at all. She’d tripped over a person. She couldn’t see the face of the person passed out facedown, but it looked like a man by the size of him.
“Hey, are you okay?” she said. She poked his shoulder when he didn’t respond. “Excuse me. Wake up.”
When he didn’t move at all, fear began to crawl along her belly. She reached over to take the guy’s pulse.
His skin was cold to the touch, and there was definitely no pulse to be found.
She hadn’t just tripped over a person. She’d tripped over a body.
Tanner groped for the phone, his mind becoming instantly alert as it rang on his bedside table. After ten years in law enforcement, he’d gotten used to having it go off at any and all hours of the day or night.
But when he saw it was Bree, his heart began to gallop. She wouldn’t call at four o’clock in the morning without reason.
“Bree, what’s wrong?”
Her breath sawing in and out didn’t ease his fear in any way. He was already getting out of bed and putting on his clothes. “Bree? Talk to me, freckles.”
“Tanner? There’s a...body.”
He cursed as he zipped and buttoned his jeans. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
“No. I’m not hurt.”
He pulled on a shirt and began buttoning it. “But someone was inside your apartment?”
“No, I found the body outside.”
He had no idea why she would’ve found a body outside in the middle of the night. Maybe someone was drunk and passed out on her lawn. Maybe it wasn’t a body at all.
“Are you inside? Safe?”
“Y-yes.” The barely whispered word didn’t reassure him.
“Just stay where you are, okay? Don’t move. I’m at my place in town. I’ll be to you in less than five minutes.”
He hated to hang up but had to so he could call the station and get Ronnie Kitchens, the deputy on duty tonight, out to the scene. Tanner would meet them there. He was pulling up to Bree’s place by the time he got off the phone with Ronnie.
Weapon drawn, he approached her front door, keeping an eye out all around him.
He knocked. “Bree, open up, sweetheart. It’s me.” He kept his eyes pinned out in the darkness, looking for any sign of movement.
The door creaked open just slightly. “Tanner?”
He hated to hear the fear in her voice, so much more noticeable because it had been conspicuously absent for the last month. “Yeah, freckles. Let me in, okay?”
The door opened wider, and he stepped inside, holstering his weapon and pulling her against him in a one-armed hug. “Are you all right?” He looked around the room. Nothing seemed out of place or destroyed.
“Yes, i-it’s out back. Outside. I tripped over it.” A shudder racked her small frame.
“I want you to stay here. Ronnie will be here in just a minute, and we’re going to check it out.” He led her to the kitchen table and helped her sit in a chair. “Why were you outside in the middle of the night?”
“I was measuring the yard to see if it was regulation size for a dog.”
Even with the gravity of the situation, Tanner almost smiled. Measuring a yard in the middle of the night for her new puppy? That totally made sense in a Bree world.
“Sweetheart, not that I doubt you, but are you sure it was a body?”
“Yes. I tried to get him to move before I called you. In case it was someone who’d fallen asleep or something.”
That didn’t sound good.
“Okay.” He rubbed his hand soothingly over her hair. “Stay here. I’m going to check it out.”
The lights from Ronnie’s squad car were reflecting in the windows, so Tanner went outside to meet him.
“We definitely have a body?” Ronnie asked as he exited his car, a little slower than he’d once been after narrowly escaping a body bag himself a few weeks ago.
“Bree says it’s out back. I haven’t confirmed. Said she tripped over it when she was measuring the yard for her new dog.”
Ronnie stopped and stared at him. “Do I even want to ask why she would be doing that in the middle of the night?”
Tanner shrugged. “It’s Bree. Once she gets her brain set on something, there’s no way around it.”
The whole town was getting used to that response. Ronnie was no exception. “Let’s go check it out.”
They grabbed high-powered flashlights from the squad car and moved quickly to the back of the house, firearms once again drawn. Bree’s patch of land wasn’t that large, and it didn’t take them long to realize Bree hadn’t been mistaken.
There was very definitely a dead body.
Ronnie muttered a curse and kept him covered with his weapon as Tanner rushed over. As soon as he touched the cold skin of the male body lying on his stomach, Tanner knew there was no way the guy was alive. But he checked the pulse anyway.
Dead.
“We need to get the crime lab out here. Definitely dead—for a while, it feels like.” Tanner stood, backing away from the body to try to keep the scene as pristine as possible.
“Natural causes?” Ronnie asked.
Tanner shone his light on the back of the guy’s shirt. It was covered with blood. “Nope. Nothing natural about this.”
* * *
TANNER STAYED OUTSIDE as forensics made their way onto the scene and began processing, using the floodlights they brought. It didn’t take long to realize the guy not only hadn’t died of natural causes, he’d been murdered. The multiple stab wounds covering his back were testament to that.
Tanner kept Bree inside the house. She was curious, but coming face-to-face with this sort of violence under the glaring lights wasn’t something he’d suggest for anyone. Not to mention it was now an active crime scene that shouldn’t be contaminated.
It wasn’t long before he was having to give that excuse to more than just Bree. The lights had woken folks up, and before long there were curious bystanders from all over town stopping by. It wasn’t every day someone was murdered in Risk Peak.
Ronnie was doing his best to shoo them along, thankfully having set up the crime scene tape far enough back to keep this from becoming an online media sensation.
“Captain Dempsey.” Owen, one of the crime lab techs, jogged over to him. “We’ve done all our preliminary processing and are ready to turn the body over.”
Time to find out if they had a dead local on their hands. Tanner prayed he wouldn’t be making a dreaded trip to the house of someone he knew to tell them a loved one had been killed.
He and Ronnie both joined the two techs as they reached down and rolled over the body. Ronnie let out a relieved breath. “That’s nobody from Risk Peak, right? Thank God.”
Relief flooded Tanner, too. “Yeah, I think you’re right. I don’t recognize—”
Tanner stopped. Because he did recognize the dead man, although it wasn’t someone from here. He let out a blistering curse.
“What?” Ronnie asked. “Is it someone we know?”
Tanner crouched