the day to stumble on a corpse. Jensen loved to eat, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to handle a greasy barbecue sandwich slathered with spicy red sauce if they discovered a dead body.
Jensen put his back to the wall on one side of the kitchen door, paused with his gun pointing up, and ducked into the room. Kwong followed. They lowered their weapons and stared.
“Something definitely happened in here,” Kwong said. Jensen didn’t disagree. The pieces of a shattered coffee pot were strewn in and around a puddle of dark brown liquid that covered a good part of the floor. There was another liquid on the counter that had seeped under the corner of a loaf of bread. Only this liquid wasn’t coffee. There were also traces of blood spattered on the floor, and a fine spray decorated the ivory-white refrigerator door.
“Look at that,” Kwong said, drawing Jensen’s attention to the blood on the blade of a large knife that lay on the kitchen counter.
“Let’s check the house,” Jensen said.
Most of the Shelbys’ home was as neat as the living room, but the bedroom was a mess. The bed wasn’t made, and the covers had been thrown back as if someone had gotten out of bed in a hurry. The closet doors were open, too, and several items of clothing lay on the closet floor as if they’d been knocked down when someone was dressing.
“What do you think happened?” Kwong asked.
“I don’t know, but I think we’d better find out what type of car Mark Shelby drives and its license number and have the dispatcher broadcast an all-points bulletin. I don’t like all that blood in the kitchen, and I definitely don’t like the fact that so much of it was on that knife.”
Chapter 2
A Midnight Call
Madison was sleeping soundly in a soft, warm place when someone started burrowing into her head with a dentist’s drill. Aargh! She rolled onto her stomach and wrapped her pillow around her head and over her ears, but the terrible sound wouldn’t stop.
Madison used every ounce of her strength to raise an eyelid. The bright red numbers on her digital clock read 12:16. Groaning, she let her eyelid drop back in place. Last night she had been so excited about starting her first day of seventh grade that she hadn’t fallen asleep until late, which meant she’d only been asleep for . . . Madison was so tired she didn’t have the energy to subtract.
Madison’s mother had died when Madison was in first grade, and she’d been raised by her father, Hamilton Kincaid. He was a top criminal defense attorney and a total workaholic. Once he got a case it became his life. It wasn’t unusual for Madison’s dad to work on a case deep into the night, and it definitely wasn’t unusual for a new client to call after midnight.
The second-floor landing was across from her father’s first-floor study. Peering through the railing, Madison saw that the door to the study was open.
“I’ll be at the jail in half an hour, Mr. Shelby,” her father said.
She ducked back from the railing just as Hamilton walked out of his den. Without looking up, he said, “I know you’re listening, Madison. I have to go to the jail. I’ll see you at breakfast.”
Most of her friends’ parents would never leave a twelve-year-old alone in the middle of the night, but Hamilton was absentminded, and Madison had grown used to taking care of herself. Double-checking that her dad had locked the door behind him, Madison, though curious, went back up to bed.
Madison’s alarm went off at 7:15. She sat up right away. She was bleary eyed from her restless night, but if she hit snooze she wouldn’t have time to blow-dry. Looking put together on her first day at a new school was seriously important.
By the second or third day, the snooze button would probably be in heavy use again. But today she couldn’t afford to go back to sleep.
Grabbing her cell phone from her bedside stand, she speed-dialed Ann. Madison and Ann had met on the first day of soccer practice when they were both five and had been best friends and teammates ever since.
Madison often thought it was cool that two such different girls could be best friends. Madison was orderly, strong willed, and liked a plan, while Ann was happy-go-lucky and ready for anything. Madison loved school, though she knew it sounded dorky. She was a straight-A student and often read books that weren’t required reading. She wanted to be the world’s greatest crime-solving attorney, so she was always on the lookout for information that could someday come in handy. Sherlock Holmes, for example, could identify 140 different types of tobacco ash and had such a great knowledge of different kinds of soil that he could tell where a person had been by examining the dirt on the sole of a suspect’s shoe. Those were just a few of the things Madison would have to know if she wanted to defend the innocent against unjust accusations in court.
Ann was smart, but she didn’t read outside of class and didn’t care if she got As or Ds as long as she could play soccer. Madison thought of Ann as her “head in the clouds” best friend. Ann probably thought of Madison as her “nose in a book” best friend.
With the first day of school also being the day of tryouts for Pettygrove’s championship soccer team, Madison had to make sure she and Ann wore matching socks, a tradition they’d kept since the first day they met.
Weirdly, Ann’s phone went straight to voice mail, so Madison left a message and rolled out of bed. After her shower, with her thick brown hair still wet, she threw her pajamas back on and went downstairs. On the way to the kitchen, Madison passed her dad’s room. The bed still hadn’t been slept in. It must have been a long night at the jail.
As Madison poured herself a big bowl of cereal, she heard her father working in his study. She carried the bowl into his home office.
“Hey, Dad.”
“Morning, honey,” Hamilton said without looking up from the stack of papers he was reading. Though he had changed his clothes since the night before, his socks were mismatched and his hair looked like a hurricane had roared through it.
“It’s the first day of junior high, Dad.”
“Oh, yeah.”
Hamilton finally looked up at his twelve-year-old daughter. She was tall for her age and thin, with strong legs from years on the soccer field. Madison knew her dad still had trouble thinking of her as anything but the little girl with pigtails who would color and play with her toys amid his law books.
Because Hamilton was a single parent who was addicted to his work, Madison had basically grown up in his downtown law office. When she was in elementary school, Hamilton would pick her up from school and take her to the firm. As she grew older and started to understand what her father did for a living, Madison began asking him about his cases—and giving him her unsolicited advice on how to win them. Eventually she became a file clerk at his office to earn pocket money, and by now she was addicted to anything having to do with law, including old Perry Mason novels and any lawyer TV show. The other kids in her elementary school would say they wanted to be bakers, teachers, and firefighters when they grew up. Madison wanted to be a criminal defense attorney and try murder cases. Now that she was entering junior high, she was more determined than ever to follow in her father’s footsteps.
“New case?” Madison asked, munching on her cereal and pointing at a stack of police reports.
