Chapter 1

"You sure dispatch called this... natural causes?" I gripped the steering wheel of the Ford cruiser, throwing a sideways glance at the veteran detective in the passenger seat, Robert Gates.

"That's what dispatch said," Gates mumbled around an unlit Marlboro before sparking it and rolling down his window to let the smoke draft out.

A few minutes later, we pulled up to 302 Oak Street. It was my third week in Major Crimes, my very first call-out as a newly minted detective.

"Deep breaths," Gates caught my nervous fidgeting before we stepped out, offering a gruff reassurance. "Probably just a sick senior who didn't survive the night."

I nodded and popped my door. The morning air was crisp and clean. The two-story Victorian looked like the absolute picture of suburban domestic bliss—wind chimes swaying gently on the front porch, accompanied by a vibrant pot of geraniums in full bloom.

Gates hit the buzzer. Barely ten seconds later, the door swung open.

A man pushing fifty stood in the foyer. He was dressed in aggressively pressed khaki slacks and a light blue knit sweater. His blond hair was meticulously combed with not a strand out of place, though his eyes were heavily rimmed with red.

"Officers," the man rasped, his voice low and exhausted. "I'm Arthur Pendleton. I made the call."

"Mr. Pendleton." Gates gave his badge a customary flash. "Mind if we come inside and take a look?"

"Of course. Come in." Arthur stepped aside to let us pass.

The moment I followed Gates over the threshold, a bizarre, suffocating odor punched me directly in the sinuses.

It was a heavy cocktail of cheap lavender Glade spray desperately trying to mask something else... something cloyingly sweet and sickeningly foul.

My stomach did a violent flip. I had to grind my molars together to keep from dry-heaving on the spot.

"The smell is a bit much, isn't it?" Arthur noted my pale face and offered an apologetic sigh. "Grace... my daughter. Her condition caused some incontinence issues toward the end. Elaine is upstairs trying to pull herself together. She's completely devastated."

Gates didn't offer any empty condolences. His seasoned eyes scanned the hallway before he bypassed Arthur entirely, making a beeline for the partially open French doors at the end of the corridor.

The living room beyond appeared perfectly curated and pristine, the mantle crowded with framed portraits of a happy family of three. But whatever residual comfort the room held was instantly shattered by an overwhelming wall of noise.

The massive flat-screen mounted in the center of the room was blasting SpongeBob SquarePants at maximum volume.

The yellow sponge's shrill, manic laughter bounced off the walls of the totally spotless room, practically vibrating against my eardrums.

I scanned the room for our "victim." The space was uncomfortably tidy. There was no hospital bed, no medical equipment, not even a single misplaced magazine. It was so clean that, on my first pass, I couldn't actually spot a body anywhere.

Then Arthur stopped at the threshold. Burying his face in his hands, his shoulders began to heave. He raised a trembling index finger and pointed straight ahead. "She... she's right there."

I followed his gesture.

As the cartoon scenes cut rapidly, the screen threw out bright strobes of aggressive neon light. Red, blue, and yellow flashes raked across the dim, curtain-drawn room, spotlighting a large, overstuffed recliner positioned dead center against the focal wall.

Driven by the frantic, shifting glare of the television, my eyes finally adjusted. Deeply sunken into the cushions, buried beneath a heavy, floral-patterned blanket, was a human silhouette.

Fighting the violent nausea churning in my gut, I closed the distance step by step. With every inch I gained, the sickly stench of putrefaction radiating off the chair grew exponentially worse.

Barely three feet away, I froze dead in my tracks. A cold sweat immediately broke across my neckline.

There sat a woman who was little more than a skeletal frame draped in parchment-thin skin. She was swallowed by a comically oversized pink nightgown. Her jaw hung loosely at an impossible, unhinged angle, the corners of her mouth caked with a dried, black sludge. But the most spine-chilling detail was her eyes. They were stretched impossibly wide open, her clouded, vacant pupils locked dead ahead, staring blankly into the manic strobing of the television.

"Her name is Grace," Arthur murmured from behind me. "She was sick. So very sick. We were sitting with her, watching TV just last night before bed. When I came downstairs this morning, I found that she had... passed on."

My scalp prickled as the hyper-colored television flashes illuminated tiny, writhing white specks clustered along the folds of Grace's sunken cheeks.

They weren't dust motes. They were maggots.

A body that had allegedly died 'this morning' doesn't breed maggots.

The fiercely cheerful background track of the cartoon continued to blast obliviously through the room.

"Are ya ready, kids?" the Pirate Captain bellowed from the surround-sound speakers.

"Guh—"

My biological reflexes hijacked my brain. Clamping a hand over my mouth, I bolted blindly out of the living room, bursting through the front door, and violently emptied my stomach onto the manicured front lawn.

I gasped for air, wiping my mouth with the back of my trembling hand as I stared back up at the impeccably perfect Victorian baking in the warm morning sun.

What the hell actually happened in that house?