Eighteen years later

Evelyn Baine knew how to think like a killer.

In fact, she was damn good at it. Serial killers, arson¬ists, 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 al¬ways more.

Even before she stepped inside the unmarked build¬ing 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 her¬self in her
cubicle wouldn’t stop the cases from coming.

It would only stop her from having a life outside the office. And after
she’d almost been killed by the serial killer she’d been profiling a month
ago, that had become important.

So, she shoved the guilt back, dropped into her chair and dialed her voice
mail. There were three requests for follow-up on cases she’d profiled, a
pretty typical way to start her morning. She jotted them down and kept
going.

The next call was from the FBI’s Employee Assis¬tance Program, reminding
her that the Bureau had psy-chologists she could talk to about the case
that had nearly killed her, and had claimed another agent’s life. Evelyn
ground her teeth and deleted it. She had her own psy¬chology degree, and
her professional opinion was that she was doing just fine. She was about to
hang up when she realized there was one more message.

“I’m looking for Evelyn Baine.” The voice was vaguely familiar and every
word vibrated with tension. “The Evelyn Baine from Rose Bay. This is Julie
Byers. Cassie’s mom.”

Whatever she said next was drowned out under a sud¬den ringing in Evelyn’s
ears, under a bittersweet flood of memories. Cassie, the little girl next
door who’d come over the day Evelyn had moved in with her grandparents and
announced they were going to be best friends. The girl who hadn’t given a
damn that Evelyn was the only person in town—including Evelyn’s
grandparents—who wasn’t white, at least not entirely white. And eighteen
years ago, in Rose Bay, that had mattered.

Cassie had been Evelyn’s first real friend, a symbol of everything that was
supposed to change in her life when she came to stay with her grandparents.

For two years, she and Cassie had been inseparable. And then one night,
Cassie had disappeared from her bed. In her place, her abductor had left
his calling card, a macabre nursery rhyme.

Cassie had never come home. Julie Byers calling now, eighteen years later,
could only mean one thing. They’d found her.

Pressure tightened around her heart. Evelyn had worked enough child
abduction cases in her year at BAU to know the statistics. After eighteen
years, Cassie wasn’t going to be found alive. But she didn’t want to snuff
out the flicker of hope that just wouldn’t die.

With unsteady hands, Evelyn called her voice mail again and skipped through
to the last message, to hear what she knew Julie Byers was going to say.
Cassie was dead.

She clutched her hands tightly together as the mes¬sage replayed. “I’m
looking for Evelyn Baine. The Evelyn Baine from Rose Bay. This is Julie
Byers. Cassie’s mom.”

In the pause that followed, tears clouded her vision. Her whole body tensed
as she waited for Julie Byers to destroy the dream she’d had for eighteen
years. The dream of one day seeing Cassie again.

“Please call me, Evelyn.”

Her body deflated and she dropped her head to the desk.

“Evelyn?”

Willing her pain not to show on her face, she turned around. “Greg,” she
croaked.

Greg Ibsen was the closest thing she had to a part¬ner at BAU. Even if
she’d sounded normal, he was the only one in the office who might have seen
through it. As he stepped into her cubicle, worry brimmed in his soft brown
eyes.

“What happened? Are you okay?”

She stared up at him, trying to get control of herself. But her eyes kept
losing focus, and her heart still tripped erratically.

“Come on.” Greg set his briefcase next to hers and took her arm, pulling
her out of her seat.

“Hang on,” she croaked, jotting down the number from her voice mail.

She spun back, her eyes on the loud plaid tie someone—probably his
daughter, Lucy—had paired with his somber blue suit. Then Greg was
propelling her into an empty interagency coordination room.

He guided her into a chair, then shut the door and leaned against it.
“What’s wrong?”

Everything was wrong. She’d joined the FBI, joined BAU, to find Cassie, but
she’d never told anyone at the Bureau about her past. Except Kyle McKenzie.

Kyle was an operator with the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team. Since HRT and BAU
worked closely together, she’d met him the day she joined BAU. And for a
whole year, she’d managed to resist his incessant flirting, as¬suming it
was all a joke. Until last month.

Last month, she’d acted on the attraction. And every¬thing between them had
changed. Despite the fact that he’d been called away on a case too soon for
them to fig¬ure out where their relationship was going, she wished he was
here. Wished she could lean into his strong arms while she called Cassie’s
mom.

But Kyle wasn’t here. He was somewhere not far from where she’d grown up,
on a mission she didn’t “need to know” anything about. And the nature of
his job meant she had no idea when he’d be back.

Greg had trained her and he’d become a good friend. Hell, he was her
emergency contact, because she didn’t have any real family left except her
grandma, and these days, Evelyn took care of her.

A month ago, Evelyn would have pretended to be fine. She would have brushed
off Greg’s concern and gone back to work. But she was trying to make a
change in her life. So, she told him, “When I was twelve, my best friend,
Cassie, disappeared. She was never found.” It had been the driving force in
her life for eighteen years, the one thing she’d been willing to sacrifice
everything else for. “And now…”

She squeezed her eyes shut. She’d always wanted clo¬sure, always needed to
know what had happened. But if Cassie was dead, she suddenly, desperately,
wanted to stay ignorant.

Greg’s hand rested on her arm, and when she opened her eyes he was kneeling
next to her, his gaze steady and compassionate. The gaze of someone who’d
sat beside too many victims and always known the right thing to say.

And maybe, more than anyone, he’d know what she should do now. He was
practiced at comforting survivors—his son, Josh, had watched his birth
father kill his mother before Josh had been adopted by Greg and his wife.

“Cassie’s mom wants me to call her.” The next words didn’t want to come,
but she forced them out. “It must be because they finally found her body.”
Saying it out loud felt like ripping a bandage from a wound it had covered
so long it had grown into the skin.

Sorrow folded into the creases beside Greg’s fawn-colored eyes. “I’m so
sorry, Evelyn.” He squeezed her hand, those gentle eyes searching hers.
“Eighteen years is a long time. Too long for there to be any good outcome.”

He was right, of course. If Cassie had still been alive, what hell might
she have endured for the past eighteen years?

A rush of images stampeded through her head from a child abduction case
she’d profiled in her first month at BAU. She’d gone to the scene to advise
HRT when they went into the suspect’s house. She’d watched Kyle kick the
door in. She could still smell the cordite from the flash-bang, still feel
the tension, the restrained hope that maybe, just maybe, they’d find the
boy alive.

She’d waited and waited until finally they’d come out. First, two HRT
agents leading the suspect, naked, hand¬cuffed and swearing. Then Kyle
carrying the boy, mi¬raculously still breathing. Someone had wrapped an FBI
jacket around his violated body, but the anguish in his eyes—seven hundred
days past terror—had burrowed deep into her soul and she’d known. He hadn’t
really come out alive.

Greg’s voice brought her back to the present. “You were too young to have
saved Cassie, Evelyn. But she brought you to us. And to all the victims you
did bring home.”

“I don’t want to hear there’s no more hope,” she ad¬mitted.

“I know.”

Greg didn’t let go of her hand as she pulled out her phone and stared at
it, not wanting to dial.

“You need to get it over with. It’s not going to get any easier, and
waiting won’t change anything. You can do this.”

Evelyn nodded, tried to prepare herself. She dialed the number fast, before
she could change her mind. Some cowardly part of her hoped Julie wouldn’t
pick up, but before the first ring ended, she did.

“Mrs. Byers? It’s Evelyn Baine.” Her voice sounded strange, too high-
pitched and winded, as if she’d just run the Marine training course over at
Quantico.

“Evelyn.” Julie’s voice betrayed that she’d been crying.

Dread intensified, and slivers of ice raced along Ev¬elyn’s spine.

“I’m so glad I found you.” Julie’s voice evened out. “I heard you joined
the FBI.”

She had? Evelyn had left Rose Bay at seventeen, after her grandma had
gotten sick and her mom had suddenly shown up again. She’d never gone back
and she hadn’t talked to anyone from Rose Bay in more than a decade.

“Yes,” Evelyn managed. Get on with it, she wanted to say. Just tell me
Cassie’s dead.

A sob welled up in her throat and Evelyn clamped her jaw tight, holding it
back.

“You probably figured after all this time I’d only be calling… Well, it’s
about Cassie.”

Evelyn’s fingers started to tingle and she realized she’d squeezed Greg’s
hand so tight both of their knuckles had gone bloodless. But she couldn’t
seem to loosen her grip.

“You found her?”

“No. But the person who took Cassie is back.”