Vanished. Elizabeth Heiter

the information about the Nursery Rhyme Killer covering his desk. “What?”

      Jack Bullock, longtime police officer, son of the previous police chief of Rose Bay and general pain in Tomas’s ass, stood in the doorway of his office. Jack was scowling as he let the chaotic noise of the station blast in.

      “Evelyn Baine,” Jack snapped, a tic quivering near his eye and a vein throbbing on his forehead.

      Tomas jerked to his feet. “The FBI profiler is here?”

      “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Jack gaped at him. “You don’t know who she is?”

      It figured Jack would have some kind of problem with the profiler. The head of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit had told Tomas that Evelyn was originally from Rose Bay, but he’d gotten the impression she’d left town at seventeen.

      “What now, Jack?”

      “Wow. Really? Did you even read the case file?” Jack made an ugly sound through his nose. “She was named in one of the damn notes!”

      Tomas leveled a warning look at him. “Lose the attitude.” Then he frowned. Jack had a decade less experience than he did but knew the town better. And Jack had been a rookie during the original investigation eighteen years ago. “What are you talking about?”

      Jack’s nostrils flared as he made an obvious attempt to rein in his temper. “Evelyn Baine. She was best friends with Cassie Byers. The note said the perp had also taken Evelyn. We don’t know why he didn’t, but Evelyn is way too connected to this case. She shouldn’t be here.”

      Frustration bubbled up, amplifying nerves already frayed to the breaking point. As if he didn’t have enough problems. A police force he’d inherited from Jack’s father, too many of whom distrusted him because of the color of his skin or where he’d grown up. A child abductor hunting for victims. And a terrified town looking to him to stop a predator who’d gotten away with it for eighteen years. “Damn it.”

      Jack nodded, the vein in his forehead disappearing. “You’re going to send her home, right? We have plenty of FBI crawling around. We don’t need an intended victim mucking around in the investigation.”

      Tomas’s shoulders slumped. He’d spent nineteen hours at the station, running on adrenaline and caffeine, but he suddenly felt bone tired. “Tell her to come in.”

      “Chief...”

      “Just tell her to get in here, Jack.”

      Resentment sizzling in his eyes, Jack nodded curtly and left the office.

      When the door opened again, Tomas wasn’t sure who was more shocked, him or the woman standing there in her prim, boxy suit and tidy bun.

      Her surprise must’ve been because the top law enforcement official was black in a town she would’ve remembered as almost entirely white and intent on keeping it that way.

      His was because when Jack said she’d been an intended victim, he’d assumed she was white. And she was. Partly. But she was partly black, too.

      When he was a boy, Rose Bay had been a town stuck in the past. North of Hilton Head and south of Charleston, nestled in a small bay, it was mostly old money. The town had relegated its poor and unwanted to the outskirts of town, near the marsh. Rose Bay had been almost totally segregated.

      Tomas had spent his childhood in the marshes, but he’d been long gone by the time the Nursery Rhyme Killer struck. Still, he knew attitudes hadn’t been vastly different then.

      He studied Evelyn curiously, her light brown skin so different from that of the girls in the pictures he’d spent the past few hours reviewing. All the Nursery Rhyme Killer’s victims had been white. But if Evelyn had been an intended victim...

      Dread rushed over him like a tidal wave. He’d already drilled it into each of his three boys that his youngest—his only daughter, who was in the age range of the perp’s victims—wasn’t to go anywhere alone. As soon as he talked to the profiler, he was calling home to make certain they were following orders.

      Shaking himself out of his stupor, Tomas held out a hand. “Agent Baine. I’m Police Chief Tomas Lamar. Thanks for coming.”

      She put a tiny hand in his and he shook it briefly, carefully. “When I spoke with Dan Moore, he didn’t discuss your personal connection to the case.”

      Evelyn dropped the FBI blue duffel bag that was about as big as she was from her shoulder to the ground. Then she placed her briefcase on the floor, settling back in her seat and unbuttoning her suit jacket, which made the gun on her hip visible.

      He didn’t need to be a profiler to read that move. She was telling him she wasn’t leaving, no matter what he thought of her personal connection. “Relax, Agent Baine. I’m not thrilled that I had to find out from my officers, but I’ll take all the help I can get. And I’ll assume the fact that you requested this case file a month ago means you’re committed to it and you’re going to help us nail this son of a bitch.”

      Her shoulders relaxed a fraction of an inch and so did the tight line of her mouth. But the intensity in her eyes didn’t diminish as she said, “He’s not getting away with it this time.”

      He hoped to God she was right. Brittany Douglas had been missing for thirteen hours. And to his mind, catching the Nursery Rhyme Killer wasn’t a success unless they could also bring Brittany home alive.

      He sank into his seat, couldn’t keep his shoulders from slumping as he took a gulp of coffee that had gone cold an hour ago. “Give it to me straight, Agent Baine. Are we already too late?”

      She leaned forward and locked sea-green eyes on him. “I can’t tell you that. Not yet, not even when I’ve reviewed the case—not with one hundred percent certainty. Which is what you’d need in order to call off all the searchers I saw when I arrived. But I do have to see Brittany’s file. Everything you’ve got. And the ones from eighteen years ago, as well. Then I’ll give you a profile of who you’re looking for. Sometimes, if you can’t trace the victim’s movements, you get inside the abductor’s head. Because if you can find him, you’ll find Brittany.”

      Tomas nodded quickly, the sliver of hope that had refused to vanish even as the hours ticked by beginning to grow again. “I talked to the Child Abduction Rapid Deployment team the FBI sent. They said they knew you were coming.” The FBI’s CARD team had shown up fast, set up a command post in his conference room at the back of the station and gotten to work immediately. But so far, they still didn’t know where Brittany was. Maybe a profiler would change that.

      “The CARD team has a desk for you in their command post. They have everything you need. But let me give you the basics right now.”

      “Great.” She pulled out a pen and notepad.

      “Brittany Douglas disappeared last night from her front yard. Her mother was inside when it happened. She didn’t see the abduction, but she said she’d been checking out the window periodically, so there’s a pretty small time span when he must’ve grabbed her. Around 9:30 p.m., Brittany hadn’t come in yet, so her mom went outside—and found a nursery rhyme.” As soon as they’d seen it, all the veteran cops on the force had gone pale.

      “Just a nursery rhyme?” Evelyn’s voice was steady, but the tension in her body betrayed her.

      The media had gotten hold of the fact that the abductor left nursery rhymes at the abduction scenes eighteen years ago—that was how he’d gotten his moniker. But what the media didn’t know was how the Nursery Rhyme Killer had changed the rhymes. “A twisted version of a nursery rhyme.”

      Evelyn released a loud breath. “Just like before.”

      “It’s the same person from eighteen years ago, isn’t it?”

      “I don’t know yet. I need to study all the notes first. I’ve read part of the original case file, but to be honest with you, I haven’t read the whole thing.” She looked