Chapter 1

1

Abby drummed her fingertips on her tablet as Mark guided their giant Crown Vic down Summer Street. Summer Street wasn’t supposed to be this wide or open, and up by its start near Boston Common it was exactly as it should be. Down here by Fort Point, Summer Street had been widened, made modern and bland. It could be any street in any city in the country, and Abby hated it.

None of the widening changed the volume of traffic on Summer Street. Whether true to seventeenth century form or expanded to accommodate the twenty-first, Summer Street was always a clogged mess. Abby and Mark had lights and sirens to get them through the unholy tangle.

“Where are all these people going?” Mark gripped the wheel hard enough to whiten his knuckles. “Shouldn’t they all be home by now?”

“Nah, this is close enough to the Financial District. They’re all putting in overtime, trying to impress someone.” Abby scoffed. Her stepbrother worked in one of those buildings. She never could be sure which one. Steve-o changed jobs too often for her to keep track. Whatever it was he did, he made good money at it. She couldn’t imagine it was worth the long hours.

Granted, here she sat, inching her way through traffic at nine-thirty at night on her way to yet another crime scene. At least Steve-o got paid for it, and paid well too.

She made a face. “What do we know about this case?”

Mark sucked his lower lip in, like he was about to drop an f-bomb. Then he glanced down at his wrist, where a rubber band dangled over an angry red welt. Mark’s kid was about eighteen months old now, and repeating everything that came out of Mark’s mouth. He was making a good-faith effort to clean up his language, something Abby had to applaud.

“Not a whole lot,” Mark said, once he’d recovered his thoughts. “We know we’ve got a dead body, throat cut. Vic is male, about thirty. Crime scene is outside The Gin Barrel and he hasn’t been there that long.”

“Did anyone try to save him?” If he hadn’t been there all that long, it was possible someone had tried to save him. Maybe they could have. People did sometimes survive having their throat cut. At the same time, rescue attempts would have compromised the scene.

Abby curled her lip in disgust at herself. Compromising the scene should be the last of her worries, if there had been any possibility of the victim surviving. Instead here she was weighing the benefit like there was any comparison to saving a human life. She’d been in this job too long.

“No. He hadn’t been dead long, but the weather isn’t great and no one wants to be out in it. The person who called 9-1-1 rolled him over and saw exposed bone, saw the blood, saw his eyes were fixed and glassy. There wasn’t anything left to pump with CPR, according to dispatch.” Mark shook his head and took the left onto A Street.

“Yikes.” A slashing like that would have been brutal. “It takes a lot of rage to get to that point.”

Mark grunted. “Or a lot of training.”

Abby snorted. “Which is more likely, in Boston outside a bar? A ton of rage, or some Navy Seal creeping up out of Fort Point Channel to go cutting throats of random drunks in the night?”

A tiny smile played at the corners of Mark’s mouth. “Embrace your and, Morgan. There’s no reason a Navy Seal couldn’t have crept up out of Fort Point Channel and cut someone’s throat good and deep. Maybe he was pissed off about all the tea. Or maybe it was road rage.”

Abby snickered as Mark parked the car in a no-parking zone on Congress, right outside the bar. A few people honked their horns and gave them the finger. It was part of the job. Abby hardly noticed anymore.

She looked over the building in which the bar was housed. She’d never been in here before. Steve-o had sent her a link to the bar’s website. It was way too rich for her blood. Plus, the whole thing seemed kind of pretentious, almost like it was gentrifying Boston’s past. The Gin Barrel was located in the basement of a building that had once been a warehouse, that had once been a factory, that had once been a different warehouse, with a once-notorious brothel on top. It had no flashing neon signs and didn’t serve lowbrow anything, but it deliberately harkened back to the days when gin was a poor man’s tipple. It was like they wanted to pretend there was something dashing and romantic about rats, human trafficking, and venereal disease.