Trevor’s cell phone woke him, but it took him a few seconds to orient himself. With one eye open he noted the time on the hotel room’s standard issue alarm clock. Three a.m. Was that the right time? He snatched the phone from Lara’s bedside table. “Kinsey.” He didn’t bother to look at the caller ID.

“It’s Ethan.”

“What are you doing up at this hour?” First he calls at 7 a.m., now in the middle of the goddamn night. Trevor would never catch up on his sleep.

“I have a dead body I think you’ll want to see. The Captain called me about forty minutes ago. I’m at the scene now.” Voices sounded in the background, as did the racket of the cicadas and tree frogs doing their mating call.

As much as he wanted to get into Homicide, he couldn’t leave Lara, but he might not have the chance to work a case with Ethan for a while. Lara rolled over in bed. “What’s so special that you need to drag me into the mix?”

“A Native American woman was found in the woods. And get this. She was scalped.”

Trevor bolted upright and flicked on the nightstand light. “Did you say scalped?” His nerve endings fired rapidly.

“Yeah. There’s something weird going on with the Seminoles around here. I figured you’d want to know.”

“No shit.” At the nearby desk he located a pad and a Sheraton Hotel pen. “Give me the address.” Ethan gave him the directions to the scene, but as soon as he heard it was at the Reservation, he only wrote down the final few turns. “Got it. See ya in a few.”

Lara would either be pissed he dragged her out in the middle of the night, or she might actually want to go. No telling with her. Regardless, she’d be coming with him, like it or not.

He shook her shoulder. She rolled over and placed a hand over her eyes. “What?”

He pulled on pants and a shirt while she roused. “We need to go someplace.” He spoke slowly.

She shot straight up. “What’s wrong?”

He unplugged her batteries from the wall and brought them over to her. Once she was set up to hear, he relayed what Ethan had said.

“I can be ready in five.”

True to her word, Lara was dressed in about three. The trip to the crime scene was near where the Seminoles held the Snake festival.

“Seems like yesterday we were here,” Lara said, lowering the window. The damp, cool breeze helped wake him up.

“Try three weeks.” In his mind, they’d interviewed Billie Jumper’s wife a lifetime ago.

With Ethan’s instructions in hand, Lara directed him down several winding roads toward a park. Flashing lights led him the rest of the way. He cut the engine. “Let me speak to Ethan first.”

“I’m coming with you.”

He pressed his lips together, debating how to convince her to stay put. Lara touched his arm and his mind stopped working. “I won’t be long.” He hoped.

“Do you think I’m going to throw up if I see a dead body? Remember I deal with corpses all the time.”

“Your dead don’t have flesh on the bones.”

“Sometimes they do. Remember Tanya Dansler?”

“True, but this will be different.” He hadn’t mentioned the scalping.

She slapped the dash. “This isn’t my first crime scene, you know.” She pushed open the truck door and slid out. He hopped out too. She came around to his side and planted her hands on her hips. “I’m no rookie. I’ve helped out on my share of murders during my tenure at the University. Please don’t treat me like I’m incompetent.”

Her words stung. “I never said you weren’t capable.”

“Locking me in the car is about the same thing to me.”

She stepped so close he could smell her sweet scent. She turned him inside out, which wasn’t helping when he needed to stay objective about a crime scene. Her need for independence would get her in trouble some day. He recalled her voicing concern about not living up to some mythical high standard.

“Fine. I don’t have time to get into a lengthy debate anyway.” She probably participated in mockups of murder scenarios, which weren’t like the real thing. Truth was he couldn’t exactly lock her in the car. “Come on then.”

He grabbed her hand as they made their way through the dense forest. Fallen logs and vines created an obstacle course. Had it not been for the many flashlights lighting the area, one of them might have stumbled.

Ethan was directing the Crime Scene Unit when he and Lara approached. “Tell me what you know,” Trevor said.

Ethan acknowledged Lara with a nod. “Woman was Julie Bowman, aged thirty-two.”

“Who found her?”

His brother pointed to an elderly gentleman in a bathrobe. “He said his dog was outside barking up a storm, and when he came out to investigate, he found Julie and then called us.”

“No witnesses to the actual murder, I take it.”

“Nope. There are some freshly broken tree branches, along with heel marks on the path, if you can call anything around here a path. Whoever did this dragged the body in from the road.”

“Any identifiable footprints?”

“One, maybe. We’re taking a cast of it now. Good thing it rained this afternoon or we’d have squat. Mud has a way of preserving prints.”

Trevor motioned Ethan for his flashlight and shone the light on the victim. “There’s a lot of blood around her head. Was the scalping the cause of death?” He admired the fact that Lara hadn’t made a sound when she heard what happened.

“I don’t know yet, but the examiner said the victim bled out. That doesn’t mean it was the cause of death though.”

“Christ. The girl must have been alive when he scalped her or there wouldn’t be so much blood.”

“True.”

Lara stiffened at his side. She stepped in front of Trevor and faced Ethan. “Do we know if Julie was from the Reservation?”

“She was.”

He didn’t like any of this. Hope of finding the rest of his men alive diminished with each Native American killed. This case was getting weirder by the moment.

Lara leaned into him. “Sensible women don’t go out alone at night in a dark, creepy park.” She kept her voice low.

“You go out running by yourself.”

“Yes, but this woman doesn’t look like a runner. Look at her shoes.”

Trevor pointed the beam on the victim again. “You might be right.”

He handed the flashlight back to his brother. “Did you hear mention of anyone else being scalped in this neighborhood? Could this be a ritual of some kind?”

Ethan shrugged. “I have my men canvassing the neighborhood now. I’m reluctant to let anyone know how she died. I don’t want to cause a panic.”

“Not to mention the media frenzy if they get a hold of this story. There could be a slew of copycats.”

“You got that right.”

Derek Wolfe, Ethan’s partner, jogged up to them. “I spoke with Julie’s neighbor.” He consulted his pad. “A Mrs. Natalie Culver. She said Julie and Charlene Eason went for a walk together almost every night.”

“Mrs. Culver see them tonight?” Ethan asked.

“Yes. They stopped by her place before they left. Julie’s a nurse, and Mrs. Culver was experiencing some pain in her legs and called her.”

“So let’s talk to this Charlene,” Ethan said.

“I tried, but she’s not home.”

Trevor’s gut soured. “Is her car at her house?”

“Yes.”

Ethan held up a finger and stepped away from the group to direct the Medical Examiner to the victim. He rejoined them a few minutes later. “If the two women were together, where the hell is Charlene?”

Derek shrugged. “My guess is he’s got her.”

Ethan whipped out his phone and punched one number—most likely the department’s.

“It’s Ethan Kinsey.” He relayed the need for a battering ram to break down the door of the missing woman’s home.

Ethan and Derek moved away from him and Lara, their conversation lost among the leaves crunching under the men’s feet.

She wrapped her arms around her shoulders. “This case reminds me of the Sanchez case.”

“How so?” he asked.

“Think about it. If this Julie woman wasn’t alone, then it’s the same situation. One person goes missing and a second victim dies. Maybe the killer is only looking for one particular type of person. Anyone nearby is killed.”

He hadn’t considered the possibility before. “George Sanchez wasn’t scalped, nor were any of the other victims.”

“You don’t know that. Did you ever find Tanya Dansler’s head? Maybe the killer scalped her.”

“God, help us.”

The sun beat down on Lara as she walked across the Fair Lawn Cemetery, each step taking more effort than the last. This was her first visit to her parents’ grave, and she mentally rehearsed what she’d tell them. Silly yes, but talking might make the hurt ache less.

Trevor was inside the cemetery building speaking with the manager, Jeffery somebody. Getting him to agree to let her visit the gravesite by herself took some doing, but he’d finally relented.

She placed fresh flowers on the two mounds and knelt in front of the engraved stone. Her throat clogged. These two wonderful people had raised her. Oh, how she missed them.

“Hey, Mom, Dad. I found my birth mother.” She held in her tears.

As the clouds swept across the blue expanse, the wind blew against her back, and two squawking birds battled above her before flying off.

She told her folks how her birth mother had spent her last days in New Mexico, dying from lung cancer. “I bet you already knew that already. The good news is that my birth grandmother and uncle treated me like one of their own.”

She wiped a tear from her cheek that had refused to stay put and rubbed a hand over the letters on the headstone, praying her parents had heard her words. She glanced at her watch and realized she’d done what she’d come here for. Trevor had asked her to keep an eye on the tractor man, the one hired to exhume George Sanchez’s body.

Saddened by all the death around her, Lara hurried across the lawn to the section dedicated to those unknown or lost souls. She appreciated Fair Lawn gave such care to those without families.

Despite the temperature in the low seventies, the humidity did a number on her energy level.

Sanchez’s gravesite was easy to find since the tractor man was working his magic near a copse of trees. Such a shame George hadn’t been identified earlier so his parents could have had him nearby.

The weathered looking man in the tractor had already dug down close to six feet. She waved to him wanting to make sure he understood the need for care.

He cut the engine to idle, and she introduced herself.

“Don’t you worry, young lady, I won’t hurt the coffin none. It’s encased in a vault to protect it.”

He must hear the concern often. “Thank you.” She stepped back to give the driver room.

A lone man, dressed in a black suit, strode across the lawn. She squinted and blocked the sun’s rays with her hand. From the way his shoulders remained rigid and his hips barely rotated, she guessed it was Mr. Hoffman, the kind funeral director who’d taken care of her families’ service. It was the weekend, and he was probably here for another funeral. Poor man. How could he be around grief day in and day out?

The giant tractor claw made a clanking sound, drawing Lara’s attention back to the large hole. She couldn’t be sure if the noise was metal hitting the cement vault or the engine misfiring. Her implant was tuned more for voices.

She stepped a little closer, checking for the container holding the casket to peek through the soil.

The funeral director stopped at her side and her pulse skipped a beat.

“What are you doing on this side of the cemetery, Ms. Romano?”

“The police are exhuming a body.”

His eyes widened. “Is that so? Who?”

“I’m not at liberty to say. Detective Kinsey is right inside if you want to ask him.” She motioned with her head toward the cement building at the far end of the parking lot.

Mr. Hoffman waved a hand. “It’s no matter.”

The tractor’s engine cut off and the grizzled old man climbed down. He wiped his brow with a stained handkerchief. “I need to get some help to lift the coffin out of the heavy liner.”

“Okay.” She rechecked her watch. Trevor would be wondering what had taken her so long and turned to Mr. Hoffman. “I need to head back. My overseer job is done.”

“I’ll walk with you.” He mopped his brow with his handkerchief. “I noticed you at your parents’ grave just now and wanted to see how you were holding up.” He placed a gentle hand on her shoulder.

Did he make a habit of wandering around the cemetery? Or had he come out to speak with her personally? “As well as can be expected.”

“I’m glad.” He smoothed out the lapels of his jacket. “Rolf was speaking of you the other day.”

She caught a look of pride in his eyes. “That so?”

“Yes. He was pleased you’ve done so well at HOPEFAL.”

“Thank you. Praise coming from Professor Hoffman means a lot to me.”

He nodded back over his shoulder. “Were you looking for another body to add to your list of accomplishments?”

“Perhaps.” She caught the quick clench of his fist and the tic that tugged at his right eye. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to find Detective Kinsey.” His hovering made her stomach queasy.

“Call me if you need anything.”

She hoped to not need him for a very long time. Or ever. All of her relatives were dead. “Will do.”

Mr. Hoffman veered toward the parking lot without looking back. She could have sworn the man had more pep in his step after their conversation.

The moment she entered the cemetery building, the cool air kissed her skin, and she dropped her head back, enjoying the relief. She was halfway to the manager’s office when Trevor appeared down the hall. He smiled and her heart twisted. He was an exceedingly handsome man, but it was his focus, determination, and caring that tugged at her heart. He’d make a good husband to somebody.

“Hey. Everything go okay?” he asked.

“Yes. The tractor man is lifting the coffin now.” Talking about work was easy. Having a conversation about her life was not.

He turned her around, placed a hand on her lower back, and walked her toward the exit. “Good. When the men are done, Jeff LaMont, the head guy here, says they’ll deliver the body to HOPEFAL.”

“I can’t wait to see how George Sanchez died, assuming it’s him.”

“I’m pretty sure he’ll be the guy. The facts line up too well.” Trevor opened the front door. “Police report said the guy’s throat was slit, and he was stabbed in the heart. I think that should answer your question as to the COD.”

“I want to see if he had any drugs in his system. That might connect him to the others.”

He opened the truck’s passenger side door. “You can tell from a skeleton?”

“The earth’s temperature six feet down is a constant seventy to seventy five degrees in Tampa. There should be tissue left to do a tox screen. The coffin would protect him from complete decomposition unless someone dumped lime on him. We should see the tattoo on his shoulder too.”

“If we’re lucky.”