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  The little girl was pudgy, as children sometimes are when they reach the outer edge of adolescence. She was covered with blood. Her long blond hair was matted with it. Her tank top was shredded, like her cotton shorts. There was dirt on her legs and her bare feet. The next series of photos were taken in the hospital, without her clothing. Her stomach showed multiple stab wounds. There were bruises all over her arms and legs. She had a black eye, and her mouth was bloody. There was blood around the tiny, pink buds of her breasts.

  The damage matched that of the dead child Garon had seen at the autopsy, except that this poor victim had lived. He studied the photos and then turned to lift the police report, which gave the child’s name.

  Garon’s breath exploded in the silence of the office. His heart seemed to stop beating. The child’s name was Grace. Grace Carver.

  Memories flashed in front of his eyes. Grace, shy and afraid of him. Grace, letting him pick her up with wide, frightened eyes. Grace, clinging to him. Grace, in his arms, in his bed, loving him. Grace holding his hand and radiating joy. Grace, cringing from him in Barbara’s Café…!

  The puzzle fell into place. Grace was innocent because she’d been abducted, assaulted and very nearly killed by a homicidal maniac. And he’d made light of her experience. Worse, he’d seduced her and then pushed her out of his life, like a man discarding a used towel.

  He put his face in his hands and tried to justify what he’d done to that poor, tortured soul out of his own fear that she was getting too close to him. God in heaven, he thought poignantly, what have I done!

  Cash wasn’t blind. He’d heard the gossip about Garon and Grace, especially in the past couple of weeks since she’d been forced to leave town to stop the whispers. He and Garon weren’t close, so he hadn’t asked any questions. But the man across from him didn’t seem very arrogant now.

  Garon leaned back in his chair. His eyes were blank. He’d lost color in his lean face. The shock was all too apparent.

  He was trying to come to grips with his own actions. No wonder he’d been an outcast after his treatment of Grace. The important people in this town knew the truth of what had happened to her. They were delighted that she’d found someone who could heal her emotional wounds, give her a little happiness. It hadn’t been malicious gossip about the two of them, or an attempt to marry them off. It had been happiness that, after all Grace had endured, she might have a loving future to comfort the pain of her past.

  Instead she’d been kicked in the teeth one more time by fate. By Garon.

  Garon let out a slow breath.

  “Marquez wanted to tell you himself,” Cash remarked after a minute. “But I didn’t trust him that close to you, once he knew the facts of the case.”

  Garon looked at his brother blankly. “He didn’t know?”

  Cash shook his head. “Grace told no one. Chet gave him the details, along with this file. To date, not one person knows what that animal did to her in the three days he kept her a prisoner.”

  He was remembering the dead child, the horrible mutilation of her young body. That could have been Grace. She could have been dead, instead of emotionally and sexually crippled and left for dead. It was like a nightmare. He’d never thought of himself as a monster. Before.

  “Was there any trace evidence?” he asked, forcing his numb brain to work.

  “Yes. I’d bet my baton that the DNA will match what you found on the latest victim.”

  “DNA.” He stared at Cash while the truth drilled a hole in his heart. “DNA.” His teeth ground together. The son of a bitch had raped Grace…!

  He got up from the chair in one powerful movement, almost shaking with rage and self-loathing.

  Cash got in front of him before he could start for the door. “Sit down.”

  “Like hell I will!”

  “I said, sit down!”

  Cash pushed him back into the chair and stood over him, powerful and immovable. “Remember who and what you are,” he said forcefully, his dark eyes even and steady on his brother’s. “You can’t go raging out of here like a mad dog, chasing shadows. You don’t even have a suspect. What are you going to do, run cheek swabs on every male in Jacobs and Tarrant Counties?”

  Said like that, it sounded absurd. But Garon wasn’t thinking straight. He was furious. He wanted to hurt someone. He wanted to find the sexual predator and strangle him slowly with his own hands. He couldn’t remember feeling such mindless rage. At least not since he’d lost his own love, so long ago…

  But he’d lived in the past too long already. He’d used it to ward off any emotional ties, to keep himself safe from another relationship. He was alone, by choice. But Grace had paid the price for his escape. He’d savaged her to save himself. She would never forgive him…

  He stared up at Cash with dawning realization. Grace had come out of the dark nightmare that was her life to reach out toward Garon with hope and breathless anticipation. He’d knocked her back, savaged her verbally and emotionally. He’d frightened her so badly in the café that she’d backed away from him, shaking like a leaf. He’d done that to her, when her only crime was that she wanted to love him.

  His eyes closed on a wave of pain. Grace had sent Marquez to El Paso to dig up the most horrible chapter in her life. She’d done it not for herself, but to try to save some other child from what she’d endured. She was willing to take the risk that reopening the case might bring the killer back to finish the job he’d started.

  In a flash he saw what he’d missed from the minute Cash gave him the file folder. Grace was the only person alive who could identify the child killer. And sharing the case with police might get her killed, as well.

  12

  IT WAS A LONG DRIVE to Victoria. Saturdays in early spring brought all the weekend adventurers out on the highway. Usually Garon didn’t mind bottlenecks, but he was anxious to get to his destination. He wasn’t sure how he was going to manage it, but he had to coax Grace into coming home.

  He’d phoned Marquez’s cell phone, but he hadn’t gotten an answer. Probably the younger man was still furious and unwilling to talk to him. He couldn’t blame him. The detective loved Grace. It wouldn’t sit well with him that Garon had caused her so much pain.

  He was wearing a lightweight jacket, which he probably wasn’t going to need. It was a warm, sunny day. The SUV ahead of him had a canoe lashed to its rack and fishing poles sticking out of the back window. Fishing. He grimaced, recalling how he’d overreacted when he found Grace at the local fishing pond.

  Her cousin lived back off the road in a grove of pecan trees. There was a dirt driveway that led up to the house. It was an old house, simple white clapboard, one story, with two chimneys and a long front porch that contained rocking chairs, a settee and a swing, all painted green. Off to the side was a large pond with a pier. He glanced toward it and blinked. Grace was out there, dressed in knee-high cutoffs and a red T-shirt, bending over what looked like a minnow bucket.

  He got out of the SUV and walked down to the pond, sunglasses hiding the apprehension in his dark eyes. The sunglasses were an individual thing now. But when he was in the elite Hostage Rescue Team, everyone copied the team leader’s sunglasses. Those had been good days, working tight with an expert group of men. His job now, even heading a crime unit squad, was less exciting. It was less stressful as well. Maybe that would seem like a benefit, one day.

  Grace saw him coming and straightened. Her chin came up. She was barefoot and wore no makeup at all. Her long hair was in a braid that reached between her shoulder blades. She wasn’t wearing sunglasses and she wasn’t smiling. In one hand, she held a long cane pole with a cork, sinkers and a hook on the fishing line.

  The memory of their last meeting, when he’d humiliated her in Barbara’s crowded café, was still fresh in her mind. “Well, well, if it isn’t the Prince of Darkness,” she said coldly, and her gray eyes reflected the pain, indignation and outrage of the past few weeks. “I can’t think of a way you could cause me any mor
e embarrassment on this planet. So, have you come for my soul?”

  He stopped just in front of her. If he’d hoped for a truce, he was disappointed. He stuck his hands in his pockets, eyeing the plain, old-fashioned fishing pole. “If you plan to catch anything, you’d have better luck with a spinning reel,” he advised.

  She moved to the side of the pier, bent and pulled up a string of bass. They were five to six pounds, each, and she had four of them. His surprise was visible.

  She held the string of fish at her side, and she was glaring. “I won the Jacobsville Bass Rodeo two summers in a row,” she informed him. “Which is why I spend every free minute at Jake’s Fish Pond in Jacobsville in early spring. Practicing. Sadly I’ve had to forego practice since you decided that I was chasing after you!”

  He felt the hot color flow into the skin over his high cheekbones. He’d accused her of following him to the fishing pond. She hadn’t been chasing him at all. At least, not that time.

  “Why are you here?” she asked, not moving.

  He stuck his hands in the pockets of his slacks and searched for inspiration. He hoped he didn’t look as uncomfortable as he felt.

  But he did. She cocked her head and studied him for a minute. “Oh. I see. Someone told you the truth about my past, is that it?” she asked with icy poise.

  The muscles in his jaw tautened. “Something like that.”

  She averted her eyes and moved to the foam cooler she’d brought to store her fish in. She opened the top and put the fish on top of the layer of ice inside. She closed it back, all without giving him a second glance.

  “You sent Marquez to El Paso,” he said without preamble.

  She looked at him. “I know things about the killer that you don’t. I tried to tell you, but you decided that I’d come to your house for, shall we say, other purposes, before I could get the words out.”

  His lips compressed tightly. “Listen,” he began.

  “No, you listen!” she shot back, eyes flashing like silver lightning in a face livid with bad temper. “I’ve spent my entire adult life backing away from men. I’ve never chased anyone in my life, and that goes double for you. Do you really think I have so little pride and self-respect that I’d go running wildly after a man who’d just told me he didn’t want anything else to do with me?”

  Now that he thought about it, no, he didn’t. But it was too late for that belated inspiration to save him. Grace was furious, and he was already on the defensive and not liking it.

  He drew in a short, angry breath. He rammed his hands deeper into his slacks pockets and scowled down at her. “What do you know about the killer that we don’t?” he asked.

  “For one thing, that he likes little girls with long blond hair and light-colored eyes,” she said, trying to sound calmer than she felt. “He also said that he’d been watching me at school. He knew that I lived with my grandmother and that she drank herself to sleep. It amused him to take me right out of her house and through the window in the middle of the night. He said that he’d dreamed of collecting blond girls just my age, with long hair, and that he would tie us up with red ribbons so that everyone would know we belonged to him. I believe that’s what your organization calls a killer’s ‘signature’?”

  “My degree is in criminal justice,” he countered. “I don’t do profiling. That’s up to the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico.”

  She gave him a smoldering look. “If there’s a dead child in San Antonio, and there were also dead children in Del Rio and Palo Verde,” she pointed out, “with a year or so in between, similar coloring and a similar killing style, then you’re looking for a serial killer.”

  “Perhaps you’d like to put that in writing and send it to Marquez’s lieutenant,” he suggested. “He still doesn’t consider it a serial crime.”

  “Or maybe he just doesn’t like the FBI,” she returned sweetly, “and is trying to keep you from taking over his case.”

  “Criminal cases aren’t property. Nobody owns them.”

  She picked up the cooler and her fishing pole.

  “Whatever you say.”

  She was walking away.

  “I saw the file,” he bit off. “And the photos.”

  She stopped in her tracks. Her spine stiffened. But she didn’t turn around.

  He moved to her side, turned and looked down at her pale, strained face. “You told me the scars were from an automobile accident.”

  She wouldn’t meet his gaze. “That’s what my grandmother taught me to say,” she replied simply. “I thought she was being evasive and old-fashioned. Then, when I was sixteen, one of the new boys at my high school asked me out on a date and I told him just a little of what happened to me.” She didn’t look at him as she drew the memory out of the past. “We went to a fast food place. I noticed that he was looking at me in a really strange way. I asked why. He wanted to know exactly what the man who abducted me did to me, how it felt and if I enjoyed it.”

  His indrawn breath was eloquent.

  “That’s right,” she said when she saw his face. “All the warped people aren’t in jail or seeing psychiatrists. I got sick. I wouldn’t even let him take me home. I phoned Barbara and she sent Rick to pick me up. He was all for laying my date out on the floor, but I thought it wouldn’t look good on his record.”

  So that was why Marquez was so protective of her. They had a history. It bothered him.

  “After that,” she continued, “I stopped going out at all. Unless you can call helping Barbara and Rick can vegetables every summer after harvest a social life. What do you want to know about it?” she asked bluntly.

  “Anything you remember,” he said, averting his face.

  “I don’t like remembering,” she said with quiet honesty, putting the ice chest down. “I still have nightmares.”

  He recalled the one she’d had at his house. It made him feel even more guilty, now that he knew the truth. “Cash said Chet told him that your abductor had you for three days, and that you’ve never talked about it.”

  “He’s right. I’ve never told a soul. Not even Chet Blake, right after it happened.” Her face closed up tight. “If you’re hoping to have me identify a subject in a lineup or in mug shots, you’re out of luck. He kept me blindfolded the whole time.”

  “He talked to you.”

  She swallowed. Nausea rose in her throat. “Yes.” She sounded as if the word choked her.

  “You can remember his voice.”

  She chewed on her lower lip. “He said I looked like his stepmother. He had a picture of her as a child.”

  “What?”

  “He said he wet the bed and she made him wear dresses and a red ribbon in his hair. He said she sent him to school like that when he started, and the teacher sent him home again. Everybody laughed. He tied my hair up with the ribbon, but later, just after he tried to strangle me, and he couldn’t, he tied it around my neck.” She swallowed down nausea. It was hard to remember this. “The ribbon wasn’t long enough. He had white hands, very white, and he couldn’t pull the ribbon tight enough to kill me. He said it was her fault his hands didn’t work right. He was furious. He pulled out his pocketknife and stabbed me, over and over…”

  “It’s all right,” he said, his voice quiet, reassuring.

  “Don’t force it.”

  She was shaking. She had to fight for control over herself.

  Garon watched her, concerned. He didn’t touch her. He knew that if he did, she’d connect it with what was done to her. He let her fight her demons.

  He pulled out his BlackBerry and his stylus, and started keying in notes. Suddenly he remembered how she’d almost collapsed at the police station in Palo Verde when the chief there had mentioned red ribbon.

  “The child in Palo Verde was strangled with a red ribbon,” he murmured.

  “Yes,” she said after a minute. “That was when I started to suspect that it was the same man, when the police chief said he used a red ribbon.” She looked up at him, her
face pale. “I never read anything about red ribbons in the other child murders.”

  “We always hold something back,” he reminded her, “to make sure we’ve got the killer and not some lunatic looking for dark fame. You said he mentioned his stepmother. Was that all?”

  “Yes,” she replied, looking up. “He was using a computer, though. I heard his fingers on the keyboard. He used it a lot.”

  That might be helpful. He noted it with the stylus. If the man still used computers, it might be a way to track him. If he was a pedophile, he must have access to the pornography Web sites. The FBI had cyber detectives who tracked down child pornographers and locked them up.

  “He said that he loved little children.” She said the words as if they were some huge, cosmic joke.

  “Three dead children in three years,” he was saying to himself. “Maybe as many as eleven, one a year since you were abducted. But you lived. Why did you live?”

  Her slender shoulders rose and fell. “The police came sooner than he expected. He taped my wrists and my ankles together with duct tape. Then he carried me out to a field somewhere and tried to choke me, but he couldn’t do it with his hands. He couldn’t do it with the ribbon, either. He had thin fingers, white fingers, and they were limp and cold. So he wrapped duct tape around my mouth and nose. Then he opened his pocketknife and started stabbing me. It hurt so much, and blood went everywhere…I tried to scream, but all I could do was mumble. I started kicking at him. That spooked him and he stopped. But I knew he’d finish me off if I kept struggling. So I kept very still, held my breath and played dead. The sirens came closer. He hesitated for just a minute, as if he wanted to make sure I was gone, but there wasn’t time. He took off running. With the duct tape over my nose and mouth, if the police hadn’t spotted me when they did, I wouldn’t have been able to tell them anything. I’ll never forget how good it felt when they took the duct tape off and I could get air in my lungs at last. But it really hurt. One of the knife wounds punctured my lung.”