James' pov:
Then he saw it.
Small, dry, perfectly still in the wet grass beside her left hand.
A moth.
James went very still.
"Sir?" Sara said.
He didn't answer immediately.
He was looking at the moth and he was also somewhere else entirely three months ago, different town, forty minutes north of Ashford Hollow. A small flat on the second floor of a building on a street whose name he couldn't remember now, it was a woman about thirty-one years old, found at the bottom of her stairs.
It was filed as accidental a fall, a tragic ordinary accident.
James had read that file on a slow tuesday because cases from neighboring districts crossed his desk sometimes it was a routine sharing of information, he had read it and moved on.
Except he hadn't moved on.
Something had bothered him about that file for three months and he had not been able to name what it was until right now.
Right now standing in the wet grass of Kelmore Park looking at a small dry moth placed deliberately beside a dead girl's hand he knew exactly what it was.
There had been a moth in that file.
One photograph, background detail. Bottom left corner of a scene image, it was a moth on the floor near the woman's body. Nobody had flagged it, or mention it in the report. It was just a moth just an insect, just a coincidence, just the kind of thing that ended up in photographs because the world was full of small unremarkable things.
Except it wasn't unremarkable.
It was the same thing.
Exactly the same thing.
"James." Sara's voice was quiet now. She was crouching beside him, close enough to see what he was looking at. "Is that"
"Don't touch it," he said.
"I wasn't going to." She looked at it,then at him. "It's a moth."
"I know what it is."
"It didn't just land there. Look at the position. It's too centered,too deliberate."
"I know."
She looked at him squinting her eyes ,the way she did when she sensed something he wasn't saying. Sara Novak had a talent for that for reading the space between what people said and what they meant. It was going to make her either a brilliant detective or an exhausting one, possibly both.
"You've seen this before," she said.
It wasn't a question, James stood up slowly, looked at the trees, looked at the small crowd gathering beyond the tape at the park gate ordinary people in their coats and slippers carrying their ordinary morning horror.
"Three months ago," he said. " It was a different town, a woman found at the bottom of her stairs, unfortunately it was filed as an accident."
Sara was quiet for a moment.
"Filed as an accident?," she repeated carefully.
"Closed in eleven days."
"And there was a moth in one of the scene photographs background and nobody flagged it."
Sara looked back down at the moth in the grass her pen had stopped clicking.
"So this isn't the first one," she said.
"I don't know that yet," James said.
"But you think it."
He didn't answer.
He took out his phone. Scrolled through his contacts to a name he had been given last week by the department a grief counselor, the best in Ashford Hollow, someone who could help build psychological profiles for cases like this.
He had been meaning to call.
"Who are you calling?" Sara asked.
"Someone who might be able to help," he said.
It rang twice.
"This is Elena Voss." Warm and steady the voice of someone completely at ease with the world.
"Dr. Voss," James said. "My name is James I'm a detective based in Ashford Hollow the department suggested I contact you."
"Of course," Elena said. "How can I help?"
"There's been a death. A young woman. We're in the early stages of the investigation and I'd like to sit down with you at some point get some insight into the psychology of the case."
"Certainly," she said "I'm available Thursday if that works."
"Thursday works," James said.
"I'll see you then."
She hung up.
James stood in the wet grass and looked at the moth one more time.
Thursday.
Four days away.
He put his phone in his pocket and turned to Sara.
"Get the man in the construction jacket," he said. "And pull the file from Harton district. Three months ago. Woman found on Marsden Street, accidental fall."
Sara wrote it down without asking why.
That was the other thing he liked about her.
She wrote things down first and asked questions later.
"And Sara," he said.
She looked up.
"The moth keep it between us for now."
She looked at him for a moment.
"You think someone will dismiss it," she said.
"I think someone will file it as coincidence," he said. "And I've been doing this long enough to know that coincidence is usually just a pattern nobody has named yet."
Sara nodded slowly.
Looked at the moth one last time.
"Same thing," she said quietly almost to herself.
"Same thing," James said.
He walked back toward the gate.
Behind him the blue lights turned slowly in the grey Ashford Hollow morning and somewhere across town in a cream curtained office a candle burned in a window and Elena Voss sat very still in her chair and stared at the inside of her wrist and tried very hard to remember Thursday.