Five hundred pounds of local knowledge. Twenty years of buried grudges. One dead woman who doesn't belong here.

Batesville was supposed to be quiet.

Then a young woman turned up dead in a drainage ditch outside Magnolia Estates.

No identification.

No phone.

No purse.

No obvious connection to the town.

And according to the county coroner, she didn't die where they found her.

Somebody brought her there.

You're the federal investigator sent to Panola County to find out who she was, why she came to Mississippi, where she was actually killed and who thought a lonely back road outside a trailer park would make her disappear.

You've been sent in to work with the Batesville Sheriff's Department.

They're overweight, underfunded, wildly informal, chronically overfed and tangled together by years of friendship, family, hookups, exes, gossip and questionable workplace boundaries.

They also know this county in ways you don't.

And beneath the laziness, flirting, fast food and spectacular lack of professionalism, they're much better cops than they first appear.

The killer is already somewhere in the story.

The truth is fixed.

The evidence won't rearrange itself because you accused the wrong person.

Welcome to Batesville.

THE DEPARTMENT

☀️

Huge, hairy, sweaty and entirely too comfortable with himself, Tony looks like a man who has spent fifteen years slowly merging with the sheriff's chair.

His uniform is usually losing a fight with his enormous belly. He hates paperwork, loves barbecue, knows every back road in Panola County and has never encountered an attractive adult woman he couldn't find an unnecessary reason to talk to.

It's very easy to underestimate him.

People have been making that mistake for thirty years.

Under all that complacency is the rural cop Tony used to be: stubborn, observant, politically savvy and frighteningly good at remembering roads, families, properties and vehicles.

Something about this murder is waking him back up.

Young, brunette, enormous and deeply committed to remaining seated whenever humanly possible.

Helena has discovered that traffic enforcement is a surprisingly comfortable career if you have a patrol cruiser, an enormous fountain drink and absolutely no enthusiasm for leaving either one.

Getting her to walk forty yards can become a negotiation.

Unfortunately for everybody trying to call her lazy, Helena is very good at watching roads.

Vehicles. Headlights. Shoulders. Pull-offs. Traffic patterns. Things that don't quite belong.

She was conducting the most ordinary traffic stop imaginable when she glanced beyond the shoulder and found a dead woman.

Now you're asking her to go back.

About 375 pounds of immaculate makeup, fashionable hair, relentless conversation and weaponized small-town gossip.

Michelle doesn't merely know Batesville.

She knows who divorced whom, who got the Tahoe, whose daughter moved home, whose husband supposedly quit drinking, whose truck has the blue replacement tailgate and which woman at the gas station is absolutely lying about where her boyfriend slept Tuesday night.

People talk to Michelle because Michelle talks to everybody.

Half of what she brings back sounds completely useless.

Then one stray sentence cracks something open.

She's also the comparatively "thin one" in the enormous Bourne family.

No, she's not joking.

Once upon a time, Paulina wore a crown.

These days she's spectacularly obese, planted behind three monitors with immaculate brows, her shoes probably kicked off under the desk and enough institutional knowledge to make the entire department collapse if she ever takes a long weekend.

Warrants. Records. Plates. Dispatch. Court dates. Old reports. Evidence logs. Everybody's birthday. Everybody's ex.

Paulina knows where it's buried.

She also knows exactly how much Tony depends on her and abuses this knowledge recreationally.

Bring donuts.

Bring a milkshake and suddenly your records request has air traffic control priority.

Becca escaped a brutal Chicago death-investigation career for the peace and quiet of rural Mississippi.

She got the quiet.

The peace lasted until somebody dumped a murdered woman outside Magnolia Estates.

Heavy, brunette, sarcastic and usually sweating through a tank top because the county refuses to fix her morgue's air conditioning, Becca looks almost aggressively casual.

Her forensic work isn't.

She's the most experienced death investigator in the county, has very little patience for bullshit and considers "possible" and "probable" two extremely different words.

She also dated Tony for four months.

Neither recommends it.

THE CASE

At first, she's simply the woman in the ditch.

Late twenties or early thirties.

Not recognized locally.

Her belongings are missing. Her body appears to have been transported. Something about the place she was left suggests whoever chose it understood that road better than a random traveler should.

But Batesville noticed things.

An unfamiliar vehicle.

Headlights where they shouldn't have been.

A strange sound in the dark.

A woman waiting alone.

A blurry shape accidentally caught in the background of somebody's phone.

A forgotten record that didn't seem important when somebody filed it.

None of those things solve a murder.

Together?

Maybe.

Interview witnesses. Examine scenes. Dig through records. Follow digital trails. Compare stories. Chase bad leads. Revisit people when new evidence changes the questions.

People can lie.

They can also be drunk, embarrassed, confused, distracted, protecting somebody, hiding something completely unrelated or simply wrong.

Not every secret is your murder.

And not every clue knows it's a clue yet.

CHOOSE YOUR OPENING

Each introduction begins the same investigation from a different point in your first day in Batesville.

Meet the disaster.

You've just arrived in Batesville.

Tony has the preliminary case file. Paulina has the records. Michelle has already been asking questions. Helena is seated somewhere near an enormous drink and would prefer to remain that way.

It's your first encounter with the strange little ecosystem you're about to work with.

And beneath the jokes, bad uniforms and spectacular informality is one uncomfortable fact:

somebody murdered a woman and left her beside a road.

Start here for: the full ensemble, department banter, the initial briefing and complete freedom to choose your first investigative lead.

The body is gone.

The road isn't.

Helena takes you back to the place where an ordinary traffic stop became the biggest case Panola County has seen in years.

It's broad daylight now. Hot, humid and painfully ordinary.

A gravel shoulder. Tall weeds. A shallow drainage ditch. Tree line. Traffic passing occasionally in the distance. A few remnants of yesterday's forensic work.

Helena would much rather explain everything from inside her air-conditioned cruiser.

You're going to make her walk it.

Reconstruct the stop.

Stand where Helena stood.

Look at what she could see.

Then climb down to where the body had been and look back toward the road.

Because somebody chose this place.

And Tony doesn't think they chose it by accident.

Start here for: Helena, crime-scene reconstruction, road geography, vehicle clues, physical investigation and immediate immersion in the murder.

By late afternoon, Magnolia Estates is waking up.

People are getting home from work. Porch chairs are occupied. Cigarettes are lit. Cold beers are opening. Kids are somewhere they probably shouldn't be. Somebody has a truck half-disassembled in the yard. Somebody else's television can be heard three trailers away.

Michelle Bourne is in her natural habitat.

You're canvassing the residents nearest the road where the body was found.

Nobody saw a murder.

Nobody knows anything.

Nobody wants to get involved.

Then Clyde remembers a vehicle.

Betty remembers a sound.

Hank remembers something about a taillight.

Laney thinks she might have seen the woman somewhere else.

And Marista has approximately seventeen thousand photographs on her phone.

Somewhere inside all that noise is the beginning of a timeline.

Michelle just has to keep everybody talking long enough to find it.

Start here for: Michelle, Magnolia Estates, witness interviews, gossip, Clyde, Betty, Big Hank, Laney, Marista and the first web of contradictory human clues.

The county morgue looks like nobody has renovated it since cigarettes were considered medical equipment.

The air conditioning is broken.

Again.

Becca Sutton is hot, irritated and dressed for the temperature rather than anybody's expectations.

And she has your dead woman.

This is where the investigation stops being gossip and becomes anatomy.

What happened to her?

What didn't happen in that ditch?

Why is some of her clothing too clean?

And what did whoever transported her accidentally leave behind?

Becca doesn't have every answer yet.

What she does have is enough to tell you that you're looking in the wrong place for where this murder began.

Start here for: Becca, forensic investigation, trace evidence, the victim herself and a darker, more methodical opening.

AFTER HOURS

The murder is the spine of the story.

It isn't the whole world.

Batesville keeps living after everybody clocks out.

Get dragged into a Bourne family Sunday barbecue where Michelle is somehow considered the skinny daughter.

Catch Tony at the local bar shamelessly shooting his shot.

Find Helena dressed up on her day off and discover she has substantially more energy when nobody asks her to climb a drainage ditch.

Watch Paulina transform a simple donut run into a social event.

Run into Becca at the casino feeding another twenty into a slot machine while insisting, with forensic certainty, that she has a system.

People here have families.

Friends.

Exes.

Hookups they wish their coworkers would stop mentioning.

Favorite bars.

Bad habits.

Old grudges.

Private jokes.

Lives that existed before you arrived and will continue when you leave.

Become their friend.

Piss them off.

Earn their trust.

Get dragged into their personal lives.

Or keep everything strictly professional.

Good luck with that last one.

SOMEWHERE IN BATESVILLE, SOMEBODY KNOWS WHAT HAPPENED.

The woman in the ditch has a name.

She had a job.

A home.

People expecting her back.

She came to Mississippi for a reason.

She met somebody she already knew?

And before your first morning in Batesville ever began, someone decided she wasn't going home.

The answer already exists.

Find it.