LITMIR.BIZ

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tugged the pillow around her head and tried to go to sleep again, but she couldn’t stop thinking …

      A hammer.

      Someone in Mississippi got killed with a hammer.

      She told herself it wasn’t her case, and she’d said no to Brent Meredith.

      But even as she finally drifted back to sleep, those thoughts wouldn’t go away …

      There’s a killer out there.

      There’s a case to be solved.

      CHAPTER FIVE

      When she walked into the Rushville police station first thing in the morning, Samantha had a feeling she was going to be in trouble. Yesterday she’d made a few phone calls that perhaps she shouldn’t have made.

      Maybe I should learn to mind my own business, she thought.

      But somehow, minding her own business didn’t come easily to her.

      She was always trying to fix things—sometimes things that couldn’t be fixed, or things that other people didn’t want to have fixed.

      As usual when she showed up for work, Sam saw no other cops around, just the chief’s secretary, Mary Ruckle.

      Her fellow officers teased her a lot for that …

      “Good old reliable Sam,” they’d say. “Always the first to get here, the last to get out.”

      Somehow, they never seemed to mean that in a nice way. But she always reminded herself that it was natural for “good old reliable Sam” to get picked on. She was the youngest and newest cop on the Rushville force. It didn’t help any that she was also the only female on the force.

      For a moment Mary Ruckle didn’t seem to notice Sam’s arrival. She was busily doing her nails—her usual occupation during most of a workday. Sam couldn’t understand the appeal of doing one’s nails. She always kept hers plain and clipped short, which was maybe one of the many reasons people thought of her as, well …

      Unladylike.

      Not that Mary Ruckle was what Sam would consider attractive. Her face was all tight and mean, as if it were all pinched together by a clothespin on the bridge of her nose. Still, Mary was married with three children, and few people in Rushville foresaw that kind of life for Sam.

      Whether Sam actually wanted that kind of life, she didn’t really know. She tried not to think too much about the future. Maybe that was why she focused so hard on every bit of whatever came in front of her on any given day. She couldn’t actually imagine a future for herself, at least not among the choices that seemed to be available.

      Mary puffed on her nails and looked up at Sam and said …

      “Chief Crane wants to talk to you.”

      Sam nodded with a sigh.

      Just like I expected, she thought.

      She walked on into the chief’s office and found Chief Carter Crane playing Tetris on his computer.

      “Just a minute,” he grumbled upon hearing Sam walk into the room.

      Probably distracted by Sam’s arrival, he quickly lost the game he was playing.

      “Damn,” he said, staring at the screen.

      Sam braced herself. He was probably already pissed off with her. Blowing a game of Tetris wasn’t going to improve his mood.

      The Chief turned around in his swivel chair and said …

      “Kuehling, sit.”

      Sam obediently sat down in front of his desk.

      Chief Crane steepled his fingertips together and stared at her for a moment, trying as usual to look like the big shot he imagined himself to be. And as usual, Sam wasn’t impressed.

      Crane was about thirty, and he was blandly pleasant-looking in a way that Sam thought would better suit an insurance man. Instead, he had risen to the post of police chief due to the power vacuum that Chief Jason Swihart had left when he went suddenly went away two years ago.

      Swihart had been a good chief and everybody had liked him, including Sam. Swihart been offered a great job with a security company way over in Silicon Valley, and he’d understandably moved on to greener pastures.

      So now Sam and the other cops were answerable to Chief Carter Crane. As far as Sam was concerned, he was a mediocrity in a department full of mediocrities. Sam would never admit it aloud, but she felt sure she had better brains than Crane and all the other local cops put together.

      It’d be nice to have a chance to prove it, she thought.

      Finally Crane said, “I got an interesting phone call last night—from a certain Special Agent Brent Meredith in Quantico. You’d never believe what he told me. Oh, but then again, maybe you would.”

      Sam groaned with annoyance and said, “Come on, Chief. Let’s get right to the point. I called the FBI late last afternoon. I talked to several people before I finally got connected with Meredith. I thought somebody ought to call the FBI. They should be down here helping us out.”

      Crane smirked and said, “Don’t tell me. It’s because you still think Gareth Ogden’s murder the night before last was the work of a serial killer who lives right here in Rushville.”

      Sam rolled her eyes.

      “Do I need to explain it all over again?” she said. “The whole Bonnett family got killed here one night ten years ago. Somebody bashed in their heads with a hammer. The case was never solved.”

      Crane nodded and said, “And you think the same killer has come out of the woodwork ten years later.”

      Sam shrugged and said, “There’s pretty obviously some connection. The MO is identical.”

      Crane suddenly raised his voice a little.

      “There’s no connection. We went through all this yesterday. The MO is just a coincidence. The best we can tell, Gareth Ogden was killed by some drifter passing through town. We’re following every lead we can. But unless he does the same thing somewhere else, we’re liable to never catch him.”

      Sam felt a surge of impatience.

      She said, “If he was just a drifter, why wasn’t there any sign of a robbery?”

      Crane slapped his desk with the palm of his hand.

      “Damn it, you don’t give up on any of your notions, do you? We don’t know that there wasn’t a robbery. Ogden was dumb enough to leave his front door open. Maybe he was also dumb enough to leave a wad of money lying on his coffee table. The killer saw it and decided to help himself to it, bashing in Ogden’s head in the process.”

      Cradling his fingertips together again, Crane added …

      “Now doesn’t that sound more plausible than some psychopath who’s spent ten long years … doing what, exactly? Hibernating, maybe?”

      Sam took a long, deep breath.

      Don’t get started with him again, she told herself.

      There was no point in explaining all over again just why Crane’s theory bugged her. For one thing, what about the hammer? She herself had noticed that Ogden’s hammers were all still neatly stowed in his tool chest. So did the killer lug around a hammer with him as he drifted from town to town?

      It was possible, sure.

      It also struck her as a little bit ridiculous.

      Crane growled sullenly and added, “I told that Meredith guy that you were bored and overly imaginative and to forget all about it. But frankly, the whole conversation was embarrassing. I don’t like it when people go over my head. You had no business making those phone calls. Asking for help from the FBI is my job, not yours.”

      Sam was grinding her teeth, struggling to keep her thoughts to herself.

      She managed to say in a quiet voice

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