Tessa Stark: Desert Heat

Chapter One

According to statistics, only fifty one percent of homicide cases had been solved in the year 2022. That left half of all murders in the United States unresolved. And half of the families of the murder victims with no answers, no closure...no justice. And according to statistics, the reason for such a tragic clearance rate was fairly simple. There were more murders being committed than there were people to solve them.

States had been given inadequate resources to properly fund local police departments. There weren't enough homicide detectives, enough forensic technicians to work crime scenes, enough medical examiners to handle cases in a timely fashion, and certainly not enough laboratory facilities capable of keeping up with the influx of evidence. Boiled down, most communities simply lacked the necessary funds and manpower to properly investigate major crimes.

In terms of real world consequences, all those factors combined gave someone bent on committing murder a fifty-fifty shot at walking away scot-free.

It was mind boggling, really. With all the modern technology that could be involved in police work...DNA, fingerprinting, palmprinting, wrist vein mapping, gait analysis, iris recognition...fewer and fewer homicides were actually being solved just because there weren't enough people to use those technologies to hunt down the perpetrators.

Thinking on it, the odds seemed about as poor as one man standing on a beach, physically trying to fight back the ocean waves as they rolled into shore. He could fight as long and hard as he could possibly fight, he could use every tool available to him, but the waves were going to win by sheer force of volume. That man, valiant though his effort, was fighting a battle he could not win.

That was how police work felt at times. Like trying to fight back wave after surging wave, never making any headway, and basically, just trying not to drown.

As futile and foolhardy as it could seem, though, those stalwart souls that were drawn to policing thought it was worth spending their lives trying to single-handedly fight back those never ending waves simply because, in doing so, they might be able to save just one person from a watery grave.

That was the thing that kept most law officers going. The notion of saving even just one person. However, in her case, by the time she was called in, it was already too late. The victim was beyond saving. So, she instead tried to save the family that had been left behind.

In reality, helping one family was akin to catching a single drop of water from one of those waves crashing into shore and tossing it back into the sea. It made absolutely no difference on the whole. The person was already gone. And another person would be taken, given only a matter of minutes. Which would leave another family grieving, wanting answers, wanting justice.

No. Counting the whole, helping one family changed nothing. It didn't shift crime rates or lower statistics. It didn't comfort all the other families who'd never gotten their answers. But, for that one family...it changed everything.

She, on the other hand, did feel like she was drowning at times. Especially when she'd been called in on back-to-back cases for nearly six months straight. She'd already been to Cincinnati, Miami, Great Falls...and now Santa Maria.

She'd almost said no. She'd almost told Sheriff Grainger that she needed a break, some time off to rest. She hadn't wanted to turn away a family that she might be able to help, but she'd also been steering clear of Texas with a measure of vehemence for nearly fifteen years.

But, a favor had been called in and Clyde Grainger was someone she considered a friend, as well as a mentor, so she couldn't turn him down, no matter how much she might want to. And so, she was driving along Sunset Lane, straight toward the very thing she'd been avoiding. Well, what she'd been avoiding wasn't actually a thing. It was a person.