Once Gone (a Riley Paige Mystery--Book #1)

Chapter 1

At least the stench hasn't kicked in, Special Agent Bill Jeffreys thought.

Still leaning over the body, he couldn't help but detect the first traces of it. It mingled with the fresh scent of pine and the clean mist rising from the creek—a body smell that he ought to have been long since used to. But he never was.

The woman's naked body had been carefully arranged on a large boulder at the edge of the creek. She was sitting up, leaning against another boulder, legs straight and splayed, hands at her sides. An odd crook in the right arm, he could see, suggested a broken bone. The wavy hair was obviously a wig, mangy, with clashing hues of blond. A pink smile was lipsticked over her mouth.

The murder weapon was still tight around her neck; she'd been strangled with a pink ribbon. An artificial red rose lay on the rock in front of her, at her feet.

Bill gently tried to lift the left hand. It didn't budge.

"She's still in rigor mortis," Bill told Agent Spelbren, crouching on the other side of the body. "Hasn't been dead more than twenty-four hours."

"What's with her eyes?" Spelbren asked.

"Stitched wide open with black thread," he answered, without bothering to look closely.

Spelbren stared at him in disbelief.

"Check for yourself," Bill said.

Spelbren peered at the eyes.

"Jesus," he murmured quietly. Bill noticed that he didn't recoil with disgust. Bill appreciated that. He'd worked with other field agents—some of them even seasoned veterans like Spelbren—who would be puking their guts up by now.

Bill had never worked with him before. Spelbren had been called in for this case from a Virginia field office. It had been Spelbren's idea to bring in somebody from the Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico. That was why Bill was here.

Smart move, Bill thought.

Bill could see that Spelbren was younger than him by a few years, but even so, he had a weathered, lived-in look that he rather liked.

"She's wearing contacts," Spelbren noted.

Bill took a closer look. He was right. An eerie, artificial blue that made him look away. It was cool here down by the creek late in the morning, but even so, the eyes were flattening in their sockets. It was going to be tough to nail down the exact time of death. All Bill felt certain of was that the body had been brought here sometime during the night and carefully posed.

He heard a nearby voice.

"Fucking Feds."

Bill glanced up at the three local cops, standing a few yards away. They were whispering inaudibly now, so Bill knew that he was supposed to hear those two choice words. They were from nearby Yarnell, and they clearly weren't happy to have the FBI show up. They thought they could handle this on their own.

The head ranger of Mosby State Park had thought differently. He wasn't used to anything worse than vandalism, litter, and illegal fishing and hunting, and he knew the locals from Yarnell weren't capable of dealing with this.

Bill had made the hundred-plus-mile trip by helicopter, so he could get here before the body was moved. The pilot had followed the coordinates to a patch of meadow on a nearby hilltop, where the ranger and Spelbren had met him. The ranger had driven them a few miles down a dirt road, and when they'd pulled over, Bill could glimpse the murder scene from the road. It was just a short way downhill from the creek.