The pine cupboard doors stood open, their contents spewed out of them. Stoneware and china and flatware lay broken and scattered, appropriately macabre place settings for the gruesome meal that had been laid out on the floor.

Mari backed away slowly, her hand trembling as she reached out to steady herself with the one ladder-back chair that remained upright at the long pine harvest table. She caught her full lower lip between her teeth and stared through the sheen of tears. She had worked too many criminal cases not to see this for what it was. The house had been ransacked. The motive could have been robbery, or the destruction could have been the aftermath of something else, something uglier.

“Lucy?” she called again, her heart sinking like a stone at the sure knowledge that she wouldn’t get an answer.

Her gaze drifted to the stairway that led up to the loft where the bedrooms were tucked, then cut to the telephone that had been ripped from the kitchen wall and now hung by slender tendons of wire.

Her heart beat faster. A fine mist of sweat slicked her palms.

“Lucy?”

“She’s dead.”

The words were like a pair of shotgun blasts in the still of the room. Mari wheeled around, a scream wedged in her throat right behind her heart. He stood at the other end of the table, six feet of hewn granite in faded jeans and a chambray work shirt. How anything that big could have sneaked up on her was beyond reasoning. Her perceptions distorted by fear, she thought his shoulders rivaled the mountains for size. He stood there, staring at her from beneath the low-riding brim of a dusty black Stetson, his gaze narrow, measuring, his mouth set in a grim, compressed line. His right hand-big with blunt-tipped fingers-hung at his side just inches from a holstered revolver that looked big enough to bring down a buffalo.

He spoke again, his voice low and rusty, his question jolting her like a cattle prod. “Who are you?”