A book in the Forensic Mysteries series, 2007

CAMERYN MAHONEY WAS surprised to see the blood on her hand.

She’d always been careful to tug on a pair of latex gloves, the whisper-thin barrier she wore every time she processed a body. Today’s accident had been worse than anything she’d experienced thus far as assistant to the coroner. The decedent had been a young man-one Benjamin Baker, organ donor. Sixteen and dead, with Christmas only weeks away. In a bizarre twist, the car’s crumpled radio had played on, some country version of “Jingle Bells.” She’d listened to it as she picked through the wreckage, trying not to step in the blood that seeped from his gaping neck into an ever-widening arc across the snow.

Now, sitting in her driveway outside her own home, her car in neutral, Cameryn stared at the red mark on her hand. There must have been a tiny tear in her glove that had allowed the fluid to seep in. With the lightest touch of her fingertip, she traced the silver dollar-sized stain, a scarlet web whose threads disappeared into her finger line. Her own coroner stigmata.

“Cammie-come into the kitchen. You’re going to catch your death from the cold! Do you hear me, girl? Come inside where it’s warm.”

Startled, Cameryn looked up to see her Irish grandmother standing less than ten feet away on their back porch, the door held ajar by her hip. Stout and whitehaired, she scooped the air with a thick arm. Her mammaw’s lips were pressed into a frown, and her pale eyes, set deep into her face, were lit with worry.

Cameryn rolled down the window. “In a minute, Mammaw,” she said. “I just need a little time to myself right now. I’m… thinking.”

“But it’s almost noon,” her grandmother protested. “Since the crack of dawn you’ve been out looking at Lord-knows-what. Gruesome, horrible things. A dead body before the day’s even begun. It’s wrong, is what it is.”

“Mammaw, it was just a car accident.”

Where some older women had skin that wrinkled like parchment, her mammaw’s thick skin sagged into deep grooves, especially on the sides of her mouth, suggesting a perpetual frown. “Come inside. Have some lunch. Or breakfast, if you’d prefer. I’ll make you whatever you want. Food heals the soul.”

“Thanks, Mammaw. It’s just, right now, I want to be alone. I’ll be there soon, though, okay? I promise.”

Her grandmother shook her head and closed the door so that the plastic Christmas wreath swayed against the glass until it lost momentum and stopped. Pressing a button, Cameryn put the window up, and she returned to her own personal cocoon. She sat, staring, her mind drifting once again to the mangled wreckage she’d discovered on the road.

Blood. There had been so very much blood. She pressed her fingertips into her closed eyes, but the images still played behind her lids.

The gaping hole of Benjamin’s neck, the bulb of his vertebrae gleaming white, the feathers of steam from where the still-warm liquid met cold asphalt, the geometry book peppered with blood. Centrifugal force had caused Benjamin’s decapitation. Patrick Mahoney, Cameryn’s father and Silverton’s coroner, had explained this as they’d studied the remains. The car’s door had sheered off, and the body lay half in, half out of the mangled vehicle. Benjamin’s fingers curled against the snow, as if he were playing a keyboard.

“This young man didn’t wear his seat belt. A car protects the body in a crash, and without a restraint- well, you see what can happen,” her father told her.

Cameryn nodded. She’d already taken her first sweep of pictures. Propping the camera on her hip, she said, “At least it was quick.”

“He never knew what hit him.” Her father sighed as he surveyed the body, jotting notes in his red plastic binder. “We’d better get a sheet.”

“I’ll do it. I packed one in the car.”

She turned to go but found she suddenly couldn’t move. Patrick had drawn her into a tight embrace, so close she could smell the wood smoke embedded in his black regulation parka. The edge of the binder bit into her back.

She felt swallowed up, suffocated by her father’s sheer physical size. A tall man with a barrel chest and heavy brows, he had both a build and coloring so different from her own. The once-red hair was still dense as grass, but age was turning it a snowy white. His ruddy complexion made his blue eyes seem glacial. She, on the other hand, had inherited her mother’s dark curly hair, warm, golden skin, and brown eyes, as well as her mother’s diminutive height.

“Dad,” she said into his parka, “I can’t breathe. And we need to start looking.”

“Sorry.” He released her with a rough kiss to the top of her head. “You’re right, there’s still a job to do. I need to find the rest of this guy.” Squinting, he scanned the army of trees. “It is not going to be easy.”

“I know.”

The car had crashed on the Million Dollar Highway, a narrow, twisting two-lane road that folded back on itself like tossed-away ribbon. To the west, Colorado ’s San Juan Mountains loomed above them, while to the east, the ground cut away into a deep valley riddled with spruce. “The problem is,” her father murmured, “that head could be anywhere. I’ve seen them sail a quarter mile or more, which means it could have gone down the mountainside. If it did, we’re screwed.”

“We can at least figure out the trajectory.”

“How’s that?”

She told him the amount of blood contained in a skull and how, once it became airborne, blood trailed from the base of the neck like paint until the head landed back on the ground. Find the blood and track it to the end, following the splatter like a trail of crumbs. Her father seemed impressed, asking if she’d learned that from her forensic books. Unlike her grandmother, he approved of her dream of becoming a medical examiner.

“That’s good, Cammie, but reality is harder than theory. I’ll do the search while you stay with the decedent until the sheriff arrives.” He looked at his watch, tapping its face with his fingertip. “Something must have happened to hold up Jacobs. He should’ve been here by now.”

It took a moment for her to process what her father was saying. A chill crept through the soles of her cowboy boots and up past her faded jeans until it spread all the way into her chest. Once again, he was shutting her out. Before, they’d worked their cases as a team, but lately he’d been finding excuses to leave her at home. If she hadn’t taken the call about this morning’s crash, she suspected she would have been left behind on this one, too. “Wait,” she protested. “I don’t want to stay here with the body-I want to go with you.”

“And I want you to stay here. Do the inventory, okay?”

At that moment a semi appeared, blowing black smoke from an upright exhaust pipe. She heard a squeal as the driver engaged the brakes. The man, riding high in his cab, goggled the wreckage. Her father’s disgust deepened when the man honked his horn. “Keep moving! ” Patrick yelled, his arm circling like the blades on a windmill. “Go on!” Black smoke belched from the truck’s exhaust pipe as it strained to regain momentum up the steep hill. “People always want a bloody show. Cammie, get that sheet. This fellow shouldn’t be gawked at. I’ll be back as quick as I can.”

“We’ll go twice as fast with me searching.”

“I’ll take it from here,” he said pleasantly.