The Blackwood River did not run clear, not even on its best days, but this morning it dragged a film of rusted foam across the rocks below the abandoned paper mill. Cassandra Reyes stood at the water’s edge, collar turned up against the damp October chill, listening to the rhythmic slap of current against rotted timber. She had spent five years in Chicago convincing herself that Millhaven was a place she had survived, not a place she would ever return to. Yet here she was, badge clipped to her belt, staring at a corpse that threatened to unearth every secret this valley had buried.
"Found him caught on the old sluice gate around dawn," Deputy Harris said, holding up a yellow evidence marker. His breath plumed in the gray air. "No wallet, but it didn't take long to figure out who he was. Look at the monogram on the cuff."
Cass crouched by the tarp, pulling on a pair of latex gloves. The body belonged to a man in his late fifties, dressed in an expensive waxed jacket that had soaked through to the lining. Water had swollen his features, but the silver hair, the sharp nose, and the arrogant set of the jaw remained unmistakable.
Arthur Vance.
Ten years ago, Vance had been the corporate liquidator sent to shutter the Millhaven Pulp and Paper Company. He had arrived in a tailored suit, pocketed a seven-figure restructuring fee, stripped the workers' pension fund through legal loopholes, and left three hundred families without a livelihood before vanishing back to the city. To see him here now, dead and tangled in the iron skeleton of the very mill he destroyed, felt less like bad luck and more like an execution.
Cass leaned closer. Along Vance’s left temple, a deep, jagged laceration had crushed the bone—inflicted before he hit the water, judging by the lack of foam in his airways. Snagged in the zipper of his jacket was a two-inch piece of braided nylon rope, finished with a heavy brass thimble clip.
"Marine grade," Cass murmured, her pulse ticking up a notch. "Not standard utility cord. Someone tied him off, or tried to weigh him down with rigging."
"That’d be my guess, too," a familiar, low voice drawled from the top of the embankment.
Cass went rigid. For a second, the river noise faded, replaced by the ghost of a summer night fifteen years ago, the smell of lake water and cheap cider, and the feeling of rough hands pulling her close in the dark. She stood slowly, peeling off her gloves, and looked up.
Wes Calloway stood leaning against the bed of his beat-up Ford, a thermos tucked under one arm and a pair of heavy work gloves sticking out of his back pocket. He had broadened since nineteen, the boyish softness carved away into lean muscle and hard angles. Dark hair curled damp against his forehead, and his jaw carried two days of stubble. He wore a canvas deck jacket with oil stains on the sleeves—the uniform of a man who spent his life pulling broken skiffs out of the mud.
When the mill collapsed, Wes’s father had been one of the first men ruined, losing the family’s machine shop to foreclosure before drinking himself into an early grave. Wes had stayed behind to pick up the pieces, running the last commercial boatyard on the river.
"What are you doing inside the perimeter, Calloway?" Cass asked, keeping her tone stripped of anything that sounded like history.
Wes took his time descending the gravel slope, his boots crunching steadily until he stopped just outside the crime scene tape. His hazel eyes swept over her—taking in the tailored wool coat, the sharp cut of her dark hair, the badge—before settling on her face with a half-smile that didn't reach his eyes.
"Harris called the yard twenty minutes ago," Wes said mildly. "Said county needed a winch and a flat-bottom to drag the intake grate. Didn't realize you were the one calling the shots these days, Reyes. Chicago get tired of you?"
"I transferred back two weeks ago. You know that." Cass stepped closer to the tape, her voice dropping so Harris wouldn't overhear. "And you shouldn't be here, Wes. Arthur Vance isn't just any floater."
At the name, the casual warmth in Wes’s posture vanished. His eyes flicked to the tarp, darkening instantly. A muscle in his jaw jumped, tight and defensive. "Vance? That son of a bitch is back in town?"
"He was," Cass said, watching him with surgical precision. "Until somebody caved in his skull and dumped him in the sluice. Sometime between midnight and four this morning."
Wes let out a short, hollow breath that sounded almost like a laugh, though there was no humor in it. "Can't say I'm ordering flowers."
"Where were you last night, Wes?"
The question landed between them like a blade. Wes looked back at her, his expression shuttering into guarded stillness. For a second, the old intimacy flickered between them—an unspoken current of anger, regret, and the undeniable pull that had never truly died—before he leaned his forearms against the wooden fence post.
"Working late at the slip," he said, his voice dropping an octave, slow and deliberately evasive. "Engine overhaul on an inboard. Nobody around to vouch for me, if that’s what your notebook is waiting for, Detective."
"Wes—"
"You want to question me, Cass? You know where the shop is," he murmured, holding her gaze with an intensity that made the chill in the air feel suddenly suffocating. "Or you can do it right here in front of Harris. Your call."