Page 1 of The Woman Left Behind

Prologue

GUT

Harry

Shitty police work was one of the ugliest stains on society.

This was the thought Sheriff Harry Moran had as he sat in his ergonomic chair behind his desk at the sheriff’s department.

He was staring at the two files in front of him trying to ignore the email that was up on the monitor of his computer.

Those files were two of fifteen stacked on his desk.

Each of those files had one thing in common: the shoddy, lazy or corrupt investigation overseen by Fret County’s last sheriff, Leland Dern.

Dern was the man who came before Harry.

Which meant Harry was the man who had to clean up Dern’s mess.

Due to recent circumstances—the latest being a double murder that wasn’t properly investigated and an innocent man served prison time—a full and exhaustive, time-consuming and resource-heavy audit of every investigation under Dern’s tenure had been done.

There were shambolic cases they’d had no choice but to file away. The police work hadn’t been up to Harry’s expectations of his department, but there was nothing that pointed to an injustice being done.

Now, he and his team had to go back over those fifteen cases and hope what Harry expected—Dern playing favorites, taking bribes, looking the other way or preferring to go hunting rather than working—wouldn’t land them in lawsuits.

He was starting with these two.

He glanced at his monitor and felt his neck muscles tighten, which meant he again looked to the files and refocused.

They were the two cases that intrigued Harry the most, because the woman who had connections with both lived a block away from his department, only a five-minute walk from where he sat right there at his desk.

Lillian Rainier.

He’d lived in the town of Misted Pines his entire life, and because of his job, he knew or knew of a great many people in all of Fret County, and he’d never heard of her.

But Dern suspected, and investigated, her parents of a robbery sixteen years ago.

The investigation stalled, because Sonny and Avery Rainier had disappeared. And then, the case had simply died. Nothing else had been done. Not an interview, not a single follow-up of a lead.

A year later, Lillian married Willie Zowkower, a man Harry did know well.

Willie was a low-level gentleman dealer and a high-level charming asshole who currently had three outstanding arrest warrants in Fret County.

Recently, Willie had also disappeared.

And Lillian hadn’t reported her parents, or her husband, missing.

Harry’s gut was telling him something was up with Lillian Rainier.

And what was on Harry’s computer monitor was telling him whatever that was, it was something bad.

So, no. His gut wasn’t telling him anything. It was practically screaming at him to get off his ass, walk to her house and have a word.

Since Harry wasn’t lazy, and he thought of law enforcement not as a job but as a calling, he got off his ass in order to walk to her house and have a word.

It would be a good bet Harry had passed Lillian Rainier’s house thousands of times in his life, and he never noticed it.

Standing outside it now, he wondered why.

---