She crawled forward, one foot, two, then raised herself up to get a better view of the door.

Hadley was staring into the eyes of a dead woman. She was half in, half out of the doorway, mouth still open from her last word, her blood soaked into her shirt and puddling beneath a plastic laundry basket filled with towels.

Oh, my God.

Hadley collapsed back onto the ground, squeezing her eyes shut like a kid hiding from the boogeyman. She swallowed, dry-mouthed, against her rising gorge. I'm not going to throw up, she thought. I'm not going to throw up. With her eyes closed, she noticed the things she should have earlier: the bright copper tang of blood, the nose-wrinkling suggestion of human waste, the buzzing of full-bellied flies.

She could hear the timbre of Van Alstyne's voice floating on the heat-saturated air. I have to let the chief know about this. Of course, to do that she was going to have to move, which she didn't want to do, not now, not maybe ever. She didn't want to deal with yet another dead person. What was this? The fourth? Fifth?

With that, she had another realization. The chief's promise of thirty days in the county jail-a lie to begin with, since the guy had shot at a cop, for God's sake-wasn't going to seduce this man. He wasn't going to give himself up. He was already headed for Clinton. He had nothing to lose.

Hadley reversed herself, staying as low to the ground as she could, then belly-crawled back around the side of the house.