Sometimes, the past can haunt you…

Eighteen years ago, FBI profiler Evelyn Baine’s best friend, Cassie Byers, disappeared, the third in a series of unsolved abductions. Only a macabre nursery rhyme was left at the scene, a nursery rhyme that claimed Evelyn was also an intended victim. Now, after all these years of silence, another girl has gone missing in South Carolina, and the Nursery Rhyme Killer is taking credit. But is Cassie’s abductor really back, or is there a copycat at work?

Sometimes, the past is best forgotten…

Evelyn has waited eighteen years for a chance to investigate, but when she returns to Rose Bay, she finds a dark side to the seemingly idyllic town. As the place erupts in violence and the kidnapper strikes again, Evelyn knows this is her last chance. If she doesn’t figure out what happened to Cassie eighteen years ago, it may be Evelyn’s turn to vanish without a trace.

Praise for Elizabeth Heiter’s Hunted

“This is a really excellent thriller—fast-paced and exciting, with a memorable cast of characters. Well done!”

—New York Times bestselling author Suzanne Brockmann

“Hunted is a terrific, gripping, page-turning debut by a talented new voice in suspense. A great read!”

—New York Times bestselling author Allison Brennan

“When you pick up Hunted, get ready for a roller coaster ride that will twist, turn and spin you around until the very last page! I loved this book! Evelyn Baine is one of the most amazing characters created in print that I’ve ever had the pleasure to get to know.… If you love a book that grabs you by the throat and holds you there until the very end of a breathless journey, Hunted must be added to your wish list of books.”

—Fresh Fiction

“Elizabeth Heiter has written a thriller that grabs readers from the first page.… Hunted is a fast read because the pages fly by as the narrative gets more and more exciting and suspenseful. For a debut, Heiter has hit a high note right at the start of her writing career.”

—BookReporter

“Heiter…provides a fascinating insight into the minds of killers.… Author Heiter has created well-developed characters and a gripping story. I look forward to reading what happens next in The Profiler series.”

—Suspense Magazine

“Heiter’s Hunted is intriguing and tightly plotted. A strong debut!”

—New York Times bestselling author Laura Griffin

“A gripping, powerful read.… I love psychological suspense. Unlike many books where I can pick out the guilty party, this book is set up so that there is no possible way. I loved that! I learned things as Evelyn did, which is a real treat in a suspense or mystery novel. From start to finish, I was on the edge of my seat.”

—Roundtable Reviews

Vanished

Elizabeth Heiter

www.mirabooks.co.uk

This book is dedicated to the memory

of my grandparents. Thank you for always believing.

I love you. I miss you.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Praise

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Extract

Copyright

Prologue

The girls raced through the backyard, holding hands and giggling, oblivious to any danger. They kept running, faster and faster, until they reached the far end of the property. It was a solid two hundred feet from the house. Too far for anyone inside to see them.

Anger burned, intense enough to light sparks of pain along his nerve endings. If he wasn’t here, anything could happen to them.

He hunkered deeper in his dugout in a clump of huge, blooming lilac bushes, drew a deep breath of South Carolina’s humid summer air and waited. Watched.

He’d been watching for weeks, so he knew exactly how much time he had before they’d be called inside for dinner.

It was the little blonde girl’s yard. Cassie. He’d noticed her first, the bouncing ringlets, eyes the color of the sky on a perfect summer day. She was too innocent, too trusting. Cassie had no clue what the world had in store for her.

He never wanted her to have to find out. He’d picked her before he’d seen her friend.

Cassie’s friend was different. Small for twelve, skin the shade of coffee with a generous helping of cream and moss-green eyes that were way too perceptive, way too wary. Evelyn.

Evelyn wasn’t the kind of girl he’d been searching for, but considering how everyone treated her, she’d be better off with him. Which was why he was watching them both, why he was still trying to decide which one to save. They both needed him. But which one could he save? Which one?

Pain punched up his back, vertebra by vertebra, until it ricocheted around in his head. Another migraine. Probably the stress of having to choose.

He didn’t want to leave either one behind. But he had no choice. He was already taking a big risk by doing this in Rose Bay. He’d never dared to scout so close to home before.

Cassie laughed, the sound loud and ringing. The vibrations seemed to skim along his skin, even though she was twenty feet away.

“Let’s play hide-and-seek,” Cassie said, closing her eyes and counting.

Evelyn pivoted too fast and let out a yelp as she almost pitched herself onto the dirt. He thought she was going to dash past him, but she stopped, running tiny hands over the purple flowers, as though testing whether she could crawl inside and hide there.

You can, he wanted to whisper.

She leaned closer, peering through the branches, and he hunched lower in his hiding spot. She tilted her head and he tensed, ready to grab her if she spotted him.

“Girls!” Cassie’s mother called. “Lemonade’s ready!”

Evelyn turned away from him, waiting for Cassie to race over before the two of them hurried back to the house, hand in hand.

Once they were out of sight, he left the bushes, the scent of lilac clinging. He wove through the hundred-year-old live oaks at the back of the property and out to the street behind, where his van waited. The migraine receded as peace swelled inside him. He’d made his decision.

He’d take this same route late tonight, when the whole town was sleeping, careless with their children, ignorant of what could happen in one unguarded moment. After tonight, none of them would be so neglectful again.

Because tonight, everything was going to change. Maybe he only needed one of them, but he couldn’t leave either behind. Tonight, they were both coming with him.

One

Eighteen years later

Evelyn Baine knew how to think like a killer.

In fact, she was damn good at it. Serial killers, arsonists, bomb-makers, child abductors, terrorists—she’d crawled around in all of their twisted minds. She’d learned their fantasies, figured out their next moves and chased them down.

But no matter how many she found, there were always more.

Even before she stepped inside the unmarked building in Aquia, Virginia, where the FBI hid its Behavioral Analysis Unit, Evelyn knew the requests for profiles on her desk had grown overnight. It was inevitable.

She strode through the entrance and a blast of air-conditioning chased away the mid-June heat, raising goose bumps on her arms. As she headed toward the drab gray bull pen packed with cubicles, the scent of old coffee filled her nostrils. The whiteboard near the front of the bull pen was covered in her boss’s distinctive scrawl—notes on a case. They hadn’t been there when she’d left last night.

The handful of criminal investigative analysts who’d arrived before her—or hadn’t gone home—gazed at her with bloodshot eyes and quizzical expressions. But it had been a full two weeks since she’d been cleared to come back to work. A full two weeks for them to get used to her not being the first agent through the door in the morning and the last to leave at night.

A full two weeks for her to get used to it, too. But it still felt unnatural.

Slipping into the comfort of her cubicle, she set her briefcase on the floor, hung her suit jacket over the back of her chair and slid her SIG Sauer P228 off her hip and into a drawer. Then she looked at the case files stacked on her desk. Yep, the pile had definitely grown. And the message light on her phone blinked frantically.

Guilt swirled through her, rising up like a sandstorm. If she’d stayed an extra few hours yesterday evening, an extra few hours the evening before, she might’ve gotten through another couple of files. But she knew from a year of ten-hour days, seven days a week, that cloistering herself in her cubicle wouldn’t stop the cases from coming.

It would only stop her from having a life outside the office. And after she’d almost been killed by the serial killer she’d been profiling a month ago, that had become important.

So, she shoved the guilt back, dropped into her chair and dialed her voice mail. There were three requests for follow-up on cases she’d profiled, a pretty typical way to start her morning. She jotted them down and kept going.

The next call was from the FBI’s Employee Assistance Program, reminding her that the Bureau had psychologists she could talk to about the case that had nearly killed her, and had claimed another agent’s life. Evelyn ground her teeth and deleted it. She had her own psychology degree, and her professional opinion was that she was doing just fine. She was about to hang up when she realized there was one more message.

“I’m looking for Evelyn Baine.” The voice was vaguely familiar and every word vibrated with tension. “The Evelyn Baine from Rose Bay. This is Julie Byers. Cassie’s mom.”

Whatever she said next was drowned out under a sudden ringing in Evelyn’s ears, under a bittersweet flood of memories. Cassie, the little girl next door who’d come over the day Evelyn had moved in with her grandparents and announced they were going to be best friends. The girl who hadn’t given a damn that Evelyn was the only person in town—including Evelyn’s grandparents—who wasn’t white, at least not entirely white. And eighteen years ago, in Rose Bay, that had mattered.

Cassie had been Evelyn’s first real friend, a symbol of everything that was supposed to change in her life when she came to stay with her grandparents.

For two years, she and Cassie had been inseparable. And then one night, Cassie had disappeared from her bed. In her place, her abductor had left his calling card, a macabre nursery rhyme.

Cassie had never come home. Julie Byers calling now, eighteen years later, could only mean one thing. They’d found her.

Pressure tightened around her heart. Evelyn had worked enough child abduction cases in her year at BAU to know the statistics. After eighteen years, Cassie wasn’t going to be found alive. But she didn’t want to snuff out the flicker of hope that just wouldn’t die.

With unsteady hands, Evelyn called her voice mail again and skipped through to the last message, to hear what she knew Julie Byers was going to say. Cassie was dead.

She clutched her hands tightly together as the message replayed. “I’m looking for Evelyn Baine. The Evelyn Baine from Rose Bay. This is Julie Byers. Cassie’s mom.”

In the pause that followed, tears clouded her vision. Her whole body tensed as she waited for Julie Byers to destroy the dream she’d had for eighteen years. The dream of one day seeing Cassie again.

“Please call me, Evelyn.”

Her body deflated and she dropped her head to the desk.

“Evelyn?”

Willing her pain not to show on her face, she turned around. “Greg,” she croaked.

Greg Ibsen was the closest thing she had to a partner at BAU. Even if she’d sounded normal, he was the only one in the office who might have seen through it. As he stepped into her cubicle, worry brimmed in his soft brown eyes.

“What happened? Are you okay?”

She stared up at him, trying to get control of herself. But her eyes kept losing focus, and her heart still tripped erratically.

“Come on.” Greg set his briefcase next to hers and took her arm, pulling her out of her seat.

“Hang on,” she croaked, jotting down the number from her voice mail.

She spun back, her eyes on the loud plaid tie someone—probably his daughter, Lucy—had paired with his somber blue suit. Then Greg was propelling her into an empty interagency coordination room.

He guided her into a chair, then shut the door and leaned against it. “What’s wrong?”

Everything was wrong. She’d joined the FBI, joined BAU, to find Cassie, but she’d never told anyone at the Bureau about her past. Except Kyle McKenzie.

Kyle was an operator with the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team. Since HRT and BAU worked closely together, she’d met him the day she joined BAU. And for a whole year, she’d managed to resist his incessant flirting, assuming it was all a joke. Until last month.

Last month, she’d acted on the attraction. And everything between them had changed. Despite the fact that he’d been called away on a case too soon for them to figure out where their relationship was going, she wished he was here. Wished she could lean into his strong arms while she called Cassie’s mom.

But Kyle wasn’t here. He was somewhere not far from where she’d grown up, on a mission she didn’t “need to know” anything about. And the nature of his job meant she had no idea when he’d be back.

Greg had trained her and he’d become a good friend. Hell, he was her emergency contact, because she didn’t have any real family left except her grandma, and these days, Evelyn took care of her.

A month ago, Evelyn would have pretended to be fine. She would have brushed off Greg’s concern and gone back to work. But she was trying to make a change in her life. So, she told him, “When I was twelve, my best friend, Cassie, disappeared. She was never found.” It had been the driving force in her life for eighteen years, the one thing she’d been willing to sacrifice everything else for. “And now...”

She squeezed her eyes shut. She’d always wanted closure, always needed to know what had happened. But if Cassie was dead, she suddenly, desperately, wanted to stay ignorant.

Greg’s hand rested on her arm, and when she opened her eyes he was kneeling next to her, his gaze steady and compassionate. The gaze of someone who’d sat beside too many victims and always known the right thing to say.

And maybe, more than anyone, he’d know what she should do now. He was practiced at comforting survivors—his son, Josh, had watched his birth father kill his mother before Josh had been adopted by Greg and his wife.

“Cassie’s mom wants me to call her.” The next words didn’t want to come, but she forced them out. “It must be because they finally found her body.” Saying it out loud felt like ripping a bandage from a wound it had covered so long it had grown into the skin.

Sorrow folded into the creases beside Greg’s fawn-colored eyes. “I’m so sorry, Evelyn.” He squeezed her hand, those gentle eyes searching hers. “Eighteen years is a long time. Too long for there to be any good outcome.”

He was right, of course. If Cassie had still been alive, what hell might she have endured for the past eighteen years?

A rush of images stampeded through her head from a child abduction case she’d profiled in her first month at BAU. She’d gone to the scene to advise HRT when they went into the suspect’s house. She’d watched Kyle kick the door in. She could still smell the cordite from the flash-bang, still feel the tension, the restrained hope that maybe, just maybe, they’d find the boy alive.

She’d waited and waited until finally they’d come out. First, two HRT agents leading the suspect, naked, handcuffed and swearing. Then Kyle carrying the boy, miraculously still breathing. Someone had wrapped an FBI jacket around his violated body, but the anguish in his eyes—seven hundred days past terror—had burrowed deep into her soul and she’d known. He hadn’t really come out alive.

Greg’s voice brought her back to the present. “You were too young to have saved Cassie, Evelyn. But she brought you to us. And to all the victims you did bring home.”

“I don’t want to hear there’s no more hope,” she admitted.

“I know.”

Greg didn’t let go of her hand as she pulled out her phone and stared at it, not wanting to dial.

“You need to get it over with. It’s not going to get any easier, and waiting won’t change anything. You can do this.”

Evelyn nodded, tried to prepare herself. She dialed the number fast, before she could change her mind. Some cowardly part of her hoped Julie wouldn’t pick up, but before the first ring ended, she did.

“Mrs. Byers? It’s Evelyn Baine.” Her voice sounded strange, too high-pitched and winded, as if she’d just run the Marine training course over at Quantico.

“Evelyn.” Julie’s voice betrayed that she’d been crying.

Dread intensified, and slivers of ice raced along Evelyn’s spine.

“I’m so glad I found you.” Julie’s voice evened out. “I heard you joined the FBI.”

She had? Evelyn had left Rose Bay at seventeen, after her grandma had gotten sick and her mom had suddenly shown up again. She’d never gone back and she hadn’t talked to anyone from Rose Bay in more than a decade.

“Yes,” Evelyn managed. Get on with it, she wanted to say. Just tell me Cassie’s dead.

A sob welled up in her throat and Evelyn clamped her jaw tight, holding it back.

“You probably figured after all this time I’d only be calling... Well, it’s about Cassie.”

Evelyn’s fingers started to tingle and she realized she’d squeezed Greg’s hand so tight both of their knuckles had gone bloodless. But she couldn’t seem to loosen her grip.

“You found her?”

“No. But the person who took Cassie is back.”

Two

The Nursery Rhyme Killer was back.

The words repeated themselves in her head the way gunfire echoed after the shooting stopped, but she couldn’t make sense of them. Eighteen years of silence and then another abduction? It wasn’t completely unprecedented, but it was really rare.

Eighteen years ago, before kidnapping Cassie, her abductor had taken two other girls, from two other communities in South Carolina. No bodies had ever been found, but the press had called their abductor the Nursery Rhyme Killer.

After Cassie went missing, all of Rose Bay had been terrified, expecting him to strike again. But he never did. The trail had been cold ever since.

And Evelyn had waited eighteen years for the chance to investigate. Determination put speed in her steps as she strode through the bull pen toward her boss’s office.

“Attitude incoming,” Kendall White singsonged as she marched past his cubicle. “I knew that laid-back thing you had going for the past two weeks was just a ruse,” he called after her.

She ignored him, but something uncomfortable wormed around in her gut. In her year at BAU, her work ethic had been intense and nonstop. The past two weeks had probably seemed like an anomaly to her colleagues, but she’d intended to make a real change.

It wasn’t going to happen now. Not with the Nursery Rhyme Killer grabbing new victims. She pushed open her boss’s door without knocking. “Dan, I need to go to Rose Bay, South Carolina.”

Dan Moore, the assistant special agent in charge who ran BAU, lifted his frustrated gaze to hers and sighed. “Damn it.” Then he said into the phone at his ear, “I think I know who has it. I’m going to have to call you back.”

He hung up the phone and then barked, “Shut the door.”

Shit. She should have knocked. But Dan wasn’t exactly her biggest fan on the best day, so she tried not to let his reaction worry her.

When she’d closed the door and turned back to him, Dan said, “That was Chief Lamar from Rose Bay.”

Relief swept through her. If Rose Bay was formally requesting a profiler, it would be a lot easier to get herself assigned. “I already know the case. I—”

“Because you requested the case file under false pretenses?” Dan interrupted, his cheeks darkening to an angry, mottled red. “Chief Lamar was calling to find out if the FBI had come up with anything on the abductor since we’d asked for a copy of the file a month ago. I was in the process of telling him we’d never requested that file when you barged in.”

He slapped the desk hard, making her jerk backward. “What the hell are you doing, Evelyn? Assigning yourself cases without the Bureau’s knowledge or approval? Are you trying to get yourself investigated by OPR again?”

Evelyn stood a little straighter and prepared for a fight. The Office of Professional Responsibility hadn’t really investigated her, but they had reviewed the case she’d profiled last month that had cost another agent his life and almost took hers, too. She’d never been in trouble before that case. It hadn’t occurred to her that requesting Cassie’s case file could put a stain on her FBI personnel file.

When her grandma had let slip after seventeen years of silence that the note left by Cassie’s abductor had said he’d taken her, too, she’d needed to know. And the case file had told her it hadn’t been her grandma’s dementia talking.

Eighteen years ago, she’d somehow escaped dying alongside Cassie.

Evelyn reached a hand up to smooth hair she knew was tucked neatly into its usual bun. “I had to find out what really happened. This is why I joined the Bureau in the first place.”

Dan rubbed his hands over his temples, sending the hair on the sides of his head—the only place it grew—shooting outward. “This is that case?”

He hadn’t realized? She knew he was aware of her past. Having been best friends with a kidnap victim and being so intensely invested in the case had almost prevented her from being accepted into BAU. But apparently Dan either hadn’t looked into the case too closely or had forgotten the details. He’d been a lawyer before joining the Bureau, and since he could easily spout court case details from thirty years ago, she suspected it was the former.

She’d nearly lost a spot in BAU and Dan hadn’t even known the facts of the case. She pushed her annoyance aside. It didn’t matter now.

“Yes, this is the same case. If the perp is back, I’m in the best position to profile him. I know the case and I know the people involved.”

Dan shook his head. “Or you’re the worst possible choice, because you’re too personally involved to be objective.”

“I’m the only one who can—”

“A CARD team is there now,” Dan interrupted, his tone hard and final.

The FBI had Child Abduction Rapid Deployment teams throughout the country that could respond quickly to child abduction cases and bring specialized resources. Usually a BAU agent coordinated with the team, either from Aquia or, more often, on-site.

Evelyn tried to put on her most professional voice, but it vibrated with emotion she couldn’t hide. “We don’t have one of our agents on-site yet?”

Dan’s jaw jutted out and she sensed that he was debating whether or not to share something. Finally he said, “Vince is in Florida. He was supposed to be on his way, but his current case just had a major turn.”

Before Dan could tell her who he planned to send instead, Evelyn interrupted. “I’m already up to speed. I can leave now.”

Dan made a noise that might have been laughter, except instead of amusement it was filled with frustration. “I have to choose the agent best suited for the case, Evelyn. And we have agents who’ve worked many, many more child abductions than you. Agents without a conflict of interest.”

Evelyn stepped closer, rested her palms on Dan’s desk. She had to convince him. Nothing was keeping her off this case. “There is no one—no one—who cares about this more than I do. Okay, you’re right. It is a conflict of interest. But maybe that’s exactly what will solve this case after eighteen years.”

She stared at him, unblinking, certain the passion in her tone and the truth in her argument would convince him.

But he frowned, emphasizing the deep lines bracketing his mouth as he reached into his desk drawer and popped a handful of antacids into his mouth. “Evelyn, I’m sorry. I can’t assign you.”

“I’m going, anyway.” The words burst from her mouth without thought, then her heart started pounding a rapid, almost painful tempo. Her job was everything to her.

Dan’s lips compressed into a thin line that hooked up at the corners with disapproval. When he spoke, his voice was quietly intense. “You’re willing to throw away your career for this? Because if I don’t send you and you go, anyway, any OPR investigation will be for show. You’ll be out of the Bureau.”

Pain pierced her eyes. She’d given up everything to be in the Bureau. But she’d joined for Cassie.

“I have to.” Her voice quavered, but she pressed on. “Whatever the consequences, I can’t turn my back on this. She was my closest friend.” Evelyn clenched her fists. “I have to do this for her.”

Dan jolted to his feet, his face a mask of fury. “You are the biggest pain in the ass I have ever supervised.”

“What?” Hope pushed through her dread.

“If you fuck this up, do you know how much heat I’ll be in for sending you? Damn it, Evelyn! You’re a good profiler. I don’t want to lose you. And I don’t appreciate being put in this position.”

He didn’t give her a chance to respond, just pointed at the door. “Get the paperwork in order now. And when this case is over and you come back here, you are going to be the most obedient employee in the whole damn office—do you understand me?”

“Yes,” she choked out, suddenly wanting to run around the desk and hug Dan. Instead, she croaked, “Thank you,” and hurried out the door.

After thirteen years, she was finally going home to Rose Bay. And this time, she wasn’t leaving without knowing what had happened to Cassie.

* * *

“You’ve got to send her home.”

Police chief Tomas Lamar looked up from the information about the Nursery Rhyme Killer covering his desk. “What?”

Jack Bullock, longtime police officer, son of the previous police chief of Rose Bay and general pain in Tomas’s ass, stood in the doorway of his office. Jack was scowling as he let the chaotic noise of the station blast in.

“Evelyn Baine,” Jack snapped, a tic quivering near his eye and a vein throbbing on his forehead.

Tomas jerked to his feet. “The FBI profiler is here?”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Jack gaped at him. “You don’t know who she is?”

It figured Jack would have some kind of problem with the profiler. The head of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit had told Tomas that Evelyn was originally from Rose Bay, but he’d gotten the impression she’d left town at seventeen.

“What now, Jack?”

“Wow. Really? Did you even read the case file?” Jack made an ugly sound through his nose. “She was named in one of the damn notes!”

Tomas leveled a warning look at him. “Lose the attitude.” Then he frowned. Jack had a decade less experience than he did but knew the town better. And Jack had been a rookie during the original investigation eighteen years ago. “What are you talking about?”

Jack’s nostrils flared as he made an obvious attempt to rein in his temper. “Evelyn Baine. She was best friends with Cassie Byers. The note said the perp had also taken Evelyn. We don’t know why he didn’t, but Evelyn is way too connected to this case. She shouldn’t be here.”

Frustration bubbled up, amplifying nerves already frayed to the breaking point. As if he didn’t have enough problems. A police force he’d inherited from Jack’s father, too many of whom distrusted him because of the color of his skin or where he’d grown up. A child abductor hunting for victims. And a terrified town looking to him to stop a predator who’d gotten away with it for eighteen years. “Damn it.”

Jack nodded, the vein in his forehead disappearing. “You’re going to send her home, right? We have plenty of FBI crawling around. We don’t need an intended victim mucking around in the investigation.”

Tomas’s shoulders slumped. He’d spent nineteen hours at the station, running on adrenaline and caffeine, but he suddenly felt bone tired. “Tell her to come in.”

“Chief...”

“Just tell her to get in here, Jack.”

Resentment sizzling in his eyes, Jack nodded curtly and left the office.

When the door opened again, Tomas wasn’t sure who was more shocked, him or the woman standing there in her prim, boxy suit and tidy bun.

Her surprise must’ve been because the top law enforcement official was black in a town she would’ve remembered as almost entirely white and intent on keeping it that way.

His was because when Jack said she’d been an intended victim, he’d assumed she was white. And she was. Partly. But she was partly black, too.

When he was a boy, Rose Bay had been a town stuck in the past. North of Hilton Head and south of Charleston, nestled in a small bay, it was mostly old money. The town had relegated its poor and unwanted to the outskirts of town, near the marsh. Rose Bay had been almost totally segregated.

Tomas had spent his childhood in the marshes, but he’d been long gone by the time the Nursery Rhyme Killer struck. Still, he knew attitudes hadn’t been vastly different then.

He studied Evelyn curiously, her light brown skin so different from that of the girls in the pictures he’d spent the past few hours reviewing. All the Nursery Rhyme Killer’s victims had been white. But if Evelyn had been an intended victim...

Dread rushed over him like a tidal wave. He’d already drilled it into each of his three boys that his youngest—his only daughter, who was in the age range of the perp’s victims—wasn’t to go anywhere alone. As soon as he talked to the profiler, he was calling home to make certain they were following orders.

Shaking himself out of his stupor, Tomas held out a hand. “Agent Baine. I’m Police Chief Tomas Lamar. Thanks for coming.”

She put a tiny hand in his and he shook it briefly, carefully. “When I spoke with Dan Moore, he didn’t discuss your personal connection to the case.”

Evelyn dropped the FBI blue duffel bag that was about as big as she was from her shoulder to the ground. Then she placed her briefcase on the floor, settling back in her seat and unbuttoning her suit jacket, which made the gun on her hip visible.

He didn’t need to be a profiler to read that move. She was telling him she wasn’t leaving, no matter what he thought of her personal connection. “Relax, Agent Baine. I’m not thrilled that I had to find out from my officers, but I’ll take all the help I can get. And I’ll assume the fact that you requested this case file a month ago means you’re committed to it and you’re going to help us nail this son of a bitch.”

Her shoulders relaxed a fraction of an inch and so did the tight line of her mouth. But the intensity in her eyes didn’t diminish as she said, “He’s not getting away with it this time.”

He hoped to God she was right. Brittany Douglas had been missing for thirteen hours. And to his mind, catching the Nursery Rhyme Killer wasn’t a success unless they could also bring Brittany home alive.

He sank into his seat, couldn’t keep his shoulders from slumping as he took a gulp of coffee that had gone cold an hour ago. “Give it to me straight, Agent Baine. Are we already too late?”

She leaned forward and locked sea-green eyes on him. “I can’t tell you that. Not yet, not even when I’ve reviewed the case—not with one hundred percent certainty. Which is what you’d need in order to call off all the searchers I saw when I arrived. But I do have to see Brittany’s file. Everything you’ve got. And the ones from eighteen years ago, as well. Then I’ll give you a profile of who you’re looking for. Sometimes, if you can’t trace the victim’s movements, you get inside the abductor’s head. Because if you can find him, you’ll find Brittany.”

Tomas nodded quickly, the sliver of hope that had refused to vanish even as the hours ticked by beginning to grow again. “I talked to the Child Abduction Rapid Deployment team the FBI sent. They said they knew you were coming.” The FBI’s CARD team had shown up fast, set up a command post in his conference room at the back of the station and gotten to work immediately. But so far, they still didn’t know where Brittany was. Maybe a profiler would change that.

“The CARD team has a desk for you in their command post. They have everything you need. But let me give you the basics right now.”

“Great.” She pulled out a pen and notepad.

“Brittany Douglas disappeared last night from her front yard. Her mother was inside when it happened. She didn’t see the abduction, but she said she’d been checking out the window periodically, so there’s a pretty small time span when he must’ve grabbed her. Around 9:30 p.m., Brittany hadn’t come in yet, so her mom went outside—and found a nursery rhyme.” As soon as they’d seen it, all the veteran cops on the force had gone pale.

“Just a nursery rhyme?” Evelyn’s voice was steady, but the tension in her body betrayed her.

The media had gotten hold of the fact that the abductor left nursery rhymes at the abduction scenes eighteen years ago—that was how he’d gotten his moniker. But what the media didn’t know was how the Nursery Rhyme Killer had changed the rhymes. “A twisted version of a nursery rhyme.”

Evelyn released a loud breath. “Just like before.”

“It’s the same person from eighteen years ago, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know yet. I need to study all the notes first. I’ve read part of the original case file, but to be honest with you, I haven’t read the whole thing.” She looked at her lap, obviously struggling with something, then finally added, “I only read the note they found at Cassie’s house.”

The note that had mentioned her. Tomas didn’t like it, but he understood. “Okay. So, now you can read them all. And after you go through the files, you’ll be able to tell me if this is a copycat?”

Please, please, let it be a copycat, Tomas silently prayed. Having a child abduction was bad enough. But the Nursery Rhyme Killer hadn’t left a single piece of useful forensic evidence eighteen years ago. Tomas had reviewed the old file enough to know they’d never caught one promising lead on the perp. He’d been like a ghost.

If he was back, Tomas was terrified this time wouldn’t be any different. No matter how many FBI agents with their databases and manpower and specialized experience showed up in Rose Bay.

“Yes,” Evelyn promised. “Give me a couple of hours and I should be able to tell you if it’s the same person.”

A few more hours. The weight pressing on Tomas’s chest seemed to double. It made him wish he hadn’t asked the lead agent from the FBI CARD team earlier in the day what Brittany’s odds were. Made him wish she hadn’t told him that most abducted children who were later found dead had been killed in the first three hours.

Were they already too late?

* * *

The FBI CARD team’s command post at the back of the station was the size of Evelyn’s study. Tables had been crammed into the room and covered in laptops, files and photographs. Briefcases and FBI duffel bags were shoved under tables and littered the small aisles. There was even a bloodhound asleep in the corner—from the FBI’s Forensic Canine Unit, Evelyn assumed.

At one point, the room must have been crowded with agents and officers, but now it was mostly abandoned. Only one agent remained, trying to ignore the frantic buzz from the front of the station. She spun her chair around and jumped up as Evelyn stepped into the room. Everything from the lines on her forehead to her no-nonsense stride as she met Evelyn in the center of the room, hand already out, screamed in charge.

Evelyn put her hand in the agent’s, who shook it vigorously, her mass of curls bouncing in a high ponytail. Words burst from her mouth in an overcaffeinated frenzy. “I’m Carly Sanchez, the lead agent here. We got the call about ten hours ago and we’ve been on-site for seven.”

“I’m Evelyn Baine. Tomas told you I was on my way?”

“Yep. We’ll need the help.”

“How far have you gotten?” Evelyn asked, feeling overheated in the tiny room. Despite the air-conditioning pumping through the vents on the ceiling, between the South Carolina early-summer heat and the number of computers running, the room was stifling.

“We’ve taken statements from the parents. Gotten our basics on Brittany’s routine, possible grudges against the family, that kind of thing. Most of my team’s out canvassing and conducting interviews. We’ll reconvene here as soon as you’re ready to present your profile.”

“Okay.”

“In the corner there is Cody.” She pointed to the bloodhound. “He arrived just before you. His handler will be back in a minute and they’ll be heading over to Brittany Douglas’s house. They’re from the Human Scent Team.”

Well, Evelyn would hope so, since the other Canine Unit was for victim recovery and trained to scent on human decomposition. “Any promising leads?” Evelyn shifted her heavy bag on her shoulder as she looked up at Carly, who had a solid eight inches on her own five foot two.

Carly’s lips twisted and Evelyn read frustration there, but not defeat. There were ten Bureau CARD teams, spread across the country, ready to leave at a moment’s notice to assist local law enforcement whenever a child went missing. If it was a parental abduction, chances of recovering the child were good. But for nonparental abductions, the statistics were a lot grimmer. Anyone who chose to work on a CARD team had to be either unrealistically optimistic or impossibly hardened.

Probably the same could be said about BAU. And Evelyn knew on which end of the spectrum she fell.

“We don’t have much,” Carly answered. “Brittany lived on High Street. You remember it?”

Evelyn nodded. It was a few blocks over from where she’d lived with her grandparents from the time she was ten until she was seventeen. If it was like it had been thirteen years ago, the houses were big and far apart, neighbors were cordial but not close, and landscaping was designed for privacy.

“Then it probably won’t surprise you that we had no witnesses. I’ve got a team of seven here and they’re all paired up with officers. One of my agents is running down the nearby sex offenders and five are conducting interviews with neighbors. We’re hoping to get lucky on a vehicle description, but so far, nothing.”

“What about forensics?”

Carly shrugged, shoving back the sleeves on her pinstriped blazer. “Unlikely. The note was taped to Brittany’s bike, and we dusted it, but we only got Brittany’s mom’s prints on the note. We’re running the prints from the bike, but I doubt we’ll get a hit.”

Evelyn tried not to feel disappointed. She’d expected that. She’d been too young eighteen years ago to be told much about the investigation, but she’d understood what was going on from her grandparents’ expressions. Evidence had been slim. And as the days turned into years, hope had become even slimmer.

She vowed that this time would be different. “Where’s my spot?” She raised her voice to be heard over the chatter that had picked up in volume at the front of the station. When a child went missing, people often assumed that a police station would be empty, but it was usually packed. With officers manning tip lines and coordinating with specialized resources. With civilians reporting suspicions, demanding answers and volunteering to join search parties. “I’d like to get to work.”

Carly pointed to a place at the end of one of the tables, stacked with boxes. “Right over there. Brittany’s file is on top. And the boxes contain copies of the evidence from eighteen years ago. You’ve seen those already?” Carly asked, eyebrows raised, telling Evelyn she knew her history here.

Evelyn shook her head, then walked toward the case files. A sharp whistle brought her up short, made her spin around.

The bloodhound shot to his feet and followed his handler out of the room as a pair of cops pushed their way in to give Carly updates.

Dumping her FBI bag on the floor, Evelyn squeezed around the table to get a better look inside the boxes. She tried to ignore the increasing level of noise as officers walked in and out of the room, but it was a sharp contrast to the morgue-like quiet that usually pervaded the BAU office.

Folding back the cardboard top, Evelyn looked inside one of the boxes and saw a stack of photographs. The first photo showed a well-loved and dirt-caked doll lying on the grass, an evidence marker next to it.

Matilda. The name of Cassie’s doll came back to her as soon as she saw it.

Evelyn slapped the lid shut. She felt Carly looking at her, but didn’t lift her gaze. She could do this. Dan wasn’t right about her being too close to the case to properly profile it.

She just hadn’t expected to see Cassie’s toy. She’d gotten a copy of the case file two months earlier, but she’d mainly wanted to read the note left on Cassie’s bed. She hadn’t read through the list of cataloged evidence. She didn’t know they’d found Cassie’s doll. She’d only known they hadn’t found Cassie.

Fortifying herself, she tried to open the box again, but her hands trembled. She needed to do this in private, not surrounded by the chaos of the station.

Hefting the boxes in her arms, she went back the way she’d come. She tried to make her voice sound normal as she told Carly, “I’m going to find a quiet corner to work.”

She glanced at her watch and frowned. “I’ll be back in three hours with a profile.” It wasn’t enough time, not really, but Brittany had already been missing for thirteen hours, and after twenty-four her chances decreased even more. They all had to hurry.

Three

Evelyn clutched three boxes of case details, carrying them as low as she could to see over the top. Her duffel bag swung toward them with every step and her briefcase dangled precariously from her right hand. Her thighs bumped the boxes as she hurried toward the hotel.

Normally, the files wouldn’t have left the station, since it was no longer a cold case. But they were only copies and she’d promised Tomas she wouldn’t let them out of her sight until she got them back to the station in three hours.

The chain hotel was a few miles from the police station, on the outskirts of town. It was well back from the road, hidden by a canopy of live oaks draped with clumps of Spanish moss. A hundred and fifty years ago, a plantation had claimed this spot. When she’d lived in Rose Bay, it’d been the location of a little bed-and-breakfast. But the town had grown, both the permanent and tourist populations booming in the past decade. The results of that, at least the ones she’d seen so far, were more bars, restaurants and hotels.

It felt surreal to be back. She kept expecting to turn a corner and see her grandparents. To see Cassie.

But her grandpa had been gone for fifteen years and her grandma now lived in Virginia, in an old-age home near Evelyn. And Cassie... Whether Cassie was dead or alive, maybe Evelyn would finally learn where she’d been all these years.

Greg had booked the hotel for her. He’d made all her reservations while she’d rushed straight to the airport and hopped on the first flight to South Carolina. The nature of her job meant her FBI “Go Bag,” currently weighing down her left shoulder, had already been in the trunk of her car.

As she held the boxes higher, blocking her sight, then grabbed the door and pushed through, the bag slipped off her shoulder. The strap dropped to her elbow with enough force to jar her hand from the boxes. “Shit!”

Evelyn yanked her hand back up, bag swinging, trying to catch the boxes before confidential case information spilled all over the hotel floor.

A pair of hands grasped the boxes from the other side. “Got them!”

She knew that deep, drawling voice. As the boxes were lifted away from her, Evelyn stuttered, “M-Mac. What are you doing here?”

Heat rushed up her face as Kyle McKenzie’s eyes locked on hers. “I figured you’d be staying on-site.” She’d known HRT was in the area, but they were working a case a few towns over, so she’d assumed they would have set up a command post there.

She’d thought about calling him and telling him she was going to be nearby. The idea of having Kyle to lean on while she looked into Cassie’s case had been too tempting. She’d resisted because he had his own job to do, and she didn’t really know where things stood between them.

Kyle gave her a big grin, complete with dimples, and despite the fact that he had heavy circles under his deep-blue eyes and his hair stuck up in odd directions, Evelyn’s entire body went clammy.

“The activity we’re monitoring is happening at night, so that’s when we’re surveilling. During the day, we’re here. The people we’re investigating live in a small town, and if we stayed too close, they’d definitely notice us. We’re telling the people at this hotel that we’re engineers, in town on a company-sponsored trip.”

Evelyn raised an eyebrow. Did they really expect anyone to believe that? HRT agents were the most fit group in the Bureau; their regular routine included physical training, helicopter rappelling and mock terrorist takedowns. HRT agents tended to either look like Olympic-level long-distance runners or military special-operations guys. Definitely not engineers.

“Don’t blow our cover, okay?” he added with a wink, shifting the boxes with annoying ease. “Where am I taking these?”

Evelyn held out her hands. “I can carry them. I just got here, so I need to go to my room and work on my profile.” She ran a hand over her hair, tied neatly back in a bun, aware that she was talking abnormally fast.

In an average social situation, she was shy and uncomfortable. Throw Kyle McKenzie into the mix and she was instantly self-conscious. Especially in the past month, since she’d opened up to him about her past, about Cassie. Since she’d kissed him, and considered jeopardizing her place at BAU for him.

Technically, they weren’t on the same squad, which was usually when dating a colleague meant risking reassignment. But the Critical Incident Response Group was unique, an overarching group made up of BAU, HRT and other essential units that responded to crises around the country. At any given time, she might be called to travel or to work intensely stressful situations with the other CIRG units. She didn’t know quite what the protocol was for dating another agent in CIRG, but her boss had made it abundantly clear that it wasn’t happening on his watch. And for years now, her job had been her whole life.

Still, after Kyle had helped her face down a serial killer, she’d shocked them both by acting on their attraction. She’d thought they would sort out what it all meant while she was on medical leave, but he’d been called out of town three weeks ago.

And now that her immediate emotional vulnerability from that case had faded, and the most important investigation of her career had surfaced, she couldn’t make any mistakes. Not even for Kyle.

As she shuffled her feet, Kyle’s expression got serious. “Greg called. He told me you were on your way.”

Unspoken was that Greg had asked Kyle to watch out for her, but Evelyn heard it in Kyle’s voice.

He stepped closer, seeing far too much as he studied her. “I know you’re working on your friend’s case, Evelyn. If you need anything, I’m here for you.”

She nodded silently, unable to meet his gaze, unable to talk about it yet.

He must have sensed that, because he told her, “I’ve got the boxes. Go check in and I’ll carry them up for you.”

Letting Kyle anywhere near her room? Bad idea. Her mind might’ve been made up, but her hormones didn’t seem to have gotten the message. “You don’t need to do that.”

Amusement sparkled in his eyes, as if he could guess exactly what she was thinking. “Sure I do.”

Instead of wasting time arguing, she checked in and let him follow her up to her room. After he’d set the boxes inside, she shooed him out by telling him she had to be back at the station in three hours with a profile.

And when the door closed behind him, she breathed a nervous sigh of relief. She’d worry about Kyle later. Right now, she had to figure out if Cassie’s abductor really was back, or if Rose Bay had a copycat.

* * *

Turkey vultures soared overhead in wobbly circles, their wings spread in a wide V. They were scavenging, and Kyle knew what that meant. They’d found a fresh carcass.

Kyle looked at the sky, out in the distance, over the high grass that led to the marsh. In his line of work, he’d seen way too much of what one human being could do to another. But the kids always hit him the hardest.

Knowing how important the case in Rose Bay was to Evelyn made it even worse. He hadn’t been able to get her out of his head since he’d seen her at the hotel. How the hell was she profiling this?

He prayed she’d get the answers she’d been searching for all these years, but even if she did, they were unlikely to be good. And there wasn’t much he could do besides join the search for the girl who’d gone missing yesterday.

Behind him, police officers and civilian volunteers from the search parties were heading in the opposite direction, toward the overgrown field beside the cemetery. Overhead, a helicopter buzzed, on its fifth hour of an aerial search.

Officially, despite his training, Kyle wasn’t supposed to be involved at all. He wasn’t here for this case. But his current mission only claimed his nighttime hours, so he and his Bureau partner, Gabe Fontaine, had volunteered with the civilian search parties looking for Brittany Douglas this morning.

Gabe wasn’t aware of Evelyn’s connection to the case, but Kyle didn’t need to tell him about it for Gabe to want to help. In HRT, they were often a last resort—an overwhelming tactical solution when all else failed—so they’d seen a lot of screwed-up situations. But the ones where kids were in danger tended to piss off the guys the most. The rest of his team would probably take a shift later in the afternoon.

When he and Gabe had arrived, he’d pulled aside Noreen Abbott, one of the administrative assistants from the Rose Bay PD who was coordinating the search parties. He’d quietly told her their full names and shown her their badges, knowing they’d be checked out otherwise. All volunteers were, because sometimes the perpetrator joined the searches. He didn’t want anyone wasting time doing background checks on him and Gabe.

Exhaustion weighed down his steps. He’d managed a three-hour nap after his team came in from their mission around 8:00 a.m. But he and Gabe had vowed to help as soon as they were marginally functional. Sleep was overrated, anyway.

Except that now, as the turkey vultures narrowed in on something they wanted down below, sleep sounded like a damn fine idea.

“Shit,” Gabe muttered next to him. He swiped a hand over his forehead and Kyle knew it wasn’t the ninety-degree heat, but fear of what they might find that was making his normally unflappable teammate sweat.

“Not a good sign, turkey vultures,” a man said.

Kyle turned around, surprised someone had come up behind them without him or Gabe noticing.

And the man was big, considering his stealth. He wasn’t tall—he was actually a solid four inches shorter than Kyle’s six feet. But he was wide. And none of his girth was fat. He appeared to be in his sixties, although Kyle’s gut said he was younger, and the deep lines on his face were from hard living.

Kyle held out his hand. “I’m Kyle. This is my friend Gabe. We’re here on a company trip, so we figured we’d help with the search.”

The man’s dark gray eyes narrowed in his craggy face, then he put his hand in Kyle’s and shook forcefully, before pulling his hand free. “Frank Abbott.”

Gabe gestured back toward the sign-up table for the search parties. “Are you related to the girl handling the sign-in?”

“My niece,” Frank replied. “She works at the station. And I didn’t have any jobs today I couldn’t reschedule, so here I am.” He heaved out a heavy sigh. “This again.”

“You lived here during the original abductions?” Gabe asked.

“I’ve lived here all my life. Can’t believe this shit has started up again.” He shook his head, suddenly looking tired, and headed toward the marsh, glancing back to call, “You want to check this out with me?”

Hell, no. Instead of saying it, Kyle nodded tightly and fell into step beside Frank. The older man walked fast, with purpose, his jaw set in a grim line.

The sounds of the search party faded as they walked, replaced by the strange clapping sounds someone had told him were made by Clapper Rail birds. It would’ve been peaceful had the circumstances been different.

Beside him, Gabe and Frank were silent, too. Gabe had the same training he did, the same ability to force back fear and get the job done, but a civilian wouldn’t. To Frank’s credit, he didn’t slow as the low, nasal whine of the vultures reached their ears.

Kyle tried to prepare himself as they continued walking, as the marsh grasses got taller and thicker, as his feet began to get stuck in the muddy ground.

“Watch your step,” Frank warned, trudging ahead without looking back. “The marsh is low now, but to get to the vultures, we have to go in.”

“If there’s a body out here, wouldn’t the alligators have gone after it by now?” Gabe spoke up, shoving back blond hair in need of a cut.

Frank snorted and kept going. “No gators. Not in these marshes. Down the coast, maybe. But not here. Come on.”

Kyle followed, his shoes sinking deeper until it was difficult to pull them free. The marsh grasses crept up around his knees as they got closer to the water. High enough to hide a body. And definitely deserted enough. The sound of the other searchers had become nothing more than a low murmur.

Kyle knew that as soon as Evelyn gave her profile, she’d be out there among them, just like she’d probably insisted on doing eighteen years ago. It was easy to imagine her as a young girl. Her best friend torn from her life, abducted only hours after Evelyn had seen her.

Even at twelve years old, Evelyn wouldn’t have sat home hoping everything would turn out okay. He could picture her, green eyes too big for her face, long hair in pigtails, wearing the determined look that seemed to be her default expression. There was no way she would’ve tolerated being left behind.

And he knew there was no way she’d leave Rose Bay now until she uncovered the truth. No matter how horrible it was, no matter what it cost her.

The image of Evelyn faded as the smell of something rotting wafted up. Please, God, don’t let it be Brittany Douglas.

He tried not to inhale too deeply as Frank splashed into the low marsh waters, startling three turkey vultures. They gave deep, guttural hisses, then took off into the sky, revealing a carcass along the edge of the marsh.

The breath stalled in his lungs. It was the remains left by some hunter, but it wasn’t human. Just a deer. He shut his eyes and allowed himself a moment of relief.

Beside him, Gabe sighed. “Thank God.”

Frank stared down at the carcass, then off into the distance, where the marsh wound through tall grasses and eventually disappeared from sight. “Let’s keep looking.”

Far behind them, the search was continuing.

* * *

Each time Evelyn read the note that had been taped to Brittany Douglas’s bike, goose bumps rose on her skin.

It wasn’t so hard,

I went to the yard,

Where you’d left the poor child alone.

When I got there,

It felt like a dare.

I thought to myself, Take her and run.

It matched the notes from eighteen years ago...and yet, it didn’t. Back then, just like now, the nursery rhymes focused on two ideas. First, that the child was being neglected in some way by the parents. And second, that the abductor was rescuing her from that.

But eighteen years ago, the abductor hadn’t displayed such obvious joy at the abduction. That idea dominated the new note, a macabre revision of “Old Mother Hubbard.”

Unlike the notes eighteen years ago, which had talked to the victim, this one was directed at the parents. In context, the change made sense, given the increased focus on the abduction stage.

But was it because the abductor had developed a taste for the actual abduction? Or because it was a new predator entirely? She’d pored over the case details from the three old abductions and the new one for more than an hour, but still wasn’t positive.

And that was the most important part of the profile she’d promised to deliver to the cops in less than two hours.

So far, what she knew were the statistics. She knew the chances of a child abductor going dormant for eighteen years and then starting up again were slim. She knew Brittany Douglas, at eleven years old, was the average age of child abduction and murder victims. Statistics said Brittany had first met her abductor within a quarter mile of her home. Statistics also said she’d been dead before Evelyn had even arrived in town.

But it didn’t matter how slim Brittany’s chances were; if there was any hope at all, Evelyn had to try.

A rush of cold swept over her in the too-warm hotel room, leaving behind an intense fear. The fear that she might fail.

Evelyn tried to ignore it as she picked up the photograph of Brittany Douglas. With her long, dark brown hair, hazel eyes and shy smile, Brittany looked nothing like Cassie. In fact, none of the victims looked alike. The only similarity was age and gender. And the fact that the killer either believed—or wanted police to think he believed—that their parents were neglecting them.

“Damn it!” Evelyn sprang to her feet, raking her hands through her bun so violently she’d have to fix it before she went back to the station. The most important case of her life and she was blowing it.

Was Dan right? Was she too inexperienced in child abduction cases to spot the important details? Too personally invested to see the case clearly?

Evelyn blew out a heavy breath. No, she could do this. She’d been training all her life for this case. She was going to put everything she had into it. She couldn’t consider the profile from eighteen years ago, couldn’t review the original suspects, because it might taint her analysis. Especially if this was a new abductor.

She had to rely on her training and the case evidence to tell her about the perpetrator. And even though Brittany’s abductor hadn’t left much behind, he’d left something of himself. They always did.

Dropping back onto the hotel bed where she’d spread out the case files, Evelyn lined up the four notes. Direct communication from the abductor could tell her a lot or it could lead her totally off track.

A smart perp, knowing the police were going to analyze the notes, would use them to misdirect the investigation. And everything about this case, from the lack of forensic details to the high-risk abduction right out of the child’s front yard, screamed that this was an intelligent perp who planned carefully.

But the notes also had an odd intensity about them. He was taunting, yes, but there was more to it. The abductor had left clues to his identity in the words. And Evelyn vowed that would be his undoing.

She glanced at her watch again. Ninety-eight minutes and counting. Somehow, in that time, she needed to figure out whether the original Nursery Rhyme Killer was back or if they had a copycat.

* * *

The Rose Bay Police Station’s briefing room was jammed full. Cops, both in uniform and in street clothes, watched her, all with exhaustion slouching their shoulders and fear lurking in their eyes. FBI CARD agents stood stiffly among them, trying to look confident. The smell of sweat and dirt, of too many bodies packed too closely together, overwhelmed the inefficient air-conditioning. The buzz of voices came to an instant halt as Evelyn stepped up to the front of the room.

She gripped the podium with slick hands. She’d given hundreds of profiles in her year’s tenure with BAU, but she suddenly felt all of twelve again.

She had an instant flashback to the last time she’d been at the Rose Bay Police Station. She remembered sitting on a plastic chair, her feet dangling. She’d held tight to her grandpa’s hand on one side and her grandma’s on the other while the cops asked unending questions. Did she remember anything unusual from the day Cassie had gone missing? Had she ever seen Cassie talk to a stranger? Did she know anything that could help them bring Cassie home?

Now, just like then, those answers seemed elusive.

Someone in the audience coughed loudly, bringing Evelyn back to the present. She looked over the sea of law enforcement officers, and jerked backward at the animosity she saw in one cop’s eyes.

Jack Bullock. It had to be. He was in his midforties now, not the rookie who’d questioned her until she’d cried so many years ago. But there was no mistaking the too-sharp planes of his face, the deep-set brown eyes, the thick shoulders stacked on a stocky body. The thin streaks of silver through his brown hair and the lines etched deep into his forehead were new, but not the intimidating glare.

Evelyn redirected her gaze. “I’m Evelyn Baine, from the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. My job is to review the evidence in your case to give you a new perspective—a behavioral portrait of your perpetrator. I’m here to tell you how he thinks, why he’s choosing his victims and what he’ll do next.”

The officers seemed to lean forward as one, glancing at one another as if to gauge their colleagues’ reactions to her. At the front of the crowd, Tomas was listening carefully, his deep-brown eyes filled with too much hope, too much expectation.

She prayed she could provide him and his officers with what they needed to find Brittany. Looking down at the profile she’d furiously finished minutes before racing back to the station, Evelyn began. “Your perpetrator is a male in his late forties or fifties. He’s almost certainly white.”

“Why?” someone from the back of the room called.

“Why do I say he’s white? Frankly, because High Street is still all white. Someone who’s not would be noticed, even now.”

“Even now? Does that mean he’s been here before? Is it the same guy from eighteen years ago?” Tomas’s voice vibrated with dread.

Nervous whispering rippled through the room.

“I’ll get back to that.” She knew discussing those details first would distract everyone. And she didn’t want them to miss anything that could help them find Brittany.

“First, let’s talk about how the abductor fits in. He lives close by, either here or in a nearby community, and has for a long time. It’s possible he moved away and came back, but he’s recognized here. He’s accepted as belonging, which gives him a plausible reason to be in the vicinity of the crime scene.”

“Hold on,” Jack demanded. “You think the asshole we’re looking for belongs here? He’s well liked?”

“Probably. It’s unlikely he has a lot of close friends, but he is socially competent. He doesn’t stand out. If asked about him, people would probably describe him as being decent, and if not likable, at least not unlikable. And he’s intelligent. He doesn’t act inappropriate around children, although a closer look into his background may reveal a suspicious incident. I’ll get into that later, when we talk about motivation.”

“This guy is grabbing kids,” the officer beside Jack argued. “How can he be decent?”

“I didn’t say he was decent,” Evelyn clarified. “Just that people view him that way. We’re not talking about the usual suspects here, because this guy is too smart to attract attention to himself. When we find him, people aren’t going to say they always thought something was off about him. Quite the opposite. Everyone will be shocked, because he’s been living among you.”

Officers shuffled, looking down at their feet, frowning. When they looked back up at her, their faces showed a mixture of trepidation, wariness and disbelief.

“The offender drives a vehicle that doesn’t stand out, and it is conducive to hiding someone inside. It could be a van with tinted windows or a sedan with ample trunk room. He also has a job with flexible hours. He works for himself, has hours that change, or a job that would require him to be away from the office for periods of time. The kind of thing where people wouldn’t notice unusual absences.”

“But Brittany was taken at night,” an officer near the podium pointed out. “Why would he need to miss work during the day?”

“Because he stalked her first. This offender is a planner. He knew Brittany’s routine and her family’s schedules. He wrote this note in advance and it fit the situation when she was abducted. She was in the yard alone at that time. And he knew she would be, because he’d watched it happen before. So he waited for the right time to grab her.”

Evelyn glanced around at the attentive officers and added, “He’s probably developed a ruse to approach children. He may have used it when he abducted Brittany, so she wouldn’t be concerned when he approached her in the yard, or he may have used it beforehand, to test her response. A lot of serial criminals do this, especially those who target strangers.”

“I thought you said this guy was known in the community?” Carly Sanchez spoke up, her voice clear and loud.

“Yes, but not necessarily to the children he’s abducting. So, he may try to test them. A child who’s eager to please or naive about strangers is a more likely candidate than one who’s street-savvy. Of course, this is also dependent on his motivation.”

“Which is what?” Carly pressed.

Evelyn wished she had one absolute answer for them. “There are two possibilities,” she began. “The first is that his motivation is exactly what he’s telling us in the notes—that he believes the child is being neglected. If that’s the case, he sees himself as her savior. And he has a tragedy in his own past involving an important young female. It could be a daughter, a sister or someone else he cared for deeply. He’s using that loss to justify his actions now.”

Jack jumped in. “What’s the other possibility?”

“Well, as I said, this offender is intelligent. He may be leaving the notes to throw us off track. And if that’s the case, then his true motivation is molestation.”

“Damn it,” Jack burst out. “We’ve got to go talk to Wiggins again.”

Before Evelyn could ask who Wiggins was, Carly demanded loudly, “Which do you think it is?”

“I don’t know.” It galled her, but pretending to have the answer when there wasn’t enough behavioral evidence to conclusively support either option would do more damage than admitting the truth.

Except perhaps to the stock these officers put in her profile, Evelyn thought ruefully as Jack shouted, “Isn’t it your job to know?”

The room went quiet, and Evelyn tried to pretend it didn’t bother her. “When I know more, so will you. But it’s possible both motivations are right. If the abductions are driven by molestation, the offender might have tried to convince himself as well as us that he’s saving his victims. An excuse he tries to believe to make himself feel better.”

Jack just scowled at her, but Tomas cut in. “What about the connection to the earlier abductions? You said you’d tell us if this was the same abductor.” He rubbed a hand across his temple and asked, “Is it?” as though he was afraid to hear the answer.

“Yes.”

Evelyn had expected an eruption of voices, but instead Tomas’s voice, barely above a whisper, seemed to echo as he asked, “Are you sure this isn’t a copycat?”

“Yes.” She’d gone over it again and again in her hotel room and it was the only way to explain the similarities.

“Take the notes, to start. I know there’ve been a few false confessions over the years, and those people always knew nursery rhymes were left at the scene, because that was in the papers. But the station has done a good job of keeping exactly how the nursery rhymes were changed out of the press. And these notes are too similar—in tone, content, style, everything—to be from a copycat.”

“Damn it,” she heard Tomas muttering, new stress in his voice.

“I’d like to have an expert in handwriting from the FBI give a second opinion, but the notes are our best indicator. And this perpetrator just knew too much to be a copycat.”

She frowned down at her profile, not really seeing the words, not really needing them. “The abductions are also much too similar to be a coincidence. The lack of forensic evidence and the pattern of abducting the child from her own property late in the evening or at night after stalking her first suggest a patient, determined predator.”

She surveyed the room, wanting everyone to understand why she’d concluded that they were looking for the same person. “I reviewed all the evidence from this case first, separately from the older cases. And everything about this abduction points to someone who’s done it before. It was way too savvy for a first abduction, and way too close in the details from the older cases that were never released to the public.”

“And he’s either molesting these girls or trying to ‘save’ them, whatever that means?” an officer asked.

“That’s right. Although, this time around, his motivation has definitely shifted. With this latest abduction, he’s enjoying the actual act of kidnapping more. He’s fantasizing about it beforehand and it’s part of the thrill, maybe as much as his ultimate motivation of molestation or his idea of saving them.”

“Then why did he stop for so long?” Tomas asked, his voice even wearier than it had been a few minutes earlier.

“There are a number of possibilities.” Evelyn ticked them off on her fingers. “He was jailed for another crime and recently released. He’s had an illness that prevented him from carrying out the abductions and he’s since gotten well. Or he was otherwise prevented from carrying them out for a period of time—because, for example, someone in his life would have noticed.”

It looked like Jack was going to interrupt, so she said quickly, “It’s also possible he didn’t really stop. If it’s molestation he’s after, he might have had an available victim in his life, like a family member. Or he obtained a position in the community that gave him easy access to children. He could have moved away for a while and still been abducting children without leaving the notes, so the cases weren’t connected. Or he was abducting children who wouldn’t be missed at all.”

“What, like runaways?” Tomas asked.

“Yes,” Evelyn said. “Another possibility, although unlikely, is that this offender’s precipitating stressors—whatever set him off in the first place and made him act on his fantasies—stopped and didn’t start again for eighteen years. Or that he relied on trophies to relive the experience and those satisfied him until recently.”

“Are we talking body parts here?” Carly asked tiredly.

The officers around her looked disgusted.

“No,” Evelyn said. “But this offender would keep something. A necklace or hair bow or other item the victim was wearing. The abductor keeps it as a symbol of what he’s done.” Evelyn took a deep breath and tried not to put faces to the names from the case files, tried not to think about Cassie and what could have been done to her. “Which is kidnapping and most likely killing his victims.”

The room went silent again, but everyone was staring at her tensely.

She knew what they wanted but were afraid to ask. So she just told them. “Whatever his motivation, whatever his reason for stopping and starting up again, time is crucial. I don’t know how long Brittany has. And it is possible that he’s hanging on to these girls long-term. But either way, he’s not finished. Unless we stop him, he will abduct another girl.”

Four

“So that’s Evelyn Baine,” an unfamiliar voice was saying as Evelyn finally broke free of cops’ questions after presenting her profile.

Evelyn’s steps slowed as she headed toward the CARD command post. Whoever was talking was around the bend in the hallway of the station.

“The way you were ranting about her, I was expecting a total disaster at the profile briefing. But she seems smart.”

“Smart?”

Evelyn didn’t recognize the first voice, but she knew who the snarling response belonged to: Jack Bullock. What she didn’t know was why he felt so much animosity toward her. The last time they’d spoken at any length, she’d been twelve years old.

“She’s a liability,” Jack said dismissively. “But if her profile matches my suspect, then why the hell can’t I go harass him? Give me a few hours with him and I guarantee you I can get this bastard to confess.”

“Evelyn?”

Evelyn jumped at the voice behind her, and Jack and whoever he was talking to were instantly silent. She spun around.

Tomas stood behind her, exhaustion hanging off him like an oversize coat. “What are you doing?”

“Spying, apparently,” Jack drawled, coming around the corner, animosity in his eyes.

Next to him was a man about his age, with rapidly receding blond hair, broad shoulders and a gut that strained his uniform. A flush spread out from beneath his neatly trimmed beard, but he held out his hand politely. “I’m T. J. Sutton, ma’am. I joined the force about ten years ago, after you were gone.” His gaze whipped to Jack, then back to her. “Sorry about what you just overheard. We’re glad you’re here.”

Evelyn shook T.J.’s hand, then, ignoring Jack’s frown, asked him, “Who’s your suspect?”

Before he could reply, Tomas sighed. “Not Wiggins again.”

“Yeah, Wiggins. Are you honestly going to tell me he’s not a suspect?”

“Of course he’s a suspect,” Tomas snapped. “But you already questioned him with that CARD agent. You’re not going back. Not now. Not unless we have some new evidence.”

Evelyn’s head moved back and forth between them. With only three hours to review the case evidence and create a profile, she hadn’t had time to look at any suspects—and it was BAU practice not to, until the profile was complete. Knowing the suspects beforehand could taint the profile. She’d hoped to investigate the most promising suspects next.

“Who’s Wiggins? How does he match the profile?”

The name sounded vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t place it until Tomas clarified, “Walter Wiggins.”

And then a hazy memory of a young man with light brown hair flopping over his forehead and big ears flashed through her mind. “Wasn’t he a teenager eighteen years ago?”

“He’d have been twenty then,” Jack said.

“That’s a little young. How does he match the profile?”

“He’s a weenie wagger,” Jack spat.

Surprised, Evelyn asked, “He exposed himself? To children?”

Jack released a disgusted sigh. “Probably. But he was convicted of child molestation.”

Queasiness rolled in her gut. She’d known this would be part of the investigation. She’d expected it. She’d even profiled it. These days, the majority of nonparental abductions were by sexual offenders. But somehow, talking about a potential suspect with a specific criminal history made her feel sick.

Don’t think about Cassie, she warned herself. But it was too late.

She’d realized for years that Cassie was probably dead. But she’d tried so hard not to imagine what had come before that, after she’d been abducted.

The cops were staring at her expectantly, so Evelyn said, “Tell me about his conviction.”

“It was after he finished college,” Tomas said. “He’d moved out to DC for some lobbyist job. According to the trial notes, he volunteered at his local church, babysat all the neighbors’ kids and was generally well liked until he was arrested for child molestation.”

“And then he came back here?”

“Yeah. Apparently his neighbors in DC started taking baseball bats to his car windows on a regular basis, so Wiggins thought he’d be safer in Rose Bay. He moved back in with his parents, and he’s lived there ever since. Well, just his dad now. His mom died last year and his dad’s in bad health himself. There’s been a lot of pressure over the years to run Walter out of town.”

“They should’ve done it,” Jack said. “Everyone would have been better off.”

Tomas frowned. “Walter’s parents always maintained his innocence.”

“But you said he was convicted, right?” Evelyn asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Tomas replied. “His parents couldn’t stand to believe it, but I read all the trial notes. There’s no question Wiggins was guilty, and he went to jail. Not as long as he should have, if you ask me, but then, I’d lock these guys up for life. Anyway, that’s why the CARD team wanted to talk to him—he’s on the registered sex offender list.”

“Is he a preferential molester?” If he was, it meant he had a specific age and gender he targeted, instead of preying on any easy target.

“He is,” Jack said. “His victims in DC were girls between six and twelve. The sick bastard.”

Cassie’s age. “What does he do now? Something that gives him time to stalk potential victims?”

“Something with computers,” Jack said, looking at Tomas, who shrugged. “I think he works from home, contract stuff.”

“So, no scheduled hours at an office, where he’d be missed,” Evelyn concluded. “Girlfriend?”

Jack snorted. “Hell, no. Far as I know, he’s never had one.”

“Who’s got the notes from today’s interview with Wiggins?”

“The FBI agent,” Jack said. “But we should just go back there. Hell, you can come if you want to. Let me do the talking, though. I can get under this guy’s skin.”

Evelyn shook her head. “No. If he’s a strong suspect, we need to monitor him carefully. If we make him too nervous, if he feels like we’re paying him special attention and he does have Brittany, he might kill her.”

“If she’s still alive,” T.J. contributed softly.

“If she’s still alive,” Evelyn agreed. “But we have to proceed as if she is.”

“Well, what if we don’t do anything and that gives Wiggins time to kill her?” Jack argued.

Tomas and T.J. turned to look at her.

Tension knotted in her neck. “Where was this guy eighteen years ago?”

“College,” Jack replied. “About an hour north of here. He spent his summers there, taking extra classes so he could graduate early. But he came home on weekends often enough. After he moved back home and word got out about what happened in DC, people started wondering if he could’ve snuck in and out of the towns back then. Only one of those original abductions was in Rose Bay...”

Jack broke off, because of course she knew that. Only Cassie had been taken here. The other girls were from small towns up the coast.

Jack cleared his throat and continued. “Once a molester, always a molester, right?”

Evelyn felt her shoulders slump and forced herself to stand straighter. “Not necessarily, but once a pedophile...”

“Always a pedophile,” Jack finished. “See?” He looked at Tomas. “We’ve got to act on this before it’s too late!”

“Was he ever investigated in connection with the original abductions?” Evelyn asked.

“He was,” T.J. answered. “Once he moved back here from DC. I was part of the force then and we pulled the Nursery Rhyme Killer as a cold case to revisit. It was...what?” He glanced at Jack, creases forming around his eyes. “Nine years ago?”

“He was arrested nine years ago?” Evelyn asked.

“No. He was arrested when he was twenty-five. But he finally got sick of the harassment nine years ago and came back here.”

“Like we wanted him,” Jack put in.

“So? Did you find any connection to the Nursery Rhyme cases?”

T.J. shook his head. “Jack and I were part of the team working on it, but we couldn’t come up with anything.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s not guilty,” Jack insisted. “I have a bad feeling about this guy.”

So did she. But experience told her he was far from the only sex offender in the area who preyed on children. And it didn’t mean he was the Nursery Rhyme Killer.

“I’ll go through the interview notes and come up with a strategy for you,” she promised Tomas. “I’d like to do that with any promising suspects you have.”

Jack leaned forward and opened his mouth, but Tomas silenced him with a long, hard look. “Okay, but hurry. And start with Wiggins, if you think he’s probable. Brittany’s been missing for...” He checked his watch. “Almost seventeen hours now. And damn it, I want to bring her home alive.”

* * *

“Let’s hear it. What’s the strategy on Wiggins?” Jack demanded an hour later.

He was sitting too close to her in the CARD command post, his wide shoulders invading her personal space as he read the notes from Walter Wiggins’s interview over her shoulder. Why he needed to read them again when he’d been part of the interview team, she didn’t understand. It was probably to piss her off.

Evelyn shifted subtly away. “Walter talks repeatedly in this interview about how people in town follow him around wherever he goes.”

“Can you blame them?” Jack asked. “Everyone knows what he did. No one wants him here. But if we can’t get rid of him, we’re going to watch his every move.”

Evelyn raised her eyebrows pointedly, but Jack just stared back at her until she sighed. “If people are constantly watching him, could he really have stalked and then abducted Brittany without being noticed?”

“It’s not like we have some kind of schedule. The Nelsons follow him around from two to six, then the Grants take over, then...”

“Yeah, I get it,” Evelyn broke in. “But if people tend to be aware of him, could he actually pull this off? Think about it, okay? I know you don’t like him and I don’t blame you, but let’s not waste time on him if he’s not a viable suspect.”

Jack scowled, but he was silent for a minute before admitting, “He’d have to be really sneaky. If people saw him on High Street, they would’ve taken notice, you’re right. It’s not like, I don’t know, say if T.J. was walking down the street. Most people wouldn’t remember it, because he belongs. But Wiggins? Yeah, people would chase him off with sticks. And they’d definitely remember if they saw him around Brittany’s house close to when she was grabbed.”

“Okay, so...”

“But I’m not counting him out. I’ve been a cop a long time and experience tells me that coincidences like this are rare. I mean, we have one sex offender who likes girls the same age as Brittany and one man abducting them. What are the chances it’s not the same person?”

“Experience must also tell you that if you check the database, you probably have a couple more registered sex offenders in the area who also fit.”

Jack nodded. “Yeah, well, I got partnered with the CARD agent interviewing those particular scumbags, so believe me, I know. There’s a guy one town over who’s nonpreferential—he’ll screw anyone or anything and he’s been arrested for all of it and keeps getting out. And there are two more in the town where the first girl was abducted eighteen years ago who could fit, too. But all three of those assholes have pretty solid alibis for Brittany’s abduction.”

“Are you sure? Because the ones from the town where the first girl was abducted...”

“I’m positive,” Jack interrupted. “The alibis are airtight. So, let’s focus on Wiggins. I see your point, but this guy is slimy.”

Evelyn held in a sigh. Walter Wiggins seemed like a dead end to her, but if she dismissed him and turned out to be wrong, she’d hate herself for it later. “Okay. What might Walter do with Brittany if he abducted her? You said he lives with his father?”

Jack tapped his thick knuckles against the table, his brow furrowed. “Yeah, he does. But hell, who knows if he kept her at all, right?” His anger suddenly seemed to deflate, leaving him looking older than he was, and very tired. “If he just...you know, raped the girl and then buried her...” His voice broke.

Evelyn nodded, staring down at the interview notes again. “I’ll talk to Tomas about putting an officer on him. We might try interviewing his father, but if Brittany is still alive, we can’t spook him. If Walter is the perp and he feels too much pressure, he could kill her out of fear.”

“It doesn’t matter what we do. Wiggins is feeling pressure right now. The whole town knows what he is. His dad’s house has already been vandalized. Someone spray painted the words child killer and pervert all over the front door. No one was outside when we went to talk to Wiggins, but I could see the curtains moving on the neighbors’ houses. They’re all watching him.”

Evelyn tried to think positive. “Well, in some ways, that’s good. If he does have Brittany, that makes it harder for him to move her.”

“I guess.” Jack looked around the room.

The CARD command post was empty except for the two of them. Even Carly had gone, to meet with Noreen Abbott, the Rose Bay PD administrative assistant coordinating the search parties.

In fact, most of the station was empty. The cops who’d come in to hear her profile had cleared out. Those who hadn’t been on shift had headed home. Most of the others had gone back to canvassing neighborhoods.

She’d never get a better chance to clear the air with Jack. “So, Jack, why the animosity? I haven’t seen you since I left for college.”

Jack’s gaze shifted back to her, anger flickering in his deep brown eyes. “I don’t care what you do for the FBI, Evelyn. You don’t belong here and you know it. You never did.”

Evelyn instinctively leaned away from him, then stiffened her spine. “This is a race thing? Is that why you questioned me so hard eighteen years ago? Were you trying to make me cry?”

“No, it’s not about race,” Jack snarled, but the expression in his eyes said otherwise. “I don’t give a shit whatever mix you are. I questioned you hard because you were one of the last people to see her alive. It wasn’t about your precious little feelings. It was about bringing that girl home.”

He got to his feet, jabbing a finger at her. “And it’s the same now. Can you really tell me you’re impartial? Can you honestly profile this case? Or are you so jammed up with hatred and anger that you’re going to overlook something? So focused on Cassie Byers that you’re going to miss seeing what’s going on with Brittany Douglas?”

A vein started throbbing in the center of his forehead. “You’re here for Cassie, but she’s been dead for eighteen years and you damn well know it. You feel guilty because you were supposed to be a victim, too. But we need someone impartial. We need a real profiler here, not an intended victim coming home to play hero.”

He pounded a fist down on the table. “We need to catch this asshole!”

She swallowed hard, unable to form a reply, and then just watched him as he shook his head in disgust, and strode from the room.

She wasn’t trying to play hero. Finding Cassie meant finding Brittany, too. But damn, as nasty as Jack’s words were, he was half right. She could try to use the original abductions to tell her about the perp, but her focus needed to be on the girl missing now, not Cassie.

And for her, it was always going to come back to Cassie.

She pressed a hand to her temple. Maybe Jack had a point. Maybe she didn’t belong here.

Eighteen years ago, she sure as hell hadn’t. Eighteen years ago, everyone had stared at her as though she were some kind of curiosity with her light brown skin in a world of white. At the time, she’d been the only one living in town who didn’t fit.

Some people—like Cassie—hadn’t cared. But a lot of them had. Most were too well-mannered to be rude to her face, but even at ten, she’d heard the whispers. She hadn’t always known what they meant, but she’d known they were about her.

It had been twenty years since she’d first set foot in Rose Bay. The town had changed. But maybe not as much as she’d thought.

She was trying to rein in her emotions when Tomas raced into the room. “Where’s Jack?”

“He left a few minutes ago. Why?”

Tomas’s eyes narrowed, as if he could tell something was off with her, then he said, “I need him to get over to the hospital and talk to his favorite suspect.”

Evelyn stood. “Walter is at the hospital? Why?”

“Brittany Douglas’s dad just beat him up.”

“Why?” Had she screwed up, rejecting Walter as a viable suspect? “Did he have a specific reason to suspect Walter?”

“I don’t know,” Tomas replied. “Two of my officers are bringing Mark Douglas in.”

When Evelyn started to follow him to the front of the station, Tomas warned, “I’d stay where you are. We just arrested the victim’s father. No one’s happy with us.” Instead of returning to the CARD command post, Evelyn picked up her pace to match Tomas’s stride.

He glanced at her, looking surprised, then warned, “Everyone was terrified already. Now we’ve pissed them off. Things are volatile out there.”

As she walked to the front of the station with him, she saw that volatile was an understatement. Angry residents swarmed the parking lot, held at bay by a pair of cops. The crowd was mostly men, between twenty and sixty. They wore everything from shorts and T-shirts to suits and ties. Evelyn guessed there were thirty of them, but with only three cops who hadn’t been expecting this kind of trouble, it was too many.

The crowd was pushing and screaming and the cops, even though they were obvious veterans, looked overwhelmed. Evelyn had never seen her hometown like this, even eighteen years ago. Despite what she’d seen in the Bureau, it was actually a little scary.

Especially as a police car pulled up as close to the station door as it could get and two officers dragged a man out of the backseat who had to be Mark Douglas. His eyes were bloodshot, his face ragged with grief, his hands raw and bloodied.

The cops were young, clearly rookies. One held tight to Mark’s arm. The other’s hand lingered near his sidearm, his gaze darting nervously around the crowd as it rushed in on him.

“Pigs!” someone shouted. “We do your job for you and get arrested for it?”

“Let him go!” someone else yelled.

“Shit,” Tomas said. “Jack! T.J.! Get out here! Grab your batons!”

“Maybe...” Evelyn began.

“Stay inside the station,” Tomas told her, heading for the front door. “Most of our officers are out running down leads, and this could get ugly.”

Evelyn grabbed his arm. “Do you have a bullhorn?”

Tomas gave her an incredulous look. “In my office,” he said, pulling free and opening the front door.

The yelling roared several decibels louder. The pair of cops trying to manage the crowd was being pushed back toward the station. The cops trying to bring Mark inside were trapped against their patrol car. One of them pulled his weapon, and just like that, two residents had him slammed into the car.

Evelyn saw the weapon drop to the ground and Tomas raced into the crowd as she spun for his office. She wasn’t a negotiator, but she’d worked with the best the FBI had. And she knew calming the crowd down fast was the best chance to avoid getting someone hurt.

As she sprinted into Tomas’s office and found the bullhorn, Jack and T.J. hurried past, carrying heavy shields she hadn’t expected a small town like Rose Bay would have.

Jack and T.J. shoved their way through the crowd with their shields, trying to get to the rookies by the car.

Evelyn spotted Tomas in the middle, his hands out in a calming gesture. A broad-shouldered man with silver-streaked hair who seemed to be the closest thing the mob had to an instigator yelled back at him, slapping Tomas’s hands away.

The two cops who’d been holding back the crowd were yelling, too. It sounded as if they were agreeing with their neighbors that Brittany’s dad shouldn’t have been arrested, and promising to let him go if the crowd went home.

The rookies who’d brought in Mark Douglas were down near their patrol car. One had crawled half-underneath it to avoid getting trampled, while the other struggled to get back to his feet, his hand pressed to his bleeding head.

Mark, still in cuffs, was being dragged through the crowd. He kept looking backward, and seemed to be arguing with the crowd to let him get arrested, which was only making them angrier.

Evelyn opened the door, stepped to the edge of the crowd and lifted the bullhorn. She pressed the button to broadcast, knowing she needed to return their focus to what really mattered. “This isn’t helping Brittany. You need to leave the investigation to the police!”

The crowd quieted, seeming to still almost instantly. But that only lasted a fraction of a second. Then the man talking to Tomas yelled, “Was it your idea to arrest the victim’s father?” And the crowd surged forward, shifting direction, toward the front of the station, toward her.

Evelyn took a quick step back, pressing the button on the bullhorn again. But it was too late. Two people closest to her shoved her sideways, away from the station door, and the bullhorn fell from her hands.

She regained her balance, put her right hand near her hip to protect her weapon and tried to move backward. But someone else came in from the other side, blocking her way.

Then Jack’s voice cut through the yelling. “Evelyn! Hey! Move away from her!” He started pushing toward her, leading with his shield, and knocked someone out of his way.

Suddenly everyone seemed to be moving at once, in different directions. The men on her left spun to face Jack, knocking her backward.

She stumbled, and righted herself just as a cloud of pepper spray dispersed into the air. It filled her lungs, making her cough with every breath. Her eyes burned, watering until it was hard to see.

The crowd moved fast to get away from it, shoving and pushing away from the station, and Evelyn went down hard on one knee.

She tried to get to her feet, but the crowd suddenly shifted again as a gunshot rang out. Someone slammed into her, and she fell to the ground. Then all she could do was curl up and try to protect her head, hoping she wasn’t about to get trampled.

Five

Gabe slammed on the brakes, getting their rental car close to the rioting crowd in front of the Rose Bay PD, and wrenching Kyle against his seat belt. He’d unbuckled and opened his door before Gabe had the car in Park.

Kyle stepped outside and pepper spray stung his eyes, burned in his nose and throat. Instead of wading immediately into the crowd, he hopped on top of the rental car for a better view.

More reinforcements were right behind them. He’d heard the call come over the radios at the search party, drawing the cops and FBI agents back to the station. Since Gabe had spent extra time on the FBI’s defensive driving course, he’d driven. At every turn, Kyle had urged him to go faster, so they’d beaten everyone else back to the station.

Whatever got them to Evelyn the fastest.

But where was she? Kyle peered through the crowd, assessing. Residents fleeing the pepper spray, fighting with the cops, pushing a handcuffed man toward a truck. Two cops down by a patrol car. Two more standing back-to-back, holding shields to protect themselves as the crowd jostled them. The police chief ducking as a resident threw a punch. And there, by the side of the station... Kyle squinted. Was that Evelyn?

The crowd shifted and, oh, shit, it was. She was down, and in real danger of being trampled.

He had to get to her now. Kyle jumped down next to Gabe and pointed. “She’s over there.”

“Let’s go.”

They’d been partners for three years, so he and Gabe didn’t need to talk. They spent hundreds of hours each year training with live rounds, when knowing exactly where your partner was meant the difference between a successful training exercise and a real death.

They’d also been friends for three years, so Gabe knew how deep his feelings for Evelyn ran, how complicated they’d become. Gabe would understand that, right now, he was feeling pretty damn desperate.

Kyle waded into the crowd, sticking to the side, where he’d encounter less resistance. Gabe tracked along beside him, far enough away to allow room to maneuver, but close enough to provide assistance.

Kyle felt his eyelids swelling as he skirted the back of the cop car, close to where the pepper spray must have been dispersed. Residents—a few women but mostly men—rushed past him, heading in both directions, not seeming to know whether to flee or fight. Someone took a swing at him, and Kyle sidestepped it, twisting the man around and down onto the trunk of the squad car without breaking stride.

From the corner of his eye, he saw Gabe dodge a pair of men running full out for the street.

The crowd was dangerous, but it was relatively small. And he and Gabe had helped break up a prison riot last summer, so in comparison this was a piece of cake. At least here no one was trying to shank him.

As he closed in on Evelyn’s position, he saw her roll away from a guy in a suit who’d stepped back to kick her.

Kyle put on a burst of speed and tackled the man before he could try again, throwing him off to the side.

Gabe came up beside him as Kyle yanked Evelyn up and over his shoulder. He felt a surge of relief the second he had her off the ground where he could protect her.

He heard more cars coming in, sirens blaring, as he rushed for the station door. The crowd scattered, moving faster; most of them had obviously abandoned thoughts of fighting.

But the man Kyle had tossed aside had gotten to his feet—Kyle hadn’t thrown him hard enough to knock him out, hadn’t wanted him to get trampled by the crowd. And instead of running away, he was coming back for more, fury on his face and a police baton in his hand, up and ready to swing.

Kyle just kept going, stepping over a bullhorn, and taking Evelyn farther away from the rushing man. Gabe moved in front of them fast, as Kyle had known he would, using the man’s own momentum to push him against the brick of the station wall. Instead of forcing him onto the ground, Gabe twisted his arm behind his back, making him drop the baton, then pushed him inside the station alongside Kyle.

Kyle lowered Evelyn off his shoulder, steadying her as she swayed. He pushed her into a chair as she pressed a hand to a bump swelling her forehead. Tilting her head back to check her pupils, Kyle stared into her eyes. They were clear, the pupils normal-size and tracking. She looked a little dazed, but she was okay. Damn, when he’d seen her on the ground, he’d wanted to forget strategy and just plow straight through the center of the crowd.

He glanced back at Gabe. His partner had the man he’d brought inside cuffed to a metal bar on the station wall. When he caught Kyle’s gaze, he nodded toward the door.

“Stay here,” Kyle told Evelyn. “I’ll be right back.” Then he followed Gabe outside.

The mob was pretty much under control now. Most of the residents were long gone. A few were on the ground, being cuffed by the additional officers and FBI agents who’d arrived. The police chief was helping the cops near the squad car to their feet. A gruff-looking veteran officer set down his shield and grabbed a Glock from the ground, tucking it beside his own weapon.

“Where’s the profiler?” the veteran cop asked, scanning the ground as if he’d seen her go down.

“She’s in the station,” Gabe said. “She’s okay.”

The cop scowled. “She shouldn’t have been out here. She shouldn’t be here at all.” He spun away from them and handed the weapon he’d picked up to one of the newbies by the squad car.

Kyle looked at Gabe and pointed back to the station, and his partner followed him inside.

Evelyn got to her feet as they came in the door. The bump on her forehead was nasty and her eyelids were almost swollen shut from the pepper spray. Her suit was torn at the knee and shoulder, and from the way she hobbled when she walked toward them, he guessed a heel had come off her shoe.

But it could have been a hell of a lot worse.

“Is anyone hurt?” she asked. “I heard a gunshot.”

“It didn’t look like anyone was shot,” Gabe said.

“Good.” Evelyn bent down and took her shoes off, then peered up at them. “What are you guys doing here?”

“What do you think?” Kyle asked, a little more harshly than he’d intended. He took a deep breath. It wasn’t Evelyn’s fault things had gotten dangerous. And it wasn’t her fault his emotions took over wherever she was concerned.

He didn’t quite know how it had happened. But sometime between a year ago, when he’d first seen her in the BAU office, and now, everything had changed. She’d gone from the newbie agent he couldn’t resist teasing to the woman he flat-out couldn’t resist.

“We heard what went down. I was worried you were in the middle of it.”

She frowned back at him, but then seemed to realize what she was doing, and said, “Thanks for the help. It got nasty out there fast.”

“Is the station going to need reinforcements?” Gabe asked as cops streamed back inside, some hauling prisoners.

Evelyn shook her head, then put her fingers gingerly against the bump on her forehead. “I don’t think so. They just didn’t expect this reaction to bringing in Brittany’s father.”

“What a fucking mess,” the veteran cop with the shield contributed as he came in the door hauling a cuffed and bleeding resident.

“Is anyone hurt, Jack?” Evelyn asked as Gabe signaled a free cop and swapped the cuffs on the prisoner he’d brought inside.

“Nothing serious.” Jack pushed the resident into a chair. “Stay there,” he told the man, then turned his gaze on Evelyn. “What the hell were you doing out there? Inciting them with the bullhorn? Are you crazy?”

Kyle forced back a response, because he knew it would piss Evelyn off to have anyone stand up for her. It always did.

“I was trying to calm them down, remind them what we all need to be focused on,” Evelyn replied, a lot more calmly than Kyle had expected.

Jack snorted. “Yeah, that worked well.”

Kyle couldn’t stay silent any longer, but he tried to keep his tone nonconfrontational. “The problem wasn’t trying to talk the crowd down. The problem was not planning better for that arrest.” He should know. He’d helped execute arrests on enough high-profile targets.

Jack shot him a look, then turned pointedly to Evelyn. “How do you know those guys? Who are they? More feds?”

Instead of answering Jack, she asked Kyle, “Can you give me a ride back to the hotel?”

“You’re just going to leave now?” Jack cut in.

What was this guy’s problem? Kyle stepped closer, angling into Jack’s line of sight with the kind of warning glare he liked to use on uncooperative targets.

“Let me grab a file, okay?” Evelyn raced off as though she hoped her disappearance would make Jack lose interest.

But Jack just moved forward, giving Kyle his own cop stare.

“You might want to watch your prisoner,” Gabe said mildly as Jack got in Kyle’s face.

“Shit!” Jack took after the bleeding resident he’d brought in a minute before, who was hobbling for the door.

Then Evelyn was back, and Kyle ushered her out the door toward Gabe’s car. “What’s with that guy?”

“Apparently he’s held a grudge for eighteen years.”

Kyle steered her around the broken glass from the patrol car headlights since she wasn’t wearing shoes. “He had a grudge against a twelve-year-old?”

Gabe looked questioningly between them as Evelyn shrugged. Evelyn had told Kyle about her past, but Gabe didn’t know what this case meant to her, or her history here.

Kyle had tried to respect her privacy and keep it to himself, but if she was in danger—and with a town that fast to mob, she definitely could be—he’d have to tell Gabe soon.

And he really didn’t like the atmosphere in the police station, either. There was definitely something off about Jack.

To hell with sleep. When he got back to the hotel, he was going to check into the guy’s history. “What’s his full name?”

“Jack Bullock,” Evelyn answered. Then she seemed to realize why he’d asked, and added, “I think it’s just this case. He was on it eighteen years ago and couldn’t solve it then. It’s probably haunted him ever since.”

Like it had haunted her.

She didn’t have to say it; the words were written all over her face.

But considering why she was here, she was handling it a lot better than he’d expected. Maybe she was still too numb from learning that her best friend’s abductor was back to really take in what was happening, or maybe she was just burying it all.

Either way, the calm wasn’t likely to last long.

* * *

Evelyn sat on the edge of her bed in her hotel room, a police file on her lap. She needed to remove her dirty, torn clothes and take a shower. She needed some ice for her forehead. But she couldn’t think about any of it until she looked in the file.

Inside was the original FBI profile of the Nursery Rhyme Killer.

She hadn’t reviewed it when she wrote her own, because that could have subconsciously influenced her analysis. Now that she’d given her independent profile, it was time to look at everything else—from the original suspects to the original profile.

Since she’d profiled the abductor as being the same man from all those years ago and not a copycat, now was the moment of truth.

Did her profile match the one prepared eighteen years ago?

Back then, when Cassie had gone missing, an FBI profiler had come to Rose Bay. Evelyn had seen him at the police station once, confident and a head taller than most of the cops. She’d been leaving after another round of questioning from Jack Bullock. She’d seen the agent studying the volunteers as she’d walked at the rear of the search parties with her grandparents. When she’d spotted him leaving the Byerses’ house, she’d run over and demanded to know who he was and when he was going to find Cassie.

He’d leaned down to her level and actually shook her hand. He’d been aware of who she was, of course, but back then she hadn’t known why. Then he’d told her his name and explained what he did for the FBI.

And that conversation had changed the entire direction of her life.

She’d never seen Philip Havok again. But she could still remember the exact shade of his sharp blue eyes, the dark gray of his suit, the quiet confidence in his voice. He was the picture she’d had in her head all the years since, the idea of what she wanted to be. A profiler. Someone who could bring girls like Cassie back home.

She’d looked him up when she’d been accepted to the Academy, wondering if he was still in profiling, and discovered he’d retired the year before. He’d spent nearly twenty-five years in the Bureau—meaning, he’d been granted an exception to the FBI’s mandatory retirement. More than half of that time had been spent profiling serial predators. Now it was her turn.

Evelyn opened the file. The basic description was right at the top: “white male, between the ages of twenty and thirty, works a job with flexible hours.” Add eighteen years and that matched what she’d profiled.

She kept reading. “Unclear whether he is single, but if married, the relationship is controlling. Could have his own child, and if so, likely to be the same age as the victims.”

Evelyn paused, realizing she hadn’t considered every angle about kids. She’d thought about them as a reason the perp could have started the abductions—because he’d lost a child that age. And she’d thought of them as a reason he could have stopped the abductions—because he had an easy victim at home who had reached the age he wanted. But she hadn’t considered the other possibility. That he might be abducting other children so he’d stay away from his own.

Evelyn closed her eyes, feeling gingerly around the tender skin on her forehead where she’d bumped it. An image of Cassie filled her mind, vibrant, laughing and full of life. What had happened to her after he’d ripped Cassie away?

Evelyn pushed back the sleeves on her suit, opened her eyes and kept reading. When she finished, she closed the file and stared blankly at the bare hotel walls.

Philip had come to the same conclusions she had. Possible molester, possible delusions of being a “savior.”

But how the hell did she figure out which one? And how the hell was she going to catch him before Brittany ran out of time?

* * *

There was just one man from the original list of suspects who hadn’t been cleared or moved out of state in the past eighteen years. And he didn’t match the profile in a very key way.

Still, with Walter Wiggins not talking, he was the best lead Evelyn had. She’d checked with Carly and discovered he was on their list for follow-up, but it hadn’t happened yet, because he wasn’t a high priority. Then she’d checked with Tomas and learned that the only officer not running down other leads was his head detective, Jack Bullock.

So, the two of them were driving to the nearby town of Treighton. They’d been on the road for fifteen minutes, but Jack had kept up a steady stream of questions that gave no sign of ending.

“If you think Darnell Conway is worth investigating, does that mean we should just disregard your entire profile?” Jack kept his tone casual, his hands loose on the wheel of his police vehicle. But the question fairly screamed his resentment.

Evelyn didn’t even glance his way. “You read the Charlotte Novak file, right? You know why I want to talk to him.”

“So, the profile...”

“Can have details that are off. The thing is to focus on the profile as a whole, not fixate on a particular point.”

“That’s a pretty huge point.”

Evelyn shifted in her seat to face him. “The murder of his girlfriend’s daughter was never solved. But after the investigation went cold, Darnell and his girlfriend left the state and came here. Do you know how old Charlotte would’ve been eighteen years ago, at the time of the first abduction, if she’d lived?”

Jack’s mocking expression slipped off. “You’re kidding.”

“She would’ve been twelve that summer. Same as the Nursery Rhyme Killer’s original three victims.”

“So, then why the hell aren’t those other FBI agents—the ones who specialize in this—chasing this guy down with everything they’ve got?”

Evelyn shrugged. “He was never arrested for that crime. He was a suspect, but obviously the cops didn’t have enough on him to make a case. It’s possible he didn’t do it. He’s got no other criminal history. And that case is the only reason he showed up on the list of suspects eighteen years ago. Which was probably a lucky fluke, since he was never charged.”

“That’s some fluke. How did they find out?”

“He was part of the search parties back then. The profiler had a weird feeling about him and did some digging. And I trust the profiler’s gut on this. I just want to feel Darnell out, see how he responds to my questions.”

“What if he’s the perp? You said not to get too close to Wiggins so we wouldn’t scare him into killing Brittany if he’s got her. Isn’t the same true here?”

Evelyn leaned her head back against the headrest, still tired from the mob scene that afternoon. She glanced at her watch, realizing it had now been a full twenty-four hours since Brittany was grabbed.

She closed her eyes, trying not to dwell on something she couldn’t change, but she could hear it in her voice when she told Jack, “If Darnell did kill his girlfriend’s daughter, it was within a few hours. Walter is different. His MO was to get his victims comfortable with him first. He wanted to believe they were willing participants. That’s part of his fantasy.”

“Okay, but just like Wiggins...”

“I know. Darnell Conway would probably be noticed on High Street. But I need to check. And there’s only so much I can tell from a copy of a cold case file. I need to see Darnell’s face when I ask him about it.”

Jack gave her a pensive glance as he drove over the bridge separating Rose Bay from Treighton. Fifty feet below them, the water looked calm in the fading light. Peaceful.

That instantly transported her back to when she was ten and she’d first come to live in Rose Bay. Her grandpa’s car had been too warm as they drove over the bridge in the middle of the night. She’d kept quiet, knowing the heat was for her—wearing a pair of threadbare, tattered pajamas and no shoes. Her grandpa had tried so hard not to let her see his anger, his sadness, his guilt.

His weathered hand had folded around hers as they drove, as he’d promised her she’d never have to go back. She was going to live with him and Grandma from now on and they would take care of her. They would protect her.

She’d never been more sheltered than her first two years with her grandparents. But then Cassie had disappeared. And the world had seemed to slide out from under her again.

“...don’t you think?”

“What?”

Jack sent her a perturbed look and she saw that he was on his cell phone.

“Well, maybe you should try to get the dad to let you in the house now.” A pause. “He refused? You think he has something to hide?”

“What’s going on?” Evelyn asked.

“Okay. Fine. Bye.” When he hung up, Jack told her, “Wiggins woke up. He’s in pretty bad shape, though, so they’re keeping him in the hospital. Apparently he’s not too happy about it, but he doesn’t want to press charges against Brittany’s dad. Which is good. Shit like that—protecting the perverts and criminals—is not why I became a cop.”

“So Walter’s dad won’t let police search the house?”

“You got it. You think he knows the girl is there?”

Evelyn shook her head. “I doubt it. I know he wants to protect his son, but that’s taking it pretty far. I’ve seen the families of pedophiles do their best to deny what their kid is, even when the proof is staring them in the face. But to be complicit in the abduction? You know his dad better than I do, but that seems like a stretch.”

Jack nodded. “True. Though his dad’s in bad health these days. I doubt he can walk down those basement stairs anymore. Maybe in his heart he knows she’s there, but just doesn’t want to believe it?”

Evelyn felt her lips twist downward. “Unfortunately, that’s a real possibility.”

When Jack’s hands clutched the wheel so hard the muscles in his arms bunched, Evelyn added, “But honestly, I still have a real problem seeing Walter being able to stalk and abduct a girl here. He’s got motive, sure, but means and opportunity?”

“Well, he’s at the top of my list,” Jack said as he pulled onto a dark street. “And frankly, a black guy like Darnell Conway on High Street would get noticed, too, especially eighteen years ago. Isn’t that why you profiled the killer as white?”

Evelyn didn’t answer as she gazed out the window at Darnell’s neighborhood. The houses were small and close together, the yards overgrown; beware of dog signs were posted everywhere. Every house was in need of a coat of paint, most needed new roofs and every yard could have benefitted from an attempt to landscape. The sun was setting, making it hard to see, but Evelyn would bet there wasn’t a single flower on the entire street. From the broken plastic kid’s slide in the front yard of one house to the car without wheels up on cinder blocks in the next, the whole street was depressing.

The house Jack pulled up to was the best of the bunch by far. Darnell Conway might not have planted a garden, but he’d at least mowed his lawn. As they walked up to the front porch, they discovered he definitely believed in security. Next to Darnell’s beware of dog sign was a security company sign; the lock on the door meant business, and all the shades were blackout-style.

Jack raised his eyebrows. “Seems like he’s got something in here he wants to keep locked tight.”

Evelyn nodded, frowning. “I noticed that.”

“And judging by the lack of barking, I’m thinking most of those dog signs are for show.”

“It is pretty silent,” Evelyn agreed, glancing around. The kind of neighborhood where no one saw anything.

“Well, let’s see what he has to say.” Jack lifted his hand to knock on the door, but before he could, they heard bolts sliding back.

Three bolts slid free before the door swung open to reveal Darnell Conway. Evelyn knew he was in his late forties, but he looked younger, with smooth dark skin and close-cropped hair. It was only his deep brown eyes that showed his age. And something about the anger lurking in the depths of those eyes made the hair on the back of her neck stand straight up.

Was he the Nursery Rhyme Killer? Had he taken Cassie eighteen years ago? Had he stalked Evelyn, intending to grab her, too?

Did he recognize her now? It was hard to tell, because Jack reached in his pocket and held up his police shield, drawing Darnell’s instant attention.

It had been twenty years since Darnell had first been investigated by police, when he found the body of his girlfriend’s daughter. But as soon as he saw Jack’s badge, hatred and fury raced across his features, so fast that if she’d blinked at the wrong time, she would have missed it.

Judging by the way Jack’s eyes darted to hers, he hadn’t blinked, either. “Mr. Conway, I’m Jack Bullock, Rose Bay PD.”

“What are you doing in Treighton?” Darnell asked, his voice as smooth and even as his expression.

Jack motioned to her. “This is Evelyn Baine, FBI.”

Darnell’s eyebrows twitched, and then his lips did the same. “FBI, huh? Anything I can help you with?”

If her name meant anything to him, she couldn’t tell. Damn it.

“Can we come in?” Jack asked.

From what little Evelyn could see of the house behind Darnell, she realized the inside was a hell of a lot nicer than the outside. Not just clean and tidy, but expensive furnishings. So, why live in this neighborhood?

Darnell’s gaze flicked to Jack, then to her. “No.”

“We’re investigating the disappearance of Brittany Douglas,” Evelyn told him.

“Never heard of her.”

Jack scoffed. “Her abduction has been all over the news.”

“I drove up the coast for a few days. Got back yesterday.”

“She was abducted yesterday.”

Darnell’s eyes, hard and shuttered, settled on Jack. “Like I said, never heard of her.”

“She’s twelve years old,” Evelyn said.

Darnell didn’t blink, just stared at her.

“That’s only two years older than your girlfriend’s daughter was when she was killed.”

Darnell’s expression shifted into fury. “Are you implying something, agent?”

“You found her, didn’t you?”

“So what? I wasn’t arrested twenty years ago and there’s a damn good reason. I didn’t kill Kiki’s kid. Leave me alone and get the hell off my property!”

He slammed the door so hard Evelyn took an instinctive step back.

“That went well,” Jack said dryly. But as they got back into the car, he asked, “You think he did it?”

“I think we’d better take a close look at him. And fast.”

Six

Tomas had never gone home last night, but he’d fallen asleep at his desk sometime after six. The call that had woken him less than two hours later had initially seemed like a crank call, a person who refused to give his name reporting “something suspicious” in the marsh. But when asked to explain the term suspicious, the person had said it looked like a body in a trash bag.

Brittany had been missing almost thirty-five hours now. The profiler had been on scene since yesterday and the CARD agents since the night before that. They’d given him the statistics, so he knew it was way too likely the caller was right.

The thought made him slow instinctively as he tracked through the marsh, and his foot sank into the goop at the bottom. Tomas yanked the top of his knee-high plastic boot until it popped free and pushed onward. Ahead of him, Jack Bullock moved forward with seeming ease.

And that was ironic. Except when taking a police call, Jack had probably never visited this part of Rose Bay. Tomas could actually see the house where he’d spent most of his formative years.

It was raised on wooden stilts at the back for when the marsh waters rose, and the exterior was stucco. When he was a boy, there had been a deck off the back, but it was gone now. His parents had finally moved once their last son left home, and since then, the house had gone through a series of owners. From this distance, it looked forlorn and neglected.

“Can you imagine?” Jack huffed, gesturing at a shack up ahead of them. “Who’d want to live there?”

Tomas kept quiet, deciding to assume Jack didn’t know he’d grown up a hundred yards away. As for the shack, it was unoccupied and had been for more than a year. “It’s empty. Let’s check it out when we’re finished here, make sure no one used it to hide Brittany.” More likely, they’d just find someone’s drug stash, but it was worth a shot.

Jack turned to say something else, then cursed as one of his feet slid out from underneath him. He caught himself before he was soaked, but still let out another stream of obscenities. “How far out into the marsh did the caller say it was?”

“It shouldn’t be much farther.”

“We should’ve taken the boat,” Jack groused, breathing hard in the heavy humidity.

“The water level’s too low.” It only came up to their knees in the early-morning tide, and Tomas knew it wouldn’t get much deeper where they had to search.

He’d spent enough time in the marshes as a child to know them. The spot he was now searching for a body had once been a favorite place for him and his brothers; it was where they’d row their dad’s old canoe, race through the marshes and out into the ocean. Back then, the main thing they’d had to worry about was their drunken neighbor, who liked to shoot at anything that moved with his hunting rifle. Tomas longed for that kind of simplicity now.

Since Brittany had been abducted and Evelyn Baine had come to town, Jack had been a bigger pain in his ass than usual, Walter Wiggins was threatening to sue the police department for not protecting him after he’d been threatened and the whole town was in an uproar over yesterday’s arrest of Brittany’s father. To make matters worse, Evelyn had brought him a suspect.

Despite presenting a profile that pegged the abductor as white, late last night she’d returned to the station with Jack and named Darnell Conway as her key suspect. And if Rose Bay learned that a black man was the prime suspect in the abductions of young white girls, the riot at the station the other day was going to look like a peaceful gathering. And he’d be in for a shitstorm he wasn’t sure his small police force could handle.

“How much farther?” Jack asked, sloshing ahead of him.

“We’re close.”

Being from the wrong side of the tracks wasn’t something Tomas liked to advertise about himself. But it gave him an advantage in his job. He’d grown up seeing Rose Bay from the other side. Instead of the perfect, safe community where the rich could feel secure leaving their doors unlocked and their children with nannies, Tomas had seen the dangers.

He’d been raised to respect the natural perils, from the undertow in the ocean to the speed of high tide when it poured in over the sand bars. He’d known to avoid the neighbor who always smelled like sour whiskey and not to let the man who claimed he was from the energy company into the house when his father wasn’t home.

Brittany’s parents, on the other hand, had felt secure in allowing their daughter to play alone in the front yard, lulled into complacency by Rose Bay’s seeming perfection. Nothing bad had ever touched them, so they thought nothing ever could. Until their daughter was taken from right under their noses.

“Over there,” Jack called, pointing, and Tomas could see it, too, floating at the far end of the marsh. An industrial-size black garbage bag, with something heavy weighing it down. Had it not gotten tangled in the reeds, it probably would have sunk.

“Shit.” The caller was right. It did look like it could be a body. A small body.

He’d come across enough dead bodies when he’d worked homicide in Atlanta—including a couple in the garbage. He’d taken the job in quiet Rose Bay, hoping to see fewer. And that was what had happened. But the child cases were always the hardest. If Brittany Douglas was in here, it would rank up there with the worse cases he’d handled.

Tomas wiped a hand across his forehead and it came back wet with perspiration from temperatures that were pushing ninety, at 8:00 a.m. He forced his feet to move faster, splashing through the murky water, until he reached the bag.

Jack got there ahead of him, but he waited, looking apprehensive. “Should we try dragging it out before we open it?”

In answer, Tomas pulled the switchblade from his pocket.

“What if it’s just the air in the bag keeping it afloat?” Jack asked, but it was too late, because Tomas had already run the knife through the top of the bag.

It deflated slightly, letting out a putrid smell. Jack adjusted his stance the way Tomas had seen him do dozens of times at crime scenes in preparation for something he didn’t want to see.

Tomas folded the knife and stuffed it back in his pocket, then slipped on a pair of plastic gloves. He tore the bag open wider with his hands and things started spilling out. A perfectly good basketball. A filthy old pillow. Some green slimy substance he couldn’t identify.

He braced his feet wide in the gunk on the marsh floor and stuck his gloved hand into the bag, feeling for anything that might have been a body. His fingers pushed through cans and tissue and a rubber ball, but nothing in the bag had ever been alive, other than the maggots feeding on old Chinese takeout.

“It’s nothing,” he told Jack, who rocked back on his heels with a relieved sigh.

“What a waste of time,” Jack complained, pivoting gracelessly and plodding back toward shore.

Tomas sighed, shoved the spilled trash into the bag and hefted it over his shoulder. It weighed far less than a body, but it felt a thousand times heavier as he followed Jack back toward a town demanding answers he didn’t have.

* * *

The tide raced greedily at Evelyn, soaking the bottom of her jeans as she walked toward the sand dunes shrouded by long grass. From the main part of the beach, the area was accessible only to the adventurous. To get here, Evelyn had clambered over an outcropping of rocks, fighting for purchase on the slick surface. Combined with the dunes to her right, this was an unlikely spot for beachcombers. For someone trying to hide a body, though, it might be appealing.

Evelyn pushed determinedly toward the dunes. The wind whipped sand around, like little needles dancing on her skin, and the waves crashed loudly into the rocks.

She’d chosen a spot away from the other searchers this morning, needing time alone to think. About Walter Wiggins and Darnell Conway. About the trickier aspects of her profile.

She hadn’t been to this spot since before Cassie had gone missing. It had been Cassie’s mom who’d shown them how to get here. Instead of risking the rocks, they’d come through the dunes. To a twelve-year-old, they’d seemed to go on forever, but then they’d arrived at this little stretch of beach, and it had been like their own private world.

She’d thought about it for the first time earlier today, and realized it had only been a month before Cassie’s abduction that they’d come here. Maybe he’d followed them. Maybe he’d made it his private world, too.

A shiver raced through her, as hard as the wind ripping strands of hair from her bun.

“Hey!”

The unexpected voice made Evelyn’s head snap up. Emerging from the dunes was Darnell Conway.

She felt a new sense of unease. Had he followed her out here?

Evelyn’s hand grazed her hip, where her SIG Sauer rested reassuringly. Her holster had rubbed the skin underneath it raw in the South Carolina sun, but she never went anywhere without it.

After leaving Darnell’s house yesterday, she’d done some more digging and learned he’d kicked his girlfriend, Kiki, out of his house two years ago. It was possible he’d stopped the abductions after Cassie eighteen years ago because Kiki had started to suspect. Now, if he had decided to go back to his old ways, there’d be no one around to notice anything.

As Darnell walked toward her, an almost lazy swagger to his stride, Evelyn watched his hands for any sign of a weapon. But they swung loosely at his sides, empty.

“It’s Evelyn Baine, from the FBI, right?” Darnell asked, an artfully blank expression on his face.

“What are you doing here?”

A hint of a smile curved one corner of his mouth, and a predatory gleam flickered in his eyes. “Well, after you and that officer told me about the missing girl, how could I not help with the search?”

“Don’t you have to work?”

“I’m sure you know I work in sales. From home. I can set my own schedule.”

He stepped closer and Evelyn continued walking, careful to keep him in her line of sight. “Why here?”

“The dunes?”

“Yeah. The cops were assigning searchers to groups.”

“You’re not in a group,” Darnell said, lengthening his stride and moving close enough to give her a whiff of his aftershave. “Should you be out here all alone?”

His tone was neutral, but his words were calculated, intended to intimidate.

Evelyn felt her jaw tighten as she strode up the first sand dune instead of heading back toward the rocks. She’d need both hands for that climb, and with Darnell next to her, she was keeping her gun hand free.

Either he wanted to flaunt his guilt, thinking he’d never be caught, or he was just one of those guys who got off on being aggressive, got power out of trying to bully others.

“Should you?” she tossed back, wanting him to know he didn’t scare her.

Darnell kept pace with her, his expression shifting in a way that told her he liked the challenge. “What’s the point of searching with the group? The more area we cover, the more likely someone is to find this little girl, right?”

Or the easier it would be to hide a body, with the convenient excuse of being out searching. Some killers liked to be the ones to “discover” their victims. And if Darnell had, in fact, killed his girlfriend’s daughter twenty years ago, he was one of them.

A sick feeling roiled in her stomach. Was she going to find Brittany in these dunes? Was Cassie here somewhere, too?

She clenched her fists and intentionally slowed, so Darnell could pick the route. If he wanted to lead her to the bodies, pretend to find them, she’d go along with it.

His eyes narrowed slightly as she allowed him to get in front of her. It was as though he could read her. As though he knew exactly what she was doing.

She half expected him to call her on it, but instead he suggested, “Let’s go this way,” and led her deeper into the dunes.

Almost immediately, he started moving faster. He probably had ten inches on her, so his strides were much longer.

Was he trying to wear her out, make her easier to overpower once he got her deep into the dunes?

She kept a careful distance between them as they crested one dune after the next. Darnell was breathing heavily, his T-shirt soaked through and stuck to him, outlining biceps bigger than her thighs.

“Kinda sick, isn’t it?” Darnell wheezed after ten minutes of silence.

“What?” Evelyn asked. She was sweating and thirsty, and the sun was beating down, no cloud cover in sight. The salty, humid air felt thick in her lungs. And the thought that Cassie could be buried under one of the dunes she was trudging over made chills dance across her sweat-drenched skin.

Because if Darnell was the Nursery Rhyme Killer, maybe she was right and he wanted to “discover” the bodies. Or maybe he was simply getting a thrill out of having her—an intended victim who was now investigating him—walk over them.

Of course, if he was worried that after eighteen years someone suspected him again, he could also be desperate. And desperate meant dangerous.

Darnell slowed down, eased in next to her. “Well, come on. No one wants to say it, but everyone knows. None of those girls were found eighteen years ago. The same guy is back now.” He raised his eyebrows meaningfully.

When she didn’t respond, he pressed, “They lure you into these search parties with the idea that you could help rescue this poor little girl. But let’s be honest. We’re looking for her body.”

An image flashed through Evelyn’s mind, and the shock made her slide partway down the dune. An image of a girl with blond ringlets bouncing in pigtails, sky-blue eyes dancing with happiness, a quick smile for everyone she met. Cassie.

The last time Evelyn had seen her, they’d played hide-and-seek in Cassie’s backyard. Evelyn had felt so free, felt she’d finally fit in somewhere, like she had a real home, a friendship that would last a lifetime. Instead, that day marked the last time she’d really been a child.

Anger swelled in her. Had this man taken that away from her? Taken Cassie?

The glare of the sun over the crystal-brown sand dimmed as Evelyn’s hand instinctively jerked toward her weapon.

When she spun around, Darnell was right there, so close that if she breathed too deeply they’d be touching. She recognized the look in his eyes because she’d seen it before, usually in interrogation rooms. His words were meant to get a reaction.

His lips twitched, something wanting to break free. A snarl? A smile? But he held it back, staring her down, triumph in his eyes.

And she realized what she’d done. She’d gotten distracted, thinking of Cassie. She’d let him get too close.

She was armed, yes, but in the time it took to clear her weapon from its holster, he could take her down with sheer bulk. She could run, but which way? She was at the base of two dunes, with no idea how to get out.

Triumph showed on Darnell’s face, telling her he could sense her fear.

And damn it, that infuriated her. It ignited all the anger she’d buried under mountains of survivor’s guilt and mourning.

So, he had a hundred pounds on her, all of it muscle. She had hand-to-hand training from the FBI. And she wasn’t going down without a fight.

She leaned her head back so he could see it in her eyes.

He was taken aback, like most bullies, when he realized sheer intimidation wouldn’t do it. A flash of surprise, of panic, appeared in Darnell’s eyes. He hid it fast and lifted his hand.

Evelyn instinctively jumped backward, her hands coming up fisted.

“Move back now!”

Evelyn identified the deep baritone instantly, and Darnell reacted to the order by calmly raking his hand through his hair. Then he took his time stepping away from her.

Finally Evelyn looked up, over the top of the dune, and right at Kyle, who was walking toward them, his weapon sighted on Darnell.

“Evelyn and I were just helping with the search,” Darnell said, sounding way too calm for someone who had a weapon aimed at his head. “You always this trigger-happy, man?”

Not lowering his weapon or taking his gaze off Darnell, Kyle held his hand out for her.

Evelyn took it, and he tugged her up the dune next to him as if she weighed nothing, barely even adjusting his weight. Only then did Kyle holster his weapon.

But his hand still lingered close to it, and Evelyn recognized the battle-hardened look in Kyle’s eyes as his “mission face.” For someone who usually seemed laid-back and approachable, right now Kyle looked exactly like the trained operator he was.

Darnell clearly saw it, because he kept his movements slow and his hands away from his pockets as Kyle indicated that he should move in front of them.

“You need to sign in with the rest of the searchers,” Kyle said as the three of them started walking out of the dunes.

“How do you know I didn’t?” Darnell parried.

“Because when I asked around about where Evelyn was, I heard I wasn’t the only one looking for her.”

Darnell had told people he wanted to find her? That meant he probably hadn’t intended to harm her, just to intimidate.

As her adrenaline level decreased, Evelyn cursed herself for screwing this up. If she’d stayed focused, she might have gotten him to slip up.

Darnell shrugged, glancing back at Kyle. “Evelyn was the one who told me about the girl’s abduction. She mentioned the search, so I figured I’d join her.”

As they stepped out of the dunes and onto the high grass alongside a parking lot full of beachgoers, Evelyn put her hand on Kyle’s arm. When he turned to her, she gave a quick shake of her head. A silent request not to warn Darnell to stay away from her.

She’d trained in psychology for years before arriving at BAU, which was its own specialized course in how the most dangerous minds worked. And every bit of her training was telling her that Darnell would seek her out again.

Next time, she’d be prepared. She wouldn’t let him catch her alone and off guard. Next time, he wouldn’t be the only one playing mind games.

Because he might have spent his whole life fooling people, but her job was to get into his head and make him give her the truth. And her job was the biggest part of her life.

She knew Kyle didn’t like it, but he kept quiet as Darnell glanced between them, obviously expecting a threat.

When none came, amusement glimmered in his eyes. “I’ll be back to help some more later. Can’t let this guy get away with it.”

He sauntered away, then called over his shoulder, “See you soon, Evelyn.”

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