Or was she simply afraid to go back inside, where his father would be waiting with his quick temper and hamlike fists?

The man did not like these thoughts. He didn’t want to play this game anymore. He jerked the aquarium from the inside of the van. He dumped its grass and twig matting into the woods. Then he dumped in half of a bottle of ammonia and went to work with his bare hands. He could feel the harsh chemical burn his skin.

Later the runoff from this little exercise would seep into a stream, and kill off algae, bacteria, and cute little fishes. Because he was no better, you know. No matter what he did, he was still a man who drove a car and bought a refrigerator and probably once kissed a girl who used a can of aerosol spray on her hair. Because that’s what men did. Men killed. Men destroyed. Men beat their wives, abused their kids, and took a planet and warped it into their own twisted image.

His eyes were running now. Snot poured from his nose and his chest heaved until his breath came out in savage gasps. The harsh scent of ammonia, he thought. But he knew better. He was once again thinking of his mother’s pale, lonely face.

He and his brother should have gone back inside with her. They could’ve walked through the door first, judged the mood, and if it came to it, taken their punishment like M-E-N. They didn’t, though. Their father was home, and they ran away into the woods, where they lived like gods on pokeweed salad, wild raspberries, and tender fiddleheads.

They turned to the land for shelter, and tried not to think about what was happening back in one tiny cabin in the woods. At least that’s what they’d done when they could.

The man turned off the hose. The van was washed, the aquarium cleansed, the whole project sanitized within an inch of its life. Forty-eight hours later, it was over.

He was tired again. Bone-deep weary in a way that people who had never killed could never appreciate. But it was over. Now, at long last, he was done.

He took his kill kit away with him. Later, he tucked it beneath his mattress before finally crawling into bed.

His head touched the pillow. He thought of what he had just done. High heels, blond hair, blue eyes, green dress, bound hands, dark hair, brown eyes, long legs, scratching nails, flashing white teeth.

The man closed his eyes. He slept the best he had in years.

Quantico, Virginia

5:36 A . M .

Temperature: 84 degrees

QUINCY JERKED AWAKE TO THE SOUND of the phone ringing. Instinct bred of so many other calls in the middle of so many other nights led him to reach automatically toward the nightstand. Then the ringing penetrated a second time, shrill and insistent, and he remembered that he was at the FBI Academy, staying in a dorm room, where the lone phone sat on the desk halfway across the room.

He moved quietly and quickly, but it was no longer necessary. Even as he cut off the third ring, Rainie was sitting up sleepily in the bed. Her long chestnut hair was tousled around her pale face, drawing attention to the striking angles of her cheeks and the long, bare column of her neck. God, she was lovely first thing in the morning. For that matter, she was lovely at the end of a long day. All these years later, day in, day out, she never failed to take his breath away.

He looked at her, and then, as happened too often these days, he felt a sharp pain in his chest. He turned away, cradling the phone between his shoulder and his ear.

“Pierce Quincy.”

And then a moment later, “Are you sure? That’s not what I meant- Kimberly… Well, if that’s what you want to do. Kimberly…” Big sigh again. The beginning of a headache already building in his temples. “You’re a grown adult, Kimberly. I respect that.”

It didn’t do him any good. His last surviving daughter had ended yesterday angry with him and had apparently started today even madder. She slammed down the phone. He returned his own receiver much more gently, trying not to notice how his hands shook. He had been trying to mend the bridge with his mercurial daughter for six years now. He hadn’t made much progress yet.

In the beginning, Quincy had thought Kimberly simply needed time. After the intense episode of what happened to their family, of course she harbored a great deal of rage. He had been an FBI agent, a trained professional, and still he’d done nothing to save Bethie and Amanda. If Kimberly hated him, he couldn’t blame her. For a long time, he had hated himself, too.

Now, however, as year advanced into year, and the raw ache of loss and failure began to subside, he wondered if it wasn’t something more insidious than that. He and his daughter had gone through a harrowing experience. They had joined forces to outwit a psychopath as he’d hunted them down one by one. That kind of experience changed people. Changed relationships.

And it built associations. Perhaps Kimberly simply couldn’t view him as a father anymore. A parent should be a safe harbor, a source of shelter amid turbulent times. Quincy was none of those things in his daughter’s eyes. In fact, his presence was probably a constant reminder that violence often struck close to home. That real monsters didn’t live under the bed. They could be very attractive, fully functioning members of society, and once they targeted you, not even a smart, strong, professionally trained father could make any difference.

It still amazed Quincy how easy it was to fail the ones you loved.

“Was that Kimberly?” Rainie asked from behind him. “What did she want?”

“She’s leaving the Academy this morning. She talked one of the counselors into giving her a leave of absence for emotional distress.”

“Kimberly?” Rainie’s voice was incredulous. “Kimberly, who would walk barefoot through fire before asking for a pair of shoes, let alone a fire extinguisher? No way.”

Quincy merely waited. It didn’t take long. Rainie had always been exceptionally bright. She got it in the next instant.

“She’s going to work the case!” she exclaimed suddenly. In contrast to his reaction, however, she threw back her head and laughed. “Well, what do you know. I told you the Georgian was a hunk!”

“If Supervisor Watson finds out,” Quincy said seriously, “her career will be over.”

“If Watson finds out, he’ll simply be mad he didn’t get to save the second girl first.” Rainie bounded out of bed. “Well, what do you want to do?”

“Work,” Quincy said flatly. “I want the ID on the victim.”

“Yes, sir!”

“And maybe,” he mused carefully, “it wouldn’t hurt to pay a visit to the forensic linguist, Dr. Ennunzio.”

Rainie regarded him in surprise. “Why, Pierce Quincy, are you beginning to believe in the Eco-Killer?”

“I don’t know. But I definitely think that my daughter is much too involved. Let’s work, Rainie. And let’s work fast.”

Kimberly and Mac drove toward Richmond mostly in silence. She learned that his taste in radio stations ran toward country music. In turn, she taught him that she didn’t function well without a morning cup of coffee.

They had taken his car; the rented Toyota Camry was nicer than her ancient Mazda. Mac had thrown a backpack filled with supplies into the trunk. Kimberly had added hiking boots and a duffel bag filled with her sparse collection of clothes.

She’d retrieved her gun first thing this morning, turning in the plastic Crayola along with her handcuffs. She signed a few forms, relinquished her ID, and that was that. She was officially on leave from the FBI Academy. For the first time since she was about nine years old, she was not actively aspiring to be a federal agent.

She should feel anxious, guilt-stricken, and horrified, she thought. So many years of her life she was suddenly throwing away on a whim. As if she ever did anything on a whim. As if her life had ever held a hint of the whimsical.