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Ralph glanced at the file again. “Yeah. What are you thinking?”

“She doesn’t have an engagement ring on,” I said.

“What?”

“In the crime scene photos you sent me she’s wearing an engagement ring.”

He flipped through a stack of papers in a manila folder. “Hmm,” he said. “She might not have been wearing it that day.”

“You get engaged, you show off the ring to everyone.” I spoke my thoughts aloud. “Of course, it’s possible she got engaged between having the picture taken and getting abducted. But that’s unlikely if she took it the day before.”

He set down the folder. “So what are you saying? You think the killer might have left it as some kind of symbol? Is he trying to tell us he’s engaged to them? Marrying them in some sick, twisted sense?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.” I stared at the photo for a long moment. “Check it out for me, though, would you? Find out if she’s really engaged to anyone. If so, I wanna meet the guy.”

“You got it.”

Suddenly I realized I was giving orders. “Um, please,” I said. Officially, I’d been brought in as a consultant, but Ralph and I had worked so many times together at the Bureau that I just seemed to pick up right where we left off.

He slapped me on the shoulder. Almost knocked me over. “Don’t worry, you’re cool. Let’s just catch this sicko.”

Ralph went to make a few phone calls and I looked at the last picture. Bethanie Dixon, twenty-two, was the only other victim besides Patty to be found indoors. She was also the one found the farthest away, in Athens, Georgia. The pawn and the yellow ribbon linked her to our killer, even though the distance didn’t seem quite right.

I was jarred from my thoughts by someone calling my name. “Dr. Bowers.”

Something about that voice.

No, it couldn’t be her.

I turned.

It was.

Special Agent Margaret Wellington.

And my day had been going so well too.

10

“Margaret,” I said. I knew she would correct me.

“I’d prefer you call me Special Agent in Charge Wellington.”

I extended my hand. “Sorry. I guess I forgot.”

She flipped back a snatch of her impossibly straight rodent-colored hair and glared at me. I’d forgotten how narrow her lips were, how straight her teeth. Instead of shaking my hand she slid her hands to her hips. “No, Dr. Bowers. You didn’t forget.”

Well, OK. That was true. I did remember how much she hated being called Margaret, but I’d forgotten that she was stationed here in North Carolina. Slipped my mind entirely. Obviously it had, or I wouldn’t have accepted Ralph’s invitation to consult on the case. I retrieved my hand. She wasn’t going to shake it anyway.

Margaret Wellington had a habit of breathing in sharply through her nose, which made it seem like she was constantly disgusted with you. Which, maybe, she was. “It’s been, what, Dr. Bowers? Four years?”

“Has it been that long?” I said. “Hardly seems like it.”

She blinked. “Yes. Four years.” She cocked her head slightly. “So. How have you been?”

“Busy.” It was true enough.

“I heard your wife died,” she said. I could feel my anger rising. She continued, her voice even and emotionless. “Very tragic. And then they transferred you to Denver and stuck you behind a desk. Must have been hard.”

“I volunteered for the position in Colorado,” I said coolly. The National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center in Denver housed the most advanced crime-mapping program in the world. I’d been helping integrate the research from the National Institute for Justice with that of the FBI. “It’s important work and this way Tessa could be closer to my parents.”

“Yes of course.” Finally she backed up a little and even let the hint of a smile dance across her lips. “Well, it looks like I’ll be moving back to Quantico again as soon as this case is wrapped up. They’d like me to teach at the Academy again.”

“Congratulations. I know how important that is to you.”

“Yes.” Her voice had turned to chalk. “You do.”

I held my tongue. Better to let it be at that.

“See you in the briefing room,” she said at last and stalked off to her glass-enclosed office in the corner of the room.

The air around me seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. I saw Lien-hua glance up from her desk, a question mark on her face. “What was that all about?”

“It’s complicated,” I said. “Ralph, why didn’t you tell me she was here?”

He grinned. “Must have slipped my mind.”

“Yeah, well, you’re going to owe me big-time for this.”

“What do you mean complicated?” asked Lien-hua.

I sighed. “We were both working at the Bureau. I was teaching environmental criminology, and she was assigned to counterter-rorism-”

“Wait a minute,” Lien-hua said. “I thought that before you moved to Denver you lived in New York City?”

“I did. I’d fly in to teach a couple weeks every month. Anyway, she’d been eyeing the assistant director’s position for quite a while and was on the fast track toward getting it when-”

“Some evidence was lost,” Ralph said. “There were a lot of accusations, and Pat here noticed some things that internal affairs was very interested in.”

I sat down at the desk beside Lien-hua. “Like I said, it gets complicated. Anyway, there was a disciplinary hearing. I had to testify, and she ended up getting transferred here, to the satellite office, to push papers around.”

“She’s blamed Pat ever since,” Ralph added. “And brown-nosed everyone she can to get reinstated at Quantico. Needless to say, she wasn’t too happy to have any of us come in on this case, but on the other hand, she wants it all wrapped up as soon as possible because it doesn’t look good to have a serial killer running around loose in your neck of the woods when you’re trying to impress the director.”

I turned back to Ralph. “Wait a minute, what did she mean by that ‘see you in the briefing room’ comment?”

“Oh yeah. Margaret wants you to brief the team on your investigative techniques.”

“When?”

He looked at his watch. “Half an hour.”

“What? No way. I haven’t visited the crime scenes yet. She knows that. It’s too early for any kind of preliminary report-”

“Just walk us through the process, Pat. You know, all that geographical time and space mumbo jumbo.”

“I can’t, Ralph. I haven’t even-by the way, you make my work sound so intriguing and scientific-”

“Thank you.”

“I need two days at least.”

“We can give you till noon-”

“There’s no way I could be ready by-”

“Two o’clock, then?”

“Two o’clock!”

“Two o’clock it is,” said Ralph triumphantly. “Good man. I’ll go tell Margaret.”

“What? Wait a minute.” I turned to Lien-hua. “What just happened there?”

“I think you’re going to give a briefing at two.”

“I didn’t agree to that, did I?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “But I can already tell I’m going to enjoy watching you two work together.”

I grabbed a handful of files off the desk and stood up. I couldn’t believe it. I came in here today planning to visit the crime scenes, and now I was going to be stuck giving a briefing instead. I hate giving briefings almost as much as I hate bad coffee.

She motioned to the screen mounted on the wall. “Before you get started, c’mere for a second. There’s something I wanted to show you.”

“Listen, Lien-hua. I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

“Wait. This might be helpful.” She pulled up the crime-scene photos and started scrolling through them. “He abducts them, tortures them, then kills them and dumps their bodies where we can find them, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Where we can find them.”

“That’s right.”