“That’s my girl,” Quincy told her.

That, more than anything, finally made her smile.

“I think Sal’s onto something,” she said seriously. “I think Dinchara has been preying on prostitutes. Ginny escaped. She was the lucky one. Now we need to do something about the other girls. I want to find them. I want to bring them home. And then, I want to nail Spideyman to the wall.”

“Given what you learned with the boot,” her father said, “I’d head to the woods. Bring some cadaver dogs.”

“Sure, seven hundred and fifty thousand acres. Couple of dogs will blow through that in a day.”

“You get your sarcasm from your mother’s side.”

“Don’t you wish. But hey, Harold has an old friend who is an arachnologist. He’s arranged for us to meet with her first thing in the morning. Normally I wouldn’t place a lot of weight on the analysis of molted spider skin, but given Dinchara’s predilections…”

“Can I attend?”

“Ah, Dad, and miss Coca-Cola World?”

Her father said seriously: “Please, I’m begging you.”

She stayed up after Rainie and Quincy retired, watching late-night TV in bed while waiting for Mac. At one a.m., she couldn’t take it anymore. She rubbed her lower back, regarded her slightly swollen feet, decided she had grown bigger since just yesterday and it was definitely time to sleep.

“Sweet dreams, Baby McCormack,” she whispered to her belly, turning off the light, dragging the covers up.

Sleep was not kind to her. She found herself running through a bloody house, which she dimly recognized from crime scene photos of her mother’s murder. She was desperate to find Bethie. She had to see her mother. There was so much she needed to say.

Except then she heard the wail of a baby and she knew it wasn’t her mother she had lost. She was racing to find her baby. Following the cries through the house. Following the blood trail.

Then, a ghostly white bassinet finally appearing in front of her…

“Shhhh,” Mac’s voice told her. “Shhh, you’re all right, Kimberly. It’s just a bad dream. It’s okay, sweetheart. I got you.”

She clung to him. Felt his arms go around her, tucking her against the solid warmth of his chest. Except she couldn’t stop shaking. Couldn’t stop trembling. Even in her husband’s arms, she didn’t feel safe.

The phone rang. Once, twice.

The third time, she finally managed to pull herself to the surface. The clock glowed five a.m. Mac was sleeping with his back to her. Her cell phone chimed again next to the bed. He stirred groggily as she snatched it up.

She checked the display screen, then put it to her ear.

“Don’t you ever sleep, Sal?”

“She’s gone,” he said flatly. “Jackie could never track her down last night. We finally stopped by first thing this morning. Apartment’s packed up and cleared out. Ginny Jones has disappeared.”

“THERE ARE TWO KINDS OF POISONOUS SPIDERS IN the United States,” USDA arachnologist Carrie Crawford-Hale was explaining. “First is the Lactrodectus mactans or black widow, known for the bright red markings on her abdomen. Only the females bite, generally only when harassed. The second poisonous spider is the Loxosceles reclusa, or brown recluse, known for the violin-shaped marking on its back. Both males and females are equally toxic. Fortunately, they’re very shy, sedentary spiders who prefer to stay tucked behind woodpiles rather than intermingle with humans. Even then, there’s at least a dozen bites reported a year, some with serious consequences.”

“Define serious,” Sal spoke up. He stood close to the door and about as far away from Crawford-Hale and her microscope as he could get. A mounted scorpion was to his right; some kind of giant black beetle with enormous claws directly above his head. The GBI special agent looked tired, haggard, and nervous as hell.

In contrast, Kimberly was trying to figure out if it was polite to ask if she could peer through the microscope. She’d never seen molted spider skin at 10x magnification before. According to Harold, it was pretty cool.

Unfortunately, Crawford-Hale’s office was roughly the size of a janitor’s closet, already overflowing with equipment, filing cabinets, and jarred and mounted specimens. Harold and her family had had to wait outside. Shame, because Quincy probably would enjoy what the arachnologist had to say.

“The venom of the Loxosceles reclusa contains an enzyme that necrotizes the flesh of the victim.” Crawford-Hale adjusted the microscope as she shifted from right to left. “To protect against the venom, the body walls off the arteries around the bite. The skin, starved of blood, begins to die, turning black and sloughing off. I’ve seen pictures of open wounds anywhere from the size of a quarter to a half dollar. In some cases, it’s a small reaction that clears up in weeks. Other times, an entire limb might swell up and it can take months, even a year, to fully recover. The variation seems to have to do more with the response from the victim’s own immune system than from the potency of the particular spider. Basically, some people are more sensitive than others.”

Sal appeared horrified. He’d already eaten this morning, judging by the smudge of ketchup on his dark gray lapel and the pervasive odor of hash browns coming from his suit. At the moment, however, it looked like breakfast wasn’t agreeing with him.

He shifted farther away from Crawford-Hale, shaking out both arms as if feeling something crawling up his skin. “How do you know how sensitive you are?”

“First time you get bit, you learn.” Crawford-Hale straightened up at the microscope. “I’m ninety percent certain this is a Loxosceles reclusa. You can still make out the upside-down violin shadowing the carapace; then there’s the light brown color, the thin, almost delicate body. A more definitive diagnostic feature is the eyes-brown recluses have a semicircular arrangement of six eyes in three groups of two, while most other spiders have eight eyes. I can’t make out that level of detail from this molting, but I’m still relatively confident in my classification.”

“Aren’t brown recluses common in Georgia?” Kimberly asked with a frown.

“Absolutely. The southern states, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma-we’re lousy with brown recluses. I got a case three months ago where a family reported an infestation. I collected three hundred specimens in the first three hours. Interestingly enough, no one in the family was ever bitten. Spiders really aren’t interested in taking on creatures that can squish them with one move of their big toe.

“Of course, then there’s Southern California, which is grappling with the Loxosceles laeta, a species of recluse that came from Chile, Peru, and Argentina. If the venom of the reclusa is a cup of tea, then the venom of the laeta is a double shot of espresso.”

“Another reason not to live in California,” Sal murmured. He’d finally spotted the scorpion mounted beside him. He turned to give it his back, only to discover the next mounted specimen-a cockroach of truly incredible size-staring at him nose to nose.

“I don’t get it.” Kimberly was still puzzling it out. “Why would a spider enthusiast collect a specimen as common as the brown recluse, especially given that it’s venomous and thus difficult to manage?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say brown recluses are difficult to manage,” Crawford-Hale corrected immediately. “They’re some of the only spiders that can be raised communally. And there’s not an aggressive instinct among them. Provide a terrarium with plenty of dark places to hide-leaves, stones, tree bark-drop in a few crickets every week, and they’d probably live quite contentedly.”