Page 22 of The Ashes of Summer

Crime scene images never stop being photographs. That's the lie people tell themselves after enough years in this job. You learn to separate the evidence from the person because you have to. Then somebody you know ends up on the board.

Michael Miller was a friend, but he was also the kind of prosecutor you wanted standing beside you in court. Careful. Methodical. More interested in getting it right than getting the headline. He built cases the same way bricklayers built walls—one piece at a time, checking every line before he laid the next. I told him Moore wasn't worth it. Told him the men orbiting that case didn't leave witnesses, loose ends or families untouched. That there'd always be another prosecution, another conviction, another chance to make his point.

I thought he listened. Then he signed the paperwork anyway. Now the only thing left of him is a handful of photographs pinned to cork while strangers stand around discussing his murder in fifteen-minute briefings.

Elaine's photograph sits beneath his. Her eyes are still open.

Whoever took the crime scene photographs caught her exactly where she'd fallen, staring past the camera at nothing at all. There's no fear frozen on her face. No instinct to run. No last attempt to fight back. Whatever happened in that room happened too fast for any of that.

One moment she was sitting in her own home. The next she was evidence.

She never even got the chance to be afraid. She deserved better than dying for somebody else's war.

I drag my eyes lower. The photograph is waiting for me.

Summer.

Pinned beneath witness statements, forensic reports and maps, boxed in by drawing pins and lengths of red string like she's already become another piece of the investigation instead of the reason it's happening in the first place.

The same photograph I found at Constance’s home. Someone had drawn a black noose around her throat and left it there for me as a statement.

The drawing pin comes free with barely any resistance, and I ease Summer's photograph away from the cork. It's only when I bring it closer that I realize it isn't the paper moving.

It's me.

My hand is shaking so violently the photograph quivers between my fingers, the edges tapping softly against my thumb every time another tremor works its way through my arm. I tighten my grip, trying to steady it, but the harder I hold on, the worse it gets.

My eyes sting.

I blink once, then again, but the blur only thickens until the image in front of me begins to soften around the edges. I stare at her face, committing every beautiful line of it to memory as though I haven't already done that a thousand times before.

She should never have been here.

She should never have been reduced to glossy paper and drawing pins while a room full of strangers stand around discussing her in shifts and timelines and search grids. She should be arguing with me. Ignoring me. Looking at me the way she always does when she thinks I'm being overprotective.

Alive.

My throat closes so fucking hard I have to force air through it. Something hot gathers behind my eyes all the same, and for the first time since that helicopter disappeared over the trees, I understand that whatever's trying to get out of me isn't grief on its own.

Grief, I know how to carry. This is something else.

Love tangled so tightly with rage that I can't separate one from the other. Guilt eating through me one slow bite at a time. Hatred so complete I can taste it every time I think of Moore's name. Fear so deep it settles somewhere behind my ribs and refuses to leave. Every one of them is fighting for space inside me, pressing harder and harder until it feels like my own body has become too small to contain them.

I want to tear every photograph from the wall, flip every fucking desk in this station and drag every deputy out to the spot the butler pointed out on the map.

But I can’t. Because he’ll hear us coming. He will expect a sloppy raid.

I need to get to her before he knows I’m there.

I can feel every pair of eyes in the room on my back, waiting to see whether I crack, and Christ, I want to. I want to put my fist through the board. Every deputy. Every detective. Waiting to see whether their sheriff breaks.

I don't.

I leave the photograph where it is, even though every instinct I have tells me to pull it from the board and shove it into the inside pocket of my jacket where nobody else gets to look at her, but I force my hand to fall back to my side. The board isn't there for me. It never was. I don't need photographs connected by red string or timelines scrawled across cork to tell me who took her or what happens if I don't find her first.

It's there because one day somebody higher up is going to walk through those doors wanting answers. Broadacre. The State Police. The FBI, if this reaches far enough. They'll want to see an investigation that followed procedure, evidence catalogued properly, resources deployed, leads assigned, every decision documented by the book. They'll want paperwork. They'll want structure. They'll want to believe the sheriff in charge kept his head while everyone else around him was losing theirs.

They'll find exactly what they're looking for.