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answered, “Tolliver.”
    Sara leaned back against the front counter, hugging her arms to her waist as she tried to read his expression. She had been a cop’s wife far too long to think that there was any such thing as a simple phone call.
    “Where is she now?” Jeffrey demanded. He nodded, his shoulders tensing as he listened to the caller. “All right,” he said, looking at his watch. “I can be there in three hours.”
    He ended the call, squeezing the phone so hard in his hand that Sara thought it might break. “Lena,” he said brusquely, just as Sara was about to ask him what was going on. Lena Adams was a detective on his squad, a woman who made a habit of getting herself into bad situations and dragging Jeffrey along with her. Just the sound of her name brought a sense of dread.
    Sara said, “I thought she was on vacation.”
    “There was an explosion,” Jeffrey answered. “She’s in the hospital.”
    “Is she okay?”
    “No,” he told her, shaking his head as if he could not believe what he had heard. “She’s been arrested.”

THREE DAYS EARLIER

CHAPTER 2
    LENA KEPT ONE HAND on the steering wheel as she scrolled through radio stations with the other. She cringed at the vacuous girls screeching from the speakers; when had stupidity become a marketable talent? She gave up when she hit the country music channels. There was a six-disc changer in the trunk, but she was sick of each and every song on each and every disc. Desperate, she reached into the floor of the backseat, groping for a loose CD. She fished out three empty jewel cases in a row, cursing more loudly with each one. She was about to give up when the tips of her fingers brushed a cassette tape underneath her seat.
    Her Celica was around eight years old and still had a tape player, but Lena had no idea what this particular cassette contained, or how it had even ended up in her car. Still, she popped it into the dash and waited. No music came, and she turned up the knob, wondering if the tape was blank or had been damaged by last summer’s scorching heat. She turned it up further and nearly had a heart attack when the opening drumbeats of Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation” filled the car.
    Sibyl. Her twin sister had made this tape two weeks before she had died. Lena could remember listening to this exact song nearly six years ago as she sped down the highway, heading back to Grant County from a drop-off she’d made at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s lab in Macon. The drive had been much like the one she was making today: a straight shot down a kudzu-lined interstate, the few cars on the road whizzing by eighteen-wheelers and mobile homes that were being transported to waiting families. Meanwhile, her sister was back in Grant County, being tortured and murdered by a sadist while Lena sang with Joan Jett at the top of her lungs.
    She popped out the tape and turned off the radio.
    Six years. It didn’t seem like so much time had passed, but then again, it felt like an eternity. Lena was just now getting to the point where her dead twin was not the first thing she thought about when she woke up in the morning. It usually wasn’t until later in the day when she saw something funny or heard a crazy story at work that she thought about Sibyl, made a mental note to tell her sister, then realized a split second later that Sibyl was no longer there to hear it.
    Lena had always thought of Sibyl as her only family. Their mother had died thirteen days after giving birth. Their father, a cop, had been shot dead by a man he’d pulled over on a speeding violation. He’d never even known his young wife was pregnant. As there were no other relatives to speak of, Hank Norton, their mother’s brother, had raised the two girls. Lena had never thought of her uncle as family. Hank had been a junkie during her childhood and a sober, self-righteous asshole during her teen years. Lena thought of him as more like a warden, somebody who made the rules