Thirty-Five
PROLOGUE
The pain snapped him into consciousness. A sharp, steady throbbing, it began at his mouth and pulsed down his jaw and neck. He tried to moan—it was the kind of pain that made men moan—but couldn’t. The pain flared so badly after each attempt that he stopped trying.
He stayed quiet, listening to the ragged streams of air rushing through his nostrils. When he opened his eyes, he saw only darkness as something brushed against his lashes.
Cloth. Heavy and rough.
He was blindfolded.
His face felt damp. He wasn’t sure, but he thought it was blood, smeared across his chin. A thin line slipped down his cheek. The liquid was inside his mouth, too. On his tongue. Pooling in the crevices between his teeth.
Blood. He was certain now. He could taste it.
He lay flat on his back, his body stretched taut, arms at his sides. When he tried to move them, they wouldn’t budge. Rope was wrapped across his arms, legs, torso, and head, binding him tight. The pressure flattened him, ironing out the stooped shoulders that fifty years on the farm had given him.
He began to panic, breathing faster through his nostrils, a locomotive picking up speed. He tried to yell for help, parting his lips to scream. But his mouth wouldn’t open. His lips refused to separate, the pain there growing more extreme. He tried two more times, the hurt so bad it formed deep grunts in the back of his throat. Since the grunts had no way of escaping, he was forced to choke them back.
On his last attempt to scream, he realized what had happened. The pain brought clarity, sharpening his mind so that he understood the situation fully.
Someone had sealed his mouth shut.
He tried to scream once more, hoping the sheer strength of the sound would blast through the barrier his lips now created. The noise that emerged was familiar to him. He heard it all the time on the farm—the high-pitched squeal made just before the slaughter. Only this time the sound was coming from him.
He heard another noise, audible beneath his own desperate attempts to cry out.
Footsteps.
Someone else was there.
“It won’t be as bad if you hold still,” a voice in the darkness said.
The owner of the voice stood just behind his head. He felt warm breath on his ear. Fingers crawled along his chin and held his head in place.
Something pressed against his neck. Cold. Sharp. There was a moment of pressure, an unsettling suspense. Then the cold, sharp something pushed through his skin, entering his body, dividing flesh from flesh.
Blood poured out of him, spilling onto his shoulders, dampening his hair. He lay there helpless, feeling like a freshly gutted animal. Each beat of his heart sent another wave of blood coursing out of his body.
This time, the pain was unbearable. It wasn’t just at his mouth anymore.
It was inside him.
It was everywhere.
He began to scream. Not out loud, but in his head, the desperate sirens of noise ricocheting off the inside of his skull. The cold, sharp something remained in his neck, wriggling. The pain was so overwhelming it erased his thoughts, his silent screams. It kept erasing until there was nothing left in his head but pain.
And fear.
And, finally, darkness.
ONE
“Chief Campbell!”
Kat’s name rattled up Main Street as soon as she set foot on the sidewalk. She had just stepped out of Big Joe’s, a Starbucks wannabe, carrying an extra-large coffee, for which she had paid Starbucks’ prices. Normally, the concept of four-dollar java would have annoyed her. But it was a gray and frigid morning, and she needed the heat and clarity that coffee provided. Unfortunately, the sound of her name, now being shouted a second time, prevented her from taking that first, precious sip.
“Hey, Chief!”
The source of the yell was Jasper Fox, owner of a flower shop burdened with the name Awesome Blossoms. Despite the cold, perspiration glistened on his face as he barreled up the sidewalk. Huffing and puffing, he waited until he reached Kat to finish his sentence.
“I’ve been robbed.”
Kat, coffee cup suspended in front of her mouth, blinked with disbelief. In Perry Hollow, robberies happened about as often as solar eclipses. Its pine-dotted streets and exhaustingly quaint storefronts were mostly trouble-free.
“Robbed? Are you sure?”
Jasper had an absurd mustache that dripped from his face like two dirty icicles. Whenever Kat saw him, she thought of a walrus. That morning, the mustache drooped even lower than normal.
“I think I’d know,” Jasper said.
His hangdog expression told her he had been expecting a different response. Something action-packed and decisive. Maybe Kat could have lived up to his expectations had she been given a chance to take a sip of her coffee. Instead, she could only lower the cup and watch Jasper as he watched her.
She knew what he was thinking. She read it in his eyes. He saw a woman five feet tall, ten pounds overweight, and six years shy of middle age. A woman who darkened her blond hair in order to be taken seriously. A woman who had bags under her eyes because the boiler was on the fritz and her son was up half the night with a cough. Most of all, he saw a woman—with a badge pinned to her uniform—idling on the sidewalk when she should have been investigating the town’s first theft in more than a year.
Knowing all of this was going through Jasper’s brain, Kat asked,
