Ties That Bind by Natalie R. Collins Page A

and jumped into her car, starting it up and zooming away.
    She laughed wildly as she drove down the street. It was still light, the summer sky not even giving a hint of the darker blue that would lead to night. How could she be so afraid of a tree?
    *   *   *
    After Sam got home, she found herself restless, so she decided to numb her mind with work. She sat and stared at the computer screen, the copy of the DVD in her hard drive, playing the slide show of the three dead teens, over and over. The CSI techs at the Smithland sheriff’s office had made the copy for her and kept the original. The pictures were not beautiful. Death was most often violent and messy. Bodily fluids, bile, contorted body shapes, smells that seemed to emanate even from the pictures. And whoever took them had seen that. There could be little doubt the pictures were real.
    Sam was looking for clues. What clues she didn’t know; so far, all she had managed to do was sicken herself.
    She stopped the frame on each teenager, looking closely for something, anything, that might lead her in the right direction.
    Sam wore only a pair of men’s boxer shorts and a thin white tank top, with spaghetti straps that kept falling down over her thin shoulders. She would push them up again and again, and they would just keep falling. If she would just take the time to tighten them, it wouldn’t happen. But she didn’t want to bother.
    The desk was an old hand-me-down from her younger self. She’d taken it from her room at her parents’ house. It had moved with her, first to Salt Lake City and then back to Kanesville. It was the one thing she clung to, because she could remember her mother standing beside her as she labored over learning to write her letters. “No, Sammy, that’s an E. Remember the F only has two horizontal lines.”
    One of the few good memories. The desk often made her melancholy and yet tied her to something she needed desperately to have a connection with.
    Tonight, with work on her mind, she was paying little attention to the desk—or the past.
    There were no words in the presentation, no names, no clues, nothing that said, Look here, aside from the bloodred VENGEANCE that followed each slide.
    The cordless phone on the desk rang, and she picked it up from the base. The caller ID notified her it was an “unknown” caller, but she always answered her phone. She didn’t know who she was waiting to hear from. Maybe Callie? Maybe her mother? More than once a hapless telemarketer had hung up on Sam, undoubtedly hating their job after she let them have it.
    She answered absently, “Montgomery.”
    “I think you have a serial killer on your hands, Sam.” The voice was Gage’s and the anger that immediately surged over her came from the past, but she fought to tamp it down, not let it roil around in her stomach and heart. She’d fought off thinking about him every day since she’d left Salt Lake.
    And now he was right here in the middle of her case.
    “Really?” she answered, more than a trace of sarcasm lacing her words.
    “Don’t be smart. It doesn’t suit. And you wasted a perfectly good cup of coffee.”
    His word usage betrayed his background, which was a little bit of Georgia farm boy mixed in with suburban Utah Mormon. He’d spent time as an Army Ranger, stationed for a while in Fort Benning, Georgia, and from time to time the years there sautéed his words with southern spice, as though he were a born-and-bred southerner. But he shared her roots. Utah Mormon pioneer stock.
    “It suits just fine, Gage. And I’m not stupid.”
    “I know you aren’t, Samantha,” he said, his voice a harsh, sexy drawl. “I’m sorry if you think I’m trying to take over your case. I’m not. But I know enough about this kind of stuff to help you. All you have to do is let me.”
    “I don’t want to.”
    “Well, you don’t really have a choice.”
    “So why act like you are here for me, huh, Gage? Why pretend? Anyways, right now,