* * *

Twenty minutes later, Stef stared down at the body of one Cindy Pope, aged twenty-one. There was no way he could mistake the resemblance between the dead girl and his Jennifer. They were both brunettes, roughly the same age and build. If a person just glanced at the two, they might think they were the same woman.

“I wondered why there was a backpack in our trash bin.” Marie shook her very sensible head. “Teeny had gone out to take the paid bags out, and she found a very nice pack. And still full of her things.

Such a shame.”

“Well, it wasn’t aliens.” A no-nonsense voice spoke up. Stef turned to see a slender, petite female of maybe sixty years pursing her lips. She wore comfortable working clothes, and her long, steel-colored hair was in a braid that went halfway down her back. She stood beside Mel, her arms crossed over her chest. “They use lasers.”

“Yep.” Mel simply nodded his agreement and stared down at the woman like she was a font of knowledge.

Dear god, Mel was in love. Heaven help everyone.

“So, no laser, Doc?” Stef would leave the actual professional opinion to the man in the green scrubs. As far as he could tell, Caleb Burke might be just as certifiable as Mel, but at least he’d gone to medical school.

“Nah,” Caleb replied. “It was a knife.”

No shit. Stef felt his stomach turn. The girl was just a kid. She was lying on a slab in a clinic in a town she hadn’t been born in. A sick feeling came over him, panic threatening. He’d known this wasn’t over. How the hell had they caught up with her? “Same as Renard?” Caleb’s face was a grim mask as he looked back at Stef. “I believe so, though I didn’t see that body personally. From the way it was described to me, I have to think it’s a possibility. There’s no hesitation here. It’s clean. Mel and his friend, Cassidy Meyer, found her in the river out by 285.”

Mel let his hand drift to the small woman’s shoulder. “We were out on the alien highway. Our group was securing the recon platform.

Cassidy here was making sure the telescope was working. That’s when she saw the poor girl. We knew it wasn’t an alien thing right away. They would never kill a fertile, young female. They would probe her.”

The woman named Cassidy, who Stef deeply feared Mel had probably met on the Internet, nodded her agreement. “She’s a prime specimen for their fertility experimentations.” Nice. He’d found someone as crazy as he was.

Dr. Burke turned on the couple, his hand out as though seeking to ward off further paranoia. “Rachel is fine. I promise.” Cassidy waved her hand. “I know that, Doc. I don’t worry about it. I gave birth to two alien babies, and they’re just fine. Sweetest boys you ever saw. They both went into the Navy. Did their country and their mama proud. One of them has some weird ideas, but he’s a good man. They like beets, though. Couldn’t get enough of them when they were boys. We should tell Rachel to stock up.”

“Cassidy raised some fine kids. You wouldn’t ever know they’re half alien,” Mel said with a proud smile.

“I think that’s all we need, Mel,” Nate said, walking into the small room that currently served as the Bliss County Morgue. He was a familiar, welcome figure of authority. “And you, too, Marie. I appreciate everything. Logan can take the rest of your statements.

Y’all go on. Enjoy the festival.”

In a few seconds the room cleared, and Stef was left with Caleb and Nate.

“Is this what I think it is?” Stef couldn’t help the tight, almost violent way the question came out of his mouth.

Nate sighed. “I don’t know. I have to think we should consider the fact that what happened to Jennifer in Dallas is connected to this. We haven’t had a murder in Bliss County since…well, we’ve had several, but they were mostly self-defense. This is very different.” Caleb pointed to the body, his finger gesturing to the line of her throat. It was split neatly, the skin blue from the cold of the river and the fact that she’d left life behind hours before. “It’s a professional job. Neat, surgical. He didn’t do more than he had to do here, but look at her stomach.”

Burke pulled back the drab blue sheet that covered the girl. Her body was a map of blue and purple bruises.

“He beat her.” Stef couldn’t imagine it.

“He tortured her,” Caleb corrected. “There’s a systematic pattern to the bruising that tells me he was very controlled when he did this.

There’s nothing that hints at someone who was out of control. He didn’t touch her face. He went for soft parts of the body. He knew what he was doing.”

Nate was staring down at her wrists. “She was tied up.” Stef flinched at the chaffing on her wrists. She’d been tied too tightly. Caleb turned the wrist over. The underside was perfectly smooth.

“I would assume she was tied to a chair,” Caleb said clinically.

“Look, I’ve never worked forensics. I was a surgeon, but I know the human body, and I know a little about interrogation techniques. If you asked me, right now, I would tell you that this young woman was tortured. Given the relative restraint of the violence, I would suspect that the man torturing her was a professional in search of something, information most likely. When he couldn’t get it out of her, he sliced her throat in a manner that would result in a very quick death. He then tossed her body in the river, which is sitting at roughly fifty degrees.

That kind of cold masks time of death, and due to the depth and speed of the water flow, we can’t know where the crime took place. If Teeny hadn’t found the pack, we wouldn’t know if she’d been here or somewhere upriver.”

“Logan and I have a grid to search all along the valley. Zane’s down there now with Rye Harper. If we find anything that could tell us where the dump took place, it could help.” Nate’s eyes had taken on that steely look he got when he was doing serious police work. It wasn’t hard to remember Nate Wright had once been a top DEA agent. Zane had been the same. Bliss might be a small town, but it had its share of veteran law enforcement.

The door to the clinic’s waiting room opened, and one of those former law enforcement employees walked in. Laura Niles looked slightly flustered, an adjective Stef almost never used for the cool blonde. Her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes narrowed as they honed in on Nate.

“I have been looking all over the town for you, Sheriff.” Nate’s eyebrows climbed his forehead under the brim of his Stetson. “It’s been a long morning, Laura. Actually, I’m glad you’re here. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions. You used to profile for the FBI, right?”

Laura had been one of their top profilers until an incident that caused her to walk out on a high-paying job. She’d found her way to Bliss, and now the Harvard-educated psychologist rang up tourists buying gas at the Stop’n’ Shop. She ran her perfectly manicured hands through her blonde hair, and if she had any problem standing in a room with a corpse, she didn’t show it. She’d barely looked down at the body, but now she let her eyes roam over it, a cool professionalism falling over her like a cloak.

“You want my opinion about this?” She stared at the body as though it was a thing rather than former housing for a soul. Stef couldn’t quite wrap his brain around it, but then he hadn’t worked for years in a job where death was all around him. Laura, he’d discovered, had made a name for herself by hunting serial killers. It wasn’t surprising that she’d learned to distance herself.

Nate nodded, and the doctor stepped aside, allowing Laura access to the corpse.

She was quiet for a moment, and when she spoke, her tone was academic, far from the bright, friendly tones he associated with Laura.

Even her husky Southern accent seemed to fade in favor of a flat, professional cadence.

“Any signs of sexual trauma?”

Caleb shook his head. “None, but I ran a rape kit anyway. She was in the water for awhile.”

“We won’t know how long until we can estimate a time of death.” Nate was cradling his cell in his hand. His face was haggard, and the morning seemed to have worn him down. “I haven’t even figured out when she went missing. Her mother talked to her last week. She was out with her boyfriend.”

“I doubt it was a boyfriend,” Laura murmured.

“It’s too clean,” Caleb insisted.

Laura’s lips pursed in agreement. “Far too clean. This is an incised wound. It’s going to be hard to determine the exact weapon beyond the fact that it was a knife. The killer stood behind the victim.”

“I thought so,” Caleb commented. His gloved finger traced the line of the fatal wound. “It starts high and ends lower on the neck. It’s also deep.”

“Yes, if he had been in front of her the wound would be more shallow. This is professional. There’s no passion in this kill. It was business, pure and simple, and this man takes pride in his work.

There’s a neat efficiency about the kill. You’re looking for a hired killer.” She turned on her heels and frowned at Nate. “Which brings me to why I was looking for you.”

“Laura, it’s going to have to wait.” Nate crossed his arms over his chest. “Right now I need to call some of my old contacts at the DEA.

If this is a Colombian cartel, we need to know.”

“I doubt it, Sheriff, unless Bliss has become the battleground for a nasty little bit of mob warfare.”

Nate turned to Laura. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means I don’t think we’re a hot spot for criminal activity. You aren’t dealing with Colombians, but I would like to know why the hell the Russian mob is in town.”

* * *

The room was becoming slightly oppressive. Jen stared at the door to the clinic, wondering why it seemed like everyone in Bliss needed to parade in and out of what had just been designated the county morgue.