Dear Maggie. Brenda Novak

nearly choked on her first bite of donut. “What?” she said, coughing.

      Mary Ann sent a furtive glance at her daughter and took a sip of coffee. “Lowell sometimes brings his work home with him, just like anybody else.”

      “So the autopsy’s finished?”

      “Of course. It was finished the same day they found the body. Lowell didn’t get home until almost midnight.”

      “And? Did he find anything unusual?”

      Mary Ann hesitated. “My husband left so he wouldn’t have to talk to you. He told me to play dumb.”

      “I still don’t understand how he knew I was going to show up here.”

      “Someone called. I thought it was you.”

      “Who else could it have been?”

      “Someone from the force, maybe?”

      Her appetite gone, Maggie pushed her donut aside. No one on the force knew her plans for this morning. How could they have alerted Lowell? Had they been following her and guessed where she was heading? Why would they waste the manpower? Mendez must have realized his gaffe the other night and had let the others know. “What’s going on, Mary Ann?” she asked. “Lowell’s never felt he had to dodge me before.”

      “He says the police are really worried about this case. They don’t want him to say anything to the press.”

      “It was a brutal murder that needs to be solved as soon as possible, but why all the secrecy?”

      “I don’t know. To tell you the truth, I think it’s wrong. I think people should know. The women of Sacramento should be warned to lock their doors and windows at night and to set an alarm, if they have one.”

      Maggie studied Mary Ann’s agitated face. “Is it that bad?”

      She nodded.

      “Are you going to tell me why?”

      With a sigh, Mary Ann lowered her voice so the children couldn’t hear. “That poor woman had her tongue cut out,” she said, her gaze pinning Maggie to her seat as effectively as her words. “Lowell said he’s never seen anything like it. He said whoever did it knew how to use a knife.”

      Maggie cringed. “A hunter or a surgeon, maybe?”

      “A serial killer, a wacko,” Mary Ann replied. “And the most frightening thing of all is that this guy has already struck six times. The first victim was a woman in Boston.”

      So Maggie’s hunch had been right. She hadn’t found what she was looking for online last night, but she hadn’t searched very long, and she hadn’t known what she needed to track down—a monster who removed his victims’ tongues. That was certainly enough to earmark a murderer. “When?” she asked.

      “Ten months ago, and he still hasn’t been caught.”

      CHAPTER FOUR

      “SO THE BLUE FIBERS are from some sort of blanket?” Nick propped the phone on his shoulder so he could thumb through the pictures of the murder victims again. They’d all been killed away from where they’d been found, and they’d all been transported, wrapped in a blanket for the journey. Evidently, Sarah Ritter had been no different.

      “That’s what the tests say.” Tony Caruso’s Jersey accent carried across the line even though he’d lived in Virginia and worked at the FBI’s crime lab in Washington DC for almost twenty years.

      “What kind of blanket?”

      There was some paper shuffling on the other end. Caruso covered the mouthpiece to speak to someone else, then came back on the line. “Sorry about that. A new one, unfortunately. Otherwise, we might have had more luck finding something else, a strand of hair maybe, to help us. I’m still hoping for a DNA profile on this guy. But, as it stands, we know only that she was wrapped in a cheap, fuzzy blanket, the kind you can buy almost anywhere.”

      “What about the other fibers? The tan ones?”

      “They’re consistent with the kind of carpet found in the trunk of most cars, usually the cheaper models.”

      “So if this guy is a doctor, he’s not a very successful one. He’s not using a BMW or a Mercedes to haul bodies around.”

      “I’d guess he’s driving an economy car,” Tony agreed. “He could have purchased it for just this purpose.”

      “Maybe.” Nick pushed his reading glasses up and rubbed his eyes. Economy cars were a dime a dozen. Cheap fuzzy blankets did nothing to narrow the field of his search, either. When was Dr. Dan going to slip up and make a mistake that would really tell him something? “Did you find anything in what the coroner scraped out from beneath Sarah Ritter’s nails?”

      “No skin or anything like that. If she put up a fight, she didn’t manage to scratch him. There was soil in what you sent, but it was consistent with the samples you included from her yard. I’m guessing she had a garden of some sort. Am I right?”

      “She’d just planted tomatoes.” He remembered seeing them in the back, along the fence, when he’d visited the house to search for evidence of forced entry, evidence he’d never found. The tomato plants had been tender and young and vulnerable, just like Sarah Ritter’s son. The memory of the shock and grief apparent in his small face made Nick clench his jaw. He had to bring down Dr. Dan. Before he killed again…

      “There was also some sand,” Tony went on.

      “What kind of sand?”

      “Rocky and uneven. The kind that usually appears on the shore of a lake, or maybe along the banks of a river.”

      …we shall soon see what the river turns up…

      “There’re two rivers that aren’t far from where the body was found. I’ll send you soil samples from each. Maybe we can get a match.”

      “I’ll be expecting them.”

      The American River originated somewhere in the Sierras, descended through the foothills and cut through the Sacramento suburbs to meet the Sacramento River, which came from the north to downtown, near Discovery Park. The American River had something like thirty miles of bike path along one bank and was by far the more accessible. If Nick had to choose, he’d guess Dr. Dan had killed Sarah Ritter somewhere along it. Down by the water, there were plenty of places where screams might not be heard, where foliage would easily conceal two people. Especially at night. Car bridges spanned the river, but they were miles apart, and the bicyclists who used the path so religiously by day were gone once the sun went down. A murderer could conceivably move, undetected, from car to bike path to footpath and back again—with a woman or a body. The only question was why. Why didn’t Dr. Dan simply kill her and dump her body in the river instead of dragging it downtown?

      The lock jiggled at the front door, and Rambo jumped to his feet, ears forward, tail wagging. A glance at the clock and Rambo’s eager response told Nick it was Justin, the thirteen-year-old neighbor boy Nick paid to feed and walk Rambo every day. Justin filled in for potty breaks when Nick had to work long hours, too. Fortunately the pair had taken to each other right away.

      “Anything else?” he asked Tony, waving as the boy came in.

      “That footprint you found in Lola Fillmore’s flower bed? The size 12? It was a Nike knock-off.”

      Justin retrieved Rambo’s leash from the kitchen and fastened it to his collar. “We’ll be back in about an hour,” he whispered.

      Nick acknowledged his words with a nod and the door closed behind the boy and the dog. “What about wear, Tony?”

      “There wasn’t any. The shoes were brand-new.”

      Nick slammed his fist down onto the desk. “Dammit! Can’t we get a break?”

      “Sorry, I should