Ingersoll looked up, his eyes finally meeting hers. “He spaces down three times, then adds two more words in all caps.”
She waited for Ingersoll to read the end of the message.
“Until now.”
Chapter 4
Numbly, Nina took the paper Ingersoll held out for her. The page trembled slightly as her eyes drifted down over the message she knew was meant for her.
In an instant, she was back in the dark, suffocating space inside the van, duct tape covering her lips, stifling her screams.
Aware her bosses were watching her closely, she worked her jaw as if loosening it from the sticky tape and forced out the only question that mattered.
“Did they catch him last night?”
“No suspect in custody,” Conner said. “No leads either.”
She’d dreaded this moment for years. Had tried to convince herself the monster was dead. She couldn’t deceive herself any longer. He had slithered from her nightmares into her waking life.
Still reeling, she addressed Ingersoll. “How did you figure out the note was about me? It doesn’t mention my name. Not exactly, anyway.”
“Your name came up from BAU Three.”
She held her tongue while she processed the information. The Behavioral Analysis Unit housed the FBI’s famous profilers. Mind hunters. Within that unit, BAU 3 was specifically tasked with crimes against children.
“One of the special agents working there has . . . prior knowledge of your case,” Ingersoll said, seeming to choose his words carefully.
“How would anyone put it together?” she said, trying to figure out which agent they were talking about. “It’s an unsolved abduction from eleven years ago.” The year before her emancipation hearing.
Glancing away, Ingersoll rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s Jeff Wade.”
Her eyes closed for a moment as she tried to block out the images gathering in her mind. Special Agent Dr. Jeffrey Wade, a name she had hoped never to hear again. “I thought he left the BAU for good.”
Wade had been reassigned to the training academy after he’d bungled a profile so badly that a girl died—at least, that’s what the lawsuit filed by Chandra Brown’s family claimed. Chandra had reported a man stalking her to the local police, who sent the information to the FBI since the circumstances were similar to an unsolved homicide that had occurred a few months earlier in a neighboring jurisdiction. A murder Wade was working on as part of a series of killings involving teenage girls. Wade had looked into Chandra’s stalking complaint, decided it had no bearing on his investigation, and punted it back to the locals. Twenty-four hours later Chandra was dead, her murder subsequently linked to the series Wade had been working on.
Because Wade had such notoriety as the FBI’s premier profiler, the Bureau took a drubbing. Chandra’s estranged family had appeared on camera—attorney in tow—numerous times to point the blame squarely at law enforcement. Wade took a leave of absence, turning his ongoing investigations over to another BAU member, and requested a reassignment when he returned to duty. Rumor had it the legendary Dr. Wade had finally cracked under the strain of two decades spent chasing down child predators. Apparently rumors had it wrong, because he was back.
“His transfer to the academy only lasted six months,” Conner said.
Ingersoll continued with the current case after a brief pause as if he, too, was remembering Wade’s very public fall from grace. “Due to the bizarre wording of the note, MPD Homicide entered the info into ViCAP to see if any other agency had a similar murder. That’s how Wade ran across the report.”
“Like everyone else in the Bureau, he’d seen the viral video, so you were on his mind,” Conner added.
Of course Wade would be the one to snap the pieces into place. To say he was familiar with her background was an understatement. The man had nearly prevented her from becoming an agent because of what he knew about her.
To her knowledge, no one else had ever undergone the level of scrutiny she had during her application process. After Nina’s polygraph had indicated possible deception on a question about her past, Executive Assistant Director Shawna Jackson had intervened, calling in Dr. Wade to perform an assessment. The EAD was one of a handful of people who reported directly to the FBI Director. Someone in such rarified air wouldn’t normally get involved in the applicant-screening process, but Shawna had a personal stake in the outcome since she had recruited Nina into the Bureau.
After reviewing the polygraph exam results and her background investigator’s report, Wade had summoned Nina to an interview room, where he demanded to know why she’d become emancipated and the significance of the new surname she’d chosen, and he wasn’t satisfied until he’d demolished her carefully constructed walls.
He’d forced her to relive beatings from older kids in the system who had figured her for easy prey due to her small stature. He’d made her recount the night of her abduction in excruciating detail, ripping off the protective scab that had formed in her mind so the whole story bled freely from her. Through it all, he’d stared at her, scribbling on his notepad, while she described the feel of a glowing cigarette tip against her skin.
While she had spoken in halting jerks and spasms, he’d listened in rapt silence, betrayed no emotion, judged her. Since he’d been assigned to determine whether she was trying to hide something from the polygraph examiner, she sensed him waiting for her to break down. To cry or scream or lash out at him. He laid open her soul and peered inside to scrutinize her innermost secrets.
In the end, Wade told her he had concluded she wasn’t being deceptive but that the polygraph had revealed her willful repression of certain details of her trauma. There were dark voids in her recollection that he believed made her a liability, a ticking time bomb sure to detonate under the right circumstances. Only EAD Jackson’s intervention had prevented his report from keeping her out of the academy. From the day Nina was hired, she had worked harder than everyone else, determined to prove that Dr. Jeffrey Wade had made the wrong call for the second time in his career. And that he was a sanctimonious ass.
“We’re detailing you to work directly with Wade,” Ingersoll said.
She felt an almost uncontrollable urge to leave the office, go home to bed, and hope like hell she woke up from this nightmare.
“Deep in the background,” Conner was saying. “As in, so deep no one sees you. Wade drove to Georgetown from Quantico. He arrived at the crime scene about half an hour ago. You can catch up with him there.”
They expected her to work with a man who had dissected her with the ruthless efficiency of a pathologist conducting an autopsy, a man who didn’t believe she should be an agent. Part of her wanted to refuse. No one would blame her if she did.
She willed her expression to remain impassive. No way would she let her superiors know what this assignment would cost her. “I’ll get a bu-car and head to the scene now.”
Chapter 5
Nina flashed her creds at the uniform on the perimeter.
He gave her official ID a cursory inspection. “You’re late to the party.”
Only the remnants of a crime scene active since dawn remained in place.
“Batting cleanup today.” She ducked under the yellow tape strung across the alley.