She tapped on the keyboard. Her fingers were trembling.
Their cars had all been found, abandoned. These women had never been seen again.
According to the police reports, the women had gone missing at night, estimated at times between midnight and three a.m.
Her cheeks went cold as she read through the case files. The cars of the last two women taken—Laura Lassiter and Wendy Crighton—had been found on the side of the road, their gas tanks empty.
She’d been right when she thought the perp had done this before. Cadence just hadn’t realized how many times he’d committed the same attack.
She scanned the next victim file. Elizabeth Jennings. Elizabeth Jennings had disappeared after leaving her shift at St. Mary’s Hospital in Clydale, Georgia. Her car had been found, with a busted radiator, on the side of an old, two-lane highway.
Elizabeth had never been seen again after that.
Kyle came to stand behind her, reading over her shoulder. She tensed, hypersensitive to him, but she didn’t glance back. Right then, there was no way she could take her gaze from the laptop.
Another e-mail from Dani popped up on her screen. As she read it, her icy cheeks flushed.
I went back twenty years, just to be certain. Maria McKenzie was the earliest match I found.
Finally, she had to glance up. Glance back at Kyle. His jaw was locked. His eyes glittered.
“She found them,” he said, but he didn’t sound like himself. She’d never heard such an empty, hollow tone from Kyle before. Kyle was passion and fire. This…this wasn’t him.
She stood and reached for his hand because she had to touch him right then. “It’s all preliminary, you know that. Right now, we’re just dealing with links, with cases that match up.” They’d have to dig deeper for more conclusive proof, but it was sure looking like a serial killer was at work.
A perpetrator who hunted women, who got them alone on dark, empty roads. He disabled their vehicles. He timed their abductions to fall in the dead of night, when no one would be around to offer help. He took those women. And no one ever saw them again.
Just. Like. Maria.
“The cases fit. The pattern is there.” In her behavioral sciences classes at Quantico, Cadence had always been told to look for the pattern.
She’d go back, study all of the victims, learn who they’d been, but first…Kyle needs me. After that call last night, a direct taunt from the killer aimed straight at Kyle, she had to make sure her partner was in control.
That he was safe.
Sane. Because Cadence feared that the killer was trying to play a game with Kyle. A very deadly, twisted game.
She swallowed and told him what she’d learned from those files. “Three years after she vanished, another woman was taken.”
Three years.
Long enough for everyone to have forgotten Maria McKenzie. Everyone but her brother.
Her hand was still on Kyle’s. “After that, roughly a year later, another woman was taken. That’s the way it appears to have been since then, over and over, nearly a year passing in between disappearances.”
“Why the hell didn’t someone know?” He pulled away from her.
“He went across state lines. Four states.” She wanted to touch him again, but instead she balled her hands into fists. “Right now, right this minute…” He knew this. He knew the caseload authorities faced. “There are as many as one hundred thousand active missing-persons cases being investigated.” So many cases and not enough investigators.
Details, patterns weren’t noticed. They slipped through the cracks.
“He took Maria.” Kyle gave a hard shake of his head. “He took her and the others.”
He. The perp they hadn’t profiled. The serial killer they were just recognizing for exactly what he was.
“You said yourself,” she whispered. “Same city. Same abandoned vehicle. Same date.”
“He came back to where he started.” His voice was hollow, but his eyes burned with blue fire.
The killer had hunted again, in the place where the abductions had first begun.
“You’re sure she was the first?” he asked, his voice rasping.
Not 100 percent sure, but… “I can get Dani to keep looking, but she’s already gone back twenty years. Maria’s case was the first to match with the others.”
His hands had fisted. “The first is special.”
She could feel his pain. She hated it.
“That’s the spiel, isn’t it? With the first kill, something breaks in the serial—”
“Or is born.”
“He liked it.” That hollow voice hurt her. “He liked what he did to my sister, so he did it again and again, and no one stopped him. No one cared.”
She had to touch him. Cadence grabbed his shoulders, unable to hold back anymore. “You care. I care.” Her breath was coming too fast. Her heart racing too hard. “We’re here. We’re going to stop him.”
Did he even hear her? See her?
She shook him a little, tightening her hold on him. “He came back here for a reason. His first kill was here, for a reason.” He needed to think like an agent and think past the grief and rage. “Why, Kyle? Why did he come here?”
She needed him to say what she already knew.
His breath heaved out. “Paradox has meaning for him.”
The first kill was never random. Nothing about it was.
“That’s right,” she whispered. “It has meaning.” Then she whirled away from him and yanked down the map of the United States attached to the wall. She grabbed a pen, started circling cities. All of the cities in Dani’s files. The abduction sites.
Her palm was damp around the pen.
It slipped from her grip even as she put a star on Paradox. A star, because the city was nearly perfectly in the middle of the abduction sites on the map. “This could be his home base. He could still be here, Kyle.” The phone call that Kyle had received meant the perp had to be close enough to watch them.
“With Maria.” The words seemed torn from him.
She stilled. Fifteen years. “No.” Her voice was sad, soft. “He doesn’t still have Maria.”
Not after fifteen years.
Not after all of those other victims. In her experience, a killer only chose a new victim to take when—
When the other one was dead.
His chin lifted. “We only found one set of remains. If they aren’t—they aren’t hers, so we don’t know—”
“Kyle,” she began softly, sadly. “You have got to—”