Kingdom Come Read Free

those two makeshiftfences. I rubbed my forehead, a sense of frustration starting in my stomach.
    â€œDamn it!” Grady cursed, apparently reaching the same conclusion.
    â€œHow far is the road?” I asked.
    As if to answer my question, an SUV lumbered past, visible through the trees on the far side. There was a road maybe thirty feet beyond the other side of the creek.
    In a righteous world, the boot prints would have climbed out the opposite bank and led right to that road. In a righteous world, there’d be tire tracks off the side of the road over there, tire tracks we could attempt to trace.
    No one had to tell me it wasn’t a righteous world.
    I looked at the creek again, then went back to look at the boot prints. The prints with the toes facing the creek definitely overlaid the prints with the toes facing away. Unless the killer had walked backward in both directions—one way carrying a dead body—he hadn’t come from the farm.
    Grady stood there shaking his head. I decided,
Screw it
, and shucked my boots and rolled up my pant legs. At least this suit was a trendy wash-and-wear and didn’t require dry cleaning.
    â€œYou don’t have to do that.” Grady sounded uneasy.
    I ignored him. If there was one thing I knew for sure about being a woman on the police force, it was that you didn’t turn up your nose at getting physical or messy. You didn’t wait for some guy to do it. If you wanted respect, you had to be willing to jump into the shit headfirst.
    But, goddamn, this sucked. I waded into the ice watermasquerading as a creek and followed the bank to the chicken-wire obstruction.
    â€œAnything?” Grady called to me as I ran my hand along the chicken wire and stepped deeper into the creek.
    When I reached the middle, the frigid water was streaming painfully around my upper thighs.
    â€œDamn,” I muttered as I felt along the fence.
    A few inches below the surface of the water the wire ended. To be sure, I sent one leg forward on a foray. It swept through nothing but water. No wonder our Jane Doe had gotten wet. The killer had pushed her under these barriers and then likely followed by ducking under himself.
    â€œBastard walked through the creek,” I said, my voice shaking with cold and not a little disgust. “He came in and out under one of these fences, but he had to leave the water somewhere. We need to search the banks upstream and down from here. We’ll find his tracks.”
    I sounded confident. And I did believe what I was saying. We were talking about a man, after all, not a superhuman, not a ghost.
    I was wrong.



CHAPTER 2
    Fistful of Seeds
    I sat at my desk and stared at the situation board I’d set up right behind me. The mug in my hands was warm, but its heat ended where porcelain met skin. Nothing could penetrate the chill I lived with. It was psychological, or so my therapist had said, the one they made me see after what went down in New York. That didn’t make it any damn less unpleasant.
    Always so cold, deep down inside. Moving back here to a simpler life was supposed to change that.
    The property survey map in front of me had been marked up with permanent pens and Post-it notes. It’d been only twenty-five hours since I’d pulled up to that barn yesterday in the predawn hours to get my first look at Jane Doe. By now I knew this case wasn’t going to be one of the quick ones.
    The teams had crawled all over the countryside yesterday. Grady even called in reinforcements from Harrisburg. We’dcarefully gone up and down that creek bed for several miles in either direction. The killer’s tracks never emerged from it.
    Which led me to one inescapable conclusion, and I’d marked it on the map.
    As for our Jane Doe, we hadn’t found her coat and shoes. The coroner was almost certain her death was caused by asphyxiation. The autopsy would reveal more. The time of death was a bit of a