Excerpt

Chapter one

Saturday, August 14
7:30am

Detective Ray Linger muttered dangit’s and fudgin’ hell’s as he fought to open the steel door to Big Dip Police Department Central Station. His brain felt like chewed gum, his hand gripless and clammy from another sleepless night. When he finally managed to create a foot-wide gap through which to scoot, he immediately banged his tumbler into the doorframe, sending burnt coffee with almond milk onto his stiff white shirt and all over the floor of the BDPD lobby. Linger groaned at his clumsiness, dealt himself a hand of brown paper towels from a nearby dispenser, and dropped to the worn marble floor.

As he walked the wad of soaked towels to the trash, Linger’s tender stomach sent out a warning blurble loud enough to echo in the silent lobby. He shuffled, clenched and sweating, to the station bathroom and jumped onto the toilet just in time. How there was anything left in his bowels after a night of alternating between the toilet seat and the cool tile floor at home, he had no idea.

He wiped his clammy forehead with a pad of toilet paper and wondered how a beautiful night out with his wife Lily had ended so wrong. It had been so, so lovely: an evening hike through the soft trails of Big Dip Regional Park, a hoppy gluten-free IPA at the Loggerhead Tavern, a slightly giddy dinner at Chao’s-

Linger fished his phone from his pocket and quickly thumbed into the search bar, Does dubnmpling has.gluten?

He knew the answer before the results popped up. One stolen pork dumpling off Lily’s plate when she’d gone to the ladies room was all it took these days to send his body into hysterics. As he scrubbed his hands, Linger tried not to perseverate over the image that faced him in the harsh bathroom light: a hollow-eyed 42-year-old with skin the waxy yellow of a nearly-healed bruise, a balding head ringed with soft fuzzy brown hair, and a lanky frame highlighting a noticeable pooch gut. He breathed deep as he tucked his splotched white shirt into his boxy black slacks. This wasn’t the first day Linger had started with a series of unforced errors, and there was too much day left for him to wallow. As he’d taught his daughters to do when they were down on themselves, he blew a huge, defiant raspberry at his reflection and wrestled his lips into the approximate shape of a smile.

Linger hummed as he walked to Police Chief Paul Burnley’s office, projecting optimism. When he swung into the room and saw Detective Cammy Crown, his smile quickly collapsed.

“Oh, great to see you too, Linger!”

Unlike Linger, Crown looked rested and ready to work in her pressed burgundy top, steel-gray pants, and clean black flats. Crown was Linger’s de facto-partner as the only other senior detective in the modest Big Dip Police Department. She was quick, intuitive, fit, and East-Coast straightforward, all of which still intimidated Linger despite having worked alongside her for two years. Crown was severe, at least for Big Dip - she had tremendous posture, cranked her straight brown hair into a tight bun, and was stingy with praise. Linger really wanted Crown to like him, to be impressed by him, to entrust him with personal information. Crown wanted Linger to be a better detective and to stop begging her to come to dinner with his family.

Seeing Crown in Burnley’s office this early on a weekend morning meant one thing: this was going to be a long day.