Chapter 1

Detective Nicholas Saint stood in the bathroom of the Lapeer County Sheriff's station, hands gripping one of the three sinks lining one wall, staring at himself in the mirror.

His eyes were bloodshot and bleary, evidence of too much Jack Daniels and too many sleepless nights. His hair was mussed from running his hands through the thick black strands in frustration. He grimaced at the sour taste of cigarettes and over cooked coffee in his mouth.

This was too much. He had come home to the town of Lapeer, a city just east of Flint, Michigan, to get away from big city crime. Dealing with stoners and street racing, the occasional bar fight or breaking and entering was a relief after working homicide in Las Angeles as he had been doing since he got his detective's badge ten years ago. One year ago, he'd had enough.

Burned out and hurting after a shoot out with some teenaged gang bangers, he had put in his resignation and gotten in touch with Lapeer County Sheriff's Department about a job. He had packed his bags, loaded up his 2003 Ford Mustang, his pride and joy, and came home to Michigan.

Yeah, he had lost the earthquakes and the mud slides and had gained the blizzards, cold weather and tornados. He had exchanged Hollywood stars and wannabes for rednecks and hicks. And had done it with a smile. At the time it had seemed like a good change. Now he wasn't so sure.

Two months ago, he had responded to a call for a detective to an abandoned farm house on a well traveled back road. That had been the first murder he had seen since returning home. And it had brought all the old memories, all the old feelings of helplessness back.

He had hoped that it was a burglary gone bad, or a domestic situation that had taken that final extra step. A one time thing where they would investigate, find the husband or lover standing over the body with a bloody knife and mark it down as solved so he could go back to his investigating the bottom of his Jack Daniel's bottle.

Even after seeing the body, seeing the atrocities that had been done to it, he still clung stubbornly to that hope. The condition of the body had been bad, so bad that fingerprints had almost been impossible. There were no teeth left in the mouth, she had been beaten so severely. Identification of the victim still hadn't been made. And the case was still under investigation. Jack had been put on hold.

Still, he had hoped for an isolated incident. Maybe some deviant from Detroit dropping off a body in a deserted area. Multiples like this happened in big cities, not in a community like Lapeer.

Until last night, he had clung to that hope.

He had bought an older house on the outskirts of the farming community outside of city limits and was working on the repairs himself. It was soothing and mind numbing, pounding nails was damn good therapy. Maybe he should recommend it to the department shrink next time he talked to her. It was much better than the notebooks that they wanted him to keep, the mind exercises, the deep breathing exercises. So much simpler than the exercises in denial that he was so good at.

He was on call. Well, being one of just three detectives in the department, he was almost always on call. He hated the beeper that he carried around with him, slept with, showered with, ate with. But it was part of the job. When it had gone off, he had just about been tired enough to be able to sleep without laying in bed for most of the night tossing and turning. He had been at work this morning at 4 am and had made definite plans to go to bed early tonight, to try and make up for all the sleep that he never got. When it went off he had wanted to throw the damn beeper across the room.

Instead, he reached for his phone, automatically dialing the number even though it was first and only one of two numbers on his auto dial. First being the precinct, second being the take out pizza joint down the road. The dispatcher had answered almost immediately and he cringed as he recognized her voice. Allison Trammel was a good dispatcher but she had a voice to match her looks, overblown and strident. She was good at her job, staying calm no matter what happened. But he would rather talk to his ex mother-in-law than listen to her voice.

He could hear the excitement behind the calm tones of her voice. If calm tones meant Minnie Mouse on speed, of course. And then what she was saying cut through his preoccupation with her voice.

"Nicky, we got another DB. Out on Five Lakes Road, nearest cross roads would be Bowers and Five Lakes. They need you out there ASAP." He thought he heard her voice crack with excitement. "Think it could be the same thing as the last?"

He shook his head. Did she actually say "DB"? Next thing he knew, she was going to be talking about unknown subjects and perpetrators.

"Now how would I know that Alli?" he said calmly. "I haven't been at the scene yet." He let a hint of a sense of humor he didn't feel lace his tone. "Besides, doll, you'll probably know all about it before I do. You dispatchers get all the good gossip."

He cringed at the hee-hawing laugh and hung up, ran to his bathroom and cleaned up quickly. Then he threw a shirt on over the old jeans he was still wearing and added a leather jacket that was ancient when it had been passed down to him in college. He tucked his Beretta 9mm into it's shoulder holster, feeling more normal with the added weight and grabbed his car keys and left.

He took back roads all the way there, kicking up a huge trail of dust behind his dark blue mustang enjoying the play even though he knew he would be doing hell on his paint job with gravel chips. He even used the bubble light that had sat on the back seat of his car in it's original plastic since he had gotten it. He arrived on the scene in fifteen minutes, something the Sheriff would have had his ass for, considering he lived some twenty miles away. It was hard to mistake which house he was looking for, three patrol units were parked in front, lights going and one state police car was sitting up close to the house. What the state boys were doing there, he had no idea.

He flashed his badge at the cop directing traffic and radioed in to dispatch that he had arrived. The he drove halfway onto the grass, parked behind one of the patrol cars, got out and took a good look at where he was.

It was a nice area, houses were older but not in too bad of repair, corn fields surrounding three of them into a tiny oasis. Across the road was a church, one of the smaller ones that just seemed to sprout up in any area that had names that no one could pronounce much less remember. Down the road about a quarter of a mile was a huge farm house and barn. Horses were grazing peacefully in a large pasture. Over the sounds of police radios and men's voices, he could hear the distant blare of a train whistle. Not the kind of area that you would figure for a murder scene. He turned to look at the property and quickly changed that opinion.

The house was deserted, listing drunkenly on its foundation. The front porch was crumbling with shoots of wild grass pushing through the cement. The yard was about an acre plot covered with tufts of weeds pitted with camouflaged holes destined to break someone's ankle. Behind the house, almost hidden in the weeds, was a decrepit outbuilding. The door was hanging open, listing on one hinge. He could see a mountain of junk, part of a washing machine and maybe what looked like a dishwasher inside. The shed itself looked ready to cave in without the least provocation. The roof was bad, rafters could be seen like ribs through the gaping holes in the shingles.

The house itself was a conglomeration of added on rooms. Very badly added on rooms to his critical eyes. Some windows were broken out and a TV antenna was hanging off the roof looking like a stiff wind would send it tumbling. There was a huge oak tree sitting out front shading the front of the house from the late afternoon sun for at least another half an hour before the sun would be below it's branches.

As he approached the house, stepping around a pile of torn open boxes that someone had just thrown on the porch, he couldn't help but notice the cops just standing around, staring at trash inside the house and bullshitting. He saw one uniformed cop outside, stringing crime scene tape. Must be the rookie, he thought, shaking his head in disgust. He nodded at a couple of the men, smiled at a female cop that looked as if she would rather be cleaning up the holding cell than in that room and took a look around.

The living room was small, tilted hard wood floor that at one time had probably been pretty classy was now bleached out and in bad need of sanding and finishing.

Someone had painted the room a very unfortunate shade of dark blue, a white six inch stripe keeping the blue from touching the ceiling. He could see down a dark hallway into what he thought was the kitchen. Ducts from a freestanding furnace were bored into the walls which were painted orange. The orange wouldn't have been bad if it had been a color that was describable. This wasn't. The same hall held a set of stairs that went to the second floor. They were narrow and tilted and looked as if they would collapse under the least amount of weight.

He could smell the body before he saw her. She was off of the main room in what could have been a small bedroom or den. In a clutter of old moving boxes and some abandoned ancient cheap furniture was a small figure barely discernable as female. She was nude, left laying in the bright spotlight of sun from one of the two windows. The sun had done a number on her body, effectively hurrying the decomposition and leaving the house filled with a number of creepy crawlies. Not to mention the smell. Please God, don't mention the smell.

There was nothing like the smell of a decomposing body be it animal or human. It was heavy and cloying. And no matter how often you smelled it, it came as a shock to the system and to the gag reflex.

He took a last deep breath through his mouth, trying not to let the taste of the odor settle on his tongue and ducked into the room. He wouldn't breath that deep again until he was out of this room. And then he took a look around.

His first impression was body dump. There were no blood stains in the cheap, tattered carpeting, no body fluids left from bowels, bladder or stomach. There was no violence, torn drapes, marks on the walls that could have been made as recently as this body had been left. There was no blood spatter left from a knife or wound. There was nothing was left to say that this was the primary crime scene. He walked around the body, careful to stay back away and not contaminate evidence.

Pictures were already forming in his mind as to what may have been done to her. It amazed him that, even after a year away, old habits died hard. He could still draw it out of himself and force himself to see.

There was really nothing left of the person she had been once here. What skin wasn't ripped up by the killer was either too bloated or black from decomposition to be recognizable. The edges of the wounds were tattered and maggots were squirming in her flesh.

He could see an earring in her right ear, a gold and diamond stud that was too big to be real. Her other ear was missing. Her face had been beaten and was as bloated as the rest of her, teeth gone in her mouth, some broken leaving yellowish stubs in the blackened gums. She had been beaten very badly before death.

Her arms were twisted in back of her and her legs were sprawled out, parted wide. Patches on her arms and legs had been sliced off and part of her chin looked chewed away. Insects and small animals had been working on her for a while. There was no clothing, no purse, nothing in the room that looked like it had belonged to the victim. She had been left like trash. Definitely a body dump.

He walked back into the other room, his mind already sorting details into nice neat file folders in his head. Questions to ask came first. He stopped by one of the uniformed sheriff deputies that he had worked with before.

"Hey, Sam."

Sam Miller had been on the job for a while. He was a good road officer, knew the rules of crime scenes and could shoot the shit with anyone. If he hadn't been so dedicated to a life of no strings and smooth sailings, he would have made a hell of a politician. He turned away from his partner, a good looking blonde with big eyes and a body that made the uniform look as if it were made by some high class fashion designer specifically for her.

Sam grinned at Nick and nodded back at the blonde. "My new partner," the grin turned lascivious. "The Gods in charge finally decided to give me someone who could keep me awake during patrol. Just too bad now that, with her in the car, I can't keep my mind on speeders and tickets." He guffawed as if had said something extremely funny.

"Yeah, too bad you'd probably put her to sleep from boredom if she ever gave you the time of day," Nick said, nodding at the blonde and reading her name tag. "M Parsons". She didn't look new to the job, didn't bat an eye at off colored jokes being made around her by cops that used humor as a defense mechanism against the violence they saw on a daily basis. She said nothing about at all about the smell. She didn't even wrinkle her lovely little nose at it. And she didn't have that shell shocked look of a rookie seeing evidence of what evil was and did to it's smaller and weaker prey. Interesting. He'd seen men twice her size turn green and puke at the smell, much less the sight of what a dead body could look like. He'd seen more reaction from Sam then what he was getting from her.