Chapter 1
The body lay face-up, staring sightlessly through the canopy of lush summer leaves at the cloudless turquoise sky. The pale skin was marred by a stream of tiny black ants that marched from the woods in two thin lines — one coming and one going. But that wasn’t the strangest thing about it. The strangest thing was the reason for the ants. A yellow goo that had run over the nose and down the cheeks, now caked dry and cracked.
The goo looked vaguely familiar, but in all his years as chief of police of the northern New Hampshire town of White Rock, Sam Mason hadn’t seen a body with yellow, crusty ant-attracting goo on its face. He guessed there was a first time for everything.
He squatted down beside his K-9 German Shepherd mix, Lucy. The smell of wet leaves and mildew rose from the ground as he carefully brushed the ants from the face.
Lucy sniffed, then looked up at Sam with her whiskey-brown eyes.
“What do you think it is?” he asked her.
Lucy sniffed again and wagged her tail once, uncertainly.
Jody Harris, his sergeant and right-hand colleague, stood on the other side of him. She bent to peer over his shoulder at the body.
“Looks like egg,” Jo said.
Sam frowned as twenty-two-year-old images of his daughters’ egg-encrusted bibs floated to mind. Now he knew why the goo looked so familiar. It was egg.
Sam glanced up into the trees, where a few tufted titmice and blue jays flittered around. Those birds didn’t have eggs big enough to produce what was on the victim’s face. But other birds nested in this area. Rare birds. Protected birds. And their eggs were big enough.
About a month ago, someone had discovered a colony of Great Bearded Owls in these woods. The discovery of the birds, which were thought extinct, had attracted all kinds of environmentalists, journalists and photographers to the area. They traipsed in and out of these woods now commonly referred to as “the owl zone.” The influx of people had been a nuisance in the small town, especially with the police force understaffed after the mysterious death of Officer Tyler Richardson.
Sam again glanced up into the trees, but he knew he wouldn’t see one of the owls. They were nocturnal.
“Owl eggs?” he asked.
“Not sure.” Jo squinted at the face again, her wide gray eyes taking in every detail. “Who do you think he is? I don’t know him from town. I guess that’s his truck out on the road. Didn’t recognize that either.”
“Probably one of the environmentalists.” Sam stood and walked slowly around the body. “I think I recognize him from Holy Spirits.”
Holy Spirits, a bar in town, had been converted from a decommissioned church. A hangout for locals, tourists would often find their way there, as it boasted the best burger in Coos County.
It was hard to tell, what with the egg and the ants all over the face, and the bloating, but Sam thought he recognized the corpse as one of the newcomers who had turned up since the discovery of the owls. And if his memory served him correctly, this guy was one of the more boisterous who routinely got into fights.
Had one of those fights ended in murder? The environmentalists were at odds with some of the locals, and with good reason. But how did he get out here? Most of the fights were fueled by alcohol, and Sam thought that would have happened in town. There was no evidence of drinking near the body, no crushed beer cans, no half-empty bottles.
“Where are the shells?” Sam asked as he slowly made his way around the body.
Jo tilted her head to look at the ground. “Good question.”
Sam looked up in the trees again. “It couldn’t have just fallen out of a nest, right?”
“If it had, the shells would be here.” Jo looked around the woods. “Unless an animal ate them or took them.”
The sound of voices pulled their attention away, and they turned to see Officer Kevin Deckard trudging through the woods alongside the medical examiner, John Dudley.
“Could you get any further out?” John asked, an exasperated look on his face. He didn’t like having to travel this far to examine the body.
“Sorry, John. This is where we found him,” Sam said.
John grunted while squatting beside the body. Setting his black case on the ground beside him, he pulled on latex gloves and started his cursory examination.
Kevin started photographing. Jo had already set out the yellow police markers, and Kevin started there, progressing inward to take photos immediately around the body.
“Looks like he was bludgeoned to death,” John said, pointing to what was left of the back of the victim’s skull after turning the head by the chin with his gloved hand.
“And looks like this is the murder weapon.” Kevin squatted near a thick branch about the size of a baseball bat that lay about ten feet from the body. “Killer didn’t try very hard to hide it.”
“Probably knew the bark was too rough and deeply grooved to hold a fingerprint,” Jo said.
“Yeah, but I guess he didn’t know we might be able to find some trace DNA on it,” Kevin said as he snapped photos of the branch.
“Someone must’ve been mad at him to swing that hard enough to kill,” Jo said.
“Or he came across something he shouldn’t have seen and someone had to silence him,” Sam suggested.
Kevin spread his arms. “What could he possibly have seen out here?”
“Who knows what goes on out in these woods.” Sam gazed into the trees, looking for evidence of anything out of place. What could be going on out here?
He didn’t see anything that indicated that it was a party spot or any other type of spot for the town teens, or any other type of spot for that matter. It was just woods. Empty woods that held endangered owls and were, therefore, now a protected area.
Sam’s eyes scanned to the west, where he could barely make out the skeleton of the new nine-story hotel real estate developer Lucas Thorne was constructing. Thorne had come to town a few years earlier, and had developed a second career as a thorn in Sam’s side ever since. Not only did Sam dislike the fact that he was buying up parcels of land and ruining the pristine New Hampshire mountains and landscape with his hotels, golf courses and restaurants, but he also suspected Thorne might be responsible for the influx of drugs that had caused the crime rate to rise in town.
“Thorne’s land abuts this parcel,” Sam said.
Jo followed his gaze and nodded. “Yep. That’s his big, ugly hotel.” Jo shared Sam’s dislike for the new construction.
“But this isn’t his land here,” Sam said.
“No.” Jo flipped through her notepad. “This land belongs to Jackson Pressler. His son called in the body. Said he found it while he was out walking his coonhound.”
Jackson Pressler, one of the town’s old-timers, owned acres of land. Family land from back in the day when it was cheap to buy up here. Now the old-timers were dying off, and their heirs sold the acres to Thorne. Sam guessed in another ten years he might be chief of a small city.
“How does Jackson feel about this owl protection?” Sam asked.
Jo shrugged. “No idea.”
“I do,” Kevin said from his position squatting on the ground, where he was taking photos of the ants. “He actually likes it. He doesn’t want his land developed. He’d never sell to Thorne, so he’s all for it being protected.”
“So he wouldn’t kill environmentalists for trespassing on it?” Sam asked.
Kevin pressed his lips together. “I don’t know about that. You know how ornery these old-timers can get.”
“Yeah, but Jackson’s the type who would own up to it,” Sam said.
John snorted. “He might even be proud of it.”
While they processed the body, Sam led Lucy around the crime scene. She didn’t need to be on a leash. She knew to stay close to him. As they walked the perimeter, Sam thought about the egg.
Bobcat, lynx, raccoon, coyote, skunk, and bear all inhabited the northern New Hampshire forest. These predators ate all kinds of livestock. Many of them loved eggs, but Sam had never known them to eat the shells. Maybe the eggshells had been tossed away from the body. But what was an egg doing there in the first place?
As he walked with Lucy, his eyes scanned the ground looking for bits of shell, animal scat or anything that simply shouldn’t be there.
“Find anything?” Jo had come to stand beside him.
Sam shook his head.
“What do you make of the egg?” Jo asked.
“I doubt it just fell out of a tree and smashed on his face. Did John find any shell under the body?”
Jo shook her head.
“So that leaves one explanation. The egg was cracked on his face on purpose. It’s a message,” Sam said.
They both looked toward the hotel skeleton in the distance.
Jo’s gray eyes assessed him over the tops of her polarized Oakley Standard Issue sunglasses. “You think it was Thorne? Why would he want to kill an environmentalist?”
Sam shrugged. “No one knows how many of these owls are really here or the range of their territory. And you know how these environmentalists are, always pushing to expand the protected area. Thorne’s land is close. Maybe he wanted to make sure the protected area didn’t get any closer.”
“And where is the egg shell?” Jo asked.
“Maybe the killer realized we could get a print off it,” Sam said. “Though I doubt Thorne has thugs that smart.”
Jo thought for a minute. “Maybe it was our graffiti artist.”
When the environmentalists had flocked to town several weeks earlier, someone had seen fit to spray-paint “Save the Owls” in fluorescent orange on the side of one of Thorne’s existing hotels. They were still looking for the painter.
Thorne had not been happy about the graffiti. Neither had Sam. Though he agreed about saving the owls, the three-foot-tall letters on the side of the hotel just outside of town gave off a city vibe he didn’t want to encourage.
“You mean you think Thorne took revenge for the vandalism?” Sam asked. “Nah, that’s not his style.”
“Are we going to talk to him?” Jo asked.
“I am. You’re going to go back to the station to find out who our victim is.” Sam whistled for Lucy, who trotted to his side, and headed down the path toward his truck, feeling the weight of Jo’s eyes on his back.
He knew she was disappointed that she wasn’t coming along. Sam and Jo had worked closely for four years, interviewing suspects together, talking over cases together, and solving cases together. But now things were different.
Sam’s stomach sank. He didn’t want to lose her trust. It made him feel empty and lonely. Even though their relationship was strictly business, Jo had become much more than a partner. But he couldn’t let her come along to talk to Thorne. Not now.
He didn’t trust Thorne not to spill what he’d discovered about Sam’s past, and he couldn’t burden Jo with it. Not yet, anyway.
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