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dad.” The bakery was right there on the corner, mere feet away from the intersection, a saving distance from the possibility of a broken human body. Her son did not need images of the dead dancing on the graves already dug in his mind. Audrey lifted her throbbing hand to her nose. She sniffed and then recoiled, having no idea what to do with the coating on her skin and clothes. This was no oil.
    â€œHelp’s coming, okay?” Ed said. “But they wanna know if anyone’s hurt.”
    â€œYes, but I’ll go see.”
    He stepped in the wrong direction around the periphery of the disaster, then disappeared.
    â€œEd!”
    Audrey moved as quickly as the blood— So much blood! Dear Jesus! —would allow. “Ed!” She was on her feet, tiptoeing to dry ground as if she might have more balance that way. The reach of the streetlights, diminished by the moisture in the air, cut across the sedan. She saw the steaming radiator and the disfigured bumper and the crushed metal under the tire. “Ed, wait!”
    He was only steps away, and she nearly collided with him where he stood still, staring down at the mangled form of a small motorcycle. It was a motor scooter, actually, light blue or yellow or white, with a platform for feet directly in front of the stumpy seat. The shredded cushion was also spattered with the terrible liquid. The front end of the scooter had been swallowed by her car. Something that looked like a storage compartment had separated from the bike and tumbled down the road.
    Audrey looked around. “Where’s the rider?”
    â€œI don’t know.” Ed was staring at the wreckage. The hand holding his cell phone dropped to his side.
    â€œHe must have been thrown,” Audrey said, thinking she would have to find and follow a trail of blood leading from this lake. She was shaking, nauseated by the shock of what she’d done.
    â€œThat’s what the dispatcher said.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œThat the rider would have been thrown.”
    Audrey turned away. “We’ll look until emergency workers get here. I’ve got a flashlight in the trunk.”
    Fog caressed Ed’s shoulders. He was fixated on the bike.
    â€œGo get your father. Ed, we need to find the rider.” The clammy moisture on her forehead and upper lip wasn’t from the weather. “ Ed .”
    He gestured at the wreckage. “That’s Julie Mansfield’s scooter.”

CHAPTER 4
    Sergeant Jack Mansfield was a city detective, not a patrol officer, and so under ordinary circumstances he wouldn’t have been the one to respond to dispatch’s announcement of an 11-83, even though both Cornucopia and its force were small. Vehicle accident, no details available, except that the caller described it as car versus motorcycle, which meant that injuries were likely. An ambulance had caught up with them half a mile back and now tailed the cruiser at a safe distance, only its flashing lights visible in the rearview mirror.
    An 11-83 was as common as an orange tree in these parts, in this season, at these hours. For the next four or five months people would spend most of their time on the road driving blind. The locals were pretty good at that, having had their entire lives to practice, but enough people were idiots, especially the young ones, and ignorant of how their tragedies happened until some emergency responder explained it to them.
    He didn’t have a lot of sympathy for idiots.
    Technically, Jack wasn’t responding on this early Wednesday morning; he only happened to be in the car of the officers who were, because the last thirty-six hours had been anything but ordinary. He’d been on duty since five Monday afternoon, collecting and chasing evidence in a rare murder, only the third in the county this year. Even more rare, however, was a break with an eyewitness who had the information Jack needed to connect crime and criminal faster than a