned to White Rock to practice law a few years after getting his fancy Harvard education.

He’d been a pain in Sam’s ass ever since he became mayor four years ago. Judging by the determined look on his face, Sam knew he was fixing to be a pain in his ass right now, too.

Sam hung up with John and went out into the main area to give Jo and Reese the bad news. "Looks like Lynn Palmer was murdered."

Jo didn’t look up from the pile of papers on her desk. A coffee mug sat half empty next to her, a jelly donut with one bite left beside that. "Not surprised. Already on it."

Reese wasn’t as seasoned or jaded—her eyes softened. Her face showed compassion, and her hands reached instinctively for the dog, which was seated beside her desk. Before she could say anything, the door opened and Dupont walked in.

His suit was impeccable, his reddish hair parted on the side and combed over the slightly balding spot in front. His beady brown eyes flicked from Reese to Sam to Jo, looking at them as if they were the broccoli side dish on his plate that his mother was about to force him to eat.

Lucy got to her feet and growled.

Dupont’s eyes jerked toward the dog, whose body was rigid, her attention focused on Dupont as if he were a threat. Sam’s estimation of the dog went up tenfold. She was a good judge of character.