As Pine scanned the email, she noted about a dozen people who’d been copied on it. He wanted to know what progress she’d made on the case thus far. There was one from her direct superior out of Flagstaff. She had heard that your work should not be your life. She dressed in fresh clothes, sat down at her knotty pine kitchen table, which had come with the apartment and which also doubled as her home office, and checked her emails, phone messages, and texts. She showered to take off the dirt and sweat of the Grand Canyon. But Pine had never allowed herself the time or opportunity to dig deep enough into her psyche to prove that theory true or false. Some shrinks might interpret that as her being fearful of another significant loss. She wanted to go through life with as few as possible. When her turn had come, Pine, who had been shot, stabbed, and attacked multiple times in the line of duty, had started to sweat and taken the coward’s way out-she had passed on her turn and never gone back.įor some reason, all of this had made her averse to possessions. She had sat in a group counseling session and had listened as the attendees went around the room discussing their most personal issues. As a bereaved six-year-old, she had found it confusing, scary, and, ultimately, unhelpful.įour years ago, she had tried it again. And she was perfectly fine with that.Īfter losing Mercy, she had been put into counseling. She had no flowers in pots, no pets in crates, no hobbies waiting for her to pick them back up when she returned from working on a case. She was a no-visitors, one-bedroom kind of gal, too. Pine didn’t know if that was true or merely anecdotal, but she could relate to the feeling. She’d heard that the author Margaret Mitchell had never lived in a place with more than one bedroom for a simple reason: She had never wanted houseguests. And her childhood home was a two-bedroom ranch in rural Georgia. She had never lived in anything larger than a one-bedroom place since leaving home. There was only one other three-story “high-rise” in town-a hotel that catered to those visiting the Grand Canyon. The apartment building was three stories tall and fully rented out by a variety of tenants. Pine threw her duffel down on the floor and looked around her tiny, Spartan one-bedroom apartment on the edge of Shattered Rock, a town so small that the outskirts and the minuscule down- town area were kissing cousins.

In the following passage, Atlee Pine digs into a man’s mysterious disappearance at the Grand Canyon, and finds unexpected connections to higher ups in the defense department.

The following is an exclusive excerpt from Long Road To Mercy, an Atlee Pine thriller from internationally bestselling thriller author David Baldacci.

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