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
