Excerpt of Dead Wrong by Janice Kay Johnson

GETTING THERE five minutes quicker wouldn't make any difference. They weren't racing to the rescue. They were going to view a corpse. Nonetheless, Meg Patton drove fast, with fierce concentration. If Detective Giallombardo said anything, Meg didn't hear.

This wouldn't turn out to be anything like the other murder, she kept assuring herself. The detail the kid who called 911 had blurted out would be an aside, something dropped at the scene, not a deliberate choice of murder weapon and staging. She'd feel like an idiot for tearing out here when she was supposed to supervise detectives, not respond to calls. She had already seen the way heads swiveled when she'd stood abruptly and said, "I'll take this one."

She'd garnered more surprise when she'd glanced around, choosing young Giallombardo almost randomly. Eenie, meenie, minie, mo. "Are you tied up? Then come with me." Everyone in the squad room had stared after them.

Butte Road ran yardstick straight for miles between rusting barbed wire fences holding back brown heaps of tumbleweed before terminating at a small volcanic cinder cone. The pavement turned to gravel not much beyond the Elk Springs city limits. Most of the year, their SUV would have raised a red cloud of cinder dust to trail them like a tail. Today, the hard-packed surface was frozen solid.

She drove this road every few weeks. Her sister Renee, the Elk Springs chief of police, lived out here on the Triple B Ranch with her husband, Daniel, and her two young children. Meg barely spared a glance for their gate when she tore by it. Renee would want to hear about the murder, even if it was outside her jurisdiction. Cops didn't like brutal murders happening in their own backyards. Even if, in this case, that backyard was a whole heck of a lot of empty country.

One of a half dozen in the immediate vicinity of Elk Springs, this lava cone, no more than a couple hundred feet high, wasn't even dignified with a name, as far as Meg knew. The county had once contemplated using its cinders for road construction, until Matt Barnard of the Triple B made a stink about having trucks roaring up and down his road all day long. After that, it was left in peace, except for Friday-night beer parties and fornicating teenagers.

A lone pickup truck sat in the turnaround at the end of the road. Two heads in it, real close together. Kids, cuddling against the horror they had suddenly understood walked their world.

Meg was careful to pull in right behind them, so as not to further damage any visible tire prints.

Uh-huh, her inner voice jeered. On frozen cinders. She killed the engine and got out, slamming the door and then pausing for just a minute to take in the surroundings. The bitter cold stung her skin.

Funny how a dead body could give a familiar landscape a surreal look. The view out here was spectacular, with high country desert stretching to the horizon in one direction, brown and stark in winter. The jagged peaks of the Sisters sliced the sky to the west, while Juanita Butte seemed to float to the north like a perfect scoop of vanilla ice cream. A few thin patches of snow clung to the cinder cone and the red-brown soil between tumbleweeds. The sky was a cold, crystal blue, the stillness absolute.

Until Detective Giallombardo also slammed her door and crunched around the rear of the Explorer to join Meg.

In silence, the two women walked forward, both staring at the woman's naked body sprawled low on the slope of the cinder cone. Head uphill, resting on the pillow of a patch of snow.

In life, she had been long-legged and shapely. In death, she was bluish-white against the rust-red cinders, with the dark stain of bruises discoloring her flesh. Even before they closed the distance, Meg could see that her left breast had been mangled. Torn by an animal after death, maybe, although Meg thought that unlikely.

But the detail that riveted her was the jockstrap. The elastic of the waistband sliced into the victim's neck. The cup had been twisted to cover her face.

A message, or a gesture of contempt for the victim. Maybe for all women. Meg never had known. The man who had killed in exactly this way, who had left the body posed just as this one was posed, had insisted he was innocent. Was still protesting his innocence from the state penitentiary, where he was serving a life sentence.

Feeling sick, she said, "I'll talk to the kids. You call for a crime scene crew. We need pictures."

Giallombardo nodded and went back to the Explorer. Meg knocked on the window of the pickup and then opened the driver side door.

"Chris Singer?"

The girl, a waif with a blotchy face and red, swollen eyes, nodded.

"And you are?" Meg asked the boy.

"Colin Glaser." He was trying to sound manly. The squeak at the end undermined his effort. He gazed through the windshield toward the ghastly sight. "That woman... She's, like, dead."

"Yes, I'm afraid she is." Meg heard the grimness in her own voice.

He shuddered.

Meg looked at both of them. "Can you tell me when you arrived? Did you get out of the pickup? Touch anything?"

In unison, their heads shook violently. "We never got out," the boy said. "I wanted to get the hell — the heck out of here, but when I started to back up Chris said we should call 911. And wait until the cops got here. So we locked the doors and that's what we did."

"We were only here like a minute before we phoned," the girl said.

They'd been cutting school, Meg learned, because they had been having a relationship crisis. Despite the boy's comforting arm around the girl, Meg guessed the relationship was dead now. Chris had called her dad, who was on his way out here. He wasn't going to be a happy man.

She thanked them for being responsible, then left them to wait for the girl's father.

"Let's take a closer look," Meg said to Detective Giallombardo, who obediently followed her. Both slipped on the slope of red cinders as they scrambled the eight or ten feet up, then edged toward the body.

Unless bloodstains provided a trail — and they were going to be a bitch to spot on volcanic cinders this color — it was going to be impossible to tell where the UNSUB parked, whether he dragged or carried the body, etc. How much Luminol did it take to spot blood in a landscape this vast? Footprints and ruts didn't last in loose cinders, which tended to rattle downslope to fill any hole even when there was still a foot in it. Meg knew, because she'd climbed up to the crater several times as a teenager.

She crouched beside the victim, Giallombardo standing right above her.

Legs splayed in a grotesquely inviting gesture of sexual come-on. The savage bite marks on the breast were made by human teeth, if Meg was any judge. Maybe they'd get lucky and at least get a decent bite impression to match up with a suspect later.Arms spread to each side. The victim had been allowed no dignity in death.

And then there was the jockstrap. To appearances, it had been used to strangle the woman. It looked brand-new. Bought for the purpose.

This wasn't chance. The staging was identical to the murder six years ago that had cost Meg her son in every meaningful way, though he still dutifully arrived at her door for family holidays.

She didn't realize she'd spoken aloud until Giallombardo said, "Identical to what?"

Meg froze, her instinct to keep family history private until such time as there was no option. But when it came down to it, she'd been a cop too long to hide evidence.

"The crew's coming," she said, glad of an excuse to put off the moment of truth.

"And Dad," the young female cop observed.

A red SUV was gaining fast on the official convoy. It fishtailed once but didn't even slow. As a parent, Meg understood.

She and Giallombardo scrambled and slid their way back down to the foot of the lava cone. Crime scene techs bundled up as they climbed out of vehicles — as afternoon fell, the air became icier. Meg estimated the day hadn't reached ten degrees Fahrenheit when the sun was at its height, and the temp had probably already dropped to six or eight degrees with sub-zero to come tonight. Her cheeks and nose were numb.

She directed the crew to get them started, some spreading out to search for evidence, the photographer beginning to snap pictures, the coroner waiting to get to the body. The girl's dad erupted from his SUV almost before it skidded to a stop, and she flung herself right over her boyfriend into Daddy's arms.

Meg introduced herself, explained the situation and asked if he'd drive both kids back to town. "We've got his pickup boxed in." To the boy, she said, "Colin, can you get someone to bring you out here tomorrow after school to get your pickup?"

He nodded.

To his credit, the father squeezed the boy's shoulder and said, "Come on, son. Your mom home from work yet?" He led the two away and was soon backing out.

Meg leaned against the fender of her black Explorer. The young cop who'd been promoted to detective all of a month ago waited with a patience Meg admired.

Trina Giallombardo had risen fast in the ranks. She was only twenty-six, twenty-seven. A local girl who had gone to Oregon State to college, then come home. As a cop, she was smart, steady, mature beyond her years and dedicated. When Meg had interviewed her for the promotion, she'd claimed to have always wanted to be a detective.

She wore her thick, shiny dark hair drawn tightly into a bun. Big brown eyes dominated an olive-complected face that gave an impression of stubbornness and intelligence rather than beauty.

Meg would have given anything to have Ben Shea, her longtime partner and brother-in-law, here instead. But Ben had broken his idiot leg — thank God not his neck — trying to keep up with Abby on the ski hill. His leg was still in traction.

But why did I have to bring a novice? Meg asked herself. Instinct? She didn't have a clue.

Gaze on the crew, spread out like giant ants below their hill, she finally answered Giallombardo's question. "Six years ago, we had a murder that looked just like this one."

"Six years..." Giallombardo frowned. "I was away at college. Wait. Not Will's girlfriend?"

"You know my son?"

"Only by sight." Did red tinge her cheeks? Hard to tell, with both their faces damn near frostbitten. "I was two years behind him in school. But I saw him play basketball. And since he was president of the student body..."

Meg nodded. "His girlfriend was raped and murdered when she came home with him for spring break from college. She was strangled with a jockstrap, and the cup was pulled over her face. She was posed just like that."

"Oh." The young cop exhaled the single, soft word. They stood in silence while she processed the implications. "Isn't that your brother-in-law's ranch up the road?"

The fact that this body had been dumped so close to her sister's home was already bothering Meg. Their family had been targeted once before. Surely not again.

Surely this had nothing to do with the Pattons. It was happenstance that the previous victim had been Will's girlfriend. She'd gone to a bar on her own and left with the killer. She'd probably never even mentioned her boyfriend or the fight they'd just had.

Giallombardo interrupted her thoughts. "Did you catch the killer?"

Meg nodded. "He's supposed to be serving life." They both glanced involuntarily toward the body. "Paroled?"

"We'll find out."

The photographer signaled the coroner, and the two women joined him. Sanchez, an elected official, had run unopposed for as long as Meg had been with the Butte County Sheriff's Department. Unlike some elected coroners or medical examiners, he was good.

"Don't see any surprises," he said after a minute.

"Looks like strangulation. See how deep the elastic has cut into her throat?"

They saw. "Time of death?"

He hemmed and hawed. This cold made it harder to tell. It was like putting a body in deep freeze. "You find any ID?"