Detective Mara’s POV
There’s a particular kind of case file that tells you it’s rotten before you’ve read a single page of it, and the Aveline Cross file had that particular smell the moment I pulled it from records too thin for what it claimed to be, too neatly closed for a missing heir to one of the largest criminal networks on the eastern seaboard, and stamped CLOSED in a font that looked almost apologetic about how fast it had gotten there.
Nine days. I’ve worked homicide for eleven years, and I’ve closed exactly one case in nine days in my entire career, and that was a domestic dispute with three witnesses, a signed confession, and a defendant who called it in himself before the body was even cold. The Cross file had no witnesses, no confession, and no body intact enough to formally
