Introduction

"Exciting... Regan keeps the dramatic reveals coming" as Detective Josie Quinn races against time to find a missing newborn baby in this fast-paced thriller from a USA Today Top 100 and Wall Street Journal bestselling author (Publishers Weekly on Vanishing Girls).

When Detective Josie Quinn is called to a large house on the outskirts of the small town of Denton, she's horrified by the viciousness of the attack: smashed glass, splintered furniture and blood are spattered across the floor. The owner, a single mother, is fighting for her life, and her newborn baby is missing.

A beautiful young woman caught fleeing the scene is Josie's only lead, but when questioned it seems this mysterious girl doesn't know who she is, where she's from or why she's so terrified . . . . Is she a witness, a suspect, or the next victim?

As Josie digs deeper, a letter found hidden in the house convinces her the attack, the missing child, and the nameless woman are linked to a spate of killings across the county, and she is faced with a heartbreaking decision: Should she risk the life of one child to save many others? Or can Josie find another way to stop this killer before any more innocent lives are taken?

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Excerpt

CHAPTER 2

MONDAY

The television blared from her living room. Josie could hear it from her bedroom on the second floor of the house, even with the door closed. As the first notes of the theme song of WYEP—the local news station—drifted up she sighed, gathered up the wedding magazines on her nightstand and headed downstairs.

Her fiancé Luke was sprawled on her couch, his tall, muscular frame taking up almost the entire space. A foam takeout container straddled his lap, and from it he shoveled French fries into his mouth. Both feet rested on her coffee table, almost touching the stack of mock wedding invitations she’d been trying to get him to look at for the last two weeks. His eyes were glued to the television where the twelve o’clock news broadcast nonstop coverage of the Interstate Killer’s trial, which had started that morning.

“Luke, can you please turn that down a bit?”

He didn’t even look at her. Josie put the stack of magazines onto the coffee table and sat down next to him, her thigh brushing his. He still didn’t look away from the television. On the screen, reporter Trinity Payne stood outside the Alcott County Courthouse, the breeze lifting her dark hair as she spoke confidently into her microphone. “Opening arguments in the trial of the Interstate Killer, Aaron King, were scheduled to begin this morning. However, King reportedly fell in his cell just a few hours ago, splitting his lip on the sink. Prison officials tell us he required several stitches.”

Luke snorted and popped another fry into his mouth. “Fell. I’ll bet he fell.”

“My money’s on the guards,” Josie said, trying to engage him—the King case was one of his favorite topics of conversation lately—but Luke seemed not to hear her. She looked around. “Did you get me a cheeseburger?” she asked.

No answer. From the depths of the cushions, he produced the remote control, using it to turn the volume up even louder.

“Luke?” Josie said, but he dismissed her with a wave of his hand.

Blue eyes flashing from the screen, Trinity Payne went on, “Aaron King is believed to be responsible for up to thirty murders in the state of Pennsylvania in the last four years, although investigators have only been able to link his DNA to eight of those murders, the most recent of which happened right here in Alcott County.”

“Should have been my stop,” Luke said under his breath.

It was a familiar refrain. A year earlier, the Interstate Killer had been caught by a state trooper who had pulled him over for a routine stop. King had been speeding along Route 80 in central Pennsylvania, down a stretch of highway that Luke usually patrolled. That night he had traded shifts with a coworker so he could go to dinner with Josie and her grandmother, Lisette, to celebrate Lisette’s birthday. Luke’s colleague had taken all the glory and fanfare for the capture of the serial killer who had terrorized the state for nearly four years.

“I’m glad it wasn’t your stop. You could have been killed,” Josie pointed out, gently squeezing his thigh. His knee jerked away from her touch.

Her hand recoiled and she felt the familiar sting of tears behind her eyes and blinked them back. She shouldn’t feel rejected—this had been going on for months now—but she did.

“Luke,” Josie said, taking the remote from his hand and turning the volume down.

“Hey,” he protested, sparing her a glance for the first time that day.

She forced a smile. “I thought we were going to spend some time together today. Just you and me. No work, no distractions.”

“I’m right here,” he said.

No, you’re not, she thought. His gaze had already traveled back to the television.

She picked up a mock-up of their wedding invitation from the coffee table. “I thought we could talk about the wedding. Your sister sent these for us to look over.”

“Really?” he snapped.

“Oh, well, we don’t have to use any of the invitations Carrieann sent. We can probably find others online. I’ll get my laptop.”

“Please, Josie, not now.”

Josie stared at him, her body stiffening. “Oh, okay. Well, maybe we could—”

“Look, I just wanted to relax today, okay?”

“Oh, sure, yeah,” Josie agreed. “We haven’t had much time to relax together lately, have we?” Her duties as Denton’s chief of police took up far more time than she had ever anticipated. She lived in a constant state of guilt. She knew that most of what he was struggling with had nothing to do with her, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that if she had more time for him, maybe he wouldn’t be drifting away from her more and more each day.

She pushed closer to him, leaning into his side, but he shifted away from her, his fingers scrabbling along the bottom of his takeout container for the last of his fries. He tossed the empty box onto the other side of the couch and Josie raised an eyebrow. “Would you like me to throw that away for you?” she asked pointedly.

“I got you a burger,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard a single word she’d said in the last five minutes. “It’s in the kitchen.” He motioned to the television. “Shh. They’re bringing him into the courthouse.”

With a heavy sigh, Josie turned her gaze back to the screen. She heard Luke’s barely audible groan as the sheriff’s deputies led King from the car to the courthouse with a jacket over his head. “They don’t want to show how bad his lip looks,” Luke said.

For the benefit of the viewing public, WYEP flashed King’s mug shot across the screen. King was young, only twenty-three, with pasty skin, unruly brown hair and a scraggly, wild beard. He had a long, narrow nose that hooked slightly at the end and dark eyes that seemed to penetrate right through the camera. Every time she saw his photo, it gave her the creeps. She was glad Luke hadn’t been the one to stop him; King had gone after the trooper who had made the stop with a machete, a fact which Luke overlooked each time he bemoaned his horrible luck in not having been there.

By Josie’s estimation, Luke had had enough trauma to last a lifetime without adding a machete attack to the list. A year and a half earlier he’d been shot and nearly killed helping Josie solve a string of disappearances of teenage girls in her town.

But that wasn’t the thing that had turned him from a loving, good-humored, passionate fiancé into the apathetic stranger before her. Four months earlier he had gone around to his friend Brady’s house to watch an NHL playoff game to find that Brady had shot his wife, Eva, and himself in a murder-suicide. The Conways had lived in the small town of Bowersville, out of Josie’s jurisdiction, so she hadn’t seen the aftermath of the crime, but Luke hadn’t been the same since. It was like Brady Conway had taken a part of Luke with him when he shot his wife and himself, and Josie wasn’t sure she would ever get it back. Try as she might, she couldn’t seem to reach him anymore. Each day brought a new degree of distance and a new level of sadness and uncertainty for Josie.

“A real live serial killer,” Luke said. “I could have had that arrest. How many people can say they arrested a serial killer?”

Josie could. “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” she said. She picked up the remote once more and turned the television off. “Luke, we have this time together today. I really thought we could—”

He sat up straight, color flooding his face. “Hey, I was watching that.”

He plucked the remote out of her hand and turned the television back on, blasting the volume once more.

Josie said, “Luke, I’m trying to have a conversation with you.”

His eyes remained glued to the screen. “About what?”

“Whatever you want to talk about.”

His gaze swept over the coffee table and then he met her eyes. “Please, Josie, I’m tired.”

She was about to reply, but he was already engrossed in the WYEP broadcast again; a million miles from her even though there were only a few inches between their bodies. Not for the first time, she wondered what had happened to him. His tenderness, his innate sense of chivalry and his absolute normalcy were the things that had drawn her to him. She knew these bouts of coldness were not really about her. She understood that. But she wasn’t sure how many more of them she could take.

She had suggested he get counseling; he clearly hadn’t processed what had happened to his friends and she suspected that he blamed himself. If he had arrived a few minutes earlier, maybe he would have been able to prevent the whole thing.

Her cell phone rang into the cold silence between them and both their heads turned in the direction of the sound—she had left it on the foyer table. “I have to get that,” she said quietly.

Crossing the room, she snatched the phone up and pressed it to her ear. “This is Josie.” It was Lieutenant Noah Fraley, her second-in-command.

“Boss,” said Noah. “We have a situation. I think you need to come and meet me right now.”

She didn’t ask why. She simply said, “Okay,” and listened as Noah rattled off an address she knew she should recognize, but that wouldn’t come to her in that moment. She hung up and grabbed her jacket from the closet.

“Josie?” Luke called from the living room.

“I have to go to work,” she said. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

To what degree do you think that Kim was motivated by the need to survive? Or do you believe she was simply an opportunist motivated by greed?

Do you believe Peter did all that he did to rid the world of a certain kind of evil, as he implied, or do you think he just didn’t want his legacy ruined?

Who do you believe bears most of the responsibility for what set off the events in this book?

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