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don’t have anything on me, but I can tell by the way they look at me that they think I killed Angie.”
    Nick rested his forehead on his palm, unsuccessfully trying to squeeze the tension from his growing headache. If the police thought Steve was guilty, there had to be some evidence to back it up.
    Dammit, Steve, what have you gotten yourself into?
    “Where are you now?”
    “My apartment.”
    “Get an attorney.”
    “If I get an attorney, they’ll think I’m guilty.”
    Nick said slowly, “They think you’re guilty now.”
    Silence. Then, “Nicky, I really need your help.”
    “What aren’t you telling me?”
    Steve didn’t say anything for a long minute, then: “Angie had a restraining order against me. It didn’t mean anything,” Steve continued quickly. “Really, she was just mad at me because I told her to be careful because she was hanging out with the wrong people, putting too much personal information online.”
    “I don’t understand. People don’t get restraining orders for no reason.”
    “Look, I just need you, okay? If you can’t help me, I don’t know who to go to. Please come. I don’t have anyone else.”
    Nick found himself listening to a dial tone.
    Slowly, he replaced the receiver. Steve suspected of murder. It didn’t make sense. Nick couldn’t see Steve killing a woman because she jilted him.
    Nothing that Steve had said made much sense to Nick. His ex-girlfriend got a restraining order against him, then ends up dead. Yeah, if he were investigating the case, Steve would be at the top of the list of suspects. Maybe that’s all this was, the detectives looking at the most likely suspect—ex-boyfriend. As soon as they cleared him, they could track down other ex-boyfriends, friends, colleagues.
    Still, Nick really had no choice but to go to San Diego and do everything he could to help Steve. Isn’t that what brothers do? Stand by each other?
    These last few years they’d grown apart, living more than a thousand miles from each other, but now Steve had asked for help, and Nick would do anything he could.
    He called in Deputy Lance Booker. Last year, during the Butcher investigation, Booker had been an overeager rookie. Today he was a solid cop. Violence and murder did that to you. Proved what you were made of. Or proved what you lacked.
    “I have a family emergency,” he told Booker. “I’m authorizing you to take over as acting sheriff until I return.”
    Booker looked surprised, but didn’t say anything. Nick was breaking protocol, though he hardly cared at this point.
    “If Sam Harris gives you shit, don’t take it. I’m telling everyone you’re in charge. You have my cell phone and pager if you need me.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Though as undersheriff, Sam Harris was second in command, the sheriff had the authority to appoint
any
deputy as acting sheriff in his absence. Harris had taken over when Nick disappeared last year and had played the press and the politicians into thinking that he’d single-handedly stopped the Butcher instead of jeopardizing the investigation.
    Nick wasn’t about to give him that control again.
    Nine months ago he’d faced a serial killer and lived, no thanks to Sam Harris.
    For thirteen years, a killer had terrorized the college town of Bozeman, Montana. The Bozeman Butcher—as the press had dubbed him—kidnapped, raped, and tortured college women. But if that wasn’t enough, he released them naked in the woods to hunt them down like animals. Twenty-two women, dead.
    Last year after the Butcher struck again, Nick called in the FBI and together they worked the case, getting closer to identifying the Butcher. But Nick couldn’t claim credit for ending the Butcher’s reign of terror. Instead, he’d made a huge error in judgment and ended up being held captive. He’d needed to be rescued instead of doing the rescuing.
    That was all water under the bridge, of course. The Butcher was dead, his victims avenged, and Montana State University,