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The phone chimes like a knife-tapped glass.

Not loud but enough to waken.

A text.

The message is simple:

Back off—Last warning.

Below is the black triangle of an attached sound recording.

A pause and then it downloads and plays.

First the scream, then the woman’s voice. “No, please ... No ... Kill me! Please. Just—”

A final scream and the recording ends.

Wednesday, April 5

Today would be out of the ordinary.

He was looking forward to it.

Cautiously.

The twenty-nine-year-old deputy pulled his somber-gray squad car into the Upper Falls strip mall parking lot, slowed to a stop and looked around him, past the parents shopping now that thechildren were in classrooms, past DIYers loading paint and drywall into their pickups, past the skinny truant teens clustered together, aimless, faces sporadically obscured by dense masses of vaping steam.

A few glances his way.

Always, with the car. Always, with a man in a Sheriff’s Office uniform, crewcut, unsmiling, brown eyes that “meant business,” he’d been told, though by a drunk he was arresting for public urination so the observation was a bit suspect.

What’s he up to? the people here would be wondering.

Shoplifters? A fight? An arrest was always good to video and upload to TikTok, even if it didn’t result in nearly as many views or likes as one would want. Supply and demand.

Deputy Anthony Lombardi noticed the man waving, eight rows away.

He steered in that direction, then pulled into a space facing Dollar General.

Lombardi killed the engine and climbed out.

The two men met on the sidewalk in front of the store. Lombardi adjusted his service belt, a habit when he was uneasy. “Marshal Greene?”

They shook hands and Greene displayed an ID and a badge; it was a silver star, like what old-time sheriffs wore, in the movies at least. No need for Lombardi to flash anything; his Sheriff’s Office uniform, along with a name tag, said it all. There was the squad car too.

Edward Greene was of medium build—if he’d done a college sport, it would’ve been baseball. He was dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, pale blue tie. Neatly trimmed dark hair. Carefully shaven, as, Lombardi supposed, all marshals had to be. A serious face and still brown eyes—which most definitely meant business.

“Welcome to Upper Falls. Or you can call it what we do: just the Falls.”

“Looks like a lovely place.” Greene had a lilt to his voice situating his origins somewhere in the South.

Lombardi chuckled. “Parts are. Yessir.” He had been a Harbinger County Sheriff’s Office deputy since the army. Unlike some of his coworkers, even at this age, he was in basic training shape. One hundred seventy-three pounds on his six-foot frame. He had a full head of brown hair and a face that looked like that of an actor on a prime-time police or hospital show. Not the lead but serving a role to advance important plot developments every third episode or so.

“Now, Deputy—”

“Let’s make it Tony, how about?”

He said this automatically, then wondered, Was it okay to go first name?

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