PierceBlake Pierce is author of the bestselling RILEY PAGE mystery series, which includes eleven books (and counting). Blake Pierce is also the author of the MACKENZIE WHITE mystery series, comprising eight books (and counting); of the AVERY BLACK mystery series, comprising five books; and of the new KERI LOCKE mystery series, comprising five books (and counting).
An avid reader and lifelong fan of the mystery and thriller genres, Blake loves to hear from you, so please feel free to visit www.blakepierceauthor.com to learn more and stay in touch.
PROLOGUE
Carolyn Rainey could sense something was wrong. It was hard to explain the feeling. But as she walked along the winding residential street to meet her twelve-year-old daughter, the skin on the back of her neck tingled.
On the surface, nothing was out of the ordinary. Carolyn always left the house around 2:30 to meet up with Jessica. She enjoyed the solitary, if brief, walk. It allowed her to clear her head for the second half of the day.
Playa del Rey Middle School let out at 2:35 and Jessica biked home every day. By the time she got everything from her locker into her backpack, made it to the bike rack, said goodbye to her friends, and got on the road, it was usually around 2:45.
Mother and daughter invariably met up at about the halfway point between the school and house around 2:50. Then they would return home together, Carolyn walking, Jessica biking slowly beside her, occasionally circling her mom playfully.
They would talk about the events of the day: who had a crush on whom, which teacher accidentally used a curse word, what song they were working on in choir. When they got home, there was always a snack waiting, after which Jessica would dive into her homework and Carolyn would get back to her own work. They had their routine and it was always the same, give or take a few minutes.
But Carolyn had been walking for close to a half hour now. It was almost 3 p.m. and she was nearly two-thirds of the way to the school. She should have run into Jessica by now.
Maybe her daughter had needed to go to the bathroom. Or maybe she had gotten caught up in a conversation with Kyle, the cute boy from her English class. But the tingling sensation on her neck told Carolyn that something else had happened.
When she rounded the next corner, she saw that she was right. Jessica’s purple bike, covered in stickers from the live-action Beauty and the Beast movie and photos of her favorite singers, Selena Gomez and Zara Larsson, was lying on its side, half on the sidewalk, half on the road.
She ran over to it and stared, frozen with fear. Looking around desperately, she caught a glimpse of something in the bushes of the nearest house. She hurried over and pulled at it. A branch snapped and the thing came loose.
She looked at it, almost unable to process what she was seeing. It was Jessica’s backpack. Carolyn dropped to her knees, her legs suddenly unsteady. Her heart pounded nearly out of her chest as the realization hit her: her daughter had vanished.
CHAPTER ONE
Detective Keri Locke was frustrated. She sat at her desk in LAPD’s West Los Angeles Pacific Division, studying the computer screen in front of her.
All around her, the station was bustling. Two teenagers who had snatched a purse and tried to escape on skateboards were being booked. An elderly man was seated at a nearby desk, explaining to a patient officer how someone took his morning paper every day before he could get outside to collect it. Two chubby guys were handcuffed on benches at opposite ends of the holding area because they’d gotten into a mid-afternoon bar fight and still wanted to go at it. Keri ignored them all.
For the last twenty minutes, she’d been poring over every post in the “strictly platonic” section of the Los Angeles Craigslist. It was the same thing she’d done every day for the last six weeks when her friend, newspaper columnist Margaret “Mags” Merrywether, had given her a tip she hoped would help her find her missing daughter, Evie.
Evie had been abducted over five years ago. But after relentless, mostly fruitless searching, Keri had finally found her, only to have her ripped away again. The memory of seeing Evie being driven away in a black van, turning a corner and disappearing from sight, perhaps forever, was too much. She shook the thought from her head and refocused on what was in front of her. After all, it was a lead. And she desperately needed a lead.
It was in late November when Mags had reached out to a shadowy figure known only as the Black Widower. He was a fixer, legendary for doing the dirty work of the rich and powerful, whether that was assassinating political enemies, making troublesome reporters disappear, or stealing sensitive material.
In this case, Keri suspected that he either had her daughter or at least knew her location. That was because just six weeks ago, Keri had tracked down the man who had abducted Evie all those years ago. He was a professional kidnapper known as the Collector. Keri had learned that his real name was Brian Wickwire after she killed him in a life-or-death struggle.
Using information she later found in Wickwire’s apartment, Keri had been able to piece together Evie’s location. She’d gone there just in time to see an older man forcing the girl into a black van. She had called out and even locked eyes with her daughter, now thirteen. She had actually heard Evie say the word “Mommy.”
But the man rammed Keri’s car with the van and escaped. Dazed and unable to follow, she’d been forced to watch helplessly as her daughter disappeared from her sight a second time. Later that night, she’d been told that the van had been found in an empty parking lot. The older man had been shot in the head execution style. Evie was gone.
For several weeks after, the department had run down every lead, shaken every tree in search of her daughter. But they were all dead ends. And without any evidence to go on, the team eventually had to pursue other cases.
Ultimately it was Mags, who looked like a cover model for Southern Socialite magazine but was actually a tough-as-nails investigative reporter, who had provided a new lead. She told Keri that the situation with Evie reminded her of someone she had investigated years ago called the Black Widower. He was notorious for double taps in parking lots late at night. He was known to drive a Lincoln Continental without plates, which had been visible in the parking lot surveillance footage where the black van was found.
And it was Mags who, using a tip from a confidential source and writing anonymously, had reached out to him using
