She steeled herself, then turned her cold, assessing gaze on the bloodstained bed and the noisome narrative she could read from it. She noted the way the blood had pooled—not splattered, pooled—on and beneath the pillow. Her gaze crawled to the walls that the bed touched on two sides. Nothing. No secondary splatter, no gray matter, nothing.

Taking a single step deeper into the cloud of odors, Meredeth grimaced at the olfactory assault—a safe expression, since no one could see her face anyway. A black-ringed hole penetrated the pillow, and gray matter coated the bullet’s path as well as the surface of the pillowcase. The tendons in her jaw creaked, and she forced it to relax, only then realizing how much her molars and jaw ached.

“Got him in his sleep, right?” asked the officer.

Meredeth didn’t answer, and after a heartbeat, she heard Bobby turning and dropping one tanned, manicured hand on the cop’s shoulder. “Come on,” said Bobby. “Let’s see if we can round up some coffee.”

“But—”

“Only take a minute,” said Bobby, and Meredeth could hear his wide, shit-eating grin in his voice.

“Well…”

“Come on, I think better with a little black-gold in my bloodstream.”

As their footsteps retreated, her mouth dropped open, and she exhaled in a silent wail. The victim would have turned seven in two months. She pinched the bridge of her nose, feeling the maelstrom coming, and hoping the headache this scene induced would leave her a modicum of dignity, that it wouldn’t lay her out. Once again, she closed the gruesome scene out by squeezing her eyes shut.

Her vision flashed—red, blue, red—and the memory of the creaking scene came crawling back to the front of her mind, bringing with it the scent of copper and butcher-shop and the heat, always the heat. A door slammed, and she started, fear blossoming in her belly like a spring flower. She snapped her eyes open and turned away from the bed, looking into the closet instead, sending her gaze somewhere safe. Whatever the brain bubble was, she didn’t recognize the memory as her own, and she sent it on its merry way.

Shaking her head, she spun and walked back into the hall as silent as a burglar, turning away from the living room and Bobby’s yuck-yuck-yuck patter, her gaze frozen on the darkened maw of the so-called master suite, which, except for its closet-sized bathroom, wouldn’t be much bigger than the other bedrooms. As she passed the communal bath, she glanced inside, cataloging the mess, the mold, and the cheap toilet paper as she did.

The master was in the same messy state—and whoever had processed the scene hadn’t helped that one bit. Her gaze rested on the bedclothes, which lay on the floor as if tossed aside in a valiant—yet doomed—attempt to protect the little boy down the hall. The woman had taken the first .40 caliber round high in the chest on her left side, just above her collarbone—as if she hadn’t stayed where the killer had expected her to stay.

Did you make it to him? she wondered. Did he make noise, wake you up? Is the murdering bastard’s skin under your nails? Her eyes stung momentarily—even after twenty-three years investigating wanton acts of violence and terror, acts of maternal heroism still got to her. She knew this poor woman thought she had a chance. But you didn’t, momma. The .40 Caliber Killer always kills the littlest kid first. Always. You’re still a hero, sweety, because you went after the son of a bitch, anyway.

Blood splattered the wall above the bed—flung there by that first assassin’s round. The second slug had gone where he’d wanted it…or close enough. It hadn’t drilled through her left eye, like the slug the unsub had put into the boy, but from what the coroner had told her on the phone as they raced down from Buffalo, he hadn’t missed by more than an eighth of an inch. Pretty impressive shooting. Hit her in the torso to straighten her up? Maybe spin her a little? Delay her long enough to set up the headshot? She shook her head. That kind of shooting, the cold assessment and snap decisions required, spoke to advanced training and long experience. More experience than just the four previous murders we tagged him with.

The coroner had also told her about a series of post-mortem gunshot wounds that peppered Debra Besson’s chest. Why’d you do that? Why did you shoot her five more times? What did she do that required Momma Besson to take a little more punishment?

Her practiced gaze swept the room, noting that nothing appeared to be missing, that the brief fight hadn’t disturbed the knickknacks, hairbrushes, and cheap perfume on the dresser. She saw no additional blood splatter—only the wall above the bed from the first shot, and the mess half on and half off the fitted sheet. Hope you hurt him, hon. I really do. Her breath hitched in her throat. God speed. After another silent, jaw-stretching wail, she pushed her emotions away, feeding that demon deep inside her, the one that caused the headaches… What other choice did she have?

One last look, then she composed her face in the flat calm everyone expected—as though her brain was solid-state, and her blood could chill ice—and headed out to the front of the trailer. As she entered the living room, the policeman’s face lit up with that puppy-dog excitement she detested.

Still, she didn’t hold it against him—not really. He was young, and the excitement overrode his horror. At least for the moment. He probably doesn’t know he looks like a ghoul. She nodded to him, then turned her gaze on Bobby. “Coffee?”

“You got it, boss,” he said with a wink at the local officer. He strode to the counter separating the kitchen from the living area and grabbed a Styrofoam cup with a lid on it.

Officer Carlsbad or Carson or Carlton—whatever, she thought—leaned forward, light dancing in his eyes. She nodded at Bobby and took the offered cup, taking a long sip to forestall the eager cop as long as possible.

“Seen enough?” he asked.

“Too much,” grumbled Meredeth.

He gave her the expression, then—the one all the young local cops gave her when she said something like that—a little confused, a little unbelieving. “Did you…get anything?” He waved his Styrofoam coffee cup at the hallway. “Back in there?”

“Garson, I told you,” said Bobby, “it’s not ESP. It’s science.”

“Yeah,” said Officer Garson with a frenetic bob of the head. “I mean, I know it’s not ESP, but she’s a profiler”—he snatched his gaze from Bobby to Meredeth—“you are a profiler, right? From that Behavior Analysis Unit?”

She swallowed the coffee and nodded. “Behavioral Analysis Unit, but yeah.”

“Right, right. I always get that wrong.” Garson did his best not to leer at her like a goon.

“I assume he picked the lock?” she asked.

Garson nodded. “We think so. There are some scratches on the knob outside.”

Meredeth nodded, then cut her gaze to Bobby. “And there’s something new this time? Besides…” She waved toward the master bedroom with her free hand.

Garson glanced down the hall, then brightened. “Oh! Right! C’mon, I’ll show you.” He turned and fast-walked to the door, then pushed out through it.

With a one-sided grin, Bobby waved her on, falling into step behind Meredeth as she walked out into the brisk spring morning, putting on his ridiculous, black-tinted aviator glasses as though his eyes couldn’t stand even a hint of direct sunlight.

Garson was already down the small deck’s steps, heading around the end of the trailer. “We found her out back.”

“Want me to shoot him?” asked Bobby sotto voce, then smiled his perfect smile, his perfect white teeth standing out against his perfectly tanned cheeks.

“Too much paperwork,” she said with the best she could do for a smile. From Bobby’s expression, she hadn’t done all that well. “Keep him off me as best you can.”

“You know it, Mere. I always do.”

She nodded once, then followed the patrolman through the dew and mud, grimacing at the state of her sensible, yet dressy new shoes as she squelched through the grass.

Around the back of the trailer, Garson stood looking at the muddy ground beneath an open window. He waved his coffee cup at the swath of mud, the long skid, the body-shaped depression. “She fell,” he said. “See that dent that looks like she landed on her hip?”

“Her name?”

“Katrin,” said Garson. “The daughter. Fourteen or fifteen.” He whirled around, slopping coffee over his wrist and not seeming to notice. “He got her over there. She almost made it.”

“Where did he hit her?”

The officer’s expression flickered, almost a grimace. “Two shots. Neck and head.”

Meredeth raised her eyebrows and nodded, walking toward the rectangle staked out in the well-kept “yard” of the next trailer. Garson was right—she’d almost made it around the corner. Smart girl, she thought. If you’d been two steps faster…if you hadn’t slipped in that damn mud… She turned and looked back at the Besson’s poor excuse for a trailer, at the green algae blooming on its sides, at the missing piece of lattice under the trailer beneath the window. “He fired from inside?”

“As best as I can figure it.” Officer Garson waved a hand at the mud. “No sign but hers.”

“What did the CSI team say?”

Garson laughed. “We got three cars, Agent Connelly. We don’t have a CSI team.”

She frowned, her gaze flicking to Bobby. “Tell me the scene has been processed.”

Bobby shrugged. “The chief of police did it.”

“The chief…” She closed her eyes.

“He used to be a statie,” said Garson. “He was BCI with the state police. Murders. Kidnappings. All that.”

“Maybe we can have the State Police CSI team come in to process the scene?” said Bobby as if the thought had just struck him. He really was exceptional at the bonhomie routine.

Garson frowned. “The chief—”

“Oh, I know, I know,” said Bobby, striding toward the man and putting a brotherly arm around his shoulders. “But the state’s paying all those CSI guys, right? They need something to do. Let’s go give them a call. What do you say?”

Garson looked at him uncertainly. “Well… I’ll have to clear it with the chief.”

Bobby nodded as if that had been his plan all along. “Of course! Let’s head back to your car and call him, get this road on the show.” Back in Quantico, the running joke was that Bobby could sell shoes to a snake, and watching him handle the locals, Meredeth believed it.

Garson sipped his coffee, squinting a suddenly shrewd gaze at Meredeth. “Uh. Sure, okay.” His gaze said, “What do you think you know about me? Think you’re better than me, Ms. FBI agent?” After a brief, probing look, he turned and started back toward his car.

She’d seen it at least a thousand times before and knew from experience that part of his budding hostility came from her demeanor—that cold, calculated FBI profiler expression she’d picked up somewhere along the line. She rubbed her eyes with her thumb and forefinger, already feeling the spikes behind her left eye, the pounding in her brow, the throbbing at the base of her neck. “This damn headache,” she said, loud enough for Garson to hear it across the yard. “Bobby, bring me my aspirin when you come back, would you?” A bitter scowl threatened as she said it, knowing the aspirin would help about as much as a bullet to the brain. It was a prop—that bottle of aspirin—no matter how much she wished otherwise. “Maybe after that kicks in, Officer Garson, I’ll be a little less FBI, a little less imposing.” She flashed a brief grin, letting her professional expression slip a little, and he nodded once—slowly. “I grew up in a town a little smaller than this. I know how important it is to make do with what you’ve got, but we need the extra help, and not just in Hanable’s Valley.”

Garson’s face relaxed—not quite into a smile but close. He nodded once more, then turned back toward his car. Bobby caught her eye and gave her that little wink that said he approved as if he were the senior special agent with two decades of experience, and she was only seven years out of the Academy and a canonical example of a blue-flamer—the half-admiring, half-dismissive term for overeager agents whose dedication to the FBI leaves them no room for a life outside of it.

She gave him as much of a smile as she could manage before she turned back to examining the yard. The chief had probably not screwed anything up—not if he really had been an investigator for the New York State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation. He’d likely measured the distance between the taped-off rectangle marking where the poor girl’s life had drained into the rich black soil and the trailer she’d lived in. Marked it down in his report, no doubt.

With a shrug, Meredeth paced it off anyway. At just under five foot ten inches tall, her stride was an even twenty-eight inches, and it took fourteen of them to reach the budding mud-pit underneath the window. Almost thirty-three feet. She turned and held up her right hand, mimicking holding her pistol. An eleven-yard headshot, in the dark, and with a running target. You only missed once, and even that stray round hit your target? If that were true, it would mean he was either extremely lucky or a godlike hand with a gun. She squinted at the exposed wall of the neighboring trailer, then her gaze darted up to the window, expecting either the unapologetic stare of a lookie-loo or rustling window coverings. Instead, she saw nothing but blinds that hung in perfect, funeral parlor stillness.

Meredeth walked around the staked-out rectangle, studying the vinyl sheeting, but the damn headache had brought a friend—an ocular migraine in her left eye—making her distance vision less than stellar. I don’t have time for this. Not today, not this week, not this month. Of course, chastising herself did nothing to relieve her symptoms and probably made them worse.

She didn’t see it until she was five steps away—and had closed her left eye—but it was there. A tiny, slightly smaller than a half-inch diameter hole punched through the siding. She turned back and looked. It was a laser-straight line through that taped-off rectangle and the window of the Besson trailer. She stepped up to it and squinted her right eye to peer into the hole, hoping for an easy round to extract, something they hadn’t managed to find in the other five scenes. Meredeth frowned at the hole, stepping back. The slug had punched all the way through.

Her gaze snapped to the window, to the still horizontal blinds behind the glass. She stood stock-still for a heartbeat, thinking hard, and then she was running. “Van Zandt! Garson!” she shouted. She didn’t know if they could hear her, if they were already ensconced in the Hanable’s Valley Police Department Crown Vic, but she didn’t slow a whit, didn’t stray from her path toward the trailer’s front stoop.

She pounded up the four wooden steps, her head pounding in time with the rhythm of her footfalls, threw a glance over her shoulder, and shouted for the two men again, this time raising her volume to a skull-splitting level that made her vision pulse in her left eye. She slid to a stop in front of the door and pounded on the flimsy thing, rattling it in its frame, rattling the frame in the wall, then froze as an errant memory flooded her mind: footsteps thudding up other wooden steps, another fist pounding on a different light door, and a horrible foreboding filled her in the present. After a moment, she took control of her emotions and thrust them down deep, thrust the unrecognizable thoughts (memories?) away.

After a quick glance behind her, she pounded on the door again, this time holding her breath, straining her ears, listening for any sign of life from within. She heard the quiet mid-morning sounds of trailer parks everywhere but nothing from inside the trailer. She lifted her hand and hammered the door again, then turned and crossed the gray deck to the side closest to the Besson trailer. “Van Zandt!” she cried, then squeezed her eyes shut and held onto the rail as the world swayed, and the dancing sick in her guts made a try for fresh air and the freedom to splatter her pants and shoes.

She blinked her eyes open, taking the world, the damn spring sunlight, the annoying bright green of nature reasserting herself, in brief, bite-sized chunks. It was enough to know Bobby had finally heard her. He was coming with his pistol drawn—of course—concern for her splashed all over his chiseled face. Garson, to give him his proper due, was half a step behind. His pistol still hung in his holster, but his eyes were bright, and his gaze was fixed on her face.

“What?” shouted Bobby, and she winced.

“He missed. At least once. Through-and-through.” She waved her hand toward the vinyl-covered wall. “No movement inside. Couldn’t rouse anyone.” The sick swirling in her belly lunged up her throat, and she slammed her teeth together.

“Maybe she’s at the grocery store,” muttered Garson, worry etching the words into something sharp and ragged. “Mildred Constantine’s place. She teaches second grade. Used to, anyway. She helped me get the hang of reading.”

Meredeth waved at the locked door. “I don’t see signs of a break-in. Maybe we should contact her next-of-kin and get—‍”

Garson glanced at her, brow knotted, a certain wildness in his eye, then turned and bashed the door in with his shoulder. His momentum carried him inside, and he yelled, “Mrs. Constantine? It’s Richie! Richie Garson!”

Bobby followed Garson into the trailer’s dark interior. Meredeth took a step to follow, her head spinning, her gaze locked on the dark rectangle. Fear tickled her belly, but not for the present, not for anything in Mildred Constantine’s trailer at all.

“Mrs. Constantine? Are you here?” Bobby shouted. “It’s the police, ma’am.”

Meredeth followed the men inside, not bothering to sing out. She knew what awaited them down the hall, knew it in her gut. Garson had gone toward the back of the trailer, and Bobby stood in the living room, glancing back at her. She jerked her head toward the hall, then turned—the picture of savage weariness—and followed Garson toward the back of the trailer.

Garson knocked softly on the master bedroom door, then glanced back at her, his eyes a study in anxiety. Meredeth wanted to say something, to say anything that would help, but nothing ever could. She nodded him onward, encouraging him to investigate the bedroom—which was twenty feet past the bullet hole in the exterior wall.

Garson closed his eyes for a heartbeat, then said, “Mrs. Constantine, I’m coming in.” He hesitated, his hand hovering over the knob. “Please be dressed,” he muttered before turning the knob and disappearing inside.

Meredeth stopped at the bathroom door and opened it softly. She looked inside and shook her head, just as Richie Garson stepped back into the hall.

“She’s not here,” he said, then his gaze flicked to the bathroom door and then on to hers. “Is she…”

“Yes, Officer Garson. Richie. She’s in here.” As she swung the door closed again, an almost overwhelming sadness assaulted her. Despair born from yet another senseless death in a career full of them. Her head hurt. Her brain felt loose, her skull so much crushed calcium.

Garson swallowed hard and squeezed his eyes shut.

“You go on outside, Richie,” said Meredeth in her best motherly tone. “Let me take care of her.”

His eyes opened, and he shook his head. “No, I should—”

“Richie, let me do this. You don’t need to see her this way. Don’t want to see her this way.”

His eyes slid shut once again, and once again, his Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed convulsively.

Meredeth shot Bobby a glare, and he started, then said, “Come on, Richie. Let’s allow Meredeth to make her ready for the people who’ll be coming. We need to call it in, anyway.”

With a slow nod, Richie stepped past Meredeth, his gaze averted, then hesitated. “Not even twenty-one hundred people live in Hanable’s Valley,” he said in a harsh whisper. “In the last twelve hours—in ten minutes of terror—four of them died.”

Meredeth opened her mouth but then closed it without speaking. FBI platitudes won’t help. Statistics won’t help. Nothing will help what this man feels right now. Not one iota. She watched as Bobby shepherded the man outside, then walked into the bathroom, passed the blood and brains sprayed across the vanity, and arranged Mildred Constantine’s clothing, giving her a bit of dignity. Her emotions felt close, feral, and her head pounded and pounded and pounded