He lifted his head, and the look on his face was so genuinely aggrieved that I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.
“Get moving,” he said. “We can finish in the shower.” He rolled off me with the resigned grace of a man who’d had too many years of practice being interrupted. “I’m an excellent multitasker.”
“Such a romantic,” I said, stripping off the rest of my pajamas.
He grinned and reached for the phone. “Lawson,” he said, and his voice shifted, the warmth leaving it like heat from a window cracked open in winter, husband giving way to sheriff in that single word.
I watched his face change as he listened. Saw his jaw tighten, the lines around his eyes deepen.
“How long ago?” His free hand scrubbed over his face. “Who found the body?” A pause. “Secure the scene. I want a perimeter wide enough to keep any early bird employees back. Don’t let anyone near the body until we get there. And have dispatch call Cole. I want him there too.”
He hung up and met my eyes.
“Body?” I asked.
“Found about forty minutes ago. Dumpster behind the old Miller’s Auto Body on Route 3. The one that closed down a couple years back.” He was already moving, throwing back the sheet. “There’s a strip mall next door that opens at six. Sanitation driver was making his rounds, went to empty the dumpster, and saw a tarp hanging out the side. Thought somebody had dumped construction debris illegally. Lifted the lid to check and found a lot more than drywall.”
My name is J.J. Graves, and somewhere in King George County, someone was lying dead. Someone who’d had their life ripped away in blood and violence, whose last breath had been stolen in fear and pain. Someone whose name would be forgotten if I didn’t stand for them. As the county coroner, I was the only voice the dead had left, the only one who could read the story their broken bodies told and demand justice for the silence that had been forced upon them.
The dead always called. And I always answered.
I headed for the bathroom. Multitasking would have to be quick.
The house was quiet as we headed out. There was no sign of Oscar, our newest addition to the family. He’d be in Doug’s bed, the two of them snoring in tandem.
The sun wasn’t up yet, but the heat was already a living thing, and I subconsciously held my breath as I climbed into the Tahoe. It pressed against the windshield as we drove, thick and wet, and it settled into your lungs and made every breath feel like work. The dashboard thermometer read eighty degrees at six fifteen in the morning, which meant the local news would be warning people to stay inside. By eight o’clock, the asphalt would shimmer like water. By midday, the air would smell like hot tar and cut grass and the misery of a Virginia summer that never learned when to quit.
Welcome to late May in King George County.
Route 3 stretched ahead of us, mostly empty at this hour, just a few early commuters with coffee cups clutched like lifelines and a delivery truck lumbering toward Fredericksburg. The world had that gray, half-formed quality it gets before dawn, when the sky can’t decide if it wants to hold on to night or surrender to morning. Trees lined the road on both sides, their leaves hanging limp and motionless in air too thick to stir.
Jack drove with one hand on the wheel, the other holding mine, his thumb tracing absent patterns across my knuckles. Neither of us spoke. We didn’t need to. After years of partnership, we’d learned to read each other’s silences the way other people read words on a page.
My skin still hummed from the shower. Jack had been true to his word about multitasking—efficient and thorough and entirely too talented at making the most of limited time. My hair was still damp against my neck, and every now and then I caught his scent on my skin beneath the soap, that warm, clean smell that was uniquely his. It was the kind of morning that made you greedy—that made you want to call in sick and go back to bed and pretend the rest of the world didn’t exist.
But the rest of the world did exist. And somewhere at the end of this drive, someone was lying in a dumpster, waiting for us to tell their story.
I pressed my free hand against my stomach—flat still, no sign yet of the secret growing beneath the surface. Ten weeks. In another month I wouldn’t be able to hide it anymore. In another month, everyone would know, and the questions would start. Could I do this job pregnant? Could I stand over an autopsy table with a baby pressing against my bladder? Could I kneel in blood and mud at crime scenes while my body was busy building something new?
I didn’t know. But I knew I wasn’t ready to stop. Not yet. And that terrified me in ways I didn’t want to examine too closely.
We crossed the bridge into King George Proper, the county’s largest town, home to the naval base at Dahlgren and King George University. This was where bars and cheap apartments sprouted up to serve the steady influx of military personnel and college students who cycled through on two-year rotations, a catchall for people who hadn’t figured out where to go next. It wasn’t traditional like Bloody Mary with its multigenerational farming families and old Victorian homes. Wasn’t artsy like Newcastle with its cobblestone streets and bohemian vibe, or dripping with tech money like Nottingham where the mini Silicon Valley had swallowed whatever small-town character used to exist. King George Proper was transient. Temporary. A place where people worked and drank and grabbed fast food on their lunch breaks while waiting for their lives to take them somewhere else.
The old Miller’s Auto Body sat at the far end of a tired stretch of commercial property, hunkered down like it was ashamed of itself. A squat concrete rectangle with bay doors gone rust-orange and windows so grimy they’d turned the color of old cataracts. Whatever sign had once hung above the entrance had faded past legibility years ago, leaving just a ghost of letters that might have spelled anything. The place had been closed since before I’d taken over as coroner—left to rot while the county argued about zoning variances and commercial developers circled like patient vultures waiting for the property values to hit rock bottom.
The strip mall next door was newer, built in that soul-crushing style of beige stucco and tinted glass that seemed designed to be forgotten the moment you looked away. A nail salon, a vape shop, a Chinese takeout place with a flickering neon sign, and one of those check-cashing joints that preyed on people too poor or too desperate to have bank accounts. All closed now, their storefronts dark, but the parking lot lights were on—pale orange circles pooling across empty asphalt like something had bled out and left stains.
The dumpster sat behind Miller’s, right where the two properties met in a no-man’s-land of cracked concrete and weeds pushing through the seams. I could see the crime-scene tape from the road, bright yellow against the gray pre-dawn light, that cheerful color that always seemed obscene at murder scenes. Two patrol cars were parked at angles near the tape, their light bars dark but their presence unmistakable. A third vehicle—a white pickup truck, unmarked, mud splattered, with a dent in the rear bumper I recognized—told me Cole had beaten us here.
Jack pulled in and killed the engine. The sudden silence felt heavy, expectant. And for a moment, neither of us moved.
He squeezed my hand once and then let go. When I looked over, the sheriff had already settled behind his eyes, the last traces of the man who’d made me laugh in the shower tucked away somewhere safe where the job couldn’t touch him.
We were both moving then, out of the car, into the heat, walking toward death like we’d done a hundred times before.
The smell hit me before I’d cleared the tape.
Sweet and ripe and unmistakable. That perfume of decomposition that you never forgot once you’d learned it. The human body, breaking down, releasing gases and fluids in its final transformation from person to evidence. Underneath it, the sour funk of rotting food, the chemical bite of old motor oil and something astringent that might have been cleaning solvent, and that other smell, the one that always lurked at scenes like this. The copper-penny scent of blood, even when you couldn’t see it. Even when it had dried and darkened and seeped into places you’d never think to look.
