Mack Peters enjoys the good life now, but it always wasn’t that way. Twelve years before, tragedy struck on a lovely Sunday morning, as Mack and his father, Beverly Hills Police Chief Bill Watson, finished their breakfast on the patio of a Beverly Hills restaurant. At the time, Mack was a member of the LAPD. In his quest for peace of mind, he resigned from the LAPD and backpacked through Europe for an extended time.

After Mack returned to the States, the former LA cop struck it rich when he came up with an ingenuous idea that gave him a lot of free time and produced millions of dollars. If asked what he does for a living, he says with a smile, “I go to my mailbox and collect checks.”

With a thriving business that practically runs itself, he has the luxury of being able to take off on trips when the spirit moves him. His friends Marcie and Kurt Conklin suggested that he visit a quaint town in Washington State called Leavenworth, and it wasn’t hard to persuade him. But they had an ulterior motive—a motive that resulted him agreeing to help one of their friends track down her missing sister. That led him to the remote small town of Watson Falls and a situation and people more deadly than he could have ever imagined.