Dear Maggie. Brenda Novak

the series of brutal murders that had started along the eastern seaboard almost four months ago, then traveled to Missouri and Colorado and finally the west coast.

      The victim’s name was Sarah Ritter. Her death brought the body count to seven. A Caucasian woman in her mid-thirties, she was attractive in a professional, polished way and held a master’s degree in English from the University of California, Davis. She’d taught second grade at an elementary school in the suburbs, had a three-bedroom, two-bath tract house, two children, a dog, and an insurance salesman as a husband.

      Unfortunately, she’d also been brutally attacked, raped and stabbed, her body tossed in a Dumpster. How she’d gotten from her house, nearly twenty miles away, to Midtown, was a mystery.

      Nick pinched the bridge of his nose. Why her? The other six victims were younger, including the Seattle reporter. Three were single, one had a live-in lover, the last was separated from her husband. All were in their mid-twenties. What had specifically attracted the murderer to these women? What put them at risk?

      It certainly wasn’t accessibility. These were difficult murders to commit. The victims hadn’t been living on the street. They weren’t drug addicts or prostitutes. They had homes and jobs, and some had families. Beyond that, they had no obvious connection to each other—they didn’t belong to the same book club, graduate from the same school, attend college together or correspond for private or professional reasons. As far as Nick could determine, they didn’t know each other at all. The only thing they had in common was the fact that they’d become victims of the same murderer.

      Random targets, except Lola Fillmore, the reporter in Seattle. That had been personal.

      Nick shuffled through another file and came up with the letter that had brought him to Sacramento in the first place. Received at FBI headquarters almost a month ago, it had been printed on regular copy paper by a standard Hewlett-Packard DeskJet. Nothing of particular note there, at least nothing that was going to help him. But the letter itself shed some light on the psychology of the killer.

      April 13th

       Seattle, Washington

      “Dear Sirs, or should I say Madams? Welcome to the investigation. For all the challenge local police have given me, I assume most forces are now run by a bunch of women, but be that as it may, I’ve decided to let you join the fun. I’ve tired of Seattle and all its blasted rain—makes working out of doors rather miserable, if you know what I mean—and have decided to move to California. But where? Los Angeles is entirely too big. With all the different jurisdictions, etc., it would be too easy for local law enforcement to bungle the investigation, and it’s certainly no fun outwitting one’s opponent so easily. I considered San Francisco, but no one would much care if I murdered women there, now, would they? They have no use for the fairer sex, anyway. So I think Sacramento is the place. River City, isn’t that what they call it? Well, we shall soon see what the river turns up.

      Catch me if you can…

       Dr. Dan

      Dr. Dan was famous for his letters. He sent them to local law enforcement, taunting their failed attempts to catch him. He sent them to the FBI, bragging about his superior intellect. And when the police and FBI kept them from the press, he started writing to newspapers, hoping for headlines. He’d sent two letters to Lola Fillmore at the Seattle Independent, right before he killed her.

      Fortunately, as far as Nick could tell, no one at the Sacramento Tribune had received such mail. Yet. After what had happened in Seattle, his instincts told him it would come, and he guessed Maggie Russell would be the recipient when it did. The Trib was the major newspaper in town, and she was the only female cop reporter on staff.

      He shoved the letter back into the file and went for the profiler’s report instead. Ms. Lalee Wong, one of the FBI’s best, had analyzed the letter, along with all the others, and deemed it genuine. But she hadn’t come up with as much as Nick would have liked. She said the perp was a man, probably fairly young, most likely short and balding, with sexual hang-ups to spare.

      No surprises there.

      Dr. Dan’s utter contempt for women, evident in the letters but even more in the violent and cruel nature of his killing, fueled his murderous rage. Perhaps he’d been abused by his mother or a strong maternal figure in his youth. Perhaps his wife had left him.

      Or maybe he’d killed her, Nick thought. There could be another body out there. Maybe more than one. Most serial killers didn’t go from zero to sixty in a matter of days. They started slowly, usually with animals, and built up from there.

      Skipping further down the report, Nick skimmed the final paragraphs. Wong doubted Dr. Dan was truly a doctor, but she hadn’t ruled out Daniel as the man’s first name. She felt certain he was educated, most likely to the college level, and that he was Caucasian, possibly British, judging by his formal and rather stilted use of language. Going by the normal statistics on such violent criminals, as well as the tone of his writing, she guessed he was in the age range of twenty-eight to thirty-five.

      The last sentence of her report Nick knew by heart because he’d come to the same conclusion himself. Considering how quickly and efficiently Dr. Dan removes certain internal organs, he probably has some working knowledge of anatomy. If he’s not a doctor, he could be a nurse, an EMT, a medical student, a veterinarian or a butcher.

      “He is definitely a butcher,” Nick growled. Dr. Dan seemed to think of himself as some sort of modern-day Jack the Ripper, but Nick planned to put an end to it. He was going to find this bastard and nail him to the wall if it was the last thing he did. No one traveled across America killing wives and mothers and got away with it. Not on his watch.

      He heard Maggie’s laugh and looked up to see her standing at the water cooler, talking to another photographer. She was very attractive in her gray tailored business suit and crisp white cotton shirt. She had the most kissable lips he’d ever seen, the most incredible bedroom eyes….

      But none of that mattered. He was a federal agent. His interest in her was strictly professional. Even if she never became one of Dr. Dan’s targets, she could dig up something that might prove helpful to his investigation. Actually, chances were good she’d do exactly that. She tracked all calls coming in after ten o’clock.

      And Dr. Dan always struck at night.

      CHAPTER TWO

      WHAT WAS GOING ON? Lowell Atkinson, the county coroner, had always been helpful to Maggie before. She’d sent his wife Mary Ann flowers when she’d delivered her last baby. She’d gotten Zach and the Atkinsons’ Katie together for a picnic last summer. She could hardly believe he’d treat her so impersonally now. When she’d arrived at his office to request a copy of the coroner’s report on the Dumpster murder, he’d claimed he hadn’t finished it, said he’d call her when he had. But when she’d pressed him for a verbal explanation of his findings, he’d told her he hadn’t even done the autopsy yet.

      Bull. Maggie knew better. The police were under a lot of pressure to solve such a high-profile case. They wouldn’t let Lowell store the victim in his morgue for over a week. They’d probably had his report in their hands the following day, but her police contacts weren’t talking, either. And to top it all off, Ben, her editor, was riding her hard, expecting a follow-up to the story they’d run last week—a follow-up she couldn’t conjure from thin air. She needed answers, and she needed them fast.

      Frustrated, she set her purse on the desk and slumped into her seat, wondering where to go from here. Detectives Hurley and Mendez had the case. She doubted they’d talk to her when no one else on the force would, but it was worth a chance.

      She fished her police roster out of her drawer and dialed, but Lopez, the sergeant at the front desk, said they were both out. She considered leaving a message, decided against it and hung up, hoping to catch them later. In the meantime, she’d get organized.

      She was clearing off her desk when she noticed a sticky note from Darla attached to the partition directly in front of her, next to her photographs of Zach.

      “Before