Twenty-Two
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.
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
