Part 11

George Foster went home, had breakfast, made love to his wife, plotted how to deal with Charlie Black and Danny Bounds, paid some bills, called his son, took a power nap, made some work-related phone-calls, filled out some paperwork, and prepared for another long night. George Foster knew how to manage his time.

Part 10

 Tobias Masters returned home to an empty house. His younger brother Chris was gone, despite the early hour. A note on the fridge said, rather curtly, that he had gone to the park and would be there all day. Tobias felt an unkind sense of relief.

Part 9

Daniel Dominic Bounds, potential future Chief of the Piper Ridge Police Department, had burnt the eggs. And the toast. And the oatmeal. And he was pretty sure he had messed up the cereal as well, although he had no idea how that had come to pass.

Part 8

“You’re what?!” Chief Foster would never be able to put into words how supremely glad he was that he’d decided to hold this conversation in private. Charlie’s public outbursts were something of a legend in town. When she wanted to, she could be a one-woman riot. Last year’s charity bake sale had almost ended in a felony charge.

Part 7

Charlie was not allowed to smoke at crime scenes, a rule that had taken Foster years to impress upon her. Charlie could be sulky and stubborn as a recalcitrant child about certain things. If told not to do something, Charlie would usually do said thing with a sort of gleeful mania that left chaos in its wake. 

In the end, however, Foster had won that fight. And once she lost a fight, Charlie never mentioned it again. She settled for an unlit cigarette clenched between her teeth, which privately annoyed Foster as much as her filthy clouds of smoke ever had. But one contaminated his crime scenes, and one simply irritated him. He’d chosen the lesser of two evils.

Part 6

She was ready in six minutes, one full minute devoted entirely to locking up her trailer. Tobias doubted the local bank had as much security covering its vaults.

Dressed in jeans, black boots and a man’s leather jacket that was about as old as her, nobody would have looked twice at her in any major city. Hell, compared to some of the people Tobias had seen in the East Village her fashion sense was charmingly conservative. In Piper Ridge, her wardrobe choices smacked of the obscene.

Part 5

While the center of town and the neighborhoods surrounding it were indeed lovely (picturesque was the word the tourism board preferred) the outskirts of town quickly fell into disrepair. It was a squalid warning to good citizens of what might happen if you didn’t keep up with your home repairs. The borders of the town, which the finer residents liked to pretend weren’t connected to Piper Ridge at all, bore little resemblance to the immaculately maintained heart of the small municipality.

Part 4

Piper Ridge was a quaint town. It strove for quaintness. It worshipped at the altar of all that was old-fashioned and charming. Piper Ridge understood what needed to be done to achieve the coveted title of ‘quaint.’ You couldn’t just plant some expensive flowers around the center of town and hope for the best. If you wanted to be considered quaint, you had to work for it.

Part 3

Tobias Masters was deeply, deeply unhappy. His unhappiness radiated like nuclear fallout, incinerating every other emotion. Tomes could be written about his unhappiness that would drive men to madness. He was the common cold of misery, infecting anyone unlucky enough to happen by. He was aggressively miserable. His depression was motivated.