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THE DEPUTY LED Sherriff Clay Spears down the embankment beside the road. On the highway above them, after-work traffic was just tapering off. A dawdling line of cars still thrummed past the traffic cones set up by officers to section off one lane for the couple of cruisers and ambulance attending the scene. Clay stopped to examine the mud patterns in the damp earth, lit blue and red. He could see what had happened. One vehicle had bumped another off the highway, then followed it down to where it crashed on its roof between the embankment and the forest. The crashed truck was still there, a pale-blue pickup with two suitcases strapped into the back. Clay’s boots crunched on grass as he followed the deputy to the third suitcase, which must have been wedged between the other two and popped free on impact. It was lying on its side at the base of a nearby tree. Clay went over and crouched carefully next to the bag so as to preserve a set of shoeprints in the mud at the front.

A woman’s headless body was curled inside a vacuum-sealed bag, the flesh cream-colored and run with veins. From where he crouched, Clay could see a tattoo on the woman’s hip, another on her collarbone. The body he’d seen at the marina only an hour before had been well covered in them. Clay had stood at the edge of the concrete ramp and watched the truck being hauled up slowly, water gushing from its open bed, a crab scuttling off the hood and making a run for it back down the ramp. The sight of the duct tape securing the man’s hands to the steering wheel had flipped the first domino in Clay’s mind, and now a veritable cascade of dread was ticking and ticking along, one aspect after the other.

The last time Clay had dealt with two bodies in one day had been when Mitchell Cline moved into town. Cline’s brief reign of terror had brought gunfire and fear and pain to Clay’s very own doorstep, but Cline was long gone, and Clay had thought it was safe. There had been a spate of disappearances a few months earlier, but in the absence of any witnesses willing to sit down and put their name on a missing persons report, Clay assumed those folks had just shuffled on. But maybe not. Maybe another monster had moved in. His thoughts went now to April and Joe. Their safety. The deputy was standing at his side, watching Clay chewing his lip, his hands on his hips and his face hard.

“I’ve asked my boys to hold off on picking up the shell casings,” the deputy offered. “There’s so many, we’ve run out of evidence bags. I’ve sent someone back to the station.”

“Hmm,” Clay grunted.

“They go back into the forest a ways,” the deputy said, pointing into shadows where the forest thickened. “Four people total. Seems like two people got chased by another two through there, but not far. Must have let them go or lost them. There aren’t any more bodies. We checked.”

“Probably didn’t want to leave the trucks and the body unattended for too long,” Clay mused. “It was broad daylight. The two chasers thought it best to hightail it before someone got curious about the glass on the road or the sound of the gunshots and came down the embankment.”

“You think it’s a road rage thing?” the deputy asked. “The blue truck pissed off somebody, who bumped them down here, then had a shoot-out?”

“Doesn’t explain the body in the suitcase,” Clay noted.

The young deputy nodded, still pondering.

“Gang thing then.”

“Probably,” Clay sighed.

They parted. Clay took out his flashlight and walked on through the forest. Ahead of him, dozens of tiny yellow flags marked the locations of shell casings or footprints. He walked on past it all, until the light and activity faded and he was alone.

He was about to turn back when his flashlight beam glinted off something in the dimness under the canopy. He went over and picked up a sleek gold watch with a filigree-patterned face. He held it, trying unsuccessfully to deny the awful recognition blossoming in his brain.

It was Susan’s watch.