Present Day
Chapter 1
Ontario Provincial Police Detective Inspector Ellie March was tired.
It was the end of a long day. As she drove out of the parking lot of the OPP Lanark detachment office on Dufferin Street in Perth, she realized she hadn’t eaten anything since the night before. A chicken salad sandwich, she thought. She wasn’t sure.
She was starving.
She drove a block and a half to the McDonald’s and waited in the Drive-Thru line to place her order.
Her eyes slowly closed. Unfortunately, though, she could still see the photographs of the case she and the crime unit had worked since dawn yesterday morning. A young female living in Lanark village, in her late teens. Sexually assaulted by an uncle who’d been passed out on the couch all night. A brutal attack, with horrific injuries. A detailed statement from the victim’s younger sister, who’d driven her to the hospital, where the police were called.
In the province of Ontario, sexual assault is deemed a major case occurrence, meaning that Ellie March assumed command of the investigation as a major case manager, overseeing the detectives of the Lanark County Crime Unit and the regional forensic identification officers as they gathered evidence and interrogated the suspect.
It had taken all day yesterday for the victim to be examined, treated, and interviewed at the hospital. A traumatic experience at the best of times. It had also taken hours for the warrants to be issued and the physical evidence gathered at the scene, and more hours, stretching into late last night, for everything to be processed and analyzed at the regional lab in Smiths Falls. It had also taken more than a day for the suspect to finally cave in to questioning and admit what he had done.
At that point Ellie’s focus doubled down in earnest as she guided the team through the detail-oriented process of assembling the case that would be handed to the assistant Crown Attorney for prosecution. All their hard work would be gathered up into what was known as a Report to Crown Counsel, or a Crown Brief, in which the accusations against the suspect, the evidence sustaining these accusations, witnesses who were interviewed and their statements, and the procedures followed to bring charges were all carefully set out in an organized and complete statement of the facts.
It was a detail-oriented business, and yet it had to be simple and logical—
“May I take your order, please? Hello?”
Ellie crawled back into present tense and leaned out her open window. “Five Big Macs.”
“Would you like fries and a soft drink with that?”
“No.”
She paid at the next window and rolled forward, next in line to exit back onto Dufferin. Two of the burgers were hers and the other three were for Reggie, her bear of a German Shepherd. She’d eat one of hers and put the other in the fridge for later. Reggie would scarf down all three of his right away and—
She pulled out onto the street and hit the brakes as a car changed lanes right in front of her and smacked into her Tahoe. Belatedly the front-collision alert began to emit high-pitched beeps as her head snapped forward. By the time it stopped, she had collected herself enough to realize that she wasn’t hurt. Two men were getting out of the other car, so she got out as well.
“You didn’t signal your lane change,” she said as they advanced on her.
The driver, small and greasy looking, ran a hand through his rat-chewed hair. The other, tall and heavy, wore a black London Fog raincoat despite the heat, black jeans, a black T-shirt, and Ray-Ban Wayfarer-style sunglasses.
She glanced at the front of her car. The Tahoe was her newly issued motor pool vehicle, replacing the Crown Victoria she’d driven for so long it had felt like a second home to her. She missed it, but not enough to prevent her from falling in love with the Tahoe. It was big, powerful, and nearly new, with much more comfort and electronic functionality than she’d had before with the Crown Vic. Now here it was with a smashed headlight and damage to the bumper and front fender.
The car that had hit her, a vintage-looking black Thunderbird, had similar damage—
“Stupid bitch.”
Frowning, she looked at the driver. Baring his teeth, he punched her in the stomach. Air whooshed from her and she folded over, just in time to meet an uppercut that caught her under the chin and flipped her over onto the pavement.
Down and out.
© Michael J. McCann 2026