I N   H I S

T H O U G H T S

(An Eve Hope FBI Suspense Thriller—Book 6)

K a t e   B o l d

Kate Bold

Bestselling author Kate Bold is author of the ALEXA CHASE SUSPENSE THRILLER series, comprising six books (and counting); the ASHLEY HOPE SUSPENSE THRILLER series, comprising six books (and counting); the CAMILLE GRACE FBI SUSPENSE THRILLER series, comprising eight books (and counting); the HARLEY COLE FBI SUSPENSE THRILLER series, comprising eleven books (and counting); the KAYLIE BROOKS PSYCHOLOGICAL SUSPENSE THRILLER series, comprising five books (and counting); the EVE HOPE FBI SUSPENSE THRILLER series, comprising seven books (and counting); the DYLAN FIRST FBI SUSPENSE THRILLER series, comprising five books (and counting); and the LAUREN LAMB FBI SUSPENSE THRILLER series, comprising five books (and counting).

An avid reader and lifelong fan of the mystery and thriller genres, Kate loves to hear from you, so please feel free to visit www.kateboldauthor.com to learn more and stay in touch.

Copyright © 2023 by Kate Bold. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the author. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Jacket image Copyright amarclc, used under license from Shutterstock.com.

BOOKS BY KATE BOLD

ALEXA CHASE SUSPENSE THRILLER

THE KILLING GAME (Book #1)

THE KILLING TIDE (Book #2)

THE KILLING HOUR (Book #3)

THE KILLING POINT (Book #4)

THE KILLING FOG (Book #5)

THE KILLING PLACE (Book #6)

ASHLEY HOPE SUSPENSE THRILLER

LET ME GO (Book #1)

LET ME OUT (Book #2)

LET ME LIVE (Book #3)

LET ME BREATHE (Book #4)

LET ME FORGET (Book #5)

LET ME ESCAPE (Book #6)

CAMILLE GRACE FBI SUSPENSE THRILLER

NOT ME (Book #1)

NOT NOW (Book #2)

NOT WELL (Book #3)

NOT HER (Book #4)

NOT NORMAL (Book #5)

NOT AGAIN (Book #6)

NOT SAFE (Book #7)

NOT TODAY (Book #8)

HARLEY COLE FBI SUSPENSE THRILLER

NOWHERE SAFE (Book #1)

NOWHERE LEFT (Book #2)

NOWHERE TO RUN (Book #3)

NOWHERE LIKE THIS (Book #4)

NOWHERE GIRL (Book #5)

NOWHERE TO HIDE (Book #6)

NOWHERE CERTAIN (Book #7)

NOWHERE PURE (Book #8)

NOWHERE SOUND (Book #9)

NOWHERE SANE (Book #10)

NOWHERE TRUE (Book #11)

KAYLIE BROOKS PYSCHOLOGICAL SUSPENSE THRILLER

LAST BREATH (Book #1)

LAST CHANCE (Book #2)

LAST WISH (Book #3)

LAST SHOT (Book #4)

LAST MISTAKE (Book #5)

EVE HOPE FBI SUSPENSE THRILLER

IN HIS BLOOD (Book #1)

IN HIS SIGHTS (Book #2)

IN HIS REACH (Book #3)

IN HIS MIND (Book #4)

IN HIS WAY (Book #5)

IN HIS THOUGHTS (Book #6)

IN HIS DREAMS (Book #7)

DYLAN FIRST FBI SUSPENSE THRILLER

OUT OF REACH (Book #1)

OUT OF TOUCH (Book #2)

OUT OF TIME (Book #3)

OUT OF BOUNDS (Book #4)

OUT OF LUCK (Book #5)

LAUREN LAMB FBI SUSPENSE THRILLER

SOMETHING KNOCKING (Book #1)

SOMETHING CALLING (Book #2)

SOMETHING WRONG (Book 3)

SOMETHING DARK (Book #4)

SOMETHING TO HIDE (Book #5)

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE

Selma’s hands slapped the water, breaking the surface tension of the shimmering blue pool. Her torso rose and fell in endless repetitions as she repeated the stroke, her shoulders rolling with each rotation. She gasped a breath every time her face emerged, then plunged back under on the downstroke.

Underwater, she performed a neat flip-turn, shooting off the far wall like a torpedo and beginning her fifty-sixth lap in the standard 25-yard pool. She nosed to the surface like a sleek brown dolphin, keeping her body as streamlined as possible until the moment she came up and began the butterfly stroke again.

Her head was beginning to feel dizzy as she repeated the stroke and breathing pattern. Was the chlorine a little stronger than usual? She was using the athletic training pool after hours, after all, when nobody was scheduled to be in it. They'd probably just treated an hour or two before she arrived. The fumes were making her sick.

But she was only fifteen laps away from breaking her own record.  

On her next lap, Selma began to notice water pooling in the bottom of her goggles. She mumbled a bubbly curse underwater and fumbled foolishly with the left eyecup. The goggles were old, and the rubber seals had spent far too much time sitting in the sunlight by the side of the pool on long, lazy summer afternoons. The suction gave way, and Selma’s eyes were instantly hit by a flood of highly chlorinated pool water.

Spluttering and blinking helplessly, Selma splashed to the shallow end of her lane. The water was still about four feet deep, coming up to her chest. Her hand found the tile lip of the pool. Ripping the goggles off her head, she hauled herself out onto the edge of the pool beside the diving block.

The midnight breeze was cool on her wet skin, although the air still held some of the drunken summer balminess. It had been over a hundred degrees that day, and the pavement still radiated some of the heat from the day’s bake in the sunlight.

The lights around the pool were all switched off. The same went for the towel return, locker rooms, patio lounge, and snack shack. Only the aquamarine lights of the underwater domes gave the outdoor athletic complex any hint of life.

The chlorine in the water was burning her eyes, even now that Selma had gotten completely out of the pool. She groped blindly, her eyes spilling over with painful tears, reaching for the towel she knew to be sticking out of her open duffel bag a few feet away.

Instead of her towel, Selma’s hand landed on something cool and smooth. It felt like polished wood or leather. Her fingers made out the shape quickly, her eyes still too affected by the chemical water to see properly in the darkness. The unidentified object under her fingertips came to a rounded point about a foot from the edge of the pool.

It moved.

It was the toe of somebody’s shoe.

“Oh!” Selma exclaimed, drawing her hand back in surprise. The jump with which she started back made the woman lose her balance, and she splashed back into the shallow end of the pool. She wiped furiously at her eyes, but that only served to splash more of the highly chlorinated water into her already-burning retinas. The smell of the chemical was overpowering – stronger than usual. Why hadn’t she noticed before?

“Hello?” she called out loudly, her voice echoing off the surrounding buildings of the empty country club. “Is somebody there? Sorry – I got some water in my eyes. I can’t see you. Hello?”

“You shouldn’t be here.”

The voice that reached her through the watery-eyed blindness was a low, slick whisper. The words seemed to crawl across the air, to slither down her ear canals and settle in her brain like a poisonous, oozing slug.

“You aren’t supposed to be here,” he said again in the same nasty whisper. “The pool is closed. It isn’t fair.” 

Selma backed up instinctively, feeling the water level rise on her chest as she back-peddled with nightmarish slowness. Her eyes burned, and she couldn’t make out more than that hazy blue shimmer of the underwater lights and a vague darkness on the edge of the pool.

“No, it’s alright,” she said, “You don’t understand, I got special permission. The owner of the Country Club is a friend of mine. Maybe you know Mitchell Harding?” She blinked again and tried another swipe at her eyes, but still, she couldn't bring the blur into focus. "He coaches my son's swim team, too. They're going to nationals next week. He said I could come by and use the pool after all the practices are through, so I…”

There was a splash.

“Hello?” Selma’s voice rose in a sharp note of fear as she waded backward. Too much further, and she knew she would back herself right into the deepest portion of the lap pool, right under the surface. Her heart pounded. “Who’s there? Are…are you here to swim too?”

The voice didn’t answer, but Selma could hear the sound of a body moving through the pool. With each step he took towards her, she heard the wet swish of cloth in the water, as if he’d jumped in wearing his clothes.

“What are you doing?” she tried again, blinking her eyes as hard as she could in a desperate attempt to clear them. The blur of watery blue light and dark approaching motion was not enough to tell her who the man in the pool was – only that he was coming toward her.

Still backing up subconsciously, Selma felt her shoulder blades come into contact with the floating lane dividers. Her mind scrambled to form a plan before she even understood the threat. Whoever was splashing towards her through the pool, Selma wanted to put as much distance between herself and him as possible, at least until she could clear her eyes and see who it was. She still clung to a shred of hope that the man splashing after her was a friend, one of the swim team parents playing a practical joke.

The electric adrenaline coursing through her veins and her throbbing heartbeat told her this was no joke. She groped backward blindly in the water, found the lane divider again, and ducked underneath. She'd cut across the pool, staying in the shallow end, until she reached the stairs she knew were in the far corner. She’d climb out, find her towel, dry her eyes, and…

The hand seized her shoulder.

Selma screamed under the iron pincer-like grip, but her shriek was cut short as her face hit the highly chlorinated water again. Without her goggles, the pool water assaulted her eyes at once. They stung horribly. She saw stars and felt the bubbles rushing up her face as they escaped from her waterlogged scream.

The hand was pushing her down. She thrashed her arms and legs, but it was no use. A second hand reached out to join the first in the death grip on her neck. Selma felt a tremendous weight pressing her down, down, down toward the bottom of the pool. Her face found the coarse, sandpaper-like surface of the floor.

She felt the pressure of his weight pinning her arms down, even as the hands pinned her neck to the bottom. He was kneeling on her back, anchoring her down. His head must be underwater now, too, the two of them fully submerged as he strangled the last bubbles of life from her chest.

Her lungs were empty, burning with the chemical water that rushed in through the iron squeeze of his fingers. Her consciousness swam, and a warm, tingling feeling ran all through her body. The sensation came almost as a relief from the cold water. She began to feel a little giddy as the blood failed to provide oxygen to her brain.

My son!

The thought swirled drunkenly around and around her mind, hardly coherent as she flitted through a dreamlike half-world before unconsciousness was complete.

My son swims strongly – so maybe my swimmer son will save me now. He'll dive in off the block. He looks so strong when he's lining up for the starting mark. He'll hit the water perfectly and swim a competent crawl over to me. He'll dive down and pull me up, and we'll have a laugh about it on the sideline.

With the last shreds of her conscious, logical mind, she knew that the fantasy was impossible. Her son was staying the night with a friend on the other side of town. She hadn’t told him that she was going swimming. Her husband was at home, in bed or sitting on the sofa, waiting for her to come back from a regular nightly exercise. There was no way for him to know anything was wrong. 

Nobody was coming to save her.

Through the chemical burn of the pool water, Selma could still see the swirling blue light of the subaquatic domes illuminated. Darkness began to creep on the perimeters of her vision, closing in and zeroing her out.

She was going under.

The weight on her neck and shoulders was not letting up. There were no more bubbles left to escape her parted lips. Her vision was restricted to a blue pinpoint now, with an infinite void of darkness all around, waiting to take her in.

She could see her son now as if she were standing on the poolside. She watched him step up to the block. She watched him set his feet and crouch, then spring smooth and perfect into the water. She saw it with perfect clarity on a summer afternoon like all the others she'd spent watching her boy swim.

He dove through the water towards her, and Selma could see herself now, too. Her beloved boy swam down to her and put his strong arms around her shoulders. Instead of pulling her up, however, they swam together down, down, down, through the bottom of the pool into the deep and ever-long darkness that no longer waited but only enveloped her in its utter nothingness.

CHAPTER ONE

Eve Hope glared at the clock.

The smallest hand was ticking away the last ten seconds before seven-thirty. She’d been sitting at the conference room table in perfect silence for forty-four minutes – waiting.

In the Deputy Director’s office across the hall, through the half-shuttered window, Eve could see the meeting taking place. She gritted her teeth, simultaneously wishing to be inside the room with the others and miles away in a different city, different job, different life.

 There were four men seated in the office, unaware of the intensity with which they were being watched by the lone agent in the conference room. Deputy Director Pliny, a bald-headed, broad-shouldered former Army field Colonel, sat behind his desk as if carved from a wooden block.

Standing to the Deputy Director's left was a dark-suited man Eve had never seen. His short hair was perfectly white, and an old scar ran from his right ear to his jaw. He stood straight, with military discipline and Ivy League dignity, his eyes trained on Pliny. His lips didn’t move, neither to smile nor to speak.

The other two men in the room were seated with their backs to the window, but Eve knew who they were. Her partner, Lucas Hobbes, was sitting on the left. Based on how rigid his posture looked through the window, Eve guessed that Hobbes did not like what was being said inside.

The man on the right was Agent Tanque, a hot shot from the FBI’s Crisis Negotiation Unit. He was a seasoned expert in the art of the manhunt, the FBI’s top pick when a high-profile person went missing.

A person like Eve’s father, Howard Hope.

It had been thirty-one hours since her father had walked out of Red Onion Supermax Prison. Thirty-one hours since she’d left her long-lost sister at the airport and rushed back to Quantico, only to be left waiting in an empty conference room while the manhunt briefing took place without her.

The second hand described another lap around the numerals. 7:31.

Eve saw the figures moving as the meeting broke up. Before the door of the deputy director’s office was even open, she was out of the conference room, striding across the hall with swift, purposeful steps.

Agent Tanque was the first one out of the office. He looked at Eve with a thoughtful expression, then nodded respectfully but didn’t say anything. He was a squarely built man with short, black hair and quick, dark eyes that rarely moved out of his perceptive squint.

Behind him, Agent Hobbes looked young and gangly by comparison. Eve’s partner walked up to her with an apologetic look on his face.

“Hobbes,” Eve said, planting herself in his path and looking into his face with earnest urgency in her eyes, “You’ve got to tell me what’s going on. Have they located my father?”

“Eve,” Hobbes said, addressing her in a quiet, familiar whisper and trying to lead her away by the elbow, “You know you can’t be involved. I’m sorry.”

She jerked her arm away, her scowl darkening her sharp, angularly beautiful features.

“Alright,” she snapped, “So, what are we doing next then? Can you tell me that much?”

“Eve,” Hobbes sighed, his eyes avoiding her face for a moment before finally resting on hers, “I’ve been assigned to the case. They’re…splitting us up for the time being.”

“What?” Eve’s eyebrows shot up, “But you’re my partner. They can’t do that!”

“They can,” Hobbes said, “And the Deputy Director said he needed me because I worked on the SPHYNX case, so I’ve got first-hand knowledge of Lily Hope’s existence and activity.” The young agent sounded as if he were reading off of cue cards.

“First-hand? You were tied up and drugged to the point of madness for most of the time,” Eve growled insensitively. “It was Melborn and I that cracked the code and figured out how to use the SPHYNX de-encryption key to save your ass. You didn’t even think my sister was alive until she was helping us save your life.”

“Eve,” Hobbes held up his hands, “You know this isn’t my call to make. I’m not claiming I know your sister better than you do. Now that I know she’s alive, I’m going to do everything in my power to keep her that way by making sure that Howard Hope remains safely behind bars. If he somehow found out that Lily has resurfaced in your life, he might be out to finish what he started all those years ago.”

“You’re wrong,” Eve said, shaking her head angrily, “You’re so wrong. See, this is exactly why I should be on the case.”

“It’s a conflict of interest,” Hobbes said, “If the FBI lets you anywhere near this case, we run the risk of the evidence we collect becoming inadmissible in court. You have to trust that we’re on your side. I’m on your side.”

The sinews of Eve’s jaw worked with frustration, but she knew he was right. Any defense attorney worth their salt would get the case thrown out as a mistrial if it came to light that the lead investigator was the defendant’s daughter.

“So what the hell am I supposed to do?” Eve asked.

“I’d recommend an extended R&R,” said the familiar baritone of Deputy Director Pliny from behind the agents’ backs, “if I weren’t positive, you’d spend the time tracking down Howard Hope yourself.”  He gave Eve a sympathetically knowing look. “Thank you, Agent Hobbes. Please join Agent Tanque in Conference Room H. I’ll take it from here.”

"I'm sorry, Eve," Hobbes said hurriedly, "I'll do my best for you and for your family." With one last sorry look over his shoulder, the young agent turned and walked away, following the Deputy Director’s orders.

“Is there any sign of him?” Eve asked, turning on the Deputy Director. Pliny’s gravely stoic expression did not change an iota. He gave only the subtlest shake of his head.

“Not that I could share it with you if we'd made a discovery, but no," he said in a low voice as if he didn't want to be overheard. “There’s no sign of him. Tanque is pulling his hair out, not that he’d ever let on as much. Come with me into the office; I have a new assignment for you."

Without another, Deputy Director Pliny turned and started back down the hall. Eve had no time to protest. With a sigh, she followed the old soldier through the doorway of his office.

The scar-faced man was still standing by the side of the desk. He’d hardly moved a muscle during the meeting, and now he stared with grim silence as Eve followed the Deputy Director into the room. Pliny shut the door.

“Agent Hope, meet Deputy Director William Fitzgerald of the FBI’s General Counsel Division. Deputy Director, this is Special Agent Eve Hope, one of the Serial Homicide Division’s finest.”

“It’s a privilege to meet you in person, Agent Hope,” the man said, reaching out to shake Eve’s hand. His fingers were soft but cold. "I'm familiar with your profile and case history. You've got an impressive record."

“Thank you, sir,” Eve said politely, but her internal alarms were going off. Flattery from the brass almost always meant trouble.

“Have a seat, please, Agent Hope,” said Pliny, “I’m sure this must be a difficult time for you, between learning that your sister was alive and your father’s escape from Red Onion Supermax, it would be understandable if you felt somewhat overwhelmed by your personal emotions.”

“My personal emotions are of no consequence to this case,” Eve replied flatly.

“Your self-awareness notwithstanding, you understand why the FBI cannot allow you to be involved in your father’s investigation?” the scar-faced deputy director asked. Eve nodded.

“I do, sir,” she said, “Although I don’t understand why it’s essential for me to be kept in the dark about the progress of the case.”

“There’s been very little progress to report,” said Pliny, giving Eve a sharp look. The Deputy Director of General Counsel’s eyes seemed to deepen as he observed Eve’s face with critical expertise and an unreadable poker face. 

“It’s the FBI’s position that all members of the Hope family – including you – should be excluded from the investigation for reasons of security. We can’t run the risk of anyone letting Howard Hope know that we’re coming. Family members are excluded from cases like these by strict policy, no matter the circumstances.”

“You think I’d leak the details of the investigation to my father?” Eve’s voice rose incredulously, “Sir, with all due respect, if I knew where my father was, I’d be dragging him back to prison myself, not helping him escape.”

“Your personal loyalty isn’t in question, Agent Hope,” said Pliny, somewhat more gently than the rigid counselor to his left. “However, the Deputy Director is right, you are not to be anywhere near this case until Howard Hope is in custody again. Is that understood?”

“It is, sir,” Eve replied.

“I know that it will be difficult for you not to investigate your father’s prison break for yourself, but I’m afraid you must trust us in this matter. It’s in everybody’s best interest, including your own.”

“What the hell am I supposed to do?” Eve demanded, briefly forgetting herself. She flinched and apologized. “I’m sorry, sir. Forgive my outburst. But I can’t just sit here on my hands – it's not in my nature. I've got to be doing something useful, or I'll go insane."

“I understand, Agent Hope,” Pliny said, “And you won’t be sitting around twiddling your thumbs. It’s the FBI’s position that the safest place for you to be is at work on another case. That’s why I’m temporarily assigning you to be partnered with Special Agent Thompson. The two of you will work together, and Thompson will report back to me.”

“You should be aware,” Deputy Director Fitzgerald put in coolly, “that Agent Thompson will be reporting on your condition as well as the status of your case.”

“You’re assigning my partner to spy on me?” Eve asked, her eyebrows knotting together in exasperation.

“The FBI can’t take any risks with the Swallowtail Killer,” Pliny said, looking more awkward and boyish than Eve had ever seen him. “Especially now that we know Lily Hope is alive…well, we just can’t afford to take any unnecessary chances.”

“We will be watching all members of the Hope family closely until Howard is behind bars again,” Fitzgerald went on with the faintest hint of a scaly smile in the corners of his thin lips. “It should go without saying, Agent Hope, but it’s my duty to inform you that if we receive any report that you’ve been tampering with your father’s investigation, it will result in your immediate arrest and the termination of your Special Agent status and clearance within the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Do I make myself clear, Agent Hope?”

“Crystal clear, sir,” Eve said, chewing back the hot-tempered retort that was bubbling in her gullet.

“Very good,” Pliny said, putting his palms down with finality on the desk, “With these unpleasantries dispensed, Agent Hope, you are dismissed. Your new partner will be waiting for you on the plane with all the case files. Put your father out of your mind if you can. The nation’s innocent citizens need you sharp.”

***

Eve stepped through the door of the private jet and heard it shut behind her. Through the thick barrier of the pressure-sealed door, she could hear the ground crew calling muffled instructions to each other over the loud winding of the turbines.

Thompson was already seated facing the opposite way when Eve boarded. She could only see the top of the agent's dirty blonde hair over the top of the headrest.

Whoever this new guy is, Eve thought, her quick mind already assessing her hired babysitter as she approached, he isn't very tall. Hopefully, I'm not dealing with a Napoleon complex on top of everything else.

“Special Agent Thompson,” Eve called out like a gunslinger in the center aisle of the grounded jet, “I’m Eve Hope, your new partner.”

The agent didn’t move from the seat right away. As Eve advanced another step, she could see that the case files were already spread out across the table between the seats. Thompson was already hard at work. Eve’s scowl deepened.

"Special Agent Hope," said a high, flutelike voice from behind the seat, "It's an honor to be working with you."

CHAPTER TWO

The agent that stood up from behind the seat was taller than Eve had guessed, a full head and shoulders taller than Eve herself.

Thompson was a pale, slender, strikingly beautiful woman with wide blue eyes and dirty blonde hair that she wore tied back in a low bun. Her suit was grey, the blouse underneath a light, minty blue. The hand she held out was strong but soft. Eve shook it, somewhat taken aback and somewhat relieved.

“Pleased to meet you,” Eve said, “I’m afraid the Deputy Directors didn’t tell me much about you, but it’s always refreshing to meet another woman in the field.”

“Tessa Thompson,” the agent re-introduced herself with a smile, “In another life, I was a professor of Criminology at Branting University.”

“What happened to that life?” Eve asked. The woman’s smile faded away.

“It ended,” she said simply, turning her eyes to the porthole window of the jet, which was now taxying to the runway. “And my life of chasing killers began.”

A moment of silence elapsed between the agents, each plunged in their own thoughts. Then, suddenly, Thompson seemed to snap back to the present moment. She shook herself like a dog coming out of the water.

“And speaking of, we’ve got quite a case unfolding in front of us,” Thompson said, tapping her nude-painted fingers on the tabletop, directing Eve’s attention to the case files spread across the table. “It was handed over to me this morning, so I’ve only just started digging into the details. So far, we’ve got two people dead in two weeks. That’s a lot for a little town like Callo, Vermont.”

“Hmm,” Eve mused, her eyes devouring the information laid out in front of her. She saw photos of two women, one Caucasian and the other Indian. Eve glanced at Thompson. “Other than the timeline, have you been able to draw any connections between the victims?”

“Both women,” Thompson said, “Both had families. Both lived in the same little white picket town.” She clicked her tongue wistfully. “Take a look for yourself.”

Eve picked up the first victim’s dossier. The woman’s name was Pamela Macey, age twenty-nine. Her corpse was identified by her employer, Hugo Watson. The occupation line of the file identified Macey as Watson’s Executive Assistant. She held a bachelor’s degree in communications from Penn State and…

Eve paused, her frown deepening as she read the intel again.

She was a new mother. Pamela Macey was survived by her ten-month old daughter, Tania Macey. The child’s father was not identified. The girl was an orphan.

Eve reached for the second dossier, her eyes scanning the lines quickly. Selma Vishni, age fifty, independent owner of a flourishing real estate firm with an office on Main Street. Eve could see the woman’s white-picket dream laid out in her career summary, the quaint homes and tidy profits. The happy families.

Selma’s corpse had been identified the day prior by her husband, Sankar Vishni. Like the other victim two weeks prior, Selma was the mother of one, although that seemed to be where the similarities stopped. While Macey’s child was hardly more than an infant, Selma’s son Arijit was seventeen.

Eve closed her eyes.

“He’s targeting families,” she said, half to herself, “Small, tightly knit family units. First, a single mother, now the mother of an only child. If I had to guess, I’d say that our killer has deeply ingrained issues with intimacy, probably dating back to some early childhood trauma.”

“That’s kind of a big jump to a very specific conclusion,” Thompson said. There was a note of pity in her voice that made Eve look up sharply. “Agent Hope, I know you’re going through a lot with your own family right now, but I hope that I can trust you not to let that influence your analysis of the case in front of us.”

“Of course,” Eve said acidly, “I'm drawing my reason only from the documents before me, Agent Thompson. The hypothesis is a critical part of the deductive process. I'm sure you taught that in the classroom. It doesn't change out here in the field.”

“Point taken,” Thompson said, “Still, the fact that the first victim, Macey, was a young single mother while the second, Vishni, represents an older traditional family unit leads me to believe that the killer is fixated on something else when choosing his victims.”

Eve narrowed her eyes, looking back and forth between the victims’ files.

“Both women were found in pools,” she pointed out after a moment, “Although not the same pool. Selma was found in a public swimming pool early this morning, while Macey’s body was discovered in her private swimming pool in the backyard of her home. The notes from the Medical Examiner say she drowned sometime between ten p.m. and twelve a.m.” She looked up across the table at Thompson, her eyebrows knitting. “It’s a little odd that a young single mother would own a house with a swimming pool, don’t you think?”

“Why’s that?” Thompson raised an eyebrow.

“Houses with pools are more expensive for one thing,” Eve said, “Macey was supporting a new baby and probably still paying off her student loans, all from an assistant’s salary. Add a mortgage and pool maintenance on top of that – there’s a piece missing from this puzzle. Besides, she would have to leave the baby alone every time she went swimming.”

“Maybe she wasn’t alone,” Thompson said. “That would mean the killer is somebody she knew and trusted enough to watch her baby while she went for a dip.”

“Possible,” Eve said, “Or maybe she was killed some other way, and her body was dropped in the pool in an attempt to throw us off the trail. Hopefully, the Medical Examiner will be able to tell us more details when we land. Without next of kin to handle Macey’s funeral arrangement, there’s a high likelihood that her body is still in the custody of the county coroner’s office.”

***

Eve pulled to a stop in front of a low, single-story, whitewashed building with the words Callo County Coroner painted in faded lettering across the front. The sun was high, cutting through a dense layer of overcast in the late-morning sky as the two agents emerged from the non-descript Ford Focus that had been waiting for them when they landed.

“I guess this is the place,” said Thompson, removing a pair of sunglasses from her face and stowing them in her blazer pocket as they crossed the pavement. “Could have fooled me. This rinky-dink establishment looks more like a defunct feedstore than a government building.”

Inside, they were greeted by a man in a white lab coat with no hair and hardly any eyebrows. He had tiny, twinkling blue eyes hidden deep in the folds of hooded sockets and a thin, skeletal face that looked as if it didn’t get much natural sunlight. He blinked at the agents rapidly through a thick pair of spectacles as they produced their badges.

“I’m Special Agent Hope, and this is my partner, Special Agent Thompson, FBI. We’re from the Serial Homicide Division, and we’re here because the FBI believes that the same person is responsible for the death of both the women who have come across your slab in the last few weeks.”

“Of course,” said the man, “I’m Spencer Brusse, coroner for the town and county of Callo. The Bureau alerted me that they would be sending two of their best agents to investigate this terrible tragedy. They didn’t mention you would be two of their best-looking agents as well. The pleasure, ladies, is mine, I assure you.”

They looked in stone-faced silence at the awkward little man, then at each other. The expression on both of their faces said the same thing: What’s wrong with coroners?

“Why don’t you show us to the bodies, Mr. Brusse,” said Eve, maintaining a neutral tone as she reminded the coroner of the case at hand. 

“It’s Doctor, actually,” the coroner muttered, his feelings hurt as he turned and led the agents away, “Not that I get any of the respect the title deserves.”

“Tell me about it,” said Thompson from behind, rolling her eyes.

“We’re not used to murders in Callo, I have to say,” Brusse announced, pausing in front of a door to punch a password into a keypad before holding it open for the agents to enter. “It’s a quiet town, although it’s getting less so by the day.”

“What do you mean by that?” Eve asked, turning to look at the coroner as he followed them into the chilled autopsy room, shutting the heavy door behind him.

“This town is on the boom,” he replied, crossing the room with swift, purposeful steps towards the wall of cold slabs. “Ever since that delivery conglomerate set up their new national dispatch center on the outskirts of town, it’s been nothing but development and gentrification.”

“How do the citizens of Callo feel about that?” Eve asked.

“It’s a mixed bag,” the coroner shrugged, “Some of the townsfolk – mostly the younger crowd – think that it’s the way of the future like that Callo is going to grow up into a middle-sized city. Then again, the other half lived here because they didn't want to live in a major city. To them, large-scale commercial development moving in is a harbinger of trouble.”

Brusse seized the handle of the first slab and pulled it out of the wall. The corpse that came out with it was uncovered – the toe tag read “Pamela Macey.” He looked up as casually as if he’d pulled a book off the shelf.

“Why? You think these murders have got something to do with the recent development of Callo?” he asked, cocking an eyebrow at Eve as he pulled out the second slab. This one contained the corpse of Selma Vishni. Like the other, Vishni’s body was cold, stiff, and uncovered.

“Can you show me evidence that both of these women’s deaths are murder?” Eve responded to the coroner’s question with another question of her own. “How do you know they didn’t drown by accident?”

“As you can see,” the coroner said, snapping on a pair of white rubber gloves before touching the skin of Vishni’s neck, “this woman suffered contusions to the neck and shoulders as well as chemical poisoning, although the actual cause of death was drowning. The stage of the bruising suggests the attack happened moments before she drowned.”

“Hold on,” Thompson cut in, “Did you say chemical poisoning? I didn’t see that on the report.”

"You wouldn't have," the coroner replied with an undue note of smugness, "We only just discovered it a quarter of an hour before you arrived, but it serves to place the scene of the murder beyond a shadow of a doubt. We know for a fact she was attacked in the same pool she was found in because the water in her lungs had an abnormally chlorinated chemical signature. This is likely responsible for the dry, scaly condition of the epidermis. The water contained far more chlorine than is typically used in swimming pools, even to clean up after there’s been a septic accident. The water of the athletic pool where she was found was tested and proved to match the water in her lungs.”

“You think somebody spiked the pool water with enough chlorine to knock her out?” Thompson asked, looking at Eve with an inspired expression on her face. 

“If it wasn’t strong enough to kill her on its own, it was certainly enough to make her loopy. Easy prey for an attacker waiting on the sideline.”

“What about Macey?” Eve asked, “Was the water in her lungs also over-chlorinated?”

“It was, as a matter of fact,” the coroner replied, stepping over to the second body and turning the head to expose the bruised neck to the overhead light. “The first victim suffered essentially the same injuries – bruising to the neck, chemical damage to the skin, and finally critical aquatic asphyxiation.”

“So he got a practiced feel for it in the backyard pool before trying it out on the public scene?” Eve tried the theory out.

“I don’t know anything about motives,” said the coroner, “But what I do know is that whoever over-chlorinated the water of these pools used the same chemical treatment. We traced the compound to the patent license. It’s something called Shock-Bright.”

“Found in every home department store, too, I bet,” Eve said with a note of discouragement in her voice.

“You don’t know how right you are,” the coroner replied, “It’s one of the most common pool products on the market today, used by commercial as well as private pool-cleaning services.”

Eve and Thompson both looked up, first at the coroner, then at each other. They were having the same thought, and both knew it. Eve turned back to Brusse with a new spark of pursuit alive in her eyes.

“That pool…” she mused aloud, “You think it’s still open to the public?”

CHAPTER THREE

“What do you mean there aren’t any security cameras?” Eve demanded, her eyebrows high with disbelief.

The young man cowering behind the counter of the athletic club’s pro shop looked as if he were trying to swallow a golf ball. He glanced at the badge, which was still resting on the counter as if to verify that it, as well as the armed agents standing before him, were real.

“I,” the young man started, then cleared his throat and tried again, “It’s like I told the police already. We have two cameras covering the parking lot, but something must have happened to them during the day. There’s no footage stored after 12:00 p.m.”

“Until when?” Thompson asked.

“Until…never?” the young man answered uncertainly, “The cameras were destroyed.”

“How?” Eve asked.

“I don’t know,” he replied, “They were just gone -- nothing left but some frayed wires sticking out of the wall. Nothing on the tapes afternoon the day before that woman was murdered, as I said."

The agents looked at each other, then back at the clerk with a shared exhale.

“Were you working that day?” Eve asked. He shook his head.

“No, but I was working the next morning when she was found. I was the one that called the police.”

“I see,” Eve said, scooping her badge off the counter and tucking it away with a casual motion. “By the way, do you know what kind of treatment they use on the pool after something like this has happened? You know, to make it safe and sanitary for the public again?” She tried to throw the question off with nonchalance, but she was watching for the young man’s reaction with hawk-like scrutiny.

“What kind of treatment?” the young man scratched his head, “I don’t know. Chlorine, I guess. To be honest with you, I don’t think I’d go swimming in there after seeing that poor lady floating in the water. It wasn’t a pretty sight in the gloomy dawn, let me tell you that. I think I’m going to quit and find another job.”

“Do you know where they keep the chemical supplies?” Eve asked. The young man gave a half-shrug. He looked lost in his own ghastly recollection.

“The custodial staff will know,” he replied, giving his head a shake as if to clear it and blinking at Eve as if just waking up from a long dream. “Do…do you think it’s safe to be here? The management won’t say anything about what happened except that the authorities are looking into it, but I know that another woman was found dead in her pool a week or two ago, and now there’s you two…is there some kind of psycho-killer running around somewhere?”

He looked back and forth between the women’s faces with pitiable fear painted across his youthful features. Eve sucked in her cheeks.

“Based on the evidence so far, that appears to be the case,” she said, “If you want my personal advice, I’d tell you to stay inside as much as possible and try not to go out alone, especially after dark, until we’ve got all this sorted out.” She gave the young man her best attempt at an encouraging smile. “Agent Thompson and I are going to get to the bottom of this.”

“Your bedside manner could use a little work,” Thompson called after Eve, hurrying to catch up as they left the pro shop.

“Never had any of that,” Eve replied with a shrug, glancing briefly back without breaking her stride, “Besides, he wasn’t in bed.”

“Funny,” Thompson replied flatly. They were walking between the two long, detached locker rooms, beyond which the surface of the pool sparkled like a sapphire in the sunlight.

“Nice place,” Eve commented, pausing where the narrow alley between the locker rooms opened up into the broad, paved deck of the pool area.

On the eastern side of the pool, surrounded by high fences, Eve could see several empty tennis and basketball courts. A patio containing rows of loungers and small tables was shaded by the wide frond of lavish palms to the west. The place emanated an aura of health and wealth – all except for the police tape running around the perimeter of the athletic pool.

The uniformed officers and crime scene photographers had all since gone away, leaving the crime scene abandoned for the agents to inspect – or so they thought. As they emerged from the buildings, however, they were greeted immediately by an elderly man wearing a khaki uniform and a ten-gallon Stetson with a sheriff’s badge on the front.

“Hold it, now, ladies,” the man said with a West Texan drawl, smiling at the agents and holding one hand up in a casual halt. The other, Eve noticed, rested on the butt of a revolver that looked older than the man wearing it. “I’m Sheriff Heinlen, and this here’s a crime scene. Pool’s closed for the day.”

“Pleased to meet you, Sherrif," Eve said, giving the old cowpoke a stare that could have withered a saguaro as she reached for her badge, “I’m Special Agent Hope, Federal Bureau of Investigation. This is my partner, Special Agent Thompson, PhD. We’re taking over this crime scene and your case.”

“Okay, now just hold your horses a minute while I get out my readers,” the Sherrif said. Eve expected him to reach for a pair of glasses, but instead, he simply took the badge from her hand and held it two inches from his eyes. He looked up at Eve, then back at the badge as if it were written in an alien language.

“Ah, hell,” he said, slumping his old, tired shoulders as he handed the badge back. “The feds just have to come riding in and take over once things start picking up around here. Nobody’s got any faith in the old sheriff anymore, huh?” He looked like he’d just given up the Alamo. "Well, I hope you girls like handfuls of nothing because that's what we've got here. Just a dead woman and a duffel bag with a change of clothes, her personal effects, toiletries, medication, and a dry towel. All that’s been taken into evidence already.”

“So, what are you doing here?” Thompson asked callously.

“Same as you, I reckon,” Heinlen said, tipping his hat back an inch or so, "Looking at the scene of the crime and trying to figure out why somebody would want to murder this innocent woman."

“Thanks, Sheriff,” Eve said, giving the old man a brief nod, “We’ll take it from here.”

"I'm sure you will," Heinlen muttered and ambled slowly off towards the pro shop.

Eve walked out to the side of the pool, stopping where the red crime scene marker indicated the woman’s body had been found. She gazed down into the water. Her solemn reflection stared back.

The aisle between the two locker rooms led, if one walked in a straight line, to the center lane of the athletic pool – lane five, according to the number inlaid in the diving block. The marker indicated that the woman had been floating in lane four. If she’d come out alone to swim late at night, she would have likely taken the center lane out of convenience. Had she been swimming with somebody else?

Eve's eyes landed on the lane divider – a string of blue buoys, each about the size of a softball. She squinted.

Was there something floating in the water on the fourth buoy from the wall on the divider between lanes four and five? The sunlight on the surface of the water made it hard to tell, but Eve thought she saw a thin line of something white – perhaps a hair or thread – waving from the link of the lane divider.

Eve snapped on a glove. Kneeling by the edge of the pool, she could just barely reach the tail end of the thread. She seized hold of it and pulled, submerging her hand in the pool water to do so. The string gave, and a moment later, Eve was holding up her dripping hand with triumph.

“Uh, what are you doing?” Thompson asked as she joined Eve by the poolside. Eve showed her the thread.

“This was stuck in the lane divider,” she said, “I’d bet that blind old sheriff simply didn’t see it. Listen, why would there be a thread stuck in the pool? Have you ever seen a swimsuit with loose threads on it? I say we send it to the lab for analysis. My guess is somebody jumped in with his clothes on. Do you have an evidence bag on you?”

“Lucky find,” Thompson said, reaching into her pocket for a tiny clear bag and holding it out. Eve squinted at her partner as she dropped the wet thread into the bag. It stuck to the side, and Thompson zipped it shut. “I wonder what else the sheriff missed.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Eve said, her eyes scanning the perimeter of the pool and the patio beyond. If the woman had been swimming in the center lane and seen someone approaching from the west, logic dictated that she would have swum in the opposite direction. The killer, Eve theorized, had come from the direction of the patio, not from the pro shop between the locker rooms. Was there a gate she’d missed? If there was a side entrance, was it possible there was a security camera covering it that the killer hadn’t noticed?

Without a word of explanation, Eve walked off in the direction of the patio, leaving Thompson to ponder her own watery reflection in lane four. She picked her way swiftly through the palms and loungers, her eyes scanning the perimeter. The whole country club, including the patio lounge, was surrounded by a high black iron fence densely overgrown with crawling ivy. She couldn’t see a gate anywhere among the thick foliage, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. 

Eve came to a stop in front of the ivy-covered fence. She could only see a few flecks of daylight through the gaps between the lush vines and the iron bars. Following the perimeter of the fence, she came to a gap in the ivy that hadn’t been visible from the pool or patio area. Almost exactly as she’d suspected, there was a secondary entrance to the patio hidden in the ivy, although it didn’t appear to be guarded by any kind of gate or barrier.

“Curious,” Eve mused, poking her head in.

The gap in the fence led into a narrow, hedged-in alley running along the outer edge of the country club. The light filtering through the thick, heavy foliage was shaded a heavy, dim green. The air in the hallway felt more humid and organic than the over-sterilized air around the pool.

At the end of the leafy alley, Eve saw a white metal door. There was a sign posted on the door, but time and the elements had left it illegible.

“Curiouser,” Eve said, stepping all the way into the narrow passage.

The leaves of ivy brushed her on either side, and she shivered as she wiped a spiderweb off her face. She reached the door at the end of the leafy alley, squinting at the old metal sign in the dim, filtered sunlight. Only now that she was closer could Eve make out the faded impression of the long-since peeled-away printing.

Maintenance Staff Only – Keep Out

Below the words were a set of equally faded warning symbols. Eve made out the electric shock and toxic chemical emblems from the decrepit sign. She reached for the doorknob, which looked dented and tarnished but more regularly maintained than the sign posted above it, and found that it was unlocked.

Eve pushed open the door. The earthy air around her was cut by the sharp scent of chemicals. The room within was dark and windowless.

Just as she was about to step inside to search for a light switch, she heard a shout rip through the sky.

“Hope!”

Eve turned her head sharply, trying to peer through the vines. The shout came again.

“Agent Hope!”

Somebody was calling her name. It sounded like Thompson.

Yanking her service pistol from her underarm holster, Eve sprinted back down the narrow maintenance path. The ivy whipped her face as she charged for the gap in the fence.

CHAPTER FOUR

Eve hit the corner with a controlled skid, her eyes scanning the patio for her partner or any sign of trouble. There was nothing. The palms swayed gently in the breeze. A distant dove cooed and subsided.

As Eve turned, she was almost hit by Thompson, who was running up from her left. She jumped back just as the other agent came to a grinding halt.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” Eve asked her pistol still out but leveled at the ground as no threat immediately presented itself. Thompson said nothing.

Looking at her partner, Eve could see that Thompson’s eyes were wide and panicked, like a spooked horse. She stared at Eve for a bewildered instant, her mouth hanging slightly open. Then, suddenly, her jaw clenched shut, and something seemed to switch off in her eyes.

“You shouldn’t disappear like that,” she said, her voice sounding robotic and emotionless.  

“Christ, Thompson, I thought you were being attacked,” Eve said, the suddenly unnecessary adrenaline quickly turning into frustration in her blood, “I was ready to start shooting.”

“I’m sorry,” Thompson replied in the same wooden tone, “I didn’t mean to alarm you. It’s just that…well, I’ve lost someone before – lost them and found them dead.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Eve said uncertainly. There was pain in Thompson’s face. “I’m guessing that’s when you took your practice out of the classroom?”

Thompson barely managed a nod.

“In the future, please let me know when you’re slipping off on your own,” she said in a slightly irked tone of voice. “It’s my assignment to keep an eye on you as well as solve this murder. So, please, don’t make my job any harder.”

Eve looked at the agent with a cockeyed squint.

“You’d better keep up, then,” Eve said, controlling her temper with a deep breath and forcing a false smile across her face. She shoved her pistol back down in the holster a little harder than necessary. "I found where they keep the pool chemicals – in this maintenance shed around the corner. Follow me.”

Without giving Thompson a chance to respond, Eve turned and ducked back down the leafy passage. Like it isn’t hard enough to solve a double homicide without this paranoid babysitter, she fumed to herself as she marched back towards the white door. She could hear Thompson’s footsteps following behind her.

The white door was still open. Eve and Thompson peered inside together.

“Dark,” Thompson commented.

“I was about to go looking for a light switch when you started screaming bloody murder,” Eve said, stepping into the dark room and groping along the wall. She found the switch and flicked it on. A fluorescent tube sputtered to life, bleaching out the room with sudden illumination. Eve blinked.

She was standing in a room roughly sixteen by twenty feet, with shelves and hooks mounted in the pegboard walls from floor to ceiling. There was an identical metal white door on the other side of the shed. Eve eyed it cautiously, noting that the bolt was locked before moving her attention to the rest of the room.

Looking around, Eve saw tools, hoses, coils of wire, bottles, jugs, eyedroppers, weed whackers, and pruning shears. The plethora of potential weapons and poisons surrounding them was staggering.

And yet, Eve reflected, the victims had been strangled and drowned. What did that mean?

With so many lethal weapons readily available, the fact that the killer had done the deed with his own hands meant he felt a sense of personal attachment, either to the victims or the act of killing.

Deep-seated intimacy issues.

The phrase echoed in Eve’s memory as she pondered this new characteristic of their unknown perp.

“We need to interview the victims' social circles next," Eve said aloud, addressing the thought that she hadn’t spoken. “We need to find out if and how these women knew each other and who they knew in common. I think we’re looking for somebody who knew the victims personally.”

“Hold it a minute,” Thompson said. Her voice sounded further away than Eve expected. When she turned, she saw that Thompson had disappeared behind the free-standing shelves in the middle of the room. “Take a look at this.”

Walking around the small island created by shelves, Eve came to stand by her partner's side. She saw what Thompson was referring to right away. On the second shelf from the top, lined up as neatly as toy soldiers sat nearly two dozen white plastic jugs of Shock-Bright. They were set in rows of four. The spacing suggested there were two jugs missing from the front column. The agents looked at each other.

“I think we know where he got the pool chemicals,” Eve said.

“What do you think he did with empties?” Thompson wondered, looking around, “Did you see a dumpster anywhere?”

“In a bougie place like this, the garbage is probably outside and around the block, where the guests will never see or smell it.” Eve said, "If the killer has any brains at all, he would have disposed of the bottles somewhere else, but it’s worth looking.”

“Think he touched any of the others?” Thompson asked, getting a small but powerful penlight out of her pocket and switching it on. She shone the bright little beam on the bottles near the back of the shelf, which were shaded from the overhead light of the fluorescents.

“None of the others look out of place,” Eve said doubtfully, “See? All the labels are facing the same way.”

“Think it’s worth dusting for prints?” Thompson asked.

Before Eve could answer, there was a noise that made both agents freeze – a scritch, click, and scrape of metal.

The door.

Eve’s eyes flicked quickly, first to the door they’d come in by, which still stood open, then to the second door, which they had hitherto left bolted and unexplored.

As she watched, the lock slowly turned back. The knob turned, and the hinges groaned softly as the door opened.

The second door opened onto a small street that ran along the side of the country club like an access road. Daylight poured in from outside. A fly buzzed in the silence. 

Eve and Thompson stared at the man who’d opened the door. He was frozen, the key still in his hand. His polo shirt bore the name of the country club – Lion’s Hill Athletic Club – over the breast pocket.

He was a tall, very tanned, strikingly handsome man in his late forties with broad shoulders and jet-black feathered hair. His white polo matched his white pool service shorts. He looked rigid upon finding the agents in the shed.

“Hey,” the man called out, stepping uncertainly into the room, “You’re not supposed to be in here. This shed is for maintenance staff only. Please return to the patio.”

“Sorry to startle you," Eve said, getting out her badge again and showing it to the bleach-white uniformed man, “Special Agent Hope, FBI. This is my partner, Special Agent Thompson. We’d like to ask you a few questions, starting with your name and job here at the country club.”

"Oh, I see," the man said, taking a step back and hitting the agents with a bright toothpaste commercial smile. "Well, my apologies. I didn't realize. Of course, I…”

Leaving his sentence unfinished and his smile hanging in the air behind him, the man suddenly turned and bolted, slamming the metal door shut.

“Quick!” Thompson shouted, “Don’t let him get away!”

The agents ran for the door, Thompson a few steps ahead of Eve. They could hear the sound of an engine starting up as she threw open the door. Eve saw Thompson struggling to get her pistol free from her holster.

She also saw the truck coming.

Thompson did not.

“Look out!” Eve cried as the truck bore down on them, the diesel engine bellowing like the hounds of hell. With a grunt of effort, Eve threw herself at her partner in a football tackle – just as Thompson freed her pistol from the holster.

There was a confusing moment of tangled bodies, burning rubber, diesel exhaust, and hard asphalt.

Then the gun went off.

CHAPTER FIVE

The pain was searing.

Almost before the report of the firearm was finished ringing in her ears, Eve knew where she’d been hit. It was her left arm, just beneath her shoulder. At once, the pain was radiating through her entire arm, through her shoulder, and up into her neck. Her temples began to throb.

She blinked, a nanosecond that seemed to go on for centuries. The world swam. The sound was muffled. She could hear the truck still, tearing away at full speed. She could hear Thompson cursing woozily.

“Shit!” she slurred, “Shit, shit shit! Are you hit?”

Without answering, Eve managed to roll over, now chest down on the street. Thompson’s pistol lay on the ground a few feet away. In the distance, she saw the red pickup truck gunning for the intersection.

In a combat daze, Eve pushed herself to her feet with an oomph and oo-rah. She scooped Thompson’s gun off the ground in the same motion and was sprinting after the truck before the other agent could gain her bearings.

Eve saw the truck barrel around the corner. She’d been too distracted by the tackle and gunshot to catch the license plate. She needed to catch up before he slipped away.

Eve sprinted at a hard-slanting diagonal across the street, bolting for the corner where she’d seen the truck turn. Her mind pounded one message through her skull, refusing to acknowledge the painful wound to her left arm. Take the corner and make the shot. Take the corner and make the shot. Take the corner…

Eve took the corner, bringing the pistol up to the level. The truck was disappearing into the distance, already thirty yards away, with the pedal to the floor. There were no other cars in sight.

With both eyes fixed on the red spot of the truck, her left hand hanging limp and useless by her side but her right steady as steel, Eve took an instant to set her aim, adjusting for the drop over an increasing distance. She knew that she only had a split second to make the shot before the truck was out of range. She drew in one smooth breath.

The world seemed perfectly still for an instant between her painfully throbbing heartbeats.

Eve exhaled and pulled the trigger.

The crack of the pistol was followed by the blowout pop of a tire as Eve’s bullet found its mark. Weak with relief, Eve allowed herself to clutch her arm painfully. Almost at the same moment, Thompson came sprinting around the corner.

“What happened?” she cried, her eyes wild with fear and frustration. With a grimace of pain, Eve handed the gun back to Thompson.

“I shot out his tire,” Eve grunted through clenched teeth, “Come on, I don't know if I can take him alone right now."

“You hit his tire from here? With my gun?” Thompson gawked, then shook her head and broke out into a sprint at Eve’s urging look.

Side by side, the agents charged down the road. As they ran, they saw that the door of the truck was open, but the man was nowhere to be seen. Eve slowed cautiously as they approached the truck. The prickling sensation under her skin warned her that danger was ahead. She pulled out her own trusty Beretta instinctively, holding up a hand to halt Thompson.

“Where’d he go?” Thompson asked in a winded whisper.

“I’ll check the truck,” Eve whispered back, “Cover me.”

Moving on swift, silent feet, Eve approached the last five yards to the truck in a defensive crouch, letting her injured arm hang but keeping the pistol level. She stalked up to the driver’s side of the red truck. Now that she was nearer, she could see that it bore the name and emblem of the Lion’s Hill Athletic Club.

Why would a custodian make a run for it in a company vehicle?

The time for questions would come later, Eve thought as she approached the door. Carefully, she stepped around the truck so that she could look down her sights through the open door.

The cab was empty. The passenger door was open. Had it been open before?

In an instant, Eve saw the man’s shoulder poke out into the open doorframe. He was turning quickly. There was something in his hands.

Eve saw the stock and barrel of a sawed-off shotgun flash for an instant in the sunlight, then dropped to the ground as the gun went off. The door behind her was peppered with buckshot. She heard the report of Thompson's pistol again as the man racked his shotgun.

Enough of this, Eve thought, laying flat on the street and aiming her gun at the man's right ankle under the car. She pulled the trigger.

***

Eve stood over the man where he lay, half-covered by a thin blue hospital blanket. The man was bound to the gurney by handcuffs on his wrists and one of his ankles. The other was tightly bandaged.

Eve's own arm had been examined, cleaned, and bandaged. The shot had only grazed her shoulder. Eve had refused painkillers.

Her own bullet, according to the ER surgeon who worked on the man, had passed right through the front of the man’s ankle, exiting through his Achilles. It was a clean shot, Eve reflected with pride. The bone had been fractured and the tendon severed, but other than a simple reconstruction and setting of the ankle, the man was going to be alright.

Well, maybe not alright-alright, Eve thought. He would walk with a limp for at least a few years, if not the rest of his life, which might cause him serious trouble when he went to prison. Still, with the memory of the man spinning around to point the sawed-off shotgun at her still fresh in her mind’s eye, she found that her reserves of sympathy were tapped just about dry.

The chains of the man’s fetters rattled softly as he shifted, muffled by the thin fabric of the sheets. He was starting to regain consciousness. His eyes fluttered in the liminal space of wakefulness.

“Good morning,” Eve said loudly. The man’s eyes shot open. His handsome face tensed at once. His body jerked as if to pull away, but his wrists and ankles quickly found the limits of his bondage. “Actually, it’s afternoon. Did you have a good sleep? Pleasant dreams?”

The man turned his face away, although whether it was because he was avoiding the agent's eyes or because he was passing out again, Eve wasn't sure.

“Hey,” Eve snapped her fingers over the bed. The man’s face jerked up spasmodically again. “You better listen up, Fabio. It’s over for you. You tried to kill two federal agents. Forgetting for the moment that we’re homicide investigators working on a recent, active case, we’ve already got you on attempted murder, resisting arrest, impeding a federal investigation, and possession of an illegal firearm.”

“Hell,” the man tried to sneer, his voice still thick from the anesthesia and painkillers, “I don’t have anything to say to you, and that firearm was legal when I bought it.”

“I’m sure it was,” Eve replied woodenly. The man glared back at her, sucking his cheeks in, the sinews of his jaw flexing as he clenched his teeth.

“I said I’m done talking,” he replied.

“Well, I’m not done listening,” Eve shot back. “If you’d let me finish my sentence back in the shed instead of running for your shotgun as soon as you saw a badge, you know that we’re investigating the murder of two women – Pamela Macey and Selma Vishni. Right now, you’re looking like my prime suspect. Assault with a deadly weapon will get you 10 years, maybe fifteen. Double homicide means you go away forever, with no hope of parole. They'll put you in a little room and look at you through a tiny window for the rest of eternity until even your bones have rotted away into dust.”

“Jesus Christ,” the man muttered, his startled eyes pinned on Eve. She smiled back at him.

“That’s if they don’t go for the death penalty, of course,” she added.

The man shuddered but didn't say anything. Letting out a breath of frustration through her nose, Eve turned her back on the gurney.

“Suit yourself,” Eve said, “Whether or not you help us out, we’re going to get to the bottom of this, mark my words.”

Eve banged the door of the hospital room shut behind her, attracting a disapproving look from a passing nurse. Eve leered back. She wasn’t a fan of hospitals since she’d nearly been imprisoned in one, so she was already on edge, and the man’s defiance wasn’t helping.

Down the hall, Eve saw Thompson walking towards her. Her partner had been busy on the phone in the waiting room. She stormed along the corridor with a troubled expression.

“What’s the matter?” Eve asked.

“Hmm?” she looked up, then gave her head a quick shake. “Oh, nothing. Just reporting back to headquarters.”

“Mmhmm,” Eve murmured, giving her partner a suspicious squint. Thompson squirmed a little. Why did she look so uncomfortable?

“How’s the suspect?” Thompson asked, changing the topic quickly while avoiding Eve’s eyes. “Did he tell you anything? Did you even get a name?”

“Nah, nothing,” Eve said, clicking her tongue with dismissive frustration. “He’s still coming out of the surgery. Anyway, he doesn’t want to talk to us.”

“What’s your instinct tell you?” Thompson asked.

“He’s guilty of something – the question is what. Nobody runs and shoots like that just because they don’t feel like talking,” Eve said, pursing her lips with thought. “As for my instinct, it’s telling me to check the truck.”

“The truck?” Thompson asked, “Why?”

“Mister good-hair isn’t going to start talking until we have something we can use against him. He didn’t flinch at the accusation of the murders, so we still have to figure out why he ran. If he’s not our man, we need to unload him from the local authorities and get back to our own case. My gut says the truck will be our fastest route to the truth.”

CHAPTER SIX

The man came home. He strolled up the walk past the three rustic wine barrel flowerpots. The gardenias were in bloom. The lawn was green and mowed. The day was good.

He whistled an improvised tune under his breath as he stepped lightly up the short stairway to his front porch. Still whistling, he checked the mailbox. Three advertisements, a political mailer, and his water bill. Everything was in balance.

Still carrying the improvised tune, the man fished his keys out of the pocket of his slacks. He unlocked his front door and pushed it open.

“Hello!” he called out cheerily, closing the door behind him and turning the bolt with a neat click. He smiled.

Kneeling, he unlaced his brown leather loafers and took them off. The bunion on his left foot throbbed with relief. He rubbed it, wincing, half with pain and half with pleasure.

From the living room of his home, he could hear the sound of the television. It was a cheerful sound, the commercial jingle reminding him to brush his teeth with Crest toothpaste. The man made a mental note to pick up a tube to Crest the next time he was at the supermarket and smiled again, clicking his mental pen shut.

“Darling,” he called out in a loud, jovial voice, “I’m home! What’s for dinner?”

There was no answer from the living room. The man’s smile faltered only a half-degree.

“Darling?” He called out again, loosening his tie as he came around the corner from the foyer into the hallway, “I said, ‘What’s for dinner?’ Perhaps you should turn down the volume on that television. You’ll lose your hearing.”

With a wide, paternal smile, the man rounded the corner of the hallway. The television was on, but his wife was not there. The smile faded from his eyes, although his mouth remained twisted in the same grin as if held up on fishhooks.

He turned slowly, his eyes scanning the room.

“Darling?” he called a third time, his voice rising with the first note of concern. Something was amiss.

Stepping into the living room, the man found the remote and turned the television off himself. He stood for a moment with the clicker in one hand, the other resting on his hip, looking around with a puzzled expression on his face.

The house was totally silent.

There was no sound of life from the bedrooms, no scent of food or heat of stovetops from the kitchen. There weren’t even any lights on.

True, the dying sunlight of the late evening hadn’t completely vanished yet, the man thought, scratching his head with gentle puzzlement. The dusk was still light enough to see by, although it was growing less so by the second. The night was coming, trailing along behind day like a solemn little sister.

“Hello?” the man called out, more uncertainly now, reaching for the light switch as he entered from the living room into the kitchen. A warm wash of artificial yellow light flooded over the kitchen, a tidal wave of homey illumination.

The kitchen was practically bare, except for that morning’s breakfast dishes, which were still dirty in the sink. The congealed yellow yolks of soft-boiled runoff clung to the ceramic dish. The kitchen had the pungent smell of day-old eggs.

“Oh, there you are,” the man said, his eyes landing at last on the familiar figure of his wife. “Really, Cindy, it’s one thing to come home and find that you haven’t even started dinner, but couldn’t you at least have cleaned up the breakfast dishes? What have you been doing all day?”

Cindy said nothing. Her eyes remained fixed in a blank, wooden stare trained on the wall across the room. She didn’t move an inch from her seat at the table. The man stared at her for a moment, sucking in his cheek thoughtfully, then let out his breath and painted another smile across his face.

It was no matter, of course. He could wash the dishes himself. It was only that he worked so hard, and from the looks of things, his wife hadn’t done more than sit in that one spot for the entire day. It didn’t seem quite fair that he should come home and be required to do all the cooking and cleaning as well.

Still, there was much about life that was less than fair. The man knew it well. Few, he thought, knew it better. Perhaps only Job. Perhaps nobody.

The man turned on the faucet and angled the handle so that the tap ran hot. Almost at once, the water that vaulted from the spigot began to steam. He let the hot water clean his hands to a soft, burning pink while he soaped and scrubbed the dishes. The pain of the scalding water grounded him, humbled him, and reminded him that he was alive with his full sensory faculties, and that was something to be grateful for.

The dishes were clean, and the man set about preparing a simple meal. He pulled sausages from the refrigerator and cooked them in red wine. He made potatoes but didn't add enough salt because the shaker had run out.

“So, I take you didn’t do any shopping today, either?” the man asked over his shoulder while he stirred the potatoes over the stove. He’d removed his tie and dress shirt, not wanting to stain his professional finery with the womanish stains of homemaking, and was now wearing Cindy’s patchwork apron over his white sleeveless undershirt. 

“You know, Watson told me that he’s buying a cabin in the mountains for summer getaways,” the man said, trying again over his shoulder while the sausage and potatoes hissed and sizzled on the stove. “He and his wife both love the outdoors, so they’ll have a good time out there together. He said he was waiting for his kids to graduate and leave the house before he bought the cabin so that he and his wife could have it all to themselves. Ha! What do you think about that?”

He looked, still chuckling, over to the table. Cindy still hadn’t moved. The man scowled as he turned back to the stove, shoveling the potatoes and sausage onto a waiting plate.

"I'd like to have a place like that," the man said as he crossed the kitchen, plate in hand, and set it down on the table. He brought over a fork and a large carving knife. Using both, he began diligently carving away at the food. "Maybe not a mountain cabin,” he said as the sausage gave way under the sharp blade of his knife. “Maybe a beach house or even an apartment in a different city. The point is to have someplace to get away, a place all to yourself, beyond the reach of the mail or the telephone, beyond responsibility and schedules.”

The man looked down at his plate. The sausage was carved into thin, bite-size slices, the potatoes skewered and oozing out of their skins. The fork and knife, steel culprits of the cut and stab massacre before him, hung limply in the man’s smooth, strong fingers.

His appetite fled like villagers before a monsoon. His mouth was suddenly dry and sandy with distaste. Wrinkling his nose, he set the utensils down gingerly and pushed the plate an inch or two away.

“You know, the Watsons seem to have a pretty good marriage," the man went on. "The way he talks about his wife, it’s like they’re actually friends or a pair of bandits that stick together through everything. They have real adventures together, just going down the street for groceries. You and I can't even…"

The man let his words trail off. He'd been staring at his plate the whole time he was talking. He let his unfinished sentence hang in the air for a minute before he looked up, his eyes locking at last on the deep, hardened expression on Cindy’s face.

“It isn’t fair,” he said with a sigh, adding almost automatically, as he always did when he made that statement, “but nothing’s fair. So it goes.”

The silence between them was unbearable.

“We don’t even talk,” the man hardly dared to whisper, tears springing up unexpectedly in his eyes. “When I look at you, I see the beautiful form and figure, the familiar shape of the woman I love, whom I took into my home, to honor and cherish as my wife, to hold close and dear through thick and thin, rich and poor, through sickness and health. But you’re like a shadow to me now, a ghost of a woman I loved so passionately. You're silent, always silent, motionless. You’re like a prisoner. Is that it?”

He stared intently, but Cindy’s face didn’t change. Not an iota.

The man’s eye twitched.

“Goddammit, I’m talking to you!” he shouted, bringing his fists down on the table with a crash that made the plate jump. The dissected sausage scattered itself across the table, leaving dribbling trails of grease. The man’s palms gripped the surface of the table as if he were clinging for his life to the sheer face of a cliff.

“Why?” he pleaded desperately, his face shaking with the physical tension of his rage and anguish. “Why, Cindy? Why won’t you speak to me anymore? What have I done to you that’s so terrible? Have I imprisoned you in a gilded cage of domestic comforts? Is that my great sin? Do you feel kept and depressed? Filled with ennui? I…”

The man’s voice broke in a guttural sob. His shoulders heaved, and he sucked a snotty breath through his nose.

“I’m trying here! At least I’m trying!” he managed to shout through the sobs. “Can’t you see that? Can’t you meet me halfway? Speak to me, my love of ages. Speak!”

There was, of course, nothing but silence from Cindy. She stared at the same point on the wall. The man ground his teeth.

It isn’t fair. His fingers closed around the handle of the large carving knife, which still rested on the table.

Nothing’s fair – so it goes.

“You won’t say anything, will you?” the man asked in a drained tone as if he already knew the answer. “You’ll just sit there, even if I shouted at you for years. Even if I cut my own throat right in front of you, you wouldn’t even blink, would you?”

The man jumped to his feet and held the knife to his throat as if to illustrate the point. He felt the sharp edge of the blade against his Adam's apple. For an instant, he considered really doing it. There would be a certain vulgar sense of immediate relief, of course, but it was the easy way out. He wouldn't give her the satisfaction.

“You’d like it, wouldn’t you?” the man sneered at her, “You’d sit right there, still as a statue, with that same far-off smile in your eyes like the goddamn Mona Lisa.”

Still, Cindy said nothing. Outside, the night had turned dark. The wind picked up, creaking through the branches of the old cypress tree in the backyard. The man let his breath out.

All his breath.

He let his chest be empty, lowering the knife to hang by his side as his chin sank back into his throat. His eyes, however, remained trained with Birddog intensity on the motionless face of his wife.

“You stubborn bitch,” he growled. “You don’t react to anything, huh? Well, how about this?”

His voice rose into an awful screech, raising the knife over his head in a sudden, dramatic gesture.

“You won’t even flinch to save your own life, will you?” he roared, his eyes bloodshot and wild with rage and grief. “Will you?”

Cindy didn’t move. Her rosebud lips were pressed in the supple, pretty line he’d adored for as long as he could now remember. How he longed to kiss her, even now as he brought the knife down in a deadly, sweeping arc, how he yearned to press his own lips against hers and find them warm, loving, alive.

The knife landed with a thwack in the crown of Cindy’s wooden head.

Her expression remained exactly the same. The faint smile painted across her lips never wavered. The knife quivered, stuck in place, protruding from her wooden skull.

The man collapsed to his knees, whimpering. His face was crumpled, distorted by his miserable sobs.

“Why, Cindy?” he cried, clutching at the lap of the wooden doll that had long sat at the kitchen table, “Why?”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Eve and Thompson stood in the county impound lot, staring at the pickup truck. They were standing outdoors under a set of football stadium-style lights.

The vehicle was in good shape. Eve’s shot had flattened the rear tire, so the truck bed rested at a limp-like tilt. The driver-side door was peppered with buckshot from the sawed-off shotgun, and the window shattered. Thompson's shot had penetrated the rear window, creating a spiderweb of cracks extending away from the bullet hole. 

The narrow windows around the top of the impound garage showed a thin bar of the night sky – darkened, starless, and cloudy. Eve studied the midnight overcast forlornly for a moment before redirecting her attention to the truck that the man had used in his attempt to escape after he’d nearly run the agents down. 

The suspect -- whose name was Floyd Cartwright, as the agents finally learned from the staff registry at Lion’s Hill Athletic Club – remained in custody and under strict observation in the recovery wing of Callo General Hospital. His lips were sealed, even as he waited for his court-appointed attorney to make time for his case. It didn’t promise to be soon.

“So,” Thompson said, stepping out towards the truck but still giving it a wide birth, as if it made her somewhat nervous, “What can we tell from this rattling death-trap, huh? Cartwright ran as soon as he found out we were agents, which means he definitely has something to hide. The fact that he made a run for it in the company truck suggests that the truck itself is somehow involved with his criminality, whatever that may be. There’s something in the truck that he didn’t want for us to find – but what?”

“How about the sawed-off shotgun?” Eve asked bluntly, walking in a straight line to the driver’s side door of the truck and peering steadily inside. In a flash of vivid memory, the shot-up truck reminded her of the totaled vehicles she’d seen turned to cinders during her combat tours in Afghanistan and Syria. She shivered, brushing off the memory with a quick huff. “How many maintenance crews do you know that keep a pistol-stock twelve-gage among their tools?”

Poking her head into the cab of the truck, Eve’s eyes landed on a long, leather holster that ran down the inner side of the driver’s seat. It was secured in place by a ratcheting strap laced through the seat belt.

“Get a load of this,” Eve called out over her shoulder, but Thompson had walked in a wide circle to the other side of the truck. She approached the passenger door and opened it, poking her head inside exactly opposite Eve’s. Her eyes followed Eve’s pointing finger to the shotgun holster.

“He carried it in the truck regularly?” Thompson pieced the scene together, then looked across the seats at Eve. “But why?”

“The first reason that springs to mind is transport,” said Eve, “During the stagecoach era, a person would be assigned to literally ride shotgun when transporting cargo and passengers in order to ward off bandits and robbers. What if we’re looking at a modern version of the same thing?”

“Alright,” Thompson nodded, “But what would he be transporting in an athletic club company vehicle? Certainly not passengers.”

“Right,” Eve said, looking behind the seats, “This thing only has a bench in the back and half-doors. They’re clean, too. No cigarette butts or fast-food wrappers. In fact, the pattern on the carpet makes me think they’ve been vacuumed recently.”

“You mean he went out of his way to clean it?” Thompson asked, eyeing the backseat for herself. 

“Doesn’t it look that way to you?” Eve asked, “See? The windows are perfectly clean, too. I'd say this vehicle has been recently detailed."

“If he went out of his way to clean it,” Thompson mused, “then what would he be so worried about us finding?”

“Something he was there to pick up,” Eve said, getting out of the cab as the realization hit her. Thompson backed out as well, coming around the hood to look at her partner.

“What do you mean?”

“He unlocked the door first, remember? That place was locked from the outside. And he was surprised to see us there. What if he showed up when he knew the place would be closed because he was trying to get something out of there before it was turned up by the police investigation?”

“I like it,” Thompson said, nodding vehemently, “I like it a lot. But it still leaves us with the million-dollar question: What was he hiding?”

“Well, whatever it was, he didn’t get to it before he ran into us,” Eve said, “Which means it’s still back at the athletic club.”

“Ugh,” Thompson shivered, “That place gave me the creeps even before Cartwright tried to kill us. I’m not looking forward to going back at night.”

“Neither am I,” Eve said with a sigh, “But this truck is clean as a whistle except for the shotgun holster. Whatever he’s hiding has got to still be there, probably in that same creepy shed.”

“Alright,” Thompson said, “But I’ll be following very closely on your six.”

Turning her back, Eve smiled as she heard her partner mutter under her breath, “God, I can’t believe I left the classroom for this horror-movie shit.”

***

The athletic club was, of course, closed when the agents arrived, but there was a uniformed sheriff’s deputy standing guard. Eve approached the deputy, who was posted under the light near the door of the pro shop.

“Evening, Sheriff,” Eve called out in a friendly tone, “Or, morning, as it might be. I’m Special Agent Hope, and this is my partner, Special Agent Thompson. I met your boss earlier, Sheriff Heinlen. Did he leave you to work the night shift?”

“That’s right,” the deputy sheriff replied dutifully, peering down at Eve’s badge before settling his hands on his hips, “How can I help the FBI?”

“As I’m sure you’ve been made aware, a man on the custodial staff of the athletic club here made a serious attempt to kill myself and Agent Thompson when we were investigating here before.”

“Right, I heard about that,” the deputy replied. “You ladies alright?”

"Yes, thank you," Eve replied a little stiffly. "Anyway, it's our current theory that Cartwright's hostile behavior was a defense response because he was hiding something – something that he was there to retrieve from the custodial shed of the club. Can you think of anything a custodian of Lion Hill might be mixed up in?”

“Not off the top of my head,” the deputy replied, sucking his teeth and rocking back on his heels, “We’ve had deputies posted at all the entrances all day.”

“What about the maintenance shed access?” Eve asked, “There was nobody posted there earlier when Cartwright tried to kill us and run for it.”

“Maintenance shed?” the deputy tipped his hat back to rub the top of his head ponderously, “No, I think we only have men posted at the main and rear gates. I didn’t hear anything about a maintenance shed.”

“Alright,” Eve said dryly, “Thanks, deputy, we’ll take it from here.”

“Are the local cops always as useless as these clowns?” Thompson asked Eve once they were beyond the deputy’s earshot.

“Not always,” Eve replied, thinking the question over genuinely for a moment as they retraced their steps from earlier that day. “Sometimes they’re well organized and timely. I’ve even met a few crack detectives wearing plain uniforms. But sometimes, they're inept old curmudgeons or even malicious saboteurs. It really depends on where you are and who you're dealing with." 

The agents crossed the darkened patio quickly, returning to the spot where Eve had disappeared into the ivy. The gap in the ivy was exactly where they remembered it, although they found their path barred by a gate.

Eve and Thompson looked at each other.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“That wasn’t there before,” Eve said.

“It must have been left open. Look – the hinges swing inward. It was probably half-buried in the ivy.”

"So, who came around to lock it?"

“Maybe one of the staff?” Thompson ventured again. Eve nodded.

“The same staff that keeps a shotgun fastened to the seat of their service truck,” Eve commented dryly. She tried the gate, rattling it in vain. It was locked tight. “Maybe they’ve got a whole operation running behind the scenes here.”

“What kind of operation?” Thompson asked, stepping close to Eve’s side and reaching for the gate handle as if she would somehow have better luck pulling against the lock. Eve stepped back and managed to refrain from rolling her eyes.

"I don't know," Eve said, "If I had to guess, I'd say it's something drug-related, but that's just a shot in the dark."

“You don’t think he’s the killer?” Thompon asked, reaching into her coat and pulling out something small that Eve couldn’t quite see in the dim lighting.

“No,” Eve replied, “His escape plan was too scattered for a serial killer. He both tried to kill us and get away and all before we'd accused him of anything. In my experience, a logic-obsessed sociopath would choose one course of action and see it through to completion. The violent flight we witnessed was the frightened response of a goon, in my critical opinion. I’d guess that Cartwright is a small cog in a larger machine."

While Eve was speaking, Thompson had been fiddling with the knob, putting to work whatever the tool was that she’d drawn out of the secret pocket in her jacket. Without a word, she straightened up and gave the gate a push. It swung open with a harmless creak and was still.

Eve stared at Thompson with an impressed expression unhidden on her face.

“Did you just pick that lock?”

“I learned a lot during my time in criminology school,” Thomspon replied with a grin that Eve could see even in the dark, “Including how to break into my professor’s office to steal test answers.”

“Really?” Eve raised her eyebrows, “That’s pretty bad. You could get in a lot of trouble for that, given your career.”

“Eh, I trust you, given the circumstances,” Thompson said with a shrug, “Besides, it was only once.”

“You sure opened that gate pretty smoothly for it only being once,” Eve said.

“Okay, but I only used it for evil once. I had to practice, didn’t I? Besides, it comes in handy when I lock myself out of my apartment.”

“How often does that happen?” Eve asked, laughing quietly as she pushed the gate the rest of the way open and stepping into the narrow alley of ivy.

“More often than I’m proud of,” Thompson admitted, following Eve closely and leaving the gate open behind her.

“Well, it certainly came in handy now,” Eve said, “Props to you. I’m terrible with delicate stuff like that. I’m more of a blunt instrument, to be totally honest with you.”

Eve pulled her pistol out but only to switch on the tac light, which served in place of a flashlight. She left the safety on. The high-powered beam sprang to life, shining a brilliant blue-white circle on the ground in front of her feet.

Ahead, the white door was once again shut. Eve pointed the beam of her light at the metal, reading the faded sign. She knew what she would find before she even laid a hand on the knob.

Locked.

“Thompson,” Eve whispered, getting out of the way, “You’re up.”

“Somebody came through and locked up after the whole incident went down,” Thompson said as she went to work with her pocket lockpick set on the knob of the white door.

“Right,” Eve agreed, holding the pistol in the proper position to light the lock but keeping her eyes trained on the leafy alley. She wasn’t about to let them be ambushed in this narrow column. “The deputy out front didn’t seem to know anything about it, so I’d say it wasn’t the local authorities that came through and locked up.”

“That means it was somebody else,” Thompson said, her tongue jammed into the corner of her mouth with concentration as she worked on her lock.

"Brilliant deduction, Sherlock," Eve joked dryly. Thompson tried to shoot her a dirty look, but all she got was a pistol light in her face.

“Somebody smooth enough to get in and out without attracting the attention of the deputies guarding the entrances,” Thompson went on.

“That doesn’t seem like it’d be too much of an obstacle,” Eve replied with a shake of her head. “How’s it going with that lock?”

“Almost got it,” Thompson replied, and indeed, hardly a second later, Eve heard the lock give way with a spring. Thompson pushed the door open, allowing Eve to shine her beam into the waiting darkness.

The room appeared empty at first, but Eve wasn’t taking any chances. She found the light switch and flicked it on, waiting for the fluorescent tubes to flood the room with pale illumination before moving to clear the room.

“All clear,” she called out, coming around the shelf to find Thompson with her gun out. Eve tucked her own pistol away.

“Whoever locked this place up might have taken whatever it was Cartwright was after if they knew about it,” Eve said, eyeing Thompson’s Glock warily. “Why don’t you put that peashooter away for now.”

"Right," Thompson said with an embarrassed chuckle, quickly switching the safety on and tucking the pistol away. “Sorry again about that. How’s the arm feeling.”

“I’ve been worse,” Eve said truthfully, “You only grazed me. The burn from the point-blank shot is worse than the wound itself."

“It won’t happen again, I promise,” Thompson said.

“Thanks,” Eve said, squaring her shoulders with a deep breath and looking around the shed, eager to drop the subject and return to the search for clues. “So, what do you think he was hiding, and do you think somebody else already got to it?”

“Nothing to do but turn this place inside out,” Thompson replied, "if he kept the shed as clean as his truck, though, I'm afraid we might come up empty-handed again."

“We’ll just see about that,” Eve muttered, picking a shelf and beginning her search. The first one she tried was filled with crates of toilet tissue. Eve opened every single box and peered down the tube of each roll. The toilet paper was innocent. She moved to the next shelf. This one contained similar boxes of paper towels. Eve repeated her process, her thoroughness unflagging.  

The agents, working on opposite sides of the room, passed about fifteen minutes in total silence, laboriously going through the contents of the maintenance shed. Eve’s frustration was mounting in the back of her mind, but she didn’t allow it to penetrate far enough to disrupt her concentration. She’d almost made her way through all the rolls of toilet paper and towels. The next shelf contained sealed plastic tubs. She’d have to pull the long tab and break the seal on each one.

Before she could start, however, Eve felt her phone vibrate in her pocket. The sound it made was sure to be audible throughout the whole shed, but Thompson didn’t say anything. Eve heard a shuffling sound as her partner continued rooting through the shelves.

For some reason that Eve herself couldn’t quite fathom, she found that she was holding her breath, her heart pounding hard in her chest. She knew from the vibration pattern that she was receiving a call on her personal line, not her work phone.

Eve slipped the phone out of her pocket, giving the screen a sidelong glance as she silenced the incessant vibrations. She recognized the number displayed on the caller ID, and it made her do a double-take.

The number was that of her former partner, Lucas Hobbes.

Why are you calling me on my personal line? Eve wondered silently, staring at the phone in her hand as if it were an active bomb. And why are you calling me now, at nearly one o’clock in the morning?

The answer sprang into her mind with an anxious certainty that made her head sink heavily in her chest.

It’s about my father.

Eve’s mind reeled with possibilities. Had he been caught? Or did Hobbes just need help on the case? Was he looking for secret guidance? Or probing to find out if Eve’s father had made contact with her?

Maybe he was calling because her father had been killed.

Maybe it was all over.

At that moment, Thompson appeared around the corner of the center shelving island. She peered at Eve, then at the phone.

“Well?” she asked with an innocent smile in the corners of her lips, looking down at the phone and then back up at Eve. “Are you going to get that?” 

CHAPTER NINE

Eve declined the call and shoved it down in her pocket, grateful that she had not saved her partner's contact into her personal phone so that only his number was displayed on her phone screen. She didn't like the way Thompson was looking at her, as if waiting to catch her in an elaborate scheme.

“Just a personal call,” Eve replied, “I’ll call back later.”

“Pretty late for a phone call,” Thompson commented. Eve scowled, turning her head away and pointedly refocusing herself on the search.

“Maybe I take my calls later than you, Professor,” Eve replied. She tried to give her words a light, raunchy spin, but she couldn’t remove the barb of sarcasm from her voice. Thompson raised her eyebrows.

“Alright, sorry,” she said, “How’s the search going? Turned up anything suspicious so far?”

“Just a lot of paper toiletries,” Eve replied with an exhausted sigh, “I’m beginning to wonder if we’re wasting our time here."

“What would you suggest instead?”

“We could check out the other crime scene, see if there’s anything around the first victim’s place that ties Cartwright to the second murder. If we find evidence that he was around Macey’s pool, then he’s our guy. If not, we’ve still got him on attempted murder.”

Thompson didn’t answer right away. She rubbed her chin thoughtfully for a long time, shaking her head slowly.

“I just can’t shake the idea that there’s something right under our noses. Somebody already tried to kill me in order to prevent me from finding it, so it must be important. I’m not ready to walk away quite yet.”

“Alright,” Eve nodded, “So we keep searching.”

“You know, if you need to step outside and take that phone call, I can keep up the search here for a few minutes on my own.” Thompson offered. Eve eyed her suspiciously. “You know, if it’s urgent.”

"Thanks," Eve said, straightening up, "I think I will since you mentioned it. Are you sure you'll be alright here by yourself? I won't be longer than five minutes, I promise."

“Don’t worry about me,” Thompson said, patting her gun under her blazer with a reassuring smile that Eve wished she could be reassured by. “I’ll be alright. Don’t go too far, though. It’s not a good idea for us to get separated at a time like this.”

“Right,” Eve said, “I’ll be on the patio, just down this little ivy access alley.”

Eve pulled her phone back out of her pocket as she hurried down the dark alley of ivy vines. The gate was still hanging open when she stepped back out onto the patio. She stood under the shadow of the palms, her face glowing blue by the light of her phone. She redialed the number and held it up to her ear.

“Hobbes?” she asked in a low voice as soon as the line was picked up, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” the voice of her partner, even over the phone, was comforting amidst the trying chaos. “Why should anything be wrong?”

“Well, you’re hunting my father, you’re not supposed to be in contact with me, and you’re calling me at zero-dark-thirty. What gives?”

“Oh, well,” she could sense the gangly agent’s halting awkwardness even without seeing his face, “no, nothing’s wrong. I know we’re not really supposed to be communicating, but I’m not calling to talk about your father’s case.”

“Oh,” Eve was slightly taken aback. “Why are you calling then?”

“I just wanted to check on you, I guess,” Hobbes said. “I know that Deputy Director Pliny thinks that the best thing for you is to keep busy on another case, but I can’t help being worried about you. Are you doing alright?”

Eve smiled in the darkness, glad that there was nobody around to see her blush. Hobbes was a sweet kid, unassuming and genuine – rare qualities to find in FBI agents. The concern that he was showing sounded real. She could imagine the doe-eyed look on his young face.

"Yeah, thanks," she said, still smiling, "I'm doing alright. I think Pliny's right, for what it's worth. Keeping busy with the case has stopped me from thinking about my dad too much."

“I heard you were shot,” Hobbes said, “Are you alright?”

"Yeah, Thompson shot me herself," Eve said with another laugh, "I guess she wanted to save the killer a little time and trouble. I'm doing alright, though; it was just a little graze and a burn."

“Jesus,” Hobbes swore, “Sounds like you’ve got plenty of troubles of your own.” He coughed uncomfortably, then asked, “So, how’s the new partner? You don’t think the replacement is going to become permanent, do you?”

"You mean aside from shooting me?" Eve asked, "She's not awful, just a little green to the fieldwork. Besides, she's really more of a spy than a partner. I know she’s going to report back to Quantico on every move I make during this case.”

“That would put a damper on the relationship,” Hobbes agreed.

"Par for the course as far as my partners go," Eve grumbled, briefly forgetting who she was talking to. She sucked in a regretful breath sharply through her teeth. "Sorry, I didn't mean you. As a matter of fact, you're the first partner I've had in a long time who didn't treat me like some kind of lethal freak because of who my father is. I…really appreciate it, actually. I’m not sure if I’ve ever communicated that to you.”

Silence hung on the line between them for a moment. Then, all at once, Eve was struck by the recollection of where she was and what she was doing. The case at hand wasn't going to wait.

"I'm glad you called me Hobbes," Eve started, "But I'm actually in the middle of an investigation right now, so I'd better…"

“Wait, before you go,” Hobbes said quickly, then halted.

Eve waited for an expectant second before asking, “What?”

Another silent heartbeat elapsed.

“Eve, I need your help,” Hobbes said at last, lowering his voice as if he didn’t want to be overheard. “I know we can’t have you officially on this investigation, but nobody else knows Howard Hope like you do.”

Eve bit her lip. She hadn’t expected this from Hobbes. Usually, the young agent was a rule follower right down to the letter. He wasn't one to cause dissension or take unnecessary risks.

So, Eve reasoned, he must really need my help.

Glancing over her shoulder, Eve ensured that Thompson was not lurking around the gate of the ivy alleyway. She turned back to her face and lowered her own voice to a scarcely audible whisper.

“Alright, but remember, this conversation is not happening,” she hissed back into the phone, hunching her shoulders subconsciously as if to hide her face from an unknown observer. “Tell me what you need.”

“Well, we do have a lead,” Hobbes whispered back, so softly that Eve had to strain her ears to make out his words over the phone, “We’ve got an eyewitness that claimed to have seen Howard Hope in Kansas City, Missouri.”

“Kansas City?” Eve asked, scrunching her eyebrows together.

“That’s right,” Hobbes said, “Somebody called in an anonymous tip. We’ve got our local people on it, and I’m flying in with Tanque first thing in the morning, but so far, we haven't been able to corroborate the eyewitness's story. As you know, eyewitnesses aren't very reliable evidence in court."

“Right,” Eve nodded, “Did they say what he was doing in Kansas City?”

“He was supposedly seen in disguise at a hardware store,” Hobbes replied.

“Hardware store?” Eve repeated the location back, “What was he doing there?”

“Shopping for a new screwdriver? How should I know?” said Hobbes with an exasperated shrug that Eve could hear in his tone. Eve winced, every muscle in her body tightening. Her father was famous for attacking young women and pinning swallowtail butterflies to their skin after stabbing them with tools – ice picks, knitting needles, screwdrivers, et cetera.

Hobbes recognized his faux pax an instant too late.

“Christ, Hope, I’m so sorry,” he stammered.

“Forget it,” Eve growled, “It sounds like you’ve got your investigation planned out. What do you need my help for?”

“Well, I know it’s kind of a shot in the dark, but I wanted to know if you thought Howard Hope would have any reason to go to Kansas City. Does KC have any kind of special significance to your father, or are we running down an anonymous tipline hoax?”

Eve tilted her head back to think. Could she remember her father ever visiting Kansas City? Eve recalled that she had an aunt and uncle on her mother’s side that lived in Kentucky, and she knew there was a cousin living somewhere in Louisiana whom she’d never met, but none of them had ever lived in Kansas City. For that matter, she didn’t think that any of them would shelter her fugitive father.

"I don't think…" Eve started, but just then, she heard a rustling in the ivy just beyond the mouth of the open gate. A moment later, she saw Thompson's head poking around the corner of the gate. How long had she been lurking there before the rustling of the leaves gave her away? 

Thompson stepped out, gesturing excitedly for Eve to wrap it up and follow her.

“Sorry,” Eve whispered hurriedly into the phone without using her partner’s name, “I’ve got to go. Best of luck!”

She hung up, quickly stowing the phone away. She strode rapidly across the patio to where Thompson waited.

“Got your phone call squared away?” Thompson asked, brimming with excitement. Eve gave her a sideways glance as she walked up. The Doctor of Criminology was almost bouncing on her toes in her eagerness.

"Sure, it's all sewed up," Eve said, brushing the comment off with what she hoped was a casual smile. She didn't like the idea that Thompson might have been eavesdropping on her conversation with Hobbes.

“Alright, good,” Thompson said, bubbling with anticipation and showing no sign that she knew the contents of Eve’s phone call, “Follow me, then. I found something, and I think you’re going to want to see it.”

CHAPTER TEN

“Oh my god,” Eve’s mouth hung open.

“Right?” Thompson bubbled by her side, “Did I hit the jackpot or what?”

The agents were looking at a pile of orange plastic pillcases that had been dumped out on the floor of the maintenance supply shed. Beside the pill cases sat an opened five-gallon drum with "acetone" printed across the side.

“That’s not acetone,” Eve said, grinning at Thompson and clapping her on the shoulder, “You hit the jackpot alright. Did you check out the labels already?”

“Sure did,” Thompson replied, kneeling down to sift quickly through the pill bottles on the floor. “Take a look.” She pulled one bottle out of the pile and held it up.

Eve accepted the pill bottle, holding it up so that she could study the label under the light of the fluorescent overheads. She read the name on the Rx label aloud.

"Selma Vishni," she said, then turned her eyes on Thompson, who was still squatting by the pile of pillcases. "That's our second victim."

“Right,” Thompson said, picking up another bottle from the pile. “This one is hers too. They all are.”

“All of them?” Eve was astounding, staring with horror at the pile of pharmaceutical pill cases. If the victim was a drug addict, that would change the variables in this scenario dramatically. Was it possible this murder was a drug deal gone wrong, entirely unrelated to the murder of Pamela Macey?

“That’s right,” Thompson replied, “The only difference is they’re not all filled. In fact, I’d estimate that only about ten percent of the pill bottles in this drum were actually filled and capped. The others were all stacked together, separated from the lids. They fell all over the place like that when I dumped the drum out.”

“What does it mean?” Eve wondered aloud, “Do you think she was buying her drugs here? Or was she using the maintenance shed to hide her stash? Maybe she had something worked out with the custodial staff.”

“I don’t know,” Thompson said, reaching out to toy with the lid of another drum of acetone, “But my instinct tells me that the rest of these chemical drums will give us the answer.”

Before Eve could say anything, Thompson had flipped out a short, heavy-bladed knife and was busy wrenching the top of the next five-gallon drum. The sealed lid gave way with a suckering pop, and Thompson fell back, overturning the next bucket by accident.

More pill bottles fell out, scattering across the floor. One of them rolled to a stop against Eve's boot. She stooped down and picked it up, studying the label.

“Eloise Burgess?” Eve read the name out, giving her partner a quizzical look. “Who’s that?”

“I don’t know,” Thompson shrugged, “Whoever she is, she’d better watch out. Things didn’t turn out so good for Selma.”

“I think we’d better look her up first thing in the morning,” Eve said. Thompson nodded.

“Good call.”

“Hey, try the next drum. Maybe we can compile a list of names to turn up. If this is some kind of drug ring, I’ll bet somebody knew Selma.”

“You got it,” Thompson said, opening her knife again and going to work.

In the next three drums, the agents found pill bottles, filled and empty, with printed labels for Gerry Hughes, Linda Burkhardt, and Tommy Pepitone. The fourth drum turned up something new.

“Aha!” Eve said triumphantly as she reached down into the drum, “Bingo.”

The thing she pulled from the dry acetone drum was a small printing device equipped with a full, albeit miniature, qwerty keyboard and a roll of blank Rx label tape. Alongside it, in the drum, she found extra rolls of labels, empty pill bottles stacked together, and a spiral-bound notebook.

“Well, well, well,” Thompson said, reaching into the drum and pulling out the notebook, “Looks like we found what Cartwright was looking for.” She thumbed through the notebook, frowning.

“What’s in the memo pad?” Eve asked, diverting her attention away from the tiny digital typewriter in her hands.

“I can’t say,” Thompson said, turning the notebook this way and that in her hands, “It’s written in some kind of code. Based on everything else we found, though, I’d guess it’s the client list and financial records of the little illegal pharma operation they’ve got going on back here.”

“Good guess,” Eve said, “That book plus the pill bottles with the victim’s name on the label should be enough to pressure Cartwright into talking. Even if he’s not responsible for Selma’s death, I’d bet my last nickel he knows more about it than he’s admitted.”

***

“I’m glad to see your ankle is healing up,” Eve said with loud, plastic friendliness in her voice as she entered the hospital room. Cartwright jerked awake with a grunt of panic, then caught his breath as he remembered where he was.

“The doctors say you should be up and hobbling around in the next few days,” Eve went on, approaching the hospital bed to which the suspect was still fettered. “Won’t that be nice? You’ll be walking in time for your trial. You’re going to plead guilty, right? Maybe you’re even dreaming about a plea deal?”

It was a little past three in the morning. The moon shone in a sliver crescent through a gap in the clouds outside the hospital window. The man in the rollaway gurney struggled to gain his bearings.

“What?” he stammered thickly, blinking his eyes rapidly as the agent walked slowly up towards his head. “What are you talking about?”

“Come on, Floyd,” Eve said in a soothing voice, “It’s over. We know everything now.”

“You know nothing,” he sneered.

"Once," Eve admitted, "But now we've got you. We turned your little shed upside down. It didn't take us too long to find the pill stashes. It was a clever plan. Let me see if I got it straight. You buy the drugs wholesale. They're pharma pills, so you probably get them coming down from Canada, not up from Mexico. You recruit customers from the Lion's Hill Sunbather's Club, take their names and pharmaceutical pill orders down in a little black memo book, and fill their prescriptions while they lounge on the patio. It's neat and easy, just like poolside drink service. You probably netted a few G's a week, right? Except last week, you hit a little snag, didn't you?"

“Woah, hold on now.” The man in the hospital bed tried to hold up his hands defensively, but they were still locked to the bedframe. He struggled pathetically in his chains for a moment, then let his hands rest by his side with a defeated sigh. “I’m not admitting anything until I see my lawyer.”

“That could be a while,” Eve said, “And we’ve already got plenty. For example, I know that Selma Vishni was one of your regular customers. I know you fed her Xanax on a bi-weekly refill plan.”

“Bi-weekly?” the man shot back with an arrogant sneer, “Where the hell did you get that?”

Eve smiled at him without speaking as Cartwright realized his mistake.

“Shit,” the man cursed under his breath.

“Save us all a little time, Floyd,” Eve said, “The more you help us now, the better you look when your sorry ass ends up in front of the judge.”

The man clenched his mouth shut, avoiding Eve’s face.

"Is that really the path you want to take?" Eve asked, "A woman you sold drugs to turns up dead in the pool – the very place where you regularly sold her the drugs, no less – and your strategy is to clam up. It doesn't make you look innocent, Floyd."

The man’s conventionally handsome face was cast in a melancholically contemplative expression as he gazed at the chains on his wrist.

"I heard she was dead," the man said with an almost wistful note in his voice. He sounded weak and exhausted as if his recovery and the bleak hospital room were wearing him down. He stared at the chains on his wrists with fatalistic ennui. "I knew it meant trouble, so I came around to clear out my stash and books. When I found you already there, I lost my head." He turned his face further away, "When I realized you'd already breached the shed, I figured all was lost. I was going to make a run for it after I shot you both, head for the Canadian border. I knew that woman's death was going to be trouble for me, but I didn't do it. I didn't kill her." He turned, looking at least into Eve's face with an anguished expression, "I swear to you, Agent Hope, I didn't kill that woman. I sold her drugs, yes. I sell prescription pills to roughly a third of the Lion's Hill members. But I ran a clean business – no hassle, no dirty-cut drugs, and no rough stuff. Every one of my clients was happy to keep it quiet. I had a smooth operation. I even kept a record of my customers with legitimate prescriptions so that I wouldn’t give anybody a heart attack.”

“That’s a smooth line, Floyd,” Eve said, eyeing the man suspiciously, “But I’m afraid I need a little more proof than that. Can you verify your whereabouts last night between ten p.m. and two a.m.?”

“As a matter of fact, I can," the imprisoned Cartwright admitted, "Although my alibi isn't going to be eager to admit it."

“Why’s that?” Eve prompted.

“Because," said Cartwright, heaving a sigh and shutting his eyes, "last night I had a midnight appointment to pick up a shipment of prescriptions from Doctor Sydney Duquesne."

“Dr. Duquesne?” Eve repeated the name to ensure she’d heard correctly.

"That's right, although around here, she's got another name."

“Oh?” Eve raised her eyebrow, “What’s that?”

 “Ask for Doctor Absolem,” the man said cryptically, “and she’ll tell you everything you need to know.”

“Dr. Absolem?” Eve was confused, “I thought you said her name was Duquesne.”

“Dr. Duquesne will tell you I’m a liar,” said Cartwright in a sing-song kind of voice as if reciting a nursery rhyme, his eyes half shut, “But ask for Dr. Absolem, and you’ll see that I’m telling you the truth.”

It must be the painkillers making him loopy, Eve thought, looking down in baffled frustration at her lugubrious suspect.

“Dr. Absolem,” he repeated, laying back on the pillows as if a tremendous weight had been lifted from his shoulders, “Ask for…Doctor Absolem…”

The man drifted off to sleep.

Eve shook her head.

It’s got to be the drugs. And yet…

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“I’m sorry.”

The man’s words dripped with guttural misery in the total darkness of the house. He was still on the floor, sprawled supine at the wooden feet of his wife. He’d wept himself dry, smearing the sanded oak grain with his tears as he lamented before her.

"I shouldn't have lost my temper like that," he said, lifting his face at last to look up at hers. She stared straight out into the darkness, her wooden-painted smile never wavering. The blade of the carving knife was still stuck in her frontal lobe.

“I never should have threatened you,” the man said, “I shouldn’t have said those awful things to you. Oh, my darling Cindy! Can you ever forgive me?” 

Clutching first at the wooden back of the chair, then at her shoulders, the man clawed himself upright. When he was on his feet, he removed the knife from the wooden mannequin's skull. He cooed tenderly under his breath, addressing the slice in her head as gently as if it were a real flesh wound.

“I’ll get you all fixed up, Cindy,” the man said, stroking the doll’s face with a compassionate hand. “The others don’t understand how lucky they are. They aren’t grateful for what they have. That’s why they have to learn. But you and me, Cindy, we get it. We understand that life isn’t fair, and it never will be. All we can do is be grateful and preserve the memory.”

With a quiver of emotion in his voice, the man ran a gentle finger along the length of the knife gash in Cindy’s head.

“Preserve the memory,” he repeated.

Cindy was silent, smiling, preserving the memory.

"Come on, darling," he said, "Why don't we watch a little television? I'll fix you up in the living room, and we can put all this unpleasantness behind us. How does that sound?"

Cindy, of course, said nothing. The man did not seem deterred this time, however, as he worked his arms carefully under his wooden wife’s armpits and hoisted her up.

Cindy disconnected just above the hips. From the bottom of her torso, she jutted a dowel peg about the circumference of a soup can. A matching hole was left behind in the cross-section of her lap.

Grunting under the unwieldy burden of the solid wooden head and torso, the man struggled to carry his wife – her top half, at least – across the threshold from the kitchen into the living room. He propped her top half in the corner crook of the armed sofa and hurried back to the kitchen for her lower half, which was carved in a gracefully seated position. The folds of her skirt looked almost soft enough to be real.

The man grunted as he hoisted her legs and waist from the kitchen chair. He got one arm under her wooden rump, the other under the crook of her knees. Touching Cindy’s salacious form still sent tingles of excitement all through his body, even though it had been years and years since the couple copulated.

It isn’t fair, but so it goes.

The thought was a familiar one to the man’s mind. He thought it so frequently, in fact, that it was no longer accompanied by any emotion at all. Much in life wasn’t fair, and yet it went on all the same. The tides of fate seemed to want not for fairness, nor for equality or balance, by the man’s estimations. All was madness. All was hopeless chaos. The most anyone could do was hold to their buoys of regularity and consistency to remember.

Give up on fair. Fair is a ruse, a trap. The expectation of fairness only urges one to let down their guard, completely vulnerable to the whims of chaos. So it goes. 

That was the lesson that the world needed to learn. How much suffering could be avoided if people would only cease to expect fairness from chaos?

With a huff of effort, the man set Cindy’s lower half down on the sofa and went about setting the peg of her torso down the waiting hole. Cindy slid back into being with elegance. Even as a wooden doll, the man thought, Cindy would always be a creature of grace, of beauty.

“I’m sorry, okay?” the man muttered, adjusting her torso this way and that, fussing over her like a tentative husband over his sick wife. “I’m so sorry. Why don’t you just sit here and watch television while I go get the wood filler and sandpaper ready, alright? Here, I think I saw in the TV guide that there’s a new episode of your favorite soap opera airing tonight. I’ll get you fixed right up, and it’ll be like this whole thing never happened. What do you think of that, darling? Would that be alright?”

Cindy stared blankly at the television in perfect silence, although the man hadn't switched it on yet. He looked at the long, thin scar his knife had left in the crown of her wooden head, and tears threatened to spill from his eyes once again.

“Of course,” the man whispered, “You have every right to be mad at me. It’s my fault, after all. All of this is my fault. It’s not fair, but that doesn’t matter. None of this is fair.” He let out a shaky sigh and picked up the remote. He turned the television on and flicked through the channels until he found Cindy’s favorite soap opera.

The bright lights and cheerful voices of the soap opera illuminated and filled the living room, but the man didn't feel any better. He only got a clearer view of the damage he'd inflicted on his wooden wife. He shuddered and looked away, despising himself, and he slunk out of the room and down the hallway toward the garage.

“You stupid man,” he chastised himself as he opened the door to the garage and groped around in the darkness for the light switch, “You know, you graduated top of your class from Branting University. You were the president of your fraternity. You picked the right girl and made an honest woman of her. And you’re still the stupidest man I know. It’s not fair. Nothing’s fair. So it goes.”

The light in the garage flickered on. The man stepped out onto the cool concrete floor in his socks and walked around the hood of his black BMW sedan to his workbench.

The man sorted through the various tools and materials scattered across the workbench, tossing aside towel refuse and empty jugs of Shock-Bright as he searched for the wood filler. He found the substance a moment later, along with a few sheets of fine-grade sandpaper.

Tucking these under his arm, the man paused in front of the large, mostly uncarved block that sat in the middle of the workbench. He reached out a hand to stroke the wood lovingly.

“Soon,” he said, speaking in a tender voice to the block of wood, which was roughly the height and width of a healthy infant, “When my stupid temper allows me time.”

With a forlorn sigh, the man returned through the garage door. He cast one last long look back at the uncarved block.

"You will be a son," the man said, mostly to himself, with a smile that he felt deep in the cockles of his bones. "I can just tell. You will be a strong, healthy baby boy. Goodnight, son. Daddy loves you."

The man shut off the light, chuckling to himself as he shut the garage door. The smile faded from his lips, however, as he heard the soap opera from down the hall and remembered the apologetic task ahead of him. His shoulders slumped. All he wanted was a little peace and quiet, a little time to work on a task that really should have been Cindy's, to begin with – the creation of their child.

But of course, he'd lost his temper, so now it was his duty to patch things up. Cindy would be quiet and detached, and he wouldn't get so much as a flicker of thanks or love from her. He returned to the living room and sat down next to his wife.

“Alright, darling, face me,” the man gently instructed, setting down the wood filler, putty knife, and sandpaper on the sofa cushion between them.

Cindy, of course, did not move.

The man reached out and took his wife delicately yet firmly by the waist, rotating her torso so that her gauged forehead was facing him and the light.

“Alright, beautiful, hold still,” the man said without a trace of irony or humor in his voice, “This won’t hurt a bit.”

Working carefully, the man spread the filler across the wound, filling and covering the scar with a smooth layer of wood glue. He scraped the putty knife carefully across his work, picking up any excess filler, then sat back to wait with a patient, hopeful expression on his face.

“There, now,” he said, his tone reflecting that he was pleased with his work, “You’ll be all sealed up in about fifteen minutes. Just in time for the end of your show. Then maybe we’ll watch the news while I sand you down and give you a fresh coat of paint. We’ll kiss and make up when you’re dry, and then we can go to bed at peace with each other. How does that sound?”

Cindy, of course, said nothing.

The man wilted.

Just once, he longed for her to reply. He yearned to hear her voice, if only one more time, telling him that she loved him. He wanted to hear that she appreciated all the effort.

He wanted to know that she hadn’t forgotten him either.

The soap opera ended earlier than the man expected. The wood filler was still drying. The man cleared his throat, looking nervously at Cindy.

“Do you mind if I put on the news before I start sanding you down? You don’t mind, do you?”

Cindy said nothing.

The man reached for the remote and changed the channel to the local news station.

“…local authorities still have offered no comment on the status of the cases, although our sources inform us that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has taken over jurisdiction of both murder investigations,” a stern-faced news anchor was saying. The man grinned in spite of himself.

“And they’re going to keep looking a long time, too,” the man said, smiling at his wife. “Those fools are running around in circles, which is what they do best. It’s good for a laugh, really. Not much else.”

Cindy didn’t laugh. She stared at the TV, unblinking. The man sighed.

“Of course, you’ll never tell me what you think of what I’ve been doing,” the man said, “Whether it's right or wrong, wicked or just. You’ll just stare straight ahead, no matter what I do. If I’m good to you and evil to them or evil to you and good to them, it doesn’t matter. You just stare on ahead, never moving, never speaking.”

The man was growing agitated, his fists balling beside him as he flushed with rage. He caught himself this time and forced himself back into the sofa cushions with a few deep breaths.

“It’s not fair,” he said, “But nothing’s fair. So it goes.”

“In other news,” said the anchor in a lighter tone that meant he was going to cheer up the viewer, “Local piano prodigy twins Eric and Simon Garret are scheduled to perform at the White House  next month after their audition tape wowed judges of American Talent. Members of Callo County are invited to a charity concert next week before the boys leave for their rocket ship tour of the United States, where the Garret twins will perform selections of Mozart, Liszt, and Beethoven. All proceeds will be split between the Garret Boys and the Callo Foundation for the Arts. Don't miss out!"

The channel cut to a video of two boys no more than ten years old seated at identical grand pianos. The children were hammering out a complicated piece of classical music with soul-crushing beauty and accuracy. The camera shot cut in close on the boys' faces, panning back and forth to show just how identical the twins were. The music stirred sorrow from the man's soul – sorrow that, once it surfaced, quickly oxidized and fermented into rage.

The news station transitioned to an interview with the boys' father, a mustached man whose eyes sparkled with pride as he talked about the innate interest his sons had displayed in music.

The man, who had picked up the first sheet of sandpaper, now crumpled it brutally in his fist. He rose slowly to his feet, his chest heaving with the force of his loathing.

“That,” he grunted, letting the sandpaper fall to the floor as he stretched out a finger to point at the television screen, “That’s really not fair.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

At 7:55 the following morning, Eve and Thompson were in the office of Dr. Duquesne. The office was plush and richly furnished. A floor-to-ceiling bookshelf covered the southern wall behind the desk, and a massive window looked out over a maintained lawn to the north. The desktop clock ticked away the seconds on a thin, spindly gold hand.

The doctor was not in.

The agents had arrived early, well before the suite of medical offices were scheduled to officially open. Getting inside had been no problem. All Eve had to do was show her badge to the janitor pushing his cart through the lobby, and they were ushered politely and somewhat fearfully through the darkened offices. The janitor had told them that the medical staff usually arrived around eight, but the offices didn’t open until nine.

The agents waited in the doctor’s private office, silent, preparing to ambush the unexpecting physician. Dr. Duquesne – or Dr. Absolem, or whoever this person turned out to be – might turn and flee upon finding the agents in her office, Eve thought. Only running on a few hours of unsettled sleep herself, Eve hoped there wouldn’t be a chase.

The second hand described another circle around the clock. The agents waited in perfect silence. The tension in the office was palpable.

“Do you think she’ll show?” Thompson asked, turning to glance at Eve over her shoulder. “Maybe the janitor tipped her off that there were a couple of feds poking around her office. Who knows how big this illegal pharma ring is.”

“You may have a point,” Eve replied, steepling her fingers thoughtfully in front of her lips. She was seated in the doctor’s chair behind the desk, leaning on her elbows with her eyes trained on the door. “Still, if this Dr. Absolem-Duquesne person is somehow involved in the pill scheme, this office would be her home base. I think we should wait it out a little longer.”

"You think she'll come in shooting like Cartwright did?" Thompson asked, fidgeting subconsciously with the flap of her blazer as her hand itched towards her weapon.

“Don’t get jumpy,” Eve warned, eyeing her partner’s hand, “Remember, this woman’s a doctor and we’re in a medical office. If she does own a gun, I’d bet that it’s right…here,” Eve grunted as she pulled open the right-hand desk drawer, then smiled with satisfaction as her eyes fell on a small pearl grip revolver. She held it up for Thompson to see.

“Curious thing to find in a doctor’s office,” Thompson commented.

“Not if she’s writing dirty scrips," Eve said, checking the safety before carefully slipping the pistol into her own pocket and shutting the drawer again. "She's got to have some kind of defense in case an addict comes after her at work."

“Do you think she could be a suspect in Selma Vishni’s case?” Thompson asked, her eyes still trained on the desk drawer where the gun had been. Eve thought about it for a moment, then shook her head.

"No, both Macey and Vishnu were strangled," she said, "The bruising to the neck suggests large hands, probably masculine. That gun is designed and shaped for a small-handed person and probably a last line of defense for somebody with an otherwise non-violent disposition – hence the 'prettying-up' of the pearl grip. She doesn't like to look at the gun and dreads the idea of using it, but is too afraid of her circumstances not to keep it around. This is somebody who will probably try to outwit us or flee before she opts for violence.”

“I’m glad you feel so confident,” Thompson said, sounding less assured.

“Shh!” Eve hissed suddenly, her ears pricking up and her muscles tensing. Through the door of the office, the agents could hear the soft, repetitive squeak of rubber-soled shoes on the floor of the hall.

The agents held their breath, rooted to the spot, as the doorknob of the office turned. The door opened, and a salt-and-pepper-haired woman wearing a knee-length white medical overcoat and half-moon spectacles came into the room, her nose buried in the pages of a manilla file.

Before Eve could do anything to stop her, Thompson pulled her Glock from the holster under her arm and leveled it at the doctor. The safety was off, and her finger was on the trigger.

“Hold it right there, Doc,” Thompson demanded, brandishing the gun at the woman’s astonished face, “No sudden movements. We’ve got you covered.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

"Okay!" Eve planted her hands on the desk, raising her voice to the tone of command she'd only ever used in the Marine Corps, "Nobody moves! Everybody just takes it easy."

The room froze. The eyes of both Thompson and the doctor were fixed on Eve. Eve turned her stare back and forth between the doctor and Thompson.

One heartbeat passed. Eve grimaced at the two.

“Close the door,” Eve said.

The doctor obeyed, moving like a marionette on tangled strings.

“Who…” the doctor stammered, stooping to pick up the file she’d dropped and glancing back and forth at the two suited women in her office. “Who are you?”

“Doctor Absolem?” Eve asked.

“You’re not…” the woman started, taken aback by the name. “Who told you where to find me?”

“Don’t worry about that,” Eve replied, shifting her eyes to Thompson, who was still holding her pistol with white-knuckle intensity. “Thompson, holster your weapon.”

Thompson looked at Eve as if she were speaking a foreign language.

“Now,” Eve implored, raising her eyebrows.

Slowly, as if waking up from a dream, Thompson lowered her Glock.

“Of course,” she said, shaking her head and muttering as if speaking to herself, “Of course, of course.”

She tucked the Glock away in the holster. Eve cocked her head at her partner but refrained from commenting. She turned her stare on the doctor, who was standing like a petrified statue with her back against the door.

“I’m Special Agent Hope,” Eve said, standing up slowly and coming around the desk. “This is my partner, Special Agent Thompson. You, I presume, are Doctor Duquesne.”

Now, the woman pinned the door and looked double disoriented.

“Who…Who are you?” she asked again, squinting back and forth between the agents.

“FBI,” Eve answered, “And I think you’ve got the answers we need. Here, why don’t you take a seat?”

Standing aside, Eve gestured to the chair she herself had just vacated – half because it would put the doctor at ease to sit in her own chair and half because the desk would separate her from the door.

With the same halting, jerky motions, the grey-haired woman moved to her desk and sank into her chair. She placed her hands palms down on the surface of the desk as if testing that it was still real.

“What…what can I do for you?” the doctor asked haltingly.

“Answers, Doc,” Eve said, “We need answers. You’re not going to like giving them to us, but we need them anyway.”

“What’s this about?” the doctor asked nervously, “Is this about one of my patients? Or my practice?”

“You tell us,” Thompson said, pulling one of Vishni’s pill bottles out of her pocket and placing it on the desk in front of the frightened doctor. "Do you know the name on this prescription label?"

Hesitatingly, Dr. Duquesne picked up the orange plastic pill bottle and studied the label. She frowned, thought for a moment, then shook her head. It was a pretty good performance, Eve thought. Almost convincing.

“No,” said Dr. Duquesne, setting the bottle back down on the table with a gentle but definitive click. “Sorry, I don’t know her.”

“You’re sure you don’t know Selma Vishni?” Thompson pressed.

“No, I don’t know her,” the doctor snapped, “Is that a crime?”

“That prescription came from your books, Dr. Duquesne,” said Eve, “The dealer you supply with black market pharmaceuticals sold Xanax to Selma Vishni. Now she’s dead.”

“Dead?” the doctor gasped, “Christ! What happened?”

Eve and Thompson looked at each other.

“She was murdered,” Eve said. The look of horror on the doctor’s face looked genuine.

“By whom?”

“We’ve got her drug dealer in custody, but he claims that he was with you the night she died.”

“I don’t know any drug dealers,” said Dr. Duquesne. “If the prescription from my book, it must be either stolen or counterfeit. I run a clean business.”

“You answered to the name Dr. Absolem,” Eve said, studying the woman’s expression carefully, “That’s an interesting moniker – Absolem. That was Lewis Carroll’s all-knowing, hookah-smoking caterpillar, right? Almost as famous among the drug scene as the White Rabbit, isn’t it?”

“How do you know that name?” the doctor asked. She hadn’t admitted that she was Dr. Absolem in so many words, but Eve knew from the expression on the woman’s face that it was her.

“We got it from a friend of yours – a Mr. Floyd Cartwright. Does that name ring any bells?”

The doctor turned a pale shade of green.

“He might be a patient of mine,” she said carefully, “Doctor-patient confidentiality forbids from saying.”

“We didn’t ask for his medical records,” said Thompson, “Anyway, Cartwright already told us everything.”

“Of course, that was after he tried to kill us for snooping around his shed,” Eve added. “The game is over, Duquesne. There are no more moves left to make. You've got a dead customer, your dealer squealed on you, and now you're surrounded. If you help us with our investigation, your case can go a lot smoother."

“Ah, well, I knew I couldn’t outrun this forever,” she said. There was a curious note of resolve in the woman’s voice that made Eve’s skin prickle.

Something was about to happen.

In a flash, Eve realized her mistake. She’d ushered the doctor into her own seat, where she thought the pearl grip revolver was in her reach. Threatened as she was now, she just might do something rash.

Eve saw the fingers of the doctor's right hand drumming nervously on the desktop.

“So, you want to know how I knew Floyd Cartwright?” she asked. The drumming fingers came to a sudden stop.

Don’t do it, Eve thought silently. This isn’t going to work out for you.

The doctor did it anyway. With a sudden yell, Duquesne wrenched open the right-hand drawer of her desk, throwing herself out of the chair as she reached inside and found…

Nothing.

The drawer came out of the desk with a crash, sending pencils and sticky notes flying across the room. Thompson jumped back and yanked her gun out when the doctor made the sudden lunge, pointing the weapon at the prostrate woman, who now held the emptied drawer in both hands with a look of supreme confusion and defeat painted across her aging, careworn face.

Tsk, tsk. Eve clicked her tongue reproachfully, reaching into her pocket and pulling out the pearl grip revolver as she sauntered casually around the desk to gaze down at the trembling doctor. She held the little gun aloft, dangling it from her finger. The light glinted off the white inlay of the handle.

“Looking for something?” Eve asked.

“The hell with you,” the doctor hissed from the floor, “The hell with both of you.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Eve walked out of the interrogation room with a sigh, letting the heavy door swing shut behind her. She hadn’t spent long in the room with Dr. Duquesne. She hadn’t needed to. Once the handcuffs were locked and reality started to sink in, the despairing doctor had come forth with details about the whole operation.

Eve had done the local authorities the courtesy of taking down Dr. Duquesne’s statement, although the information she needed could be contained in a sentence or two. Dr. Duquesne, AKA Dr. Absolem, had indeed been engaged in a meeting with Floyd Cartwright at the time of Selma Vishni’s murder. Everything else, the pharma ring and malpractice charges – that was all the DEA’s problem.

“Good work,” Thompson said, emerging from the observation theater’s door next to that of the interrogation room to clap Eve on the shoulder. “You cracked her like a soft-boiled egg.”

"Thanks," Eve mumbled, "I could use one of them right about now and a huge cup of coffee too. Come on, let's get some breakfast. I need to think this case over again from the top."

“I’m right there with you,” Thompson agreed, falling into step by Eve’s side. “If Cartwright’s alibi checks out, that means we’re back to square one.”

The diner, one of only four or five restaurants in the tiny town of Callo, was a greasy spoon joint with booths along one wall and a breakfast counter hosting a line of vinyl-covered stools. Eve and Thompson sat across from each other in the corner booth as a waitress placed plates of scrambled eggs and mugs of hot coffee in front of them.

“So,” Thomspon said, lifting the steaming mug to her lips and taking a sip, “What’s our next move?”

“Friends and neighbors,” Eve replied after thinking it over a moment. “We go to the victims’ houses and start poking around the neighborhood, find out if their social or professional lives overlapped in any way. There’s got to be something connecting these women, even if it's something as circumstantial as taking the same bus route or shopping at the same supermarket. One way or another, both of these women somehow crossed paths. Where the victims meet, there we find our killer.”

“That’s quite a strategy,” Thompson said, turning the idea over as she dug into her eggs with the tines of her fork and let them drop to the plate again. “I can’t say it’s what I’d do.”

"Oh?" Eve refrained from sighing with impatience, "And what would your next move be if you were running this case."

“I am running this case,” Thompson said, “and I would recommend digging deeper into what we know rather than plunging ahead into what we don’t. We know that the killer strangled and drowned his victims, but we also know that he over-shocked the water in both pools before doing so. The chemical damage to the skin was bad enough that the coroner made note of it in the autopsies. Don’t you think the killer would have been affected too?”

"That's a good point," Eve nodded, "Although the corpses were exposed to the chemicals far longer than the attacker would have been. In both cases, the bodies had been floating in the water for what must have been hours before they were discovered. The killer would only have been exposed to the Shock-Bright for a few minutes."

"True," Thompson conceded, although she hardly seemed to be listening because she went right on planning her investigative tack. "We could run up a list of local urgent care and walk-in clinics, call them up and see if anybody came in within our timeframe with chemical burns consistent with exposure to shock bright.”

"It's a slim shot, but I suppose it's worth a phone call," Eve agreed. "At least it's something to go on."

Just then, Eve’s work phone sounded a succinct alert. She pulled the large device out of her pocket and unlocked the home screen.

“What is it?” Thompson asked through a mouthful of eggs.

"The lab is finally getting back to me with the analysis of fiber I pulled out of the pool at Lion's Hill yesterday. According to this, the fiber is a patented blend of prima cotton only used in C’est Homme shirts.”

“C’est Homme?” Thompson asked.

“It’s a high-end designer line of men’s professional clothes – suits, jackets, shirts, ties, that kind of thing. I bet that white thread came from a men’s plain white C’est Homme dress shirt.”

“So the killer jumped into the pool wearing his clothes?” Thompson followed Eve’s new intel to the logical conclusion. Eve nodded.

"Yeah," she said, sucking her cheek pensively, "That seems more likely than changing into a bathing suit to commit the murder. The attack took place after hours, and the cameras were long since out of commission, so he wouldn't have to worry about looking out of place in his wet clothes. He probably got rid of them as soon as he got home anyway."

“So we check with thrift stores and charity donation centers,” Thompson said, adding to an ever-growing mental list. “Find out if anybody’s been eager to unload a C’est Homme suit or two that smelled like swimming pool chemicals.”

“Don’t you think he would have burned them or thrown them away?” Eve asked, raising her eyebrows. “Unless there’s something about the clothes that he explicitly wants us to find, I doubt a killer would risk putting the suit back in circulation.”

“I still think it’s worth at least a preliminary check,” Thompson insisted. Eve sighed.

“Suit yourself,” she said, “In my experience, for what it’s worth, narcissistic sociopaths don’t tend to be big on the concept of charity.”

“Snippy,” Thompson said with a smile that made Eve’s blood churn with indignation. Eve signaled to the waitress for the check.

“Damn right,” she said, “and while we’re at it, Pliny and Fitzgerald may have appointed you my official babysitter, but that doesn’t mean you’re in charge of this case. You’ve been an agent for – what? A year or two? I’ve been putting away serial killers for nearly ten.”

“I was a professor of Criminology for twelve years,” Thompson protested sternly, “and before that I spent seven years on my PhD thesis.”

“During which I am serving combat tours in Afghanistan and Syria," Eve retorted, staring Thompson squarely in the eye. "As far as the chain of command goes, I'm your ranking officer."

"Be that as it may," Thompson replied, her tone now icy, "This case was assigned to me. This isn't the army, Agent Hope. It's civilian intelligence. I was put in charge of this investigation, not only of the murder case but of keeping you in tow while we search. You may have the arrest record on your side, Agent Hope, but this is my case, and you're working on my time."

Under the table, Eve's fists balled. She took a deep breath. The waitress arrived with the check, and Eve seized it off the table.

“Have it your way,” she said, opening her wallet to drop a few bills on the table before standing up, “It’s your case, and you’re welcome to it. But I still think that if we can’t find the common point between these victims, we’re running the risk of finding another body before we get anywhere near finding the killer.”

Eve started to walk away but stopped and turned back.

“And by the way,” she said, “I wasn’t in the Army. I’m a goddamn Marine.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Eve pulled the car to a stop in front of a trim, well-maintained two-story post-war suburban daydream, right down to the Bermuda grass lawn and white picket fence. The street number over the two-car garage read 3430 – Selma Vishni’s registered address.

Eve got out of the Ford and looked back, waiting for her partner to follow. Thompson was still on the phone with her list of urgent care clinics. Each place they’d called on the drive had been hesitant to divulge patient information, even to assist in a murder investigation.

The rejection and fruitless efforts had left Thompson in a foul mood. Eve could see her snapping at an unknown recipient over the phone through the windshield of the car, although she couldn’t hear her partner’s voice.

Thompson appeared to reach the end of her conversation abruptly. She growled something unintelligible at the phone and threw the car door open.

“Bastards, the whole damned lot of them,” Thompson cursed as she rounded the hood.

“Alright, alright,” Eve said, hesitating with her hand on the latchkey wooden gate in the white picket fence. “Get it out of your system and put your sad face on. The Vishnis are in mourning, but we still need them. If we come in too hot and angry, they might just shut down completely.”

“You’re right, you’re right,” Thompson said, inhaling deeply through her nose and letting it out through her lips in a thin stream. “Thanks, Hope.”

“Anytime,” Eve replied with a nod, pushing the gate open, “Come on, let’s get to work.”

The walkway was a clean, straight path that led up a short, narrow porch. The agents took the steps quietly, and Eve reached out to rap gently but audibly on the door. 

A moment later, the agents heard the sound of soft footsteps approaching from inside the house.

“Who’s there, please?” came the voice from inside the door.

“Is this the Vishni residence?” Eve called out through the door.

"That's right," the voice replied suspiciously. Eve thought it sounded like a man speaking – Selma's husband, Sankar, most likely. "Who are you?"

“Sir, I’m Special Agent Hope with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I’m here with my partner, Special Agent Thompson. Do you have a minute to speak with us?”

There was a moment of silence from behind the door; then, the agents heard the sound of the bolt being slid back and the chain being unlocked. The door opened, and the agents found themselves looking at a tall, broad-shouldered man in his middle fifties with a neatly trimmed beard and deeply somber expression. He wore a simple yet elegant white cotton kurta unbuttoned at the neck. He looked at the agents with a slackened expression.

“This is about my wife?” the man asked, taking a step out onto the front porch but leaving the door open behind him. He spoke with the kind of total exhaustion that comes over people when they’re grieving a close loved one. From somewhere in the house behind him, the agents could hear somebody playing a slow, sad classical ballad on the piano.

“Yes, I’m afraid it is about your wife,” Eve said, “I’m very sorry for your loss. I know this must be a difficult and painful time for you. Thank you for taking the time to speak with us.”

"I already told the police everything I know," the man said without much inflection. "Selma came home from the office at five-thirty. She ate dinner with me and our son, Arijit. He left around eight to visit a friend across town. Around ten o'clock, Selma left the house again. She said she was going swimming."

“And that was the last time you saw your wife?” Eve asked.

"That's right," said Sankar, looking down at the floor of the porch between his bare feet. "The last thing I said to her was, 'Enjoy your swim – watch out for the sharks!' A stupid joke, but they were the last words I would ever get to say to her. It could have been worse, I suppose. At least we hadn't been arguing."

“Did you argue a lot?” Eve asked. The man shook his head.

“No, Agent Hope, we had a good marriage. A very good, strong, loyal marriage,” the man said quickly, almost harshly, “We disagreed now and then, but we always loved each other and our son first.”

There was something about the sudden change in the man’s tone that raised a flag in Eve’s mind. Her eyes narrowed nearly imperceptibly.

“Why didn’t you go swimming with her?” Thompson inquired. The man cocked his head at the blonde agent.

“I prefer to exercise with a Bow-Flex,” he replied coolly.

“What about your son?” Thompson followed up.

“He swims, but he didn’t go with her that night either. Selma said she wanted to swim alone.”

“Alone?” Eve asked, “Did that strike you as unusual?”

“Not very,” Sankar replied, “She was a deeply independent woman. She ran her own business because she couldn’t stand having a boss or taking orders. She did a lot of her exercise alone, not just swimming but running, biking, cross-fit, whatever struck her fancy.”

“Was your wife regularly in the practice of swimming after hours at the athletic club?” Eve asked.

“Yes, but only recently,” Sankar said.

“How recently?”

“A month, maybe two,” Sankar answered after a moment’s thought. “Our Arijit has been swimming for the Lion’s Hill competitive swim team for several years, but recently Selma told me that she’d worked out some kind of arrangement with the club so that she could have the pool to herself for an hour or so around midnight to work out.”

"Do you know who she might have worked that arrangement out with?" Eve asked. Sankar glanced around the neighborhood uncomfortably as if to ensure that nobody was eavesdropping, then turned and held out his arm towards the open door.

“Why don’t you come inside and sit down,” he offered, adding under his breath, “I don’t need to air this all out on the front lawn. Too many of the neighbors prefer spying over basic cable.”

“Of course, thank you,” Eve said, ducking through the doorway. As she entered the house, the classical music continued to swell. Sankar Vishni shut the door and walked quickly past the agents, pausing briefly in the living room, where Eve saw a tall, lean boy no more than seventeen seated at a baby grand piano.

The boy's hands were moving, slowly yet powerfully, across the keys of the piano, coaxing heart-wrenching chords and melancholic melodies from the strings of the instrument. For a moment, all the adults watched in serene awe of the boy's musical sorrow.

“Arijit, hold on a moment,” the man called out at last, causing the boy to stiffen up and whirl around. His large, dark eyes flickered from the faces and outfits of the newcomers to his father.

“What’s going on?” the boy asked.

“These people are from the FBI. They have a few more questions about Amma. I’m going to speak with them in the kitchen. Why don’t you go up to your room for a little while?”

“Okay, Appa,” the boy said, getting up from the piano stool and nodding to the agents respectfully before darting silently up the stairs. Eve watched as he disappeared around the corner of the landing of the second floor.

“Nice boy,” Eve said with a friendly smile, which Sankar managed to return.

"Yes, Arijit is a good boy. He's top of his class in high school, and he's in the fastest heat for both butterfly and breaststroke for the swim team. He's been accepted into Brown University this coming fall, with scholarships for both music and swimming. We're – that is, I'm very proud of him. I'm very worried about what losing his mother at a time like this will do to him."

"It's not easy to lose a parent at any time," Eve agreed sympathetically as Sankar ushered them into the kitchen and bade them sit down at a small wooden table. A wicker basket of fruit with a sympathy card tied to the handle sat untouched in the cellophane in the center of a circular table

“Can I get you anything?” Sankar asked, moving somewhat anxiously around the kitchen and looking as if he didn’t quite know what to do with his hands. “Coffee? Tea? Water?”

"Coffee would be great if it isn't too much trouble," Thompson said.

Sankar picked up a coffee pot from the warmer beside the microwave, still about half full, and fetched down two mugs from the cupboard. He poured coffee for the agents and brought out cream and sugar, which he left on the table. The agents thanked him, and Thomson added cream to her mug as he returned the pot to the warmer. Eve sipped her coffee black.

“Mr. Vishni,” she said, looking up as the man returned to join the agents at the table. “We were starting to discuss the arrangement your wife had with the Lion’s Hill Athletic Club – could you illuminate us on that at all?”

“I wish I could,” the man said, “She didn’t tell me much about it herself, just that she’d worked something out some kind of deal with the athletic club. When I asked for more details, she just told me that she was too tired for a long explanation and that I had nothing to worry about. I guess hindsight makes fools of us all.”

Clearing her throat discreetly, Eve leaned forward on her elbows, tenting her fingers over the coffee mug.

“Is it all possible that Selma was going to meet up with somebody at the pool?” she asked delicately, “Perhaps a swimming partner or a friend? Somebody that she didn’t want to mention to you or your son?”

Sankar eyed the agents suspiciously.

“What are you insinuating?” he asked flatly.

“Mr. Vishni,” Eve said in an empathetic tone, subtly changing her tack without altering her empathetic inflection, “Are you aware that your wife was taking Xanax the night she died?”

“Not specifically,” he replied, his remaining pinned on Eve’s, “I know that she took Xanax sometimes. It was prescribed to treat her anxiety. Was she abusing it?”

“We believe so, unfortunately,” Eve replied gravely, “Her ‘prescription’ was phony, and she was buying it regularly from a dealer at the athletic club.”

"At Lion's Hill?" the man shouted, springing to his feet with the passion of his outrage, "Unbelievable! I'm going to throw that club into the ground! Just wait until I get my hands on that Harding!"

The agents paused, looking first at each other, then back at Sankar. The bearded man seemed to have heard the way his words sounded after they came out of his mouth because he sat back down quickly and eyed the agents with a somewhat embarrassed expression.

“I don’t mean that literally, of course,” he said, “But somebody has to be held responsible for what happened to my Selma. All those late-night swims…”

“Who is Harding?” Eve asked. Sankar chewed his lower lip as if he didn’t want to answer right away, then shook his head.

“He’s the head coach of my son’s swim team and kind of a bigshot on the club’s board of directors,” the man replied at last.

“A man of wealth and status?” Thompson asked, chiming in on Eve’s line of question. Sankar frowned.

"Selma seemed to think so," he grumbled, "but I never saw what was so great about him. What, just because he coaches a swim team for prep schoolers in his spare time, that makes him a saint? No, no. All that tells me is that he doesn't have enough to keep him busy while the rest of us are at work."

“Maybe he does,” Eve said, “If he’s in a position to let Selma use the pool after hours, maybe he knew something about the drug purchases too.”

"Mr. Vishni, do you know where we could find this, Mr. Harding?" Thompson asked.

"I sure do," Sankar nodded vehemently, getting up from the table and finding a notepad on the kitchen counter. He picked up a pen and scribbled down the address. "That prick never lost an opportunity to show off his big fancy trust-fund house. He hosted swim team dinners there all the time."

“Thank you, Mr. Vishni,” Eve said, “You’ve been very helpful.”

"Glad to help," he muttered absently, adding half to himself, "I swear if I find out that walking sunscreen commercial laid a hand on my wife…" Sankar said, shaking his head and wisely leaving the threat unfinished.

 “Do you think we should be worried about Mr. Vishni going after this Harding person?” Thompson asked as they walked down the path and through the white picket gate.

“Nope,” Eve said, briskly crossing the street toward the car, “because we’re going to pick him up first, and he’s not going to leave our sight until we’re sure he’s innocent.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“Woah,” Eve said, pulling the Ford to a stop in front of a tall, mechanized gate barring the entrance of a long, smoothly paved driveway and peeling the sunglasses from her face.

The house beyond was a sloping, glass-faced new-age megalith, a testament to post-modern architectural design. Cloistered in a manicured paradise of lawns, trees, and blooming floral shrubs, the house looked like an enormous glass teardrop jutting to point in the sky. The peak of the spire appeared to be made of gold.

“Some house,” Thompson said, “Vishni wasn’t exaggerating about the trust fund.”

The eyes of both agents fell on the digital keypad, which stood on a post beside the gate. There was, as Eve could see, an intercom built into it.

"What do you say?" Thompson asked, gesturing with her chin in the direction of the intercom, "Do we try our luck and ask to be buzzed in? If he's guilty or skittish, he might make a run for it or simply refuse to open the gate."

“That’s a chance we’ll have to take. It’s better than going over the fence like thieves,” Eve said, eyeing the unfriendly points on the tips of the iron rods of the gate. She pulled the car a little closer to the standing keypad and rolled her window down.

"Here goes nothing," she said and reached out to press the call button on the keypad.

There was a quiet buzzing sound.

For a moment, nothing happened. Eve tried the buzzer again, this time giving the button a gentle double-tap. This time, a voice came on the line.

“Yeah? Who is it?” the voice that came through the little speaker in the box sounded masculine and annoyed.

“Mr. Harding?” Eve inquired.

“That’s right,” the voice replied, somewhat suspiciously, “What do you want?”

"A few minutes of your time, Mr. Harding," Eve replied. She couldn't see a security camera anywhere, but she gave a friendly smile anyway. A house like this was likely to have multiple layers of covert security in place. "We've got a few questions about a friend of yours – Selma Vishni."

There was another pause. The silence was tense. Eve looked over at Thompson, who raised her eyebrows as if to say, "Moment of truth."

Then, with a smooth grinding of unseen mechanisms, the gate began to open. Eve let out her breath with relief.

“Come on in. We’ll talk it over inside,” said the voice over the intercom, no longer sounding annoyed.

"Thanks," Eve replied earnestly and rolled her window back up as she eased the car forward. She nosed up the massive driveway and parked behind a convertible Audi R8, which in turn was parked behind a vintage Lamborghini Countach. The spiral driveway made it impossible to block the cars in.

“He’s certainly got expensive taste,” Thompson commented as she undid her seatbelt and sprung the passenger door open.

“Gawdy and pretentious, in my opinion,” Eve replied.

“The house or the cars?”

“Yes.”

The intricately etched glass door of the house opened as the agents started to walk up the front steps. They found themselves looking at a well-built man in his late thirties. He was roughly 5'8", Eve estimated, broad-shouldered and lean, with a stubble growing back on his shaved head in a horseshoe pattern of baldness. His skin was tan and smooth as if he spent many hours engaged in outdoor leisure, as opposed to the leathery tan one acquires through hard labor in the sun. He wore expensive sunglasses on top of his head.

“Pleased to meet you,” the man said, coming down the front steps of the massive house to shake both agents by the hand, “I’m Mitchell Harding. I assume you must be with the police if you’re investigating Selma Vishni.”

“In a manner of speaking,” Eve said, getting out her badge and showing it to the bald athlete. “Agent Hope, FBI. This is my partner, Agent Thompson. We’re investigating the murder of Selma Vishni as well as Pamela Macey.”

"Selma, I knew," the man said, turning to lead the agents back up the stairs and into the grand foyer of his glass mansion. "A terrible tragedy when I heard it on the news, but I'm afraid I don't see how it's related to Pamela."

"First, why don't you tell us about how you knew Selma? Then, we'll talk about Pamela," Eve suggested, a note of stolid impassiveness in her tone, not letting herself appear impressed or intimidated by the grandiosity of the extravagant wealth around her.

“I coached her son, Arijit, on the Lion’s Hill swim team,” the man said, leading them through an organically shaped doorway and into a kitchen. A circular glass table was positioned in front of a floor-to-ceiling window that overlooked a personal waterfall that spilled into a pool in the backyard. Harding seated himself with his back to the window. The afternoon sun made him somewhat silhouetted as the agents seated themselves at the table across from him.

“He’s a skilled athlete, and his parents were friendly, social, successful people. I knew them both, but no more than any of the other team's parents. Selma was more involved than Sankar, but I didn't see either of them much outside the swim team context."

“Much?” Eve raised her eyebrows in Harding’s direction.

“I saw Selma once or twice in a business setting. I sit on the board of the Callo Chamber of Commerce, and Selma Vishni was applying for membership. If I remember correctly, she owns and manages her own private real estate firm.”

“When did she apply for membership?”

“Must have been a couple of months ago now.” Harding said with a shrug, “The review process isn’t exactly speedy. There was some tension – more so before the President, Mr. Reaves, left town. Things have been a little scattered around the Chamber.” 

“What happened with her application?” Thompson asked, “Was she approved for membership?”

“We never reached a final decision. We were slated to vote on it next week. I knew I was going to vote for her. Her business is successful by any means, and she’s got a real mind for marketing – had, I mean. Damn.”

“It sounds like you knew her a little more than the other swim team parents,” Eve said. Harding faltered and smiled uncomfortably.

“Not really,” he said, “I got to know most of the parents pretty well. Some were more talkative than others, sure, but that’s just human nature. I only know about Selma’s business acumen through the Chamber of Commerce.”

“Did you buy your house through her real estate agency?” Thompson asked. Harding looked at her, then laughed patronizingly.

"This place?" he said, still chuckling, "No, this place is one hundred percent custom designed by an architectural expert from Japan. We spent a week in a sweat lodge together, drawing up the blueprints together. The design was inspired by a dream long ago. It was never listed on the market."

“I see,” Eve said, looking around at the grandeur of the glasswork around them. “Very impressive, Mr. Harding,” she said, not sounding impressed at all, “Custom laser etching, smart-ecosystem equipped, and was that a Rothko I saw on the wall?”

“Good eye,” Harding said with an oily smile, “What can I say? I’ve always had a taste for the finer things -- present company included, of course.”

Eve hid her disgust at the comment as well as she masked her disdain for the house.

“What about C’est Homme luxury wear?” she asked. “Is that among the list of finer things you enjoy?” 

“C’est Homme?” he cocked his head, “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“We’ll ask the questions, thank you,” Eve said coolly. “How about it, Harding? You got any C’est Homme shirts hanging in your closet?”

"Right. Well, uh, I'm not exactly sure off-hand. You'd have to check. It's a deep closet. Walk-in doesn't really communicate it. Journey-in is more like it," the man boasted, "Come on, let's take a look.

Getting up, Harding led the way out of the kitchen and to a semi-spiral glass staircase.

“This way to the master suite,” the man said with an alluring inflection. Eve and Thompson rolled their eyes at each other. Harding sounded as if he’d made this exact speech countless times while ushering women through his expensive home and to his bedroom.

“Keep an eye on him,” Eve muttered to Thompson, taking her partner’s arm to pause her before they started up the stairs, “I’ve got a funny feeling about this guy. Only one at a time in the closet, alright? Try not to pull your gun unless he does something risky, but be on your guard.”

“Copy that,” Thompson replied, “After you.”

Eve hoofed it up the glass staircase. The handrail was on the inside, with the steps floating in terrifying free space over the living room. She could see the ground through the stairs beneath her, growing smaller and smaller with every step. It was a disorienting experience, like climbing straight up in the air.

Harding stood at the top of the stairs, which opened into a large, sunlit loft. The ceiling and walls were combined in an abstract whoosh of glass panels that made up the peak visible from outside.

The bed, centered against the far wall, was unmade. The floor was scattered with loose socks and rumpled t-shirts.

“Sorry about the mess,” Harding said, leading the agents quickly to yet another glass door made opaque with laser etchings. “I wasn’t expecting any company.” He opened the door and held his hand out, ushering the agents to search the closet freely.

“I’ll take a look,” Eve said, glancing back at Thompson. Her partner nodded wordlessly, hanging back where she could keep both Eve and Harding in her field of vision.

Eve stepped into the closet, finding the button-switch inside the door and turning on the soft, moody overhead lights.

The man had not been lying about the depth of his closet, Eve thought – not that it made his boasting any more tolerable. The closet extended back into a long, narrow hallway that opened in a short T against the back wall, each side of the hallway lined with hanging suits and racks of shoes. The floor was covered with a material similar to that of an oriental rug, although it was spread wall to wall.

The clothes didn’t appear to be arranged in any kind of order that Eve could identify. She wandered back through the seemingly endless racks of hangers, her eyes flashing over articles of clothing of every cut, color and material imaginable.

In the back corner of the closet, nestled in the left arm of the T, Eve found a group of white silk dress shirts all hanging together. She pulled the first one off the rack and studied the tag.

“Fifth Avenue,” she muttered, returning the shirt to its rack and picking up the next. She made her way through five or six shirts this way before she found what she was looking for.

“C’est Homme,” Eve said to herself, clenching the shirt in her fist. She plucked through the next few shirts, all of which were made by the same designer brand. As she pulled the fourth C’est Homme shirt back on the rack, she halted.

She was looking at an empty hanger.

Eve checked the shirt next shirt beyond the vacant space. It was still C’est Homme.

 “Well, well, well,” Eve said, emerging from the deep closet with the white silk shirt in one hand and the empty hanger in the other, “It so happens that you own several C’est Homme shirts, Mr. Harding.”

Eve looked at Thompson, who was standing by with her hands resting on her hips. She raised her eyebrows questioningly at Eve, who held up the empty hanger and pinned her eyes on the nervous coach.

“You also happen to be missing one,” Eve said, cocking her head inquisitively at Harding. “Any idea what became of the shirt that belongs on this hanger?”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“Well?” Eve demanded, “What happened to the shirt? Answer up, Harding!”

"Woah, hey, now hold on a minute," Harding held up his hands defensively, taking a subconscious step back from Eve, who was brandishing the shirt and hanger at him like weapons. "I don't know where you got that hanger or what shirt was supposed to be on it, so I can't give you an answer. I don't have assigned hangers for my shirts – who would do that?"

Eve paused. The man was right, and the shock on his face looked genuine but not frightened. He looked back at her with his eyebrows raised and his palms up, his mouth slack.

"Well, from the way it looked in the closet, you appear to be missing one of your white dress shirts,” Eve said, the wind somewhat luffing in her sails.

Thompson stepped forward and took the shirt from Eve’s left hand, studying the tag inside the collar.

“This is a C’est Homme,” Thompson said, looking up at Eve.

“It’s a C’est Homme that’s missing, as far as I can reckon,” she replied.

“Everyone wears C’est Homme,” the man protested, quickly amending, “anybody with enough money and taste for it, that is.”

“How many people in the town of Callo have enough taste and money for a C’est Homme shirt?” Thompson asked.

“Come on,” Harding said, “Callo’s not that small a town. There’s got to be at least a hundred people with this same shirt within a hundred-mile radius of here. We’re getting more executive by the day.” He shrugged. “That’s why I’ve been investing in coffee, clothing retailers, and multi-plex real estate.”

“Is that how you knew Selma Vishni?” Eve asked, seizing quickly on the new information, “Were you working together on any real estate business deals?”

“We were, as a matter of fact,” Harding replied, who looked grateful to off the topic of his wardrobe. “It was nothing major. She came across an old Victorian that had been converted into a four-apartment complex. We were working out an ADU construction arrangement to make it a six-unit complex using one of my contracting companies, and then I was going to buy the property to rent out. It was all above board. I’m sure there are detailed records of our plans in Selma’s office.”

“I see,” Eve replied, “And where were you the night before last?”

Harding blinked.

“You don’t think I had anything to do with Selma’s death, do you?” he asked in a shocked, almost offended tone. “She was in the middle of making me a lot of money with that real estate deal. Why would I kill her?”

“Just answer the question, Mr. Harding,” Thompson advised. “Where were you the night before last?”

"Well, I was here," the man said, giving the agents another helpless shrug, "I came home from coaching the swim team around eight, had dinner, then watched television for about an hour. After that, I went to bed."

"Is there anybody that could corroborate that story, Mr. Harding?" Eve's tone was as impassive as the steel blade of a butcher knife. The man seemed to shrink back into himself. His lips pressed into a tight line, and he shook his head.

“I’m afraid not,” he said, “I was here alone all night.”

“This is an expensive property,” Eve said, “You’ve got a nice gate and intercom system out front. You probably spent a good deal of money on security systems, right?”

“Sure,” the man replied uncertainly, “I guess. I mean, I’ve got an alarm system with door sensors.”

“Any security cameras?” Eve asked.

“Cameras?” Harding shook his head again, “Sorry, Agent Hope. No cameras. We live in enough of a surveillance state as it, the way I see it.”

“Uh huh,” the FBI agent replied flatly, “Well, that’s too bad. Cameras could have gone a long way towards verifying your alibi.”

“What about the gate?” Thompson asked. Both Eve and Harding looked over at her with uncomprehending expressions.

“What about it?” Eve asked.

“How sophisticated is the system?” Thompson asked, bulleting a penetrating stare in Harding’s direction, “Does it give you alerts when the gate is opening and closing?”

“Yeah,” Harding replied cautiously, “It sends a notification to my phone.”

"Which means that the gate's operating system, at some point along the way, keeps track of when the gate is opening and closing?" Thompson continued her line of reasoning, her gaze still pinned on the nervous-looking man.

“I suppose so,” he said, “I’ve never thought to look.”

“Well, I think we’d better take a look now,” Eve said, catching on to what Thompson was driving at.

“How come?” Harding asked, and now he definitely looked worried. He was beginning to break out in a sweat. The dome of his bald head glistened under the late afternoon sunlight that shone down through the glass ceiling.

“To verify your alibi, of course," Eve said, "If the gate keeps a record of when it opens and shuts, then we should be able to pinpoint when you were coming and going from your house. You said you were alone all night, so the only person coming and going by the gate would be you. If you came home around eight-thirty and stayed in all night, then the gate should show that it opened and shut exactly once."

The man’s eyes shifted back and forth between the agents. He suddenly looked as if he’d swallowed a lemon.

“What’s the matter, Mr. Harding?” Eve asked, “You should be relieved. The archival record of a home security system is more credible to your alibi than an eyewitness.”

“Warrant,” Harding murmured half under his breath.

“What was that?” Eve asked.

“You don’t have a warrant for my gate records, do you?” Harding asked. His expression had suddenly gone completely blank. He looked at the agents as if he’d just asked them if they knew when the next bus was scheduled to arrive. Had she heard him right? Eve wondered.

“Uh, no,” she said, shaking her head to clear it, “No, Mr. Harding, we don’t have a warrant.”

“Are you suggesting that we need one?” Thompson asked.

“Yeah,” Harding said, not sounding very sure himself but sticking with the decision he’d made, “That’s right. Come back with a warrant. Until then, I don’t have to say or give you anything.”

“Are you sure this is the path of action you want to pursue, Mr. Harding?” Eve asked, “If your story is true, you have nothing to fear.”

“Come back with a warrant,” Harding repeated, “I’ll come back with my lawyer. Until then, my lips are sealed. I’ll thank you to leave me alone now. Good night, agents.”

“You’re leaving us with very little choice,” Eve warned.

“And you’re simply leaving,” Harding replied, raising his hand to gesture towards the stairs.

Eve looked at Thompson, who gave her a subtle, solemn nod.

“Mitchel Harding,” Eve said, turning back on the indignant man and freeing the handcuffs from the back of her belt beneath the tails of her blazer, “You’re under arrest for the suspected murder of Selma Vishni.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Then the sun sank.

The man was alone – alone at last.

Cindy was in front of the television. Her paint was dry, the scar now almost completely invisible. She was smiling quietly at the brilliant repetition of theme, scene, commercial break – theme, scene, commercial break.

In other words, the man’s world was turning as usual. 

The man was in the garage, standing before the uncarved block. In his left hand, he held a chisel. In his right, a hammer hung heavy and potent, waiting to swing, to chip away the fragments of wood that were not his son, leaving only the shape that was.

Over the uncarved block, a single lightbulb burned in an isolated socket. A pull chain dangled unceremoniously over the workbench. The only other light in the room came flickeringly from an old television set hooked up in the corner of the garage. Connected to it by a mess of thick black cables was an even older VCR machine.

The man only owned one VCR tape, and that tape was the only reason he still kept the VCR around. If it weren’t for that tape, he would have long ago traded in the player for something more modern, like the Smart TV in the living room. But the VCR tape was a physical memory, and the man knew it was his sacred duty to remember.

If he didn’t, who would?

The tape was plugged into the VCR player now, and the well-known footage was playing. The man stood with the tools hanging down by his sides, his eyes fixed not on the screen of the television but on the uncarved block before him.

The man had seen the footage on the tape so many times that each frame was burned vividly, viscerally into his memory. He knew every song on the setlist, every audio marker, every fragment of dialogue. He knew the scenes, knew the pacing and timing of the entire cassette.

As the tape started, he knew the recording of Iz singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow would be accompanied by a title screen. The man knew without looking what the elegantly scrawling script on the lavender background would say.

Edison Reaves and Cynthia Leowald are joined today – August the Seventh in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Four – in holy and joyful matrimony.

As the man gazed at his uncarved block, he heard the next segment following the title card. This, he saw in the perfect recollection, would be a cute, homey shot of Cindy in the bridal suite, getting ready alongside her bridesmaids. It would have been bad luck for the man to see this before the wedding, but the man had been too busy with his own wedding preparations to think about the videotape.

He could hear the tittering giggles of the bridesmaids, and he knew that the cameraman – Cindy’s Aunt Alberta with her vintage video camera, of course, the old coot – was making her way through the bridal suite for a close-up as the bride finished her makeup.

“Watch out, girls, watch out,” Aunt Alberta’s croaky voice on the tape was as familiar to the man now as his own, “Make way for an old lady to shoot some pretty pictures. There now, don’t you look stunning?”

The man turned his head and looked at the screen. He couldn’t resist the opportunity to look into his wife’s face as she’d been only moments before they’d married. The rosy-cheeked anticipation, the shameless glamor, the bridal glow – the man thought Cindy looked as beautiful and alive in that video as he’d ever seen her in person. If there was one frame he would like to remember her as forever and always, it was that one when she first looked up into Aunt Alberta's camera.

“Go on, now, Auntie,” Cindy said with a beautiful smile and laugh like gentle wind through silver chimes, “Your camera looks more like a bazooka! I’ve heard of shotgun weddings, but really!”

The other bridesmaids laughed. Aunt Alberta laughed. The man laughed too, a strange guffaw that chortled up from his diaphragm and escaped like a lizard from hot tar.

The scene on the television changed, cutting to a man popping a champagne cork. The man looked away from the screen again quickly, the smile falling off his face. The next scene, featuring himself and the groomsmen wallowing in their post-stag party jocularity, was the man’s least favorite.

The man recalled with distaste that bachelor party night. There had been alcohol, drugs, clubs, cars, and strippers – a hedonistic blur which the man remembered – gratefully – in essence rather than in detail. He hadn’t gone as far as to cheat on his betrothed the night before their nuptials, but there had been far more debauchery than he cared to mention or even think about. Cindy never found out about any of it.

As far as the man knew, she was still clueless.

The man’s jaw clenched with self-loathing, violent outrage at bygone times without means of rectification. Baring his teeth, the man lifted his tools and made the first swing. The hammer connected with the butt of the chisel, shaving a long strip of wood away from the block.

For the next hour, two hours, through the evening and into the night, the man worked. Wood chips flew around him, catching in his hair and sticking to his lips as he pounded the hammer into the chisel, pounded the chisel into the wood, pounded the wood into the shape of the boy that would have been.

It wasn't hard, as the man worked the wood away, splinter by splinter, to picture Cindy's face. He’s spent countless hours staring into her eyes when she was alive.

He’d spent perhaps even longer remembering that face in wooden form after the accident.

The harder task would be recalling the shape and features of his own face. It had been a long time since the man had removed all the mirrors from his house. The sight of himself alone – aging away, changing into someone who could not be recognized as the man on the VCR tape – was unbearable.

It didn’t matter, the man knew. He wasn’t carving his face as it looked now. He wasn’t carving his face at all, at least not in any literal sense.

The face that he carved had to be a blend of his own and Cindy’s, just the way their son's face would have resembled features in both of them. The faces of the bride and groom would serve as models, the memory of parents as real as the projection of progeny.

As the man was gently, lovingly, carefully carving out his wooden son’s eye socket, he slipped with the chisel and gauged his thumb.

The man didn't react but simply stared at his thumb as the blood appeared and began to run, gushing down into his palm.

“Live, memory of life, life of memories. Live with my blood and her love.”

Using his bleeding thumb, the man smeared a crude impression of eyes, nose, and lips across the roughly hewn face emerging from the wood.

“Live from me and live for me,” the man said, looking into the red eyes. As they stared blankly back, the blood with which they were painted began to drip down the round cheeks.

“There, there,” the man cooed consolingly, reaching his arms around the still uncarved lower section of the block as if hugging the bloody weeper by the shoulders, “Don’t cry now, son. I know that it hurts, and I know that it’s hard, but you’ve got to be strong. You’ve to be resilient. You’ve got to remember. It’s not fair, but nothing’s fair. That’s the world we live in. Somebody brought me into it just like I brought you – carved me out of wood, made me hard and strong. I didn’t have any say in the matter, just like you don’t. You just got to learn how to live with it, how to bear it, and above all, how to remember.”

The man pulled back, grinning at the painted face.

“Alright?” he said, giving the block a friendly thump on the sharp wooden corner that would soon be a shoulder. He smiled. “That’s my boy. You stay here a minute while I go get cleaned up.”

The man left the garage without turning off the light, hurrying down the hallway towards the kitchen. He ran his hand under the sink, letting the water wash away the blood. When it was clean, the man dried and dressed the wound, bandaging it with an adhesive Band-Aid from the first aid kit under the sink.

From the living room, the man could hear that the soap opera had once again changed over the late-night news broadcast. The weather anchor was on, forecasting moderate cloud coverage for the following week.

The man stood in the doorway between the kitchen and living room, looking at the rigid figure of his wife seated on the sofa. She hadn’t moved since he’d placed her in front of the television. The man sighed.

"We're going to be parents," the man said, stepping into the living room and going to the ground shyly. "We're going to have a baby boy, Cindy. It'll be just like we always dreamed, just like we talked about. Okay, well, maybe you said you wanted a girl, but those things aren't up to us."

"Oh, Cindy!" the man said, briefly forgetting his sorrows in the pride and joy of fatherhood and throwing himself happily on the sofa next to his motionless wife, "It's going be just like we planned when we took that trip to the Grand Canyon. Remember? That was the trip I proposed to you, remember? I told you that I wanted you to be my wife and that I wanted a family, and you said that you wanted that too. It was the happiest moment of my life until now. Now it's all happening. Now it's all coming true!"

The man fell silent, sinking into his own rapture like a balloon house deflating in on itself. His hand caressed his wife absently.

“Now it’s all going to be true,” he whispered.

“And now, a little something encouraging from your friends here at Chanel 11,” said the news anchor on the television. “We got permission from the father of Callo’s own piano superstars, the Garret twins, to record a rehearsal.”

The smile vanished from the man’s face. He glowered at the television.

“Every damn day with these keyboard kids,” the man grumbled, “We get it, they can play. Enough already, right Cindy?”

Cindy, of course, said nothing.

The news anchor went on, “Now, not all the compositions in the boys’ repertoire will be aired tonight, so make sure to get your tickets for their upcoming concert. In light of the dark times we've been facing here, the Garrets want to share a little musical beauty with all their friends and neighbors. Without further ado, here are the Garret twins performing Concerto No. 2 by Sergei Rachmaninoff.”

“Okay,” the man said quietly, his eyes still focused with laser hatred on the television screen, “No more.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

"Alright, boys," Kirk Garett said, smiling at his twin sons as he rapped his knuckles against the wooden surface of the podium in the otherwise empty cathedral, “Take it from the top. Remember, this is going to be for Mrs. Vishni’s funeral service, so play with feeling.”

The boys, Eric and Simon, turned back to the Steinway grand piano at which they were seated. They were sitting shoulder to shoulder on the piano bench, their little feet barely reaching the pedals, their hands reaching far across the ivory smile of the keys.

Typically, when the Garett boys performed, they played duets on two separate pianos. Haydn and Kapustin trickled effortlessly from their twenty fingertips, and still, the ten-year-olds hardly seemed to recognize the incredible nature of their own abilities.

Perhaps that was for the best, their father thought to himself as the boys prepared to strike the first chords of the piece; they were preparing for Selma Vishni's service. They still played for the love of music, not because they were destined to be famous in the concert halls of the world.

The first notes rang out from the piano, reverberating through the cathedral. Kirk took a seat in the second row of pews, shutting his eyes as he listened. The intricate delicacy of his sons’ playing never ceased to amaze him. They moved their fingers over the keys with flourishes and tremolos that he could never have taught them himself, even though he was a piano instructor by profession.

If musical passion and talent were genetic traits, Kirk thought, they must increase exponentially by generation. The boys were hardly five years old by the time they were mastering his advanced piano curriculum. They were seven years old when the boys composed their first original piece, and by age eight, they'd surpassed his ability entirely. Kirk couldn't be prouder.

Leaning his head back, the piano instructor allowed himself to be carried away by the strains of the music. The piece they were playing now was not an original composition but a nuanced and challenging suite of Liszt. The piece was called Le Mal du Pays – “The Pain of Country." The music was a tender and heart-wrenching portrait of melancholy, homesickness, loss, and alienation – a moving tribute to a woman who had dedicated her life to pairing people and homes together.

Kirk had been shocked and saddened, as most of Callo had been when he learned about the death of Selma Vishni. The death of two women in the little town had made all the headlines, although the authorities were keeping the details pretty hushed up. All that had been said was that both women drowned, and a federal investigation was underway.

The word “murder” hadn’t been published, but that’s what was one everybody’s mind. Was somebody killing off the women of Callo? Who was monstrous enough to do something so horrible? And why?

A clattering thud echoed through the cathedral. Kirk pulled his head up, startled, and looked around. Simon and Eric must have heard the noise as well because they both looked back at their father with identical expressions of surprise. The music came to a sudden halt.

“What was that?” asked Eric.

“Did you fall?” asked Simon.

“No, I was sitting right here,” Kirk called back from the pew, standing up and looking around. There was nothing to be seen. Through the glass doors at the end of the cathedral, the foyer was dark. The sun was long since set, and the janitor had shut off all the lights except the one illuminating the stage at the front of the cathedral.

“Stay where you are, boys,” Kirk called out, giving his sons a wide, reassuring smile. “I’m just going to poke my head out there and make sure everything’s alright. You keep on playing – it sounds great so far! I’ll tell you what it sounds like from the back of the cathedral in a minute when I get back.”

The boys turned, somewhat hesitantly, back to the piano and began to follow their father’s instructions. The cathedral was once again filled with Le Mal du Pays as Kirk stepped out into the center aisle between the pews.

There hadn't been any other noises before or after the clattering crash that had attracted their attention. It was probably a bird that had smacked into the window or a pile of cans losing their balance in an unseen closet somewhere, Kirk told himself as he reached the door into the darkened foyer. There was nothing to be afraid of.

He opened the door.

The piano music, which had been nothing but transcendentally beautiful from the second pew, now sounded eerie as it echoed through the vast emptiness of the cathedral. Kirk took a breath. His long, slender pianist's fingers were still closed around the doorknob.

Kirk poked his head out into the foyer. 

All was silent except the echoes of Liszt. All was dark except the distant glow of the stage lights.

“Hello?” Kirk called out cautiously, “Is there somebody out there? If that was the custodian, we won’t keep you much longer. My sons were just finishing up their piano practice, and…”

A hand shot out of the darkness and seized Kirk by the collar. The hand’s grip was strong. Before he could scream, Kirk felt himself being pulled forward. The door was flung shut behind them.

Liszt came to an abrupt halt.

"No! Stop! Let go!" Kirk managed to yell, slapping at the hand that gripped his shirt in an ineffectual attempt to ward the attacker off. It was no use. The heavy door, which had been slammed shut, was thick, heavy, fire-resistant hardwood. His voice echoed in the vaulted ceiling of the foyer only and whanged back down upon him like fury.

With a flailing effort, Kirk tried to aim a punch at the man who had grabbed him from the darkness. He still couldn’t see the man’s face, nor much beyond the arm and hand that gripped him.

He threw a hook, aiming for where he expected a man's ribcage to be. His knuckles connected painfully with something hard and flat. It felt like punching a piece of wood.

Yowling with pain, Kirk clutched his own knuckles. The hand was still gripping his collar, but he couldn't help himself. The pianist had never even hit a carnival punching bag, let alone another human being. His hands were his livelihood, after all, and besides, Kirk had never been a violent man.

“My sons,” he managed to say, still cradling his wounded fist, “Please, don’t hurt my…”

From the darkness came a voice. It was cool, calm, paternal – not at all the vile voice Kirk expected from the monster veiled in the dark.

“It’s not fair,” said the voice, “is it?”

Something just as hard and unforgiving as the surface that had busted his knuckles came down suddenly on Kirk’s head. There was a split second of outrageous pain, then all was darkness.

Kirk’s consciousness swam back into being drunkenly, spinning like a kaleidoscope, wetter than wet. The world was dark water.

Forte! The world was no air and hard-clamping hands around your throat. The world was your twin sons performing Franz Liszt while you drowned upside down and anguishing.

Mezzo piano. The world was a shallow baptismal pool and cold, dark water.

Kirk, to scream for help, tried to thrash, but his mind seemed to no longer be attached to his body. The command for kick was severed from the bodily instrument.

Pianissimo, an underwater arpeggio of bubbles as your final breath escapes, a gurgling death water with your head at the bottom of the baptism, never to rise again.

The world was death, dead and dying.

Fin.

CHAPTER TWENTY

"Well, the Callo District Attorney's office says the warrant won't get cleared at least until morning," Thompson said, ending her phone call and seating herself across the table from Eve. "We can't go near those gate system archives without it, and Harding isn't saying a word until his lawyer gets here. Given how wealthy our suspect is, I'm guessing the lawyer is going to play hardball. Unless you've got a lead, I don't know about; I don't think there's much we can do except get some sleep and pray the warrant clears first thing in the morning."

"I don't believe in prayer," Eve said absently, staring down at the tumbler of rye whiskey she was swirling gently in her hand. The agents were sitting in a small bar across the street from the motel where they were staying, registered under FBI-sanctioned aliases.

“What do you believe in?” Thompson asked.

“Effort,” Eve replied, “And luck too, I suppose, but you can’t rely on it.”

"I can agree with that," Thompson nodded. They sat in silence for a moment; each plunged deeply into their own thoughts. A frown troubled Thompson's expression.

“Do you really think Harding is our guy?” she asked, breaking the silence. Eve pursed her lips thoughtfully.

“I’m not sure. He wears the right brand of shirt, he had a relatively close relationship with the second victim, and he’s clearly hiding something about the gate records because he lawyered up as soon as we mentioned it. Those are all points in favor of a guilty conscience.”

“And yet?” Thompson prompted, reading Eve’s tone and facial expression with perfect accuracy.

“And yet, my gut tells me that he’s not a killer,” Eve said, “It’s a hunch – nothing more than a feeling, really, but I didn’t pick up on a sense of guilt from him until the gate records came up.”

“What does that say to you?” Thompson asked.

“A killer would be acting from a place of concealed guilt right from the start,” Eve said, “It’s possible that he was putting a charade, of course, in order to dismiss himself from suspicion, but then why would he call in his lawyer at the last minute?”

“Maybe you are noticing the missing shirt took him off guard,” Thompson said.

“Yeah, maybe,” Eve nodded, but her eyes narrowed and she remained unconvinced. Thompson heaved a yawn.

"Things will make more sense in the morning. Once we get ahold of that warrant, I think everything's going to clear right up," she said, giving Eve a reassuring pat on the shoulder as she got up from the booth. "Anyhow, I know I could use some shut-eye. You coming back to the motel?”

“Sure,” Eve said, “let me just pay my tab.”

Swallowing the rest of her whiskey at a draught, Eve dropped a bill on the table and followed Thompson out of the bar. They crossed the street, which was entirely devoid of traffic at that midnight hour. The stoplight in the distance changed futilely, green, yellow, red, green again.

***

Eve laid on her back on the hotel bed, staring up at the ceiling in the darkness, turning the case over and over in her mind. The radio alarm clock on the nightstand to her right read 2:15a.m. in glowing red digits.

Settle down, Marine, Eve internally addressed her racing mind. All you need is the warrant. Then you’ll get the gate records, and you’ll know if Harding was lying or not. Everything is going to be cleared up in the morning, one way or the other. So stop worrying about it and go to sleep.

Usually, Eve had no trouble getting to sleep quickly. The ability to grab a few hours of sleep on any surface and in any position was a valuable skill she'd picked up by necessity during her combat tours.

Even in wartime, it had never been the shrieks or gunfire that kept Eve awake. It was the silent waiting that kept her anxiously from sleep; the long seconds that felt like hours that ticked away into minutes like years, dragging on and on into hours that felt like eons.

What made Harding shut down like that? He was a fountain of information the whole time until we brought up the gate. Why? What's he hiding?

She rolled over and tried staring at the wall instead of the ceiling. It was no better. She couldn't get this case out of her mind – perhaps because somewhere deep down, Eve knew that there was a tidal wave of emotions and unanswered questions about her father waiting to crash down her as soon she allowed herself to relax her focus on the case at hand.

Eve saw her father’s face in the darkness – a terrifyingly lucid half-waking dream. She saw him smiling, the charmingly ingratiating grin that had never changed, even when he was incarcerated in isolation deep in a maximum-security prison. He seemed to be looking right at her, smiling at her, baring his teeth like fangs.

You'd better come to find me before I come to find you.

The mental image jarred Eve back into full consciousness. She rolled again, staring at the door of the motel room now. There was a pinhole of yellow light from the streetlamps in the parking lot shining through the fisheye peephole in the center panel.

Think about the case, or else think about your father, out there somewhere, at large amongst the innocent people of the world. Did Howard Hope escape from Red Onion Supermax just to be free? Or will he start killing again?

With a huff of frustration, Eve threw the thin motel bed comforter off her body and snapped on the bedside lamp. She sat on the edge of the twin mattress, her elbows resting heavily on her knees, trying to keep her mind in order. She focused her eyes on the spot on the floor exactly between her bare feet.

Run through it again from the top, Eve instructed herself. She took a deep, steadying breath, shutting her eyes.

Two weeks ago, on August 7th, Pamela Macey turned up dead in the pool in her backyard.

On the 20th, just a few days shy of two weeks later, Selma Vishni also turns up dead in a pool, but this time at the local athletic club.

If both women had been drowned in their personal pools, Eve might have theorized the killer to be a pool cleaner or swim instructor. It was doubtful that the maintenance staff of the Lion’s Hill Athletic Club took on private pool-cleaning gigs in their spare time. They were too busy peddling pharmaceuticals to the lazing gentry in the poolside cabanas.

Still, Eve thought it might be worth finding out who, if anyone, was employed as Pamela Macey's pool cleaner. She wasn't going to be doing any sleeping, apparently, so she might as well get some work done while she waited for the sun to come up and the warrant to come down from the DA's office.

Eve got her laptop out of its carrying case and set it open on the small, simple wooden desk in the corner of the motel room. As the system booted up, Eve tried to think of other ways Vishni and Macey might have been connected. She already knew from their dossiers that the victims neither worked together nor lived in the same neighborhood. Where else could their lives have overlapped?

The screen of Eve’s laptop came to life, showing her the familiar insignia of the FBI against a royal blue background. She keyed in her password and pulled up the encrypted database search browser.

“Show me…pool cleaners,” Eve said, her fingers drumming a busy tattoo on the keyboard of the laptop.

The search for Pamela Macey + Pool Cleaning Contracts yielded no results. Neither did Pool Service, Home Maintenance, or Sanitation. If Macey was paying somebody to treat her pool, they weren’t reporting it to the IRS.

Of course, it was possible that Macey was taking care of the pool herself. It would certainly have been the cheaper option, and the young woman had been raising a new daughter on an assistant’s salary.

It was strange that the young woman owned a house with a pool at all, Eve had to admit, given her age and employment, and that was before considering the cost of raising a child. A quick check of Macey's banking information concluded her suspicions that the woman had died with less than five thousand dollars to her name.

As she scrolled through the financial information, Eve noticed that there was no record of a mortgage anywhere among the various transactions. She furrowed her eyebrows, her skepticism mounting like heavy storm clouds. 

Could Macey have owned the house outright before age thirty with only five grand to her name? Eve frowned. Something was definitely missing from this picture.

“Died in the pool that nobody cleans, lived in a house that nobody bought,” Eve muttered, pulling out the case files and flipping open the folder containing the dossier of Pamela Macey. She ran her finger down the lines of intel until she came to the address of residence: 3478 Sickle Cut Way.

“Sort of asking for it when you buy a house on a street called Sickle Cut,” Eve said, “Then again, you didn’t actually buy it yourself, did you Pamela? Maybe you didn’t get to choose your address for some reason?”

Eve keyed the address of the house into the query bar, adding the phrase “mortgage statements” to refine her search. Her finger hit the enter key with a sharp click.

There it was, plain as day. There was nothing veiled or convoluted about it. Eve let out her breath, half satisfied with herself for finding the answer, half sorry at finding what that answer was.

The mortgage on 3478 Sickle Cut Way was being paid off in regular installments by one Hugo Watson.

“Tut-tut, Pamela,” Eve said to herself, “Your boss?”

Just then, Eve’s personal phone began ringing loudly from the bedstand where it was charging. Eve looked over in the direction of the ringing cell phone, still a little dazed by the fresh discovery. The screen was lit up, but she couldn’t make out the caller ID from across the room.

"Alright, hold on to your horse vitamins," Eve grumbled, pushing herself to her feet. She expected the call to be from Hobbes. She knew that he was trying to keep a low profile about their communications, and nobody else would be calling in the middle of the night unless there was some kind of emergency.

She reached down and picked up the cell phone from the nightstand.

It wasn’t Hobbes.

It was an unrecognized number. The area code, to Eve’s surprise, was from San Francisco. Her brother Tyler lived on the West Coast, but his number was saved in her contact list.

So, who the hell was calling?

Eve swiped the green ACCEPT icon just in time before the caller was sent to voicemail. She held her breath, pressing the phone against her ear as if trying to hear the ocean through a sea shell.

"Hello, Eve," said a voice from the other end of the line. It was a feminine voice, although somewhat low and scratchy. It sounded muffled as if the speaker were talking through a handkerchief.

"Who is this?" Eve demanded, every hair on her body suddenly standing on end as a chill ran through her body. There was something familiar about that voice as if she'd heard it recently.

“It hasn’t been that long,” said the caller, “Have you forgotten about me already? Your own sister?”

Eve nearly dropped the phone.

“Lily?”

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

“Where are you calling from? The area code looks like San Francisco.” Eve asked, sitting down at the bedside. For nearly fifteen years, the entire world believed that Eve's older sister, Lily Hope, had been murdered by their father. Even though she'd recently turned up alive and well in California, it was still a little jarring for Eve to hear her long-lost sister’s voice over the phone.

“It’s a burner,” Lily said, “And I’m nowhere near San Francisco.”

"So, where are you?" Eve asked.

“Somewhere else,” Lily said with a laugh. “Don’t worry about that.”

“I’m an FBI agent, Lily,” Eve replied, smiling in spite of herself, “It’s my job to worry about that.”

“Take a day off,” Lily said, “Anyway, that’s not why I called you.”

“I can’t take a day off,” Eve said, “The killers of the world never do.”

"Alright, alright, dial it back. I can hear the marching drums from here." Lily laughed again, "I forgot who I was dealing with. Alright, well, to soothe your anxious mind, let me tell you that I'm somewhere safe with loved ones close by."

“Well, that's good," Eve said with a sigh. She realized that along with the relief of finding her sister alive after all these came the disorientating knowledge that Lily was not the same innocent teenager she was when she fell out of Eve’s life.

She’d grown over the last fifteen years, much as Eve had herself. She’d been changed and hardened by a life of shifting identities as she fled her own assumed murder, finally settling in California married to a wealthy software developer. When her husband was murdered by a shadowy business partner known as Miss X, Lily had inherited an estate worth roughly $2.4 billion. More than her name had changed during those complicated and painful years. Eve had already seen it. But how much had she changed? Her own sister was an elusive enigma to her now.

“So, what’s going on?” Eve asked, “If you can’t tell me where you are or what you’re doing, why did you call?”

“I need a reason to call my own sister?”

“It’s the middle of the night, I’m in the middle of a case, Howard is still at large, you’re wanted for questioning in relation to his escape, and I’m not supposed to be anywhere near the investigation,” Eve pointed out the facts in a concise list, unable to keep the exasperation out of her voice.

“Alright, I see your point,” Lily conceded, “I never could get anything past you too long. You’re right, of course. Listen, all the news about the prison break and manhunt have got me thinking – how sure are you really that Dad is the Swallowtail Killer?”

“What?” Eve was taken aback by the question, “It’s beyond contention. He knew all the victims, where their bodies were hidden, how they’d been killed. He didn’t have an alibi for any of them. All the evidence points to the same conclusion – Howard Hope is guilty of serial homicide.”

“Okay, but what if he isn’t?” Lily asked, “Things aren’t always the way they seem, even when they’re presented as irrefutable facts.”

“You know that Howard escaped from prison, right?” Eve ensured with a concerned expression on her face, “He wasn’t released. Two guards were injured during the ordeal. One of them is still in critical condition.”

"I know, I know," Lily said, brushing the comment off lightly, "But think about it this way. Everybody was sure that I was dead and that Dad had murdered me, right? Even when I sent Tyler that letter, you still had a hard time getting anybody to believe I was still alive.”

“That was different,” Eve said, “You were missing, and given the context of Howard’s arrest, people made the assumption that you were his last victim. But you were running away intentionally. You were trying to disappear, so reinforcing the rumor served your ends. Why would Howard admit to murders he didn’t commit, especially something as heinous and well-documented as the Swallowtail killings?”

“It’s a good question,” Lily agreed, “And one that I can’t say I have the answer to, but I…”

Just then, a series of loud knocks sounded on the door of Eve’s motel room, giving her a start. She jumped to her feet, her body throwing itself instinctively into a defensive crouch. The knocks continued. Through the door, she heard Thompson calling out.

“On your feet, Agent Hope! We’ve got to move!”

“Sorry, Lily,” Eve whispered hurriedly into the phone, “I’ve got to go. Call me back later since you’re using burners. Stay safe, and stay away from Howard.”

Eve hung up, then crossed the room and opened the door. Thompson was standing there with an urgent look on her face. Over the paved horizon of the parking lot behind her, the sun was just starting to creep over the horizon.

“Jesus,” Eve blinked, “What time is it?”

“5:40,” Thompson replied, “Which apparently in Callo is murder-o’clock. I just got off the phone with the country sheriff. They just found another body.”

“Is it our guy?” Eve asked.

"Well, the corpse was found in a church, not a swimming pool, but we'll know more when we're on the scene. Pack your gun and your gear, and let's go."

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

Eve stared grimly down at the face of the man in the shallow pool.

The man’s neck and spine were wrenched painfully over the low wall around the perimeter of the rectangular pool, his arms hanging limply by his sides. His eyes were open wide, bloodshot, and glazed over with the film of death. His mouth hung slack, full of holy water.

“Drowned in a baptismal pool,” Thompson said, standing just behind Eve’s right shoulder. “There’s got to be some kind of symbolism in that.”

“Typically, I'd agree," Eve said, looking around at the antechamber of the church where the body had been discovered. "In this case, however, I'd say the pool of water itself is more essential to the killer's M.O. than the religious setting. There were no other religious elements in the other victims' murders."

“I’m inclined to say you’re right,” said a voice behind the agents’ backs. Both agents turned to find themselves looking at a man in a brown suit with a white shirt open at the collar. The badge that hung from his belt bore a detective’s shield with the sheriff’s star insignia. “Sorry, agents, I didn’t mean to sneak up on you. I’m Detective Slater. I’m with the Callo County Sheriff’s Department. I understand you’ve been called in to investigate this murder in relation to the other two. The official statement hasn’t been made yet, but would you say that we’re looking at a third victim of the same serial killer?”

"Pleased to meet you, Detective," Eve said, briefly shaking Slater's hand before returning her attention to the body. "It's not immediately clear whether we are looking at the work of the same killer. As we were just discussing, the scene of the crime conflicts with the killer's M.O. Granted, the killer hasn't been strictly consistent with the scene of his previous attacks. The first took place in a backyard – a very private setting, while the second took place in a public place, i.e. the athletic club. This place is even more public still.”

“That plus the decrease in time between kills could imply that killer is growing more confident,” Thompson added, kneeling by the pool and leaning down to sniff the water. She looked up at the others. “It doesn’t smell chlorinated.”

“I don’t think churches usually chlorinate their consecrated waters,” the detective said, “I guess the divine blessing keeps it clean enough for most people.”

“Meaning the custodial closet wouldn’t have the same pool chemicals. That would suggest the killer is acting more out of circumstantial convenience than careful plotting.” Eve looked at Thompson with a squint, “Do you think he could have added the chemicals after he killed the others?”

“It’s possible,” Thompson nodded, “I don’t think they can tell the exact time the chemicals were added in the analysis.”

“Either way, the killer didn’t bring the chemicals with him this time, meaning he probably found it on the site of the other two attacks. He changed his method of attack; he changed his victim profile…what else is he doing differently?”

“So you do think this is the work of the same killer?” the detective asked again.

“My gut says yes,” Eve replied, “but with an asterisk. There are a number of differences which warrant further investigation. For example, while the bruises on the neck are consistent with the strangle pattern found on the others, the victim appears to have been bludgeoned several times in the head with a blunt object. See the welts on the forehead and skull?”

"Sure do," the detective said, "Good eye, Agent…I'm sorry I didn't catch your names."

"I'm Special Agent Hope, and this is my partner, Thompson," Eve said quickly, "Anyway if we're not looking at the work of the same killer, it's possible that we're dealing with a copycat. We'll know more details when the coroner gets here."

“Who found the body?” Thompson asked.

“Ah, that’s a sad business,” the detective said, giving his head a sorrowful shake. “See, this here is Kirk Garret – he’s a little bit of a local celebrity. Or, rather, his sons are. Eric and Simon Garret are ten-year-old piano prodigies. Their father here is – was, I should say – Callo’s foremost piano instructor, not that there were many others. It was the boys that found their father.”

“That’s terrible,” Thompson said, making unexpectedly intense eye contact with Eve. Eve furrowed her brows in uncomprehending response. “The boys weren’t hurt, were they?”

“No, they were in the other room. The main cathedral is through those heavy double doors. Now, the Garret boys are already with the trauma therapist, but we got their report of the incident. They’re a strange set of twins – pretty emotionless when they’re not at the piano, although that might have been the shock. Anyway, according to the boys, they were inside the cathedral practicing a piece for an upcoming performance at Selma Vishni’s funeral.”

“They knew Selma Vishni?” Eve interrupted with a question.

"Their father was Arijit Vishni's piano instructor," the detective replied. "We got that much from the boys too. So, they're practicing the piano, and their father is sitting in the pews. They hear a crash. Their father, Kirk, goes to investigate the sound, tells them to stay put, then disappears through the door into this dark antechamber and doesn't come back. The boys said they waited almost two hours to go looking for their father because they were afraid.”

“And when they did…” Thompson said, her eyes drifting heavily down to the dead man in the water.

“Right,” the detective said, “The boys ran out screaming and called the police from a nearby house.”

"The killer was already gone by then," Eve concluded, walking from the baptismal font to the front doors on the east side of the antechamber. Studying the doorknobs, she could see that they were locked from the inside but were the type of door with a locking push bar so that it could still be opened from within even while locked from the outside. "Getting out would have been no problem, but how did he get in?"

“What about the crash?” Thompson asked, turning to look at the detective, “Didn’t you say that the boys heard a sound that their father initially went to investigate?”

“That’s right,” the detective replied, “But the glass in the front doors isn’t broken.”

“True,” Eve said, looking around the antechamber, “Maybe there’s a broken window somewhere.”

"What's through that door?" Thompson asked, pointing at a small, unmarked beige door in the far southwestern corner of the room.

“Let’s find out,” Eve said, crossing the room once again and seizing the door handle. She found it unlocked, turning easily in her hand. The door creaked gently on its hinges as Thompson and Slater hurried over to peer over Eve's shoulders.

They were looking into a small janitor’s closet. Eve found the light switch and flicked it on.

There was glass on the floor.

“Well,” Eve said, stepping forward into the closet and bending down to inspect the jagged shards on the floor, “I think we found the source of our crash.”

Looking up, Eve saw the source of the broken glass. Near the ceiling, a narrow window had been busted in. The size and positioning of the window, as well as the absence of latch and hinges, made Eve think it was designed to let in sunlight and nothing else.

"The killer enters through this window," Thompson said, talking out the theory step by step, "steals into the church through the janitor's closet, perhaps hears the music, so he hangs back until the boys' father comes out into the antechamber."

“At which point the killer bludgeons him with a heavy object, perhaps the same object he used to break the window,” Eve said, picking up her partner’s line of deduction.

“Or something he found here in the janitor’s closet and decided to use as a weapon,” Thompson added, “That’s more in line with the killer’s previous M.O.  Finding something to use in the kill in a nearby maintenance shed might be a subconscious pattern in the killer’s strategy.”

“Good point,” Eve said, “Still, there’s no blood on the glass or windowsill, which means…” Her voice trailed off as something round and wooden on the floor caught her eye among the shards of glass. Snapping on an evidence glove, she knelt down again and picked it up.

“What’ve you got there?” Detective Slater asked, stepping into the closet after the agents at last and bending down to peer at the tiny object in Eve’s hand. The small, tortoise-shell wooden circle stood out sharply against the pale blue rubber of her gloved palm.

“It’s a button,” Eve said, looking over at Thompson, “And I bet I can guess the brand of shirt it came from.”

***

“It’s a cuff button from a C’est Homme Élancée, which is a certain line of business-formal dress shirt," said the lab technician, reading off the printed sheet of results from the analysis of the button the agents had brought back to the field office. Thompson looked over at Eve.

“Were the shirts in Harding’s closet Élancées?” she asked.

"I didn't see the exact make of the shirts, I'm afraid," Eve replied with a dismissive shrug of her shoulders, "It doesn't matter, though. Harding was in custody when Garret was killed, which means he's probably innocent of all three murders. His lawyer's certainly going to think so."

“His lawyer isn’t charged with solving these murders,” Thompson shot back hotly, catching Eve somewhat by surprise. She blinked at her partner, who frowned back. “What if we’re dealing with a copycat, like you said before?”

"Maybe," Eve said, sounding unconvinced, "Still, I don't think we should limit our investigation to that line of deduction. I think it's far more likely that the killer is one person who is sloppy about his sleeves while he's killing. The question is, why?"

The agents lapsed into thoughtful silence, pondering the button that lay alone in a petri dish on the counter between them and the technician. The young tech cleared his throat.

“I’m not sure if this is helpful, but there are knicks on one edge of the button as well. I couldn’t get any particulates from them, so I can’t tell you exactly what scored the side of this button, but they’re very clean. Whatever made them was incredibly sharp and thin.”

“Like a knife?” Thompson asked.

“Maybe,” the tech said noncommittally, “Although the striations suggest something with a less uniform edge.”

“What about broken glass?” Eve asked, “Could that have made a mark like the one you’re talking about?”

"Sure," the tech said, "The right break could create exactly the right kind of edge to score the button like that, and glass is an extremely hard substance, so it wouldn't have left particulates when it cut the resin surface of the button. You might find traces of the button on the edge of the glass that made the cut, however."

"We can get the sheriff to send over the shards of glass," Eve said. The tech nodded, and Eve turned her attention to Thompson. "In the meantime," she said, "I think we should go call on Mr. Hugo Watson."

“Who?” Thompson asked.

"Pamela Macey's boss, the man who identified her body." Eve said, "I did a little research last night before we got whisked away by the discovery of Mr. Garret. I'll explain on the drive, but I think Watson is going to have a lot more explaining to do when we reach him – especially if we can dig up a C’est Homme with a missing button in his closet.”

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

“So,” Eve said, “Garret taught Selma Vishni’s son piano. I wonder if Pamela Macey played piano.”

“What?” Thompson shook her head, surprised by Eve’s sudden comment. They had been driving in silence for the past five minutes, each plunged in their own thoughts. “What are you talking about?”

"Remember?" Eve said, glancing briefly at her partner and then returning her eyes to the road in front of her. She was driving fast through the residential streets of Callo, heading in the direction of Hugo's registered address. "The boys were rehearsing a song to play at Selma's funeral. Their father, Kirk, knew Selma's family intimately because he taught her son piano. If we were to discover that Pamela was also learning piano from Kirk, I'd say we have our unifying commonality between all three victims."

“Alright,” Thompson said, nodding her head somewhat hesitatingly, “I follow your line of reasoning. How do you intend to find out if she was taking lessons from Kirk Garret? If she was, both teacher and pupil are both gone now. Who else would know?”

Eve thought about it for a moment, her hands gripping the wheel as her foot pressed down heavily on the gas pedal.

"Well," she said, "it's a bit of a long shot, but maybe we could ask Watson about that when we find him. After all, the man was paying Pamela's mortgage. Maybe he was paying for her piano lessons, too."

“Why would he do that?” Thompson asked.

“Why would he buy her a house?” Eve countered her partner’s question with a question of her own.

“You think they were sleeping together?” Thompson raised an eyebrow.

“A boss leveraging his power to seduce a subordinate with costly material gifts,” Eve said, sounding out the theory. She nodded. “It’s not exactly a novel concept, especially given that he was the one to identify her body. That suggests a certain level of intimacy.”

“And the father of her child was left unidentified in the report…” Thompson added, leaving the insinuation unspoken. Eve nodded.

“Let’s not rush to any conclusions,” she said, “but let’s not ignore obvious signs, either. I’ve got a funny feeling that somehow Mr. Watson holds the key to all this.”

The Florence and Watson Life Insurance Agency was a four-story brutalist building with chunky protrusions between the windows of each story. It cut a depressing profile against the wide, grey overcast of the morning sky as the agents crossed the parking lot.

The doors of the lobby were unlocked. Eve pulled it open, and they entered quietly. It was only eight o'clock in the morning, but there was already a young man in a white shirt and tie seated behind the receptionist's desk. He looked up with a prim expression as the agents crossed the lobby.

“Welcome to Florence and Watson,” the receptionist said in a quiet, professional tone as Eve and Thompson approached the desk. His nametag informed them his name was Keith. “What can I do to help you?”

“We’d like to see Mr. Watson, please,” Eve said.

“Do you have an appointment?” the receptionist asked, already reaching for the chorded phone on the cradle by his computer keyboard.

“Don’t reach for that phone,” Eve said, getting out her badge and laying it discretely on the desktop where the receptionist could see it. His hand froze over the phone cradle.

"Why not?" Keith asked, his eyes still fixed in a bug-eyed stare on the badge, "Did Mr. Watson do something wrong?"

“We don’t have an appointment,” Eve said, keeping her tone calm but quiet so as not to raise any attention from anybody passing by. “We’d like to see Mr. Watson without an introduction. Is he in?”

“Yes, ma’am, he’s in his office on the fourth floor – west wing,” the receptionist said, leaning forward to ask another question in fascinated whisper, “Is this about Pam?”

“Is this about Pam, Keith?” Thompson repeated the question back slowly, leaning on the desk to put her face inches from the receptionist. The young man furrowed his brows, backing off a little.

"She was Mr. Watson's assistant," the receptionist said, "She disappeared a few weeks ago. Everybody's been saying she was killed by the same person that killed that other lady – and now, this morning, I saw on the news that Kirk Garret was found dead, too. Chanel 10 is starting to call him the Poolside Strangler."

“Oh they are, are they?” Eve said, glancing anxiously at her partner, “Come on, Thompson. We’ve got to move. There’s no time to waste. Thanks for your help, Kieth. Remember – keep your hand off the phone.”

The young man raised his hands to show that he was complying with their instructions, the agents hurried off toward the elevator.

“We’d better get a handle on this thing before the media splashes it all over the place,” Thompson said warningly, pressing the button for the elevator. “Too much heat from the press and our killer could go running for the hills, maybe start up again in another town across the country. Then we’re back to square one.”

“Don’t say that," Eve muttered. The door of the elevator hissed open. "We're going to get him. Come on." She stepped into the elevator car, and Thompson followed. Eve pressed the button for the fourth floor, and the door hissed back shut. The elevator lurched upwards.

Eve and Thompson came to the end of the hall in the northwestern corner of the building’s fourth floor. The door had a wooden plaque that read Hugo Watson – CEO. Eve tried the door, once again finding the knob unlocked under the pressure of her grip.

Opening the door, the agents found themselves not in an office, as Eve had expected, but rather in a small waiting room with two upholstered chairs, a standing ashtray that looked decorative, and an empty desk. The title plaque on the desk still read Pamela Macey.

On the right side of the desk, immediately opposite the door by which the agents entered, was another door. This one read Hugo Watson – Private Office.

"That looks like our ticket," Thompson whispered. Eve nodded, keeping her lips tightly sealed. She advanced quickly across the room and tried the door. This time she found the knob locked. She let go softly, trying not to rattle the knob too much and raised her fist to knock.

Before she could do so, however, the door was suddenly flung open, and the agents found themselves facing a rotund, balding man in a grey business suit. He looked at the agents with a startled expression on his heavy-set features.

“What in the…” the man said, starting back at finding the two women standing so close to the door and giving his head an almost comical shake of surprise that made his jowls flap like a Mastiff. “Who are you?”

“FBI, Mr. Watson,” Eve said, holding up her badge, “I think it’s time we had a little talk.”

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

“Alright, what’s all this about?” Watson asked, seating himself cautiously behind his desk as the agents entered his private office. There was a single upholstered chair matching those in the waiting room positioned before the desk, in which Thompson unhesitatingly seated herself. Eve placed herself like a barricade in front of the office door and stared at a hole in Watson's skull.

“In the words of your lobby receptionist, it’s about Pam,” Eve said. Watson nodded, his face deepening into a mournful frown.

“Yes, well, that’s a tragic business, but I already told the police everything I know. Pam was my personal assistant, as I’m sure you’re already aware. She took about six months of maternity leave. She was just coming back to work when…”

“Six months?” Thompson cut the man off.

“That’s a long time for maternity leave,” Eve said, “I believe the national average is about half that.”

“I wish that I could have given her more, but she’s too essential around here as an assistant,” Watson replied, somewhat snappishly. “I’m still struggling to get along without her. She ran a tight ship. I didn’t even realize how much she was doing around here until she wasn’t around to do it anymore.”

The large man drummed his fingers on the desktop, briefly lost in his own melancholy memories. Eve noticed a thick band of gold around his wedding ring finger.

“How would you describe your relationship with Pamela Macey outside of the office?” Eve asked tonelessly, staring hard at Watson. She didn’t want to miss a single flinch or flicker of expression on the fat man’s face. She was still trying to discern whether the grief and sorrow the man was showing was genuine or a ruse.

“Outside the office?” The man bunched his eyebrows and raised them theatrically. Definitely a ruse, Eve thought, at least partially. But how much of it is truth, and how much of it is an act? He went on, “I’m not sure what you mean. She was a kind, precise, efficient person as far as I knew.”

“Drop the act,” Eve said, “There’s no time for it. We know that you were paying Pam’s mortgage for the house on Sickle Cut Way. You don’t do something like that for a person you have no relationship with outside of the office.”

“Alright, yes,” Watson said, “I bought her a house. We were friendly – but it’s not what you’re thinking. I was something like a professional mentor to her, and she helped me keep my affairs in order. Most of our interactions outside the office were concerned with discussing her career plan or the state of the market in general. You may not believe me, but I believed in her – strictly platonically, I might add." He held up his hand to display the wedding ring as if challenging the agents to defy it. “I’m a happily married man.”

“And you just gave her a house from the goodness of your heart?” Thompson asked skeptically.

"It so happens that I'm in a position of holding more liquid wealth than I could ever hope to spend in a lifetime – more than my children's children could spend between ourselves," the big man said. He raised his eyebrows earnestly, Eve thought. "I bought her the house when she confided in me that she was pregnant and didn't want to involve the father. I thought that she deserved a stable home environment to raise her child without whatever man her maternal judgment had deemed unsuitable, and it was easily in my power to make that happen. To put it plainly, I could afford an additional mortgage while she couldn't afford her first. You could say it was out of the goodness of my heart, sure, but it was also out of the convenience of my hand."

“You’re certainly a generous man,” Thompson said, her tone still guarded, “How did your wife feel about the arrangement? Did she know?”

“Sure she knew,” Watson replied in a bilious tone, “She would have seen the mortgage payments in our regular finances anyway, even if I had been trying to hide it, but I talked to her about it before I even brought it up with Pam. I tell my wife everything, and I believe the same of her. She helped me pick out the house. Relationships, romantic and otherwise, are built on trust – a lesson you’d do well to learn yourselves.”

“Trust without proof isn’t exactly in our line of work,” Eve said with a witheringly impassive stare. “Where is your wife now, Mr. Watson? I think we’d better speak to her as well.”

“She was still at the house when I left this morning,” the businessman said, “On top of helping me plan a memorial service for Pam’s friends and co-workers, we’ve been looking over the paperwork required to adopt Tania, Pam’s daughter.” He frowned. “I suppose you’re going to have a problem with that too.”

“Did Pam play the piano, Mr. Watson?” Eve asked suddenly, taking everyone by surprise.

“She did, as a matter of fact. Music and swimming were really her only hobbies, as far as I could see – that’s why I went for a house with a pool in the backyard. She took piano lessons on the weekends to unwind from Kirk Garret – maybe you’ve heard of him.”

“We have heard of him,” Thompson said flatly, “He was murdered too.”

“What?” the large man clapped a hand over his mouth, shocked. “Kirk Garret is dead? How? When did this happen?”

“His body was found this morning,” Eve said, watching the man’s face closely. He’d already admitted that he knew two of the three victims. If she could now find some tie between Watson and Selma Vishni, she would be a fair cry further towards finding the common link between all three.

Watson was shaking his head in disbelief. "Jesus Christ," he said, "I just saw the man not three days ago."

“You saw Garret three days ago?” Eve repeated, “Under what circumstances?”

“We had a meeting,” he said, “He wanted to organize a memorial concert. I think I mentioned before that my wife was helping to plan Pam’s service. Well, when Garret learned that one of his students had drowned – a young mother, no less, he wanted to put all his music students at the disposal of the Chamber of Commerce to provide music for a public memorial. This is a small town, no matter how much it’s scaling up. The people of Callo come together during hard times.”

“He put his school at the disposal of the Chamber of Commerce?” Eve asked for clarification.

"Right," the man replied, "I sit on the Chamber of Commerce myself – Vice Chairman, as a matter of fact, and acting Chairman while Reaves is out of town. It's a good thing, too. With me in charge, the Chamber of Commerce can be more than a stuffy collection of business owners trying to squeeze money out of consumers. We're a part of this community. It's just as important to support others in their grieving as it is to grieve yourself."

“And Reaves is…” Eve prompted. She recalled that Harding had mentioned that name as well.

“The Chairman,” Watson said, “Owner and CEO of Reaves Industrial Carpentry Solutions, not that he’s much of a boss in that organization from all I hear. He inherited the company from his father, and nobody can buy him out. It’s one of the biggest companies in Callo.”

“You said it’s a good thing he’s out of town,” Eve reminded Watson of his own words, “Why is that?”

“Well, I hate to cast aspersions, but Mr. Reaves isn’t exactly what one would call a sociable person. I try not to say too much because, as Vice Chairman, anything I say would look like petty jealousy or ambition, but he’s rather aloof and, between you and me, not very bright. I don’t think he would have seen the memorial service as a proper use of the Chamber’s time and funds. He’s been a bitter man since his wife Cynthia died. Since he’s not around, though, I can do what I think is best for the citizens of Callo, and Ebeneezer Reaves can read about in the minutes.”

All at once, Eve was struck so hard by a realization that she stiffened upright.

It was the Chamber of Commerce. That was the commonality between the victims.

Keeping the excitement off her stoic expression with an effort, Eve ran through each of the victims in her mind, tracing out the connection each had to the Callo C.o.C.

Pamela Macey was easy – as the personal assistant to the Vice Chairman, she would have been around the Chamber of Commerce all the time. She would have known the ins and outs of Callo’s capital market better than almost anybody else. Meetings, deals, phone calls, and feuds all would have been channeled, scheduled and orchestrated through her. Was it possible that she’d become privy to too much insider information? And what about the others?

Selma Vishni, as Harding had revealed while they were grilling him in the glass mansion, had been in the process of applying for membership in the Chamber of Commerce. Her application had been under consideration for a while – long enough for her name to circulate. She’d probably paid visits to the other members, trying to ingratiate herself and ensure a positive vote.

And finally, Kirk Garret. If he wasn’t a member himself, he was at least around during the planning of the funeral concert. He was famous as a piano instructor, as well as for his prodigy sons, so he would have been welcomed into the Chamber of Commerce as an asset of the community chest.

“Was Kirk Garett a member of the Chamber of Commerce?” Eve asked, blinking back into the present and focusing on the face of the businessman behind the broad desk.

“No, he wasn’t a member,” Watson replied, “Just a neighborly citizen.”

“What about Selma Vishni?”

“That was the woman they found in the pool out at that country club?” Watson shook his head, “There’s something seriously rotten going on in this town. Innocent women, new mothers, caring fathers…nobody’s safe anymore.”

"Our intel informs us that she applied for membership with the Callo Chamber of Commerce but that she was murdered before her application reached approval."

“That sounds right, now that you mention it,” Watson said, reaching out to shake the mouse of his computer and jabbing a password into his home screen. Even upside down, Eve could read that the keystrokes of his password spelled out 123Pancakes!

“I’m afraid I can’t keep all the applications we have pending at the front of my mind,” Watson apologized as he clicked around the monitor, trying to locate the application form. “Let’s see, let’s see. Vaughn, Veller, ah! There we go – Selma Vishni. Yes, now it’s ringing a bell. I remember when she came in, she brought her whole family with her to demonstrate that she fit in with the family values of Callo County. Her son took piano lessons from Kirk and was a star swimmer on Harding’s team. Harding was the one who recommended her, I believe.”

"She brought her family with her," Eve repeated thoughtfully. She thought she was starting to understand, but like a camera with a manual focus, the image was clarifying slowly. The killer had a fixation with families – strong families, new families, talented families. There was rage and jealousy in the murders, the jilted aggression of a man who had something stripped away from him, something he felt he was owed. A family? Were they looking for a killer with a raging impotence problem?

“That’s right,” Watson said, “If I remember correctly, Harding went to bat for her, but Reaves wasn’t very open to the idea of Selma Vishni joining the Chamber of Commerce.”

Eve's eyes narrowed ever so slightly as she looked at the man behind the desk. He was adopting Pamela Macey's baby daughter. Was that because he couldn't have his own? Or was the generosity genuine, and this kind man trying to spare an infant from the cold neglect of the public foster care system?

“Tell me, Mr. Watson,” Eve said, walking forward to lean on the corner of the man’s desk, “Did Mrs. Vishni present her family and application before the chairman left for his business trip?”

“Uh,” the big man furrowed his eyebrows, his gaze shifting to the application on his screen to verify the date, “Yes, that’s correct. Mr. Reaves was still sitting at the head of the Chamber of Commerce when Mrs. Vishni came in with her family. Why do you ask?”

“And what about Pam?” Eve asked, continuing as if she hadn’t heard Watson’s question. “Did she return from maternity leave before or after you became acting Chairman?”

“Just before,” Watson said slowly, his voice lowering as he started to piece together the point that Eve was driving at. “Mr. Reaves told me that he was going to look at some lumber interests in the Pacific Northwest about two weeks ago. I’m not sure exactly when he left, though. I’m not involved in his business beyond the Chamber of Commerce.”

“I understand,” Eve said, “And did Mr. Reaves know that Pam had her baby?”

"Well, I suppose he must have. He didn't say anything about it, though. I said before, he's a pretty quiet, aloof sort of guy.” Watson seemed to think about his own description only after it had come out of his mouth. He looked back and forth between the agents, his expression aghast.

“You don’t mean…” he gasped, unable to finish his sentence. His mouth hung slack with surprise and horror.

“I’m afraid I do,” Eve said, looking intensely at Thompson, “We can tell Harding’s lawyer he’s free to go. Thompson, get on the line to Quantico and get them to dig up Reaves’ address.”

“I know where he lives,” Watson put in helpfully. Both agents looked over at him.

“You were friendly enough with him to visit his house?” Eve asked. The man shook his head.

“No, no, he never invites anybody over. But he’s got a house on the same street as the one I bought for Pam. I remember thinking it was a little funny that somebody with as much wealth and power as Edison Reaves would pick such an ordinary, inexpensive house.”

Eve smiled thinly.

“You wouldn’t happen to remember the street address, would you?” she asked.

“Sure,” he said, “2350 Sickle Cut Way.”

"Thanks, Mr. Watson," Eve said excitedly, "Come on Thompson. Our prime suspect's house was on the same block as our first victim. I don't think he's inspecting lumber on the West Coast. Let's go get this psycho."

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

The man turned off the shower.

His skin was pink, pruned by nearly an hour under the scalding stream that bulleted from the showerhead. All the blood was washed from his body, inside and out. His nailbeds were scrubbed so clean they were lifted back. His hands were soft and smooth at last.

Like well-sanded softwood, he thought.

The man toweled himself dry and stepped in front of the sink. Once, there had been a large mirror, three feet high by six feet long, mounted to the wall over this sink. It had come down with the others when the man could no longer stand to watch himself aging alone.

The section of wall over the sink was not completely empty, however. Where the mirror had been, the man had tacked up a large, detailed blueprint depicting the head and torso of a wooden man. The face of the man in the blueprint resembled his own, but not as it was now. It was the wooden face of a much younger man, untarnished by the horrors of a chaotic universe, untouched by real loss.

It was a face that would live forever.

Around the diagram detailing the wooden humanoid’s construction were a series of jotting notes made in white pencil in the man’s slanting handwriting. There were ruminations on the right kind of materials to use, the right color palate for the coats of paint, and ideal positioning for the upper body.

The blueprint over the sink was only one of many, of course. There was more to designing an unchanging self than simply sketching the face and chest of the man he’d once been. The garage was filled with enormous binders alongside all the woodcarving materials, each stuffed with drawings, diagrams, notes, plans, and sketches.

He had all the time in the world, all the resources to build a family that would last forever, that would never abandon him or disappear unexpectedly. At last, his home life would be consistent enough to be considered fair.

And yet…

The only thing that he could rely on to always be the same and never change was the emptiness he felt in the total silence of the house. He couldn’t move on – that would be akin to forgetting.

That left only one option.

He had to join her.

Together, in a life beyond that of the living, the man and his beloved would be together. They would have a newborn son, and he would be strong and resilient. He would be oak. His name would be his father’s name.

Staring at the blueprint as if into his own eyes reflecting in a looking glass, the man reached out. On the sink was a set of electric clippers. His fingers closed around the handle. He thumbed the button. The bathroom was filled with a mechanical whine.

The man dragged the clippers brutally across the top of his own skull, pressing down as if he wanted to shave off his own skin. He clenched his teeth – not with pain at the jagged, snagging teeth of the shears as they pinched and bit his scalp, but with rage at his own fallibility, and even more so the mortal fallibility of Cindy. A chunk of brown hair fell into the sink. The face in the blueprint looked the same.

She wasn’t supposed to vanish like that.

He dragged the razor across his head again. Another large clump of hair fell out, rolling down the basin of the sink like brunette tumbleweeds down a steep, smooth porcelain valley.

You did everything right. You got into the right school, earned the right degree, took over the family business, met the right girl, and asked her to marry you.

The man shaved a third strip across the crown of his head, nearly balding it entirely. He moved on to the sides, running the clippers heedlessly close to his large, protruding ears.

She married you, and you had a beautiful wedding with a tropical honeymoon. You bought a house that you could afford together, even though you could afford a much bigger house alone.

The last patch of hair gave way under the metal teeth of the shears.

You bought her a house with a pool, jacuzzi, and gazebo. And what did she do? How did the universe reward you for doing everything right? By giving your wife an aneurism the first time she went swimming in the big, beautiful pool you bought her. Everything you worked for, everything you planned, gone in a second. No do-overs, no mulligans. Just an air pocket in the grey matter that burst inside the skull, and it was all over. She never moves again. And now, neither will you.

The man, now completely bald and bleeding in a few spots where he’d nicked his skin, made the grimace that passed for his grin at the blueprint. He ran his hand over the surface of his scalp, his eyes pinned to the smooth head of the figure in the blueprint.

It’s time to live the life you were meant to have. It’s time to make things fair.

The man walked naked out of the bathroom and into his bedroom, still unclothed. Opening his closet, he ruffled through the clothes, looking for a suit that fit the importance of the occasion. He found the one he was looking for – a $1200 C’est Hommes cashmere gabardine suit that the man had purchased more than ten years ago and never worn. It was a fatherly-looking suit, or so the man had thought when he picked it out. He had it custom-tailored to fit his body all those years ago – the kind of suit he would have liked to wear when bringing his first-born son home from the hospital.

The man slipped into the pants of the suit, fastening the clasp and zipping up the fly.

They fell around his ankles.

The man bent down, hauling the pants back up to his waist. He stared down in confusion at the waistline of the brown slacks. Holding them out, he could see that the pants were now several sizes too large. This shouldn’t have been a surprise, as the man had been losing weight steadily over the years since the incident, but still, he stared with supreme shock at the massive fabric mouth in which he stood.

Something was wrong.

Frowning with frustration and resolve, the man threw himself back into the closet, furiously searching for a belt. He found what he was looking for a moment later – a brown leather belt with a burnished bronze buckle. He threaded the belt through the loops of his pants and cinched it tight. His heart sank when he saw the way the fabric gathered together around his skinny waist.

The suit he'd picked out to feel his best on the day he introduced his son to the world fit him no longer. The poetic irony of the fact settled heavily on the man's shoulders. It was like wearing the skin of his past self.

Grumbling to himself, the man pulled back the tongue of the belt and tried to put the prong through.

It wouldn’t go.

“What?” the man looked down, frustrated at every turn.

The belt was too big as well. The final punch hole was about four inches away from the place where the belt fed through the buckle.

The man cursed bitterly.

You were supposed to be bigger by now. You were supposed to be large, broad-shouldered, barrel-chested. You were supposed to look successful and intimidating and proud. You were supposed to eat a little more than your share because you could afford it and get a comfortable little pooch around the middle. You were supposed to fill your suit by now.

It wasn’t fair, but then again, nothing was fair.

He whipped the belt back out of his loops and allowed the oversized slacks to fall once again in a heap of cashmere gabardine around his ankles. He stepped out of the pants, shedding the other clothes, which hung equally loose on his emaciated frame.

He walked, naked once more, down the interior hall of his house to the garage. The door was shut, keeping his nudity safe from the prying eyes of the neighborhood. He had no wish to expose himself to anyone. His nudity, like his family affairs, was his own private business.

Besides, he couldn’t bear the thought of anybody finding out just how thin and skeletal he'd become over the years. In high school and college, he'd been tall and strong, powerful and charismatic. The man in the video was a refined and sophisticated brute, a muscular animal of prowess and pride. The creature that skulked into the garage now was more akin to a starving rat than the lordly lion that had once been.

The man stood before his workbench, barefoot, exposed. The sunlight through the small, bubbled window in the side-yard door cast an isolated beam of gold across the floor. Particles of sawdust danced in slow, swirling arabesques where the shaft of light cut the room.

The workbench was a mess of wood, tools, stains, and sandpaper. Thrown aside on the floor of the garage were the rudimentary planks of wood that he'd worn under his clothes when he crawled into the church window to even the score with the Garret family. There was a blood stain on the corner of the plank he'd used to bash the man's skull. He'd chop it all up and burn it for firewood. Nobody would be the wiser.

Before him, the man's final project was complete. The wooden baby was as naked as he was. The man reached down with tender hands, scooping a tiny infant that he himself had brought into the world from the workbench. The paint was dry at last, the cheeks rosy and full, the eyes open and sparkling, like his father's. The pouty lips were his mother's.

The man picked up his son for the first time, holding the shape that he had hewn from the block close to his own living, beating heart. He felt a swell of warmth and pride flowing through his body. He had made this. This thing was his.

“Blood of mine,” the man whispered, remembering the marks he’d made on the boy’s face. The blood was still there, concealed beneath an odd dozen layers of paint but still marking the wooden figure’s face with the hand-painted features. “You live because I have lived. What’s mine is yours, and what’s yours is so because first it was mine.”

Bending his head down, the man placed a kiss on the wooden head of his son.

“Live, live, live,” he breathed the word again and again, turning and walking back out of the garage and into the house. He walked down the hall, cradling his wooden son as closely and tenderly as a bird’s egg.

"Cindy," the man said, stepping into the living room with his son in his arms, his eyes nearly overflowing with the joyful pride and peculiar pain of fatherhood at last. "He's here. Our son is here. Can you believe it? We're parents! I'm a Daddy, and you're a Mommy, just like we talked about. Remember?"

He sank down to the sofa beside his motionless, painted wife. She stared straight forward, her arms cradled in the same position in which they’d been carved. Gently, the man laid his son in his wife’s arms. He sighed with satisfaction.

The child was a perfect fit.

He sat frozen for a long time, a smile plastered on his face as he gazed at the image of mother and child. They had been made for each other, a perfect puzzle comprised of two pieces.

So where did that leave him?

On the outside again. Naked. Starving. Unable to reach the peace and serenity he saw on the faces of his wife and son.

It wasn’t fair.

It was supposed to be fair.

“I can’t ask you to be like me anymore,” he whispered, reaching to touch his baby’s cheek with utmost tenderness, “I must become like you.” He drew in a deep breath. “It’s time.”

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

The gas pedal was nearly touching the floor under Eve’s boot. Her fists gripped the steering wheel as she pushed the car up to breakneck speed down the backroads of Callo.

“Agent Hope,” Thompson said, looking over from the passenger seat with a somewhat pallid expression on her face as she clung to the safety bar over the window, “I know this is urgent, but you don’t have to go full sirens. We’re no good to the investigation if we die in a car wreck on the way.”

Eve grimaced, didn’t answer, and hauled the car around a tight corner, swinging hard to avoid collision with a mail truck. The mail truck blasted its horn. Eve glanced at her partner.

“There’s no time to waste,” Eve said, “We’ve got to find this Reaves person.”

“Watson said Reaves is out of the state,” Thompson replied, looking a little queasy and speaking through tight lips. “He’s out west looking at lumber, remember?”

“That’s what he told Watson and the rest of the Chamber of Commerce,” Eve said, “That’s what he wanted them all to believe. I wouldn’t be surprised if he even bought a round flight ticket and booked a hotel to support his alibi. All the most reputable people in town would have believed the same story, so Mr. Reaves would never appear on our suspect list. Don’t you find it convenient that he vanished right before the murders started?”

“Convenient?” Thompson said, gasping as Eve took another sharp corner at a cool fifty-five miles per hour. “Try coincidental. What other evidence do you have that Reaves is the Poolside Strangler?”

“Watson said Reaves’s wife died young,” Eve said, her foot unrelenting on the pedal as she pushed the car down the road. “He also said that the Chairman was an intensely antisocial man. He was turned off by Selma Vishni's application for membership, likely because she brought her family before the Chamber rather than on any professional basis. I think we're looking for a deeply disturbed man, a traumatized lumber baron who could neither cope nor move on from his wife's premature death. He's lashing out at family figures. A young, bright, promising mother was just as offensive to him as a mature, successful mother with an impressive and well-liked family because they represent the potential family he can’t have with the wife that died too young.”

“That’s all circumstantial,” Thompson said.

"That only matters in court," Eve replied, "Out here in the field we work on hunches. Listen, I can feel it in my bones. Reaves is our guy. I think Pamela's return from maternity leave triggered an episode of prolonged, premeditated violence that ends either with a massive slaughter of entire families as he expands the scope of his delusion or…" She swung the wheel hard again, causing her partner to lurch toward the center console with a nauseous groan, skimming the car narrowly past a pickup truck. "Or it ends in suicide," she concluded.

“Either way is an ugly outcome,” Thompson managed to gasp.

“Hence the speeding,” Eve muttered.

"Agent Hope," Thompson said, looking over Eve with a wide, fearful look in her eyes, "You're being reckless. You're endangering yourself and me, as well as our case. If you're really convinced that Reaves is our man, then the proper procedure would be to call this into headquarters and request backup. When we've got the suspect identified and the SWAT squad in place, then we'll go in for the arrest."

“What?” Eve looked over briefly before putting her eyes back on the road, “And give him time to get wind that we’re close? That’s how you lose a suspect and end up with another body on your hands. The best way to go is quick and clean before he has time to react."

“That tactic has gotten us almost killed already on this case,” Thompson said, getting her phone out of her coat pocket.

"True, but you're the one who shot me," Eve reminded her. "Trust me. I know what I'm doing." Thompson frowned.

“Agent Hope, I hate to play this card with you again,” Thompson said, raising her voice as much as she was able in the hurtling vehicle, “but may I remind you that I was put in charge of this case, and if I say that we’re calling it in and waiting for backup, then that’s what we’re going to do.”

“With all due respect, Agent Thompson,” Eve said, pushing her foot down on the pedal so that the engine revved angrily under the hood and gripping the wheel at ten and two so hard her knuckles turned white, “You’d better start dialing. May I remind you that I’m behind the wheel of this car, and unless you intend to shoot me again, nothing is going to change that.”

“Don’t make me truth you, Agent Hope,” Thompson said cryptically. Eve looked over with her eyebrows knotted in confusion.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean, Thompson?” Eve demanded, “Is that supposed to be a threat?”

"You know, Hope," Thompson said, trying to leer back Eve with the same toughness, "For such a seasoned agent, you certainly weren't very covert last night. I thought you would know that motel walls have the sound resistance of tissue paper. I heard your whole conversation. I can make one phone call, and you'll find yourself on the sideline with no gun and no badge."

Eve slammed the brakes. The car came to a screeching halt on the side of the road.

“You can’t be serious,” Eve said, glowering at the blonde woman. For a split second, Eve felt the rage welling up within her. For a split second, Eve felt like the daughter of the Swallowtail Killer. Her grip tightened on the wheel. The sinews in her jaw flexed with hatred.

“It shouldn’t come as such a surprise,” Thompson said haughtily, more confident now that she’d succeeded in startling the vehicle to a halt, “After all, it’s my sworn duty to observe you and your movements. That’s why we were given separate rooms, but I was instructed to listen in on any calls you made. I heard everything.”

“There was nothing to hear,” Eve retorted. “Whatever phone call you overheard, I haven’t done anything that would warrant my dismissal from the Bureau.” 

“Is that so?” Thompson snapped, smiling cruelly as if she’d just put Eve in checkmate, “Then why the grinding halt when I threatened to turn you in?”

Eve didn't answer. Her eyes narrowed, shifting from the phone in her partner's hand to the GPS navigation system in the dashboard console. Reaves's registered address was only half a block away, a secluded house on the corner with high privacy hedges growing around the backyard. Eve could see the property from the car.

The engine idled, underscoring the tension between them.

“Do you remember what Watson said about trust?” Eve asked, shifting her eyes to her partner’s.

“Sure,” Thompson replied, “What about it?”

“Maybe he was right. Maybe we could use a lesson in it. You have to trust that I haven’t done anything to impede my father’s manhunt, and I have to trust that you aren’t going to cook up an accusation out of anger.”

"So, does that mean you're breaking orders?" Thompson asked her thumb still hovering over the screen of her phone. Eve shook her head.

“You don’t give me orders,” she said, “I won’t risk blowing this case on a question of technical authority. You make your call. I’m making mine.”

Without giving Thompson time to respond, Eve sprung open the car door and stepped out into the street.

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

The time had come, the man thought as he stood at the head of his humble table, surveying his family like a kingdom, his hand resting on the high back of his waiting chair. He looked over the modern, secular nativity he’d created for himself – his wife serene and devout, his son silent and divine.

Only he, the humble carpenter who bore these figures into the world by the ache of his heart and the sweat of his brow, was now an outsider. The issue was not that the figures were wooden and lifeless – their stillness held all the peace and plenty that his heart yearned for. No, the problem was that the man himself was far too alive and animated, his soft flesh and aging bones still at the whim of the merciless winds of fate.

The man reached out, his fingers gently caressing the tender line of Cindy’s jaw. She was so beautiful, her glow and shape never waning, untouched by the sands of time. If only he could pass his whole life in that still, peaceful condition. It wasn’t fair that she should be allowed to stay young, fresh, and pretty forever while he was doomed to age and wither, collecting bunions and cavities and arthritis along the way before finally falling like a sandbag into the ever-yawing mouth of the grave.

It just wasn’t fair.

The man let his hand fall gently away from his wife’s sweet likeness. The rosy, sun-kissed tan he’d painted on her cheeks was several shades darker and healthier than his own pale, emaciated forearms. His fingers trembled as he reached for a can of light redwood varnish. 

Slowly, the man reached up to touch his face. His hand was wet, dripping strands of translucent pink varnish across the table. The familiar scent of wood stain filled his nostrils. The man could feel his skin becoming rigid and brittle as he applied another layer of varnish.

Hold still – find peace. This is fair. Anything else will not be fair. The world is in pain. The world is taking and losing.

Fully painted, the man sank into his chair at last. He sat down, ready to never move again, for any deviation would break the moment. Who knew what would happen then? He'd paid a high price for this moment. He'd carved it literally out of the unhewn wood of his family's legacy. He'd steeped himself in bloodshed and violence, deprived himself of joys and pleasures, all because he knew the moment he wanted to live in.

This was it.

He, his loving wife, and their happy, healthy, quiet son sitting together in the kitchen of their little house. It wasn't an ostentatious place – certainly, as the owner of a lumber and carpentry company, he could have afforded something larger and more glamorous, but there was a certain, pedestrian hominess about it that was as critical to the man's dream as any other component. He didn't want to be king, high on the hill and removed, isolated, lonely. He wanted to be a cozy family man.

His father had chosen that other life and had suffered for it. The man remembered his own childhood, raised amid grandeur, high vaulted ceilings, and expensive artwork on every wall. He'd felt the deep cold of those hallways at night when his father was working late or traveling for business when the house was empty except for the servants, who were too afraid to speak to the young master.

He shivered. Anything could happen to a living person who moved around. The house could catch on fire, and they'd all go up in a raging inferno, or else a random plane crash would land on the roof and kill them all. Something. Something was bound to happen. The man could feel it tingling through his veins like static electricity. It was impossible to predict what horrors would befall him if he allowed himself to move from the spot.

He could suffer a sudden aneurysm.

Just then, a heavy pounding sounded on the door. The man would have frozen if he weren’t already frozen in place. He would have stiffened if he wasn’t already stiff as a plank of hardwood. His face would have been jarred with shock if it weren’t the same impassive wooden mask as his wife and son.

The man didn’t move.

Cindy, of course, said nothing.

I promised to protect you, Cindy. The man spoke what well might be his final words silently, his eyes locked first with his wooden, then resting on the innocent face of his infant son. I brought you into this world and made you for this single, impenetrable moment. If my life should end in the effort to preserve this single nuclear moment.

The man’s table was set, although there was no food laid out. The plates winked up from the tabletop, clean and empty. The sunlight through the window glinted off the tines and points of silver cutlery.

His fist closed around the wooden grip of the carving knife. The head of the table was the only one set with serving-ware. The duty was his. At last, everything made sense. This was why he had to remain animated while his beloved wife and newborn child rested in wooden serenity. He had one more test to complete, one final duty of fairness that had to be completed before he could take his place at the head of the table.

He raised the long, sharp knife like a saber in salute. Then he turned and crept across the kitchen to the pantry. He let himself inside the narrow cupboard. Around him, the cans and boxes were silent as a standing grave.

He crouched behind the door, leaving it cracked only a fraction of an inch ajar. If need be, he would defend his fair little family to the final breath. Nothing, and nobody was going to strip him away from his moment.

The intruder was pounding on the door again. He could hear an aggressive voice penetrating his silence, as destructive as the bullets that he knew were coming.

He gritted his teeth.

This is my moment, he thought. Let them come.

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

Eve stepped over the door she’d just kicked in, her pistol locked, loaded, and leveled as she entered the house on 2350 Sickle Cut Way.

The windowless hallway by which she entered was dark. Her own shadow stretched out long and weird before her as she advanced. She flipped on the tac light mounted to her Beretta and continued down the hall.

Eve tried to put all thoughts of the conflict she’d just had with her partner out of her mind as she moved through the seemingly empty house. She couldn’t let herself get concerned with the absurd attempt at blackmail Thompson had made in the car. She needed all her focus on the present situation. In Eve’s line of work, staying alert meant staying alive in a very literal sense.

Eve reached a door at the elbow of the hallway, which she found unlocked. Opening it up, she found that she was looking into a spacious garage. There was no car present, although Eve had seen a Mercedes SLK in the driveway.

The right side of the garage was dominated by a large workbench. Woodworking tools of every age and variety hung from pegs on the wall, and more were scattered around on the surface of the workbench and surrounding floor area. Cans of paints and sheets of sandpaper were dotted here and there among the tools, and the air in the garage had the strong scent of paint thinner and sawdust on it. Somebody had been working here recently.

I knew it, Eve thought. Reaves, you sneaky bastard, you were never on any business trip, were you?

There was an empty space on the workbench, a spot about three feet wide where there were no tools or supplies. Eve narrowed her eyes.

What were you working on in there? She wondered.

Dancing her light over the rest of the garage, Eve saw that it was empty. There was nobody hiding in any of the corners nor clinging to the rafters.

The beam of her light fell on something white and plastic in the corner – dozens of plastic jugs, she realized. Even from across the garage, Eve could read the brightly colored labels on the jugs. Shock-Bright.

Gotcha.

There was an odd pile of scrap wood on the floor by the empty jugs. Eve saw flecks of blood on some of it but decided to investigate later, only when she was sure the house was empty. Closing the door again, Eve turned the corner of the hallway and continued into the living room in the front of the house. She glanced at the front door as she passed, noting that it was still locked. If the killer had run out through the front door when she came in the back, would he have stopped to lock the door behind him?

Or was it possible that the man really wasn’t in the house? Even if he’d faked the trip to the Pacific Northwest for an alibi, it was always possible that he was simply out of the house. Maybe he was out buying groceries.

Or maybe he was out stalking his next victim.

The thought sent a chill down Eve’s spine. She hurried into the living room, shining the beam of her light over the sofa, recliner, and television set. All were vacant and lifeless. Eve checked behind the furniture, ensuring that the room really was empty.

It was.

With every nerve in her body still on edge, Eve turned to survey the kitchen.

The agent nearly jumped out of her skin.

There were two people – a woman and an infant baby seated at the table.

“What in the ever-loving fuck?” Eve blurted, jumping back and leveling her pistol at the man seated at the head of the table. “FBI! Nobody move!”

Nobody moved.

Nobody moved at all. Not an inch. Not a quiver. The people at the table didn’t so much as blink in the face of Eve’s Beretta. The baby didn’t cry – didn’t so much as gurgle.

They weren’t real. Now that she was really looking at them, it was obvious to Eve that the figures seated at the table were wooden mannequins. The strange, life-size dolls were painted with clothes, hair, and faces, although it was amateurishly done.

Still with her pistol leveled, Eve walked across the kitchen floor to the nearest of the figures. This one was a woman. Her hair was painted a sandy blonde color, her dress a pale green tone, and her skin a flushed, rosy peach. Her lips were set in a thin, gentle smile.

The lifeless eyes stared out at nothing.

Eve knocked on the woman’s head with the barrel of her gun. She couldn’t help herself. She knew it was a doll – nothing more than wood and paint. Still, she had to be sure.

The woman didn’t move.

"Wooden dolls," Eve muttered, her eyes moving across the table to the wooden baby in the highchair. Its chubby wooden arms were up, the little fingers extended as it reached out.

There was something incredibly tender about the statues, Eve thought as she looked at them. Not what she’d expected from a deranged killer. There was life captured in the positioning of all three: mother, father, and baby.

Tender or not, Eve reflected, they were looking for somebody hyper fixated on families. These bizarre wooden carvings were yet another sign that her hunch had led her right. The man himself might not be in the house, but the evidence was piling up around him.

Just then, Eve heard a sound that made her whole body tense. She turned her head, her ears pricked up as she tried to identify the faint shuffling sound she was hearing.

Footsteps.

Eve turned in the direction of the hall, her pistol leveled, her fingers on the trigger. Her eyes remained wide open. Her heartbeat felt slow.

Come on, you bastard, Eve thought, rush me, and let's finish this.

Eve heaved a breath and rounded the corner, her pistol up, her eyes wide.

The beam of her light fell on a gun in the hand of a figure in the hallway. Eve froze, but only for an instant.

It was Thompson.

"Christ, fucking announce yourself next time," Eve snapped peevishly, tucking her pistol away so that she didn't accidentally pull the trigger out of pure irritation. Thompson blinked at her, still gripping her pistol with fearful intensity.

“I didn’t want to announce my position,” Thompson said defensively.

“I already cleared the house,” Eve snapped, “He isn’t here.”

“Where is he?” Thompson asked.

“That’s the million-dollar question,” Eve said, “For all I know, he’s in the Pacific Northwest.”

“You mean you think Reaves is innocent after all?”

“Not by a long shot,” Eve said, “Take a look at his garage back down the hall. He’s got twenty or more spent bottles of Shock-Bright, plus some blood-stained lumber. I think he might have used it to knock out Kirk Garett.”

Thompson started to turn back, intending to check out the garage, but Eve stopped her.

“Wait a second,” she called out, “Come on into the kitchen first. I think you ought to see this.”

The agents stared at the wooden mother and child in befuddled confusion.

“What do you think it means?” Thompson asked.

“I think it means we're looking at a person who’s trying to emulate a family instead of starting a real one, for some reason. These go beyond eclectic decoration. This is an inability to cope with reality.”

"You were right," Thompson said, shaking her head in disbelief, "Reaves is our guy." She turned to look back at Eve with an amazed expression on her face. "This, on top of everything, is enough for me. How did you know?"

“I…” Eve started, but something caught her attention. She cocked her head and narrowed her eyes pensively.

“What is it?” Thompson asked.

“Look at the place settings,” Eve said, her eyes fixed on the head of the table.

“You think he was having little tea parties with his make-believe family?” Thompson asked, “Suggests an infantilized sense of denial consistent with your theory of a childhood trauma, possibly retriggered by the death of his wife.”

“He set a place for himself,” Eve said grimly, “He was here recently, but now he’s gone.”

“How recently?” Thompson asked.

“The garage still smells like woodwork, so I’d he’s at least been here within the last few days. The stain varnish dribbled across the table looks wet, too,” Eve said, “Suggesting he’s been here within the last hour.”

Eve’s voice trailed off. Her eyes were narrow slits as she stared at the places set out before the wooden figures and empty chair.

There was something very prim, proper, and complete about the way the forks, knives, and spoons were laid out. She saw that they were arranged with careful precision – the salad and dinner forks were set in the proper order, the desert and soupspoons aligned inscrutably. An English butler wouldn’t have found one thing amiss among the serving platter, meat fork, gravy boat, and glassware.

Everything was in place. Everything was perfectly straight and orderly.

Except for the carving knife.

There was an empty spot next to the serving platter, beside the two-pronged fork. It could just be missing – after all, the whole thing was little more than a grown man’s oversized playset. Still, the absence of a large knife from the table, when so much care had been placed on the proper setting of the table otherwise, made the hairs on the back of Eve’s neck stand up.

“The knife,” she breathed, raising her gun suddenly to sweep the kitchen once again. Thompson’s eyes fell on the table, picking up on what her partner saw missing from the set.

“Where is he?” Thompson whispered, bringing her own weapon up and moving a step closer to Eve. The agents stood nearly back-to-back, their eyes wide and alert.

The house was perfectly silent.

Eve’s eyes fell on what she’d at first taken for a cabinet door in the corner of the kitchen.

The door was ajar. Eve's gaze fell to the floor.

There was a dripping trail of the thin, reddish stain leading from the head of the table to the cabinet door.

Maybe it’s not a cabinet at all, she thought suddenly, every muscle in her body tensing.

“Door,” Eve hissed to her partner. Thompson nodded and advanced forward. Eve kept her gun trained on the door, but Thompson crossed into her line of fire as she reached for the handle. Eve gritted her teeth. If it came to a sudden decision, Eve couldn’t risk the friendly fire.

Thompson opened the door and screamed.

CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

The man exploded out of the pantry in a blur of motion. Eve saw the flash of the knife in his hand as he lunged at Thompson. She squeezed the trigger, pulling her shot to the rear so that she wouldn't hit her partner, but even as the report sounded and the gun kicked in her hands, Eve knew her shot was useless. Her bullet ripped through the panel of the pantry door and thudded into a soup can.

Thompson fired her weapon also, her shot flying ineffectually high at presumed head level. The man exploded out of the pantry from a crouch, his long, scrawny body shooting up at a diagonal, his teeth bared, his thinning hair flying out behind him in a straggling mess.

The man’s carving knife connected with Thompson’s gun hand, sweeping it down and away as she pulled the trigger again. Her shot went through the floor at an oblique angle across her body. The cut on her hand weakened her grip, and the recoil from the shot sent the gun flying back. Thompson’s Glock smacked her in the temple, and the agent sagged. She fell nearly into the arms of Reaves, and the two tumbled to the floor.

Eve caught her breath, her gun trained on the pair of bodies. There was no clean shot, and Reaves was still holding the knife.

The combination blow to the head from the recoil and tackle from Reaves had knocked her briefly unconscious. The gun fell from her slumping hand as they collapsed.

Now, the man, cowering behind his unconscious human shield, was reaching for the handle of the pistol. Eve saw that the hand he had wrapped around her ribs still held the carving knife. The razor-sharp edge was pressed against Thompson's throat.

“Edison Reaves,” Eve called, hoping that her loud voice would do something to revive her partner, "Stop right there! Drop the weapon now. I've got you covered, and if necessary, I will kill you. This can go a lot better for you if you just put the knife down and stop reaching for that gun!"

“You first,” the man called back. Eve still hadn’t gotten a good look at his face. It was hard to read his mental state only from his hands. “Put down your gun, and I’ll let you both go easy.”

“I can’t do that while you’re holding that knife to my partner’s throat,” Eve called back.

“You can’t ask me to do something you can’t do yourself,” the man called back, his fingers closing around the grip of the pistol. “It isn’t fair.”

Eve didn't say anything. Her eyes were narrow slits as she tried to calculate the odds and angles of the difficult shot. Could she shoot the gun out of his hand without killing her partner? And what would Reaves do with that knife if she tried it? No, the better move was to try to keep him talking. Maybe she could talk him into giving himself up. At the very least, it would buy her some time.

“What about Pamela Macey?”  Eve called out, “She was drowned in her backyard. Her little daughter is an orphan now. Is that fair?”

The man murmured something that Eve couldn’t catch. He was cornered in the kitchen with Eve standing squarely between him and the only exit. Still, his fingers did not relinquish the pistol. He got a hold of the handle, his finger itching towards the trigger before he’d even raised the weapon.

Thompson’s face twitched as if she were starting to regain unconsciousness. She murmured something thickly, and the man pressed the blade of the knife against her throat.

“Selma Vishni, too,” Eve called, advancing a step closer. The man using Thompson as a shield was stronger than his thin, sinewy limbs suggested. Eve traced the line of his white, varnished streaked arm with the bead of her gun. "I don't think her family feels fairly treated. And Kirk Garret – he was lost by his family and his music students. Was that fair?"

“The world doesn’t turn the axis of what’s fair, does it?” The hand gripping the gun lifted, turning awkwardly to aim in Eve’s direction. “People are hit by cars. Airplanes crash and burn at random. Infants are born with heart defects.”

“And young brides suffer aneurysms in the pool,” Eve said, “Is that right, Mr. Reaves?”

Eve heard the man catch his breath. Without looking back, Eve recalled the wooden family set up so carefully at the table. She could see the impotent rage that drove him to such precision in the manufacturing of his delusion – the care and attention to detail that he’d placed on carving and painting his wooden wife and child.

“Your wife,” Eve said, trying another step towards the man. His knife trembled against Thompson’s unconscious throat. “What happened to her wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair to her, it wasn’t fair to you, and it wasn’t fair to your potential family. But killing the others doesn’t change that.”

“So it goes,” the voice sneered. “I had to learn, so they had to learn. They had to learn to love what they had by losing it, just like I did.”

“I can see that you loved her,” Eve called out. She was stalling, trying to draw him out. “You put a lot of care into your dolls.”

“They’re not dolls,” the voice snapped. “They’re memories.” She could see the muzzle of Thompson’s gun in the man’s hand, awkwardly trying to work around the side of her ribs in order to point at Eve without losing his grip on the knife. He couldn’t quite bring it far enough to aim directly at her, Eve noticed. She inched away. The man grunted as he turned, keeping Thompson propped up between himself and the barrel of Eve’s Beretta.

Thompson's eyes snapped open suddenly. She didn't move from her dead-weight slump, but Eve could see her desperately making eye contact. Eve didn't allow the revelation to reflect in her expression, although she didn't think Reaves could actually see her from behind Thompson. His head was hunched down behind Thompson’s right shoulder.

The agent’s eyes interlocked. From the slight furrow of Thompson’s eyebrows, Eve understood what her partner was asking.

What side is the gun on?

Eve saw Thompson’s plan in a flash. Her arm hung only a few inches away from the man’s nose. One sharp jab could work like a knockout punch. Then she’d grab for the gun hand and roll.

If she failed – if the elbow was not quick or hard enough, if Thompson slipped or gave away her attack a second before she made it, all Reaves had to do was draw the knife across her throat, and her life would be over.

It was a dangerous gamble, but Eve could see from the steely look in Thompson’s eye that she intended to make it.

Eve flicked her eyes down to the man’s gun hand to her left, Thompson’s right. Her gun was trained on the spot where the man would recoil. Her finger touched the trigger gently. She gave the slightest nod of her head.

With a swift, precise motion that caught even Eve slightly by surprise, Thompson brought her chin down and her elbow back. Eve heard the thwack of strong contact as her partner’s blow connected with the man’s nose.

He yowled with pain, rearing back just as Thompson ducked forward. Eve saw the knife blade catch her partner’s jaw as she seized the man’s wrist with both hands, rolling forward in a strong summersault.

Eve pulled the trigger and this time, her geometry had been perfect. At the exact second the man's head appeared behind her partner's back, the bullet pierced his skull.

The knife fell from his hand.

Gasping and clutching at her throat with one hand, Thompson wrestled the gun out of the man’s suddenly limp hand and scrambled away. She sprung up and spun around, her weapon leveled and her eyes fierce, but Eve was already lowering her weapon.

The man lay splayed out on the floor of his kitchen, stiff as a wooden board.

EPILOGUE

Eve unlocked the door of her apartment with a weary sigh. Every muscle in her body felt totally exhausted. All she wanted was to fall down and sleep for the entire week she was given for rest and recuperation.

Reaves was guilty. It was an open and shut case – a surefire posthumous conviction, according to the DA. Another tally in the column of cases solved for Eve Hope, another win for peace and lawfulness.

So why did she feel as if she'd swallowed a bag of concrete spoonfuls at a time on the flight home?

There was still tension between herself and Thompson. The argument in the car had not really been resolved, even though they'd arrested the killer and solved the case. There was still the matter of the phone call that Thompson had overheard and plainly misinterpreted through the hotel wall. That could prove to be a problem for Eve if Thompson's ego pushed her to leverage the trusted position she’d been assigned by the Deputy Directors out of spite.

Still, Eve thought, she was far too tired to think about any of that now. The problems would all be there waiting for her, she had no doubt after she'd gotten a few hours of solid shuteye.

Eve locked her door and snapped on her overheads. The living room was filled with warm artificial light, and Eve nearly jumped out of her skin.

There was somebody sitting on her sofa.

Eve had her gun out of her holster and leveled at the intruder in less than a second. The person on the sofa turned around slowly, smiling at Eve.

"Hey, Eve," the woman said casually, "Is that a gun in your hand, or are you just surprised to see me?"

“Lily?” Eve gasped, lowering her weapon and gaping in disbelief at the face of her sister, “I thought you were in San Francisco.”

“No, I said I wasn’t in San Francisco,” Lily said, “Weren’t you listening.”

"I thought it was a ruse," Eve replied with a smile, tucking her gun away and coming around to sit down heavily on the sofa, "You know, to throw me off the trail."

“Nope,” Lily said, giving her sister a hug, “Real deal, no bluffing. Here I am.”

"How did you get in here?" Eve asked, "My complex has a gate and a guard." She furrowed her eyebrows as the illogical probability that her sister slipped in unnoticed and uninvited mounted up in her mind. "And I have a door with a lock on it. How did you do it?"

“Ah, ah, ah,” Lily waggled a finger in Eve’s face, “A magician never reveals her secrets. Besides, you ought to know. Don’t you remember SPHYNX?”

“Of course,” Eve said, “I also remember crushing it under my heel in the basement when Miss X tried to kill my last partner.”

"Right – that's what you remember. But the original code was running on the burner phone, if you recall.”

“I thought that was a joke,” Eve replied with a concerned expression. Lily smiled and shrugged.

“Anyway, I buzzed myself in and decided to wait for you. I hope you don’t mind.”

“How long have you been waiting?” Eve asked, sinking exhaustedly to the soft by her sister’s side.

"A couple of days," Lily replied casually, "I needed someplace lowkey where nobody would come looking."

“What?” Eve sat up, looking intently at her sister, “Why would you need that? Are you in some kind of trouble?”

“Not exactly,” Lily replied, “At least, I’m not the one that’s in trouble.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Eve said, “And I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m really exhausted. Can this wait until the morning?”

“I’m afraid it can’t wait another minute,” Lily said, and Eve noticed that she was trying to repress a smile. “Do you remember what I told you when I called?”

“Of course,” Eve said, “You had some harebrained idea that Howard isn’t really the Swallowtail Killer. Don’t tell me that’s what this is all about. Lily, I can’t get involved. It’d be a conflict of interest for me to get involved in Howard’s investigation one way or the other.”

“That never stopped you from coming to see me before,” said a voice from nowhere that made Eve’s blood run cold. She froze in place.

She knew that voice, but it couldn’t be. 

Eve looked at her sister, who was biting her lips in order to repress the smile.

“What did you do?” Eve asked.

“Okay, now, Eve, please don’t be mad,” Lily said, getting to her feet and holding up her hands as if to ward off the flurry of protests that she expected from her sister. “I know that you’re not fully convinced yet, and I know you’ve got plenty of reasons not to get involved, but that was actually why I thought it would be a good idea to bring him here.”

"Who?" Eve asked, her eyes wide as she stared at her sister in utter astonishment and disbelief, "Who did you bring into my home, Lily?"

“Because turning him in would mean putting your own career at risk,” Lily went on happily, “so I figured that would force you to give him at least enough time to talk to you himself. I think he at least deserves that much after all this time."

Eve’s eyes fell on the door of her bedroom. It was shut. Eve knew with certainty that she never shut her bedroom door all the way unless she was inside.

"This isn't real," Eve said, turning away from her bedroom door and running her fingers through her hair, "This can't be real. This is a dream, and I'm going to wake up any second. This simply cannot be happening."

“Well, I hate to break it to you, but you’re awake,” Lily said, “And this is real, and so am I, and so is he. You can’t run from this forever. You have to know that. After all, he’s your father.”

“Howard Hope is no father of mine,” Eve snarled at her sister, “I’ve spent my life making sure that’s the case. I risk my life every day to make sure that I’m not Howard Hope’s daughter. How dare you bring him here? How dare you break into my house? You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you when I came in, do you know that?”

She’d worked herself up in a fuming shout, standing up and throwing her hands about expressively. Lily stared back with a pained expression on her face that couldn’t quite fully cover the concealed excitement in her eyes. She was proud of herself; Eve could see from her expression. She was just waiting for Eve to get over the shock.

“I’ll turn him in,” Eve said, “And you too. It was a mistake to break into my place. It was a mistake to bring him. You’ll both go to prison, and I won’t feel sorry for either of you. You forgot that I’m an agent of the FBI first. My sworn duty is my life. Without it, I’m nothing.”

Lily looked at her sister for a longer, somber moment.

Then, the bedroom door opened. All eyes turned.

A thin, lithe man with jet black hair that was starting to thin in a distinguished widow's peak and quick, intelligent obsidian eyes stood in the doorway, looking at his daughters with love and pain and laughter written all over his face.

“Fighting like sisters,” he said, stepping out of the room, “And all over me. As much as it pains me, I have to admit, I’m also a little flattered. Not many men in my position are fortunate enough to have so many people concerned with what they do and where they go. I should count myself lucky.”

Eve was stiff as a board, staring at her father. He turned to look at her. For the first time in over fifteen years, father and daughter were not separated by bulletproof glass.

Howard Hope, the notorious Swallowtail Killer, stared at Eve Hope, a famous detective with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Their eyes were identical and locked on each other. Eve’s hand itched to go for her gun, but somehow, she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She was entirely unable to command motion from her hand. In the face of her father, Eve Hope was entirely powerless for the first time since she was a little girl.

“Hello, Eve,” Howard said, a warm smile spreading across his charming face. Eve looked into his eyes. The black irises were as flat, emotionless and manipulative as ever. A shiver wracked her body.

"Hello, Howard," she said, speaking as if in a dream. "I see you've been busy."

“Oh,” Howard said, reaching out to touch Eve's shoulder. She wanted to pull away, but the shock had left her totally paralyzed. He gripped her shoulders, then pulled her close for a hug. When he whispered in her ear, his hot breath made her skin crawl all over her body. "You have no idea just how busy I've been."

NOW AVAILABLE!

IN HIS DREAMS

(An Eve Hope FBI Suspense Thriller—Book 7)

FBI Special Agent Eve Hope can’t escape the shadow of her notorious serial killer father—though he is jailed, the puzzle of the loving father of her childhood haunts her. A woman is found dead in an exclusive, tight-knit neighborhood, and Eve is summoned, as the case too eerily mirrors her father’s. But as Eve pries deeper, she discovers this town is not what it seems—and that a killer, like her father, is hiding in plain sight.

“This is an excellent book… When you start reading, be sure you don’t have to wake up early!”

—Reader review for The Killing Game

IN HIS DREAMS is BOOK #7 in a new series by #1 bestselling mystery and suspense author Kate Bold, whose books have received over 600 five star ratings and reviews.

A page-turning and harrowing crime thriller featuring a brilliant and tortured FBI agent, the EVE HOPE series is a riveting mystery, packed with non-stop action, suspense, twists and turns, revelations, and driven by a breakneck pace that will keep you flipping pages late into the night. Fans of Rachel Caine, Teresa Driscoll, and Robert Dugoni are sure to fall in love.

Future books in the series will soon be available.

“This book moved very fast and every page was exciting. Plenty of dialogue, you absolutely love the characters, and you were rooting for the good guy throughout the whole story… I look forward to reading the next in the series.”

—Reader review for The Killing Game

“Kate did an amazing job on this book and I was hooked from the first chapter!”

—Reader review for The Killing Game

“I really enjoyed this book. The characters were authentic, and I see the bad guys as something we hear about daily on the news... Looking forward to book 2.”

—Reader review for The Killing Game

“This was a really good book. The main characters were real, flawed and human. The story went along quickly and wasn't mired in too many unnecessary details. I really enjoyed it.”

—Reader review for The Killing Game

“Alexa Chase is headstrong, impatient, but most of all brave with a capital B. She never, repeat never, backs down until the bad guys are put where they belong. Clearly five stars!”

—Reader review for The Killing Game

“Captivating and riveting serial murder with a twist of the macabre… Very well done.”

—Reader review for The Killing Game

“WOW what a great read! Talk about a diabolical killer! Really enjoyed this book. Looking forward to reading others by this author as well.”

—Reader review for The Killing Game

“Page turner for sure. Great characters and relationships. I got into the middle of this story and couldn’t put it down. Looking forward to more from Kate Bold.”

—Reader review for The Killing Game

“Hard to put down. It has an excellent plot and has the right amount of suspense. I really enjoyed this book.”

—Reader review for The Killing Game

“Extremely well written, and well worth buying and reading. I can't wait to read book two!”

—Reader review for The Killing Game

IN HIS DREAMS

(An Eve Hope FBI Suspense Thriller—Book 7)

Kate Bold

Bestselling author Kate Bold is author of the ALEXA CHASE SUSPENSE THRILLER series, comprising six books (and counting); the ASHLEY HOPE SUSPENSE THRILLER series, comprising six books (and counting); the CAMILLE GRACE FBI SUSPENSE THRILLER series, comprising eight books (and counting); the HARLEY COLE FBI SUSPENSE THRILLER series, comprising eleven books (and counting); the KAYLIE BROOKS PSYCHOLOGICAL SUSPENSE THRILLER series, comprising five books (and counting); the EVE HOPE FBI SUSPENSE THRILLER series, comprising seven books (and counting); the DYLAN FIRST FBI SUSPENSE THRILLER series, comprising five books (and counting); and the LAUREN LAMB FBI SUSPENSE THRILLER series, comprising five books (and counting).

An avid reader and lifelong fan of the mystery and thriller genres, Kate loves to hear from you, so please feel free to visit www.kateboldauthor.com to learn more and stay in touch.

BOOKS BY KATE BOLD

ALEXA CHASE SUSPENSE THRILLER

THE KILLING GAME (Book #1)

THE KILLING TIDE (Book #2)

THE KILLING HOUR (Book #3)

THE KILLING POINT (Book #4)

THE KILLING FOG (Book #5)

THE KILLING PLACE (Book #6)

ASHLEY HOPE SUSPENSE THRILLER

LET ME GO (Book #1)

LET ME OUT (Book #2)

LET ME LIVE (Book #3)

LET ME BREATHE (Book #4)

LET ME FORGET (Book #5)

LET ME ESCAPE (Book #6)

CAMILLE GRACE FBI SUSPENSE THRILLER

NOT ME (Book #1)

NOT NOW (Book #2)

NOT WELL (Book #3)

NOT HER (Book #4)

NOT NORMAL (Book #5)

NOT AGAIN (Book #6)

NOT SAFE (Book #7)

NOT TODAY (Book #8)

HARLEY COLE FBI SUSPENSE THRILLER

NOWHERE SAFE (Book #1)

NOWHERE LEFT (Book #2)

NOWHERE TO RUN (Book #3)

NOWHERE LIKE THIS (Book #4)

NOWHERE GIRL (Book #5)

NOWHERE TO HIDE (Book #6)

NOWHERE CERTAIN (Book #7)

NOWHERE PURE (Book #8)

NOWHERE SOUND (Book #9)

NOWHERE SANE (Book #10)

NOWHERE TRUE (Book #11)

KAYLIE BROOKS PYSCHOLOGICAL SUSPENSE THRILLER

LAST BREATH (Book #1)

LAST CHANCE (Book #2)

LAST WISH (Book #3)

LAST SHOT (Book #4)

LAST MISTAKE (Book #5)

EVE HOPE FBI SUSPENSE THRILLER

IN HIS BLOOD (Book #1)

IN HIS SIGHTS (Book #2)

IN HIS REACH (Book #3)

IN HIS MIND (Book #4)

IN HIS WAY (Book #5)

IN HIS THOUGHTS (Book #6)

IN HIS DREAMS (Book #7)

DYLAN FIRST FBI SUSPENSE THRILLER

OUT OF REACH (Book #1)

OUT OF TOUCH (Book #2)

OUT OF TIME (Book #3)

OUT OF BOUNDS (Book #4)

OUT OF LUCK (Book #5)

LAUREN LAMB FBI SUSPENSE THRILLER

SOMETHING KNOCKING (Book #1)

SOMETHING CALLING (Book #2)

SOMETHING WRONG (Book 3)

SOMETHING DARK (Book #4)

SOMETHING TO HIDE (Book #5)