"What else?"

"Well, would you believe it, he called me 'sport.' I mean, how long since you've heard anybody use that? 'Don't mean to bother you, sport, but I was just wondering'… whatever. Probably why I remember him so well. Had a funny sort of smile too, like a guy who knew he should be smiling but didn't really want to, you know?"

"Yes," Lucas said. "I know. Mr. Burgess, I'm going to ask you to repeat this to a deputy, if you don't mind, so we'll have a written account."

"Nah, I don't mind." Burgess's eyes were sharp. "So he wasn't just a nosy tourist, huh?"

"When I find out," Lucas returned pleasantly, "I'll let you know."

Burgess snorted but didn't protest as Lucas waved a deputy over to take the statement.

Retreating to the conference room, Lucas was barely aware that both Wyatt and Jaylene were following him, and he was honestly startled when his partner spoke to him.

"Something rang a bell?"

Lucas looked at her, his mind working quickly. "Maybe. The description… mannerisms… and I imagine he could certainly hold a grudge against me, though he never showed it then."

"Luke, who is it?"

As if he hadn't heard her, he murmured, "I just don't understand how he could be doing this. Not killing, and not this way. He was a victim. He suffered, I know he did. He lost-He lost. I lost. Maybe that's the crux of the whole thing. I lost her, wasn't able to find her in time, and he blames me. I should have found her, it was my job. It was what I did. But I failed, and he suffered for it. So now it's my turn to fail. My turn to suffer."

Jaylene sent Wyatt a somewhat helpless look, then said to her partner, "Luke, who are you talking about?"

His eyes cleared suddenly and he looked at her, saw her. "When Bishop recruited me five years ago, I was working on a missing-persons case out in L.A. A girl, eight years old, never came home from school one day. Meredith Gilbert."

"Did you find her?" Jaylene asked.

"Weeks later, and far too late for her." He shook his head. "Her family went through hell, and very publicly, since her father was a real estate baron out there. Her mother never got over it and killed herself about six months later. Her father…"

"What about him?" Wyatt asked intently.

"He'd started out in construction, I'm pretty sure, so he knew how to build. Big man. Tall, barrel-chested. Amazingly powerful physically. And he had a habit of addressing another man as 'sport'"

"Bingo," Jaylene said. "If he blamed you for not finding his daughter and, by extension, for the suicide of his wife, then he could have been carrying around a hell of a grudge, Luke. Five years to plan, plenty of money to do what he needed to do. Background in construction. Even a solid knowledge of real estate could have helped him plan and set things up here in the East. It even explains his bribe to Leo Tedesco; a man like that would think of buying what he needed or wanted."

"I would have sworn he didn't blame me." Lucas shook off the thought, saying to Jaylene, "We need to check it out, find out what happened to Andrew Gilbert after the deaths of his wife and daughter. And there was an older son, I think-away at school at the time, so I never met him."

"I'll call Quantico and get them on it," she said, turning away.

That was when Lucas realized something else. "Where's Sam? I left her in here."

"Didn't see her go out the front," Wyatt said.

Lucas barely had time to feel the beginnings of a cold knot in the pit of his stomach when Caitlin appeared in the doorway, her face white.

"It's Sam. The basement-hurry."

Samantha barely felt the physical contact of the tank and the guillotine. All she felt…

The black curtain swept over her, the darkness as thick as tar, the silence absolute. For an instant, she felt she was being physically carried somewhere, all in a rush; she even briefly felt the sensation of wind, of pressure, against her body, as though she was actually moving.

Then the familiar abrupt stillness and the chilling awareness of a nothingness so vast it was almost, beyond comprehension. Limbo. She was suspended, weightless and even formless, in a cold void somewhere beyond this world and before the next.

As always, all she could do was wait, grimly, for the glimpse into whatever she was meant to see. Wait while her brain tuned in the right frequency and the sounds and images began playing before her mind's eye like some strange movie.

But from that point on, nothing happened as it always had.

Instead, scenes from her own past played before the unblinking gaze of her mind's eye. Stark, harsh, unrelenting, and in vivid color.

The beatings. His fists, his belt, once a broom handle. The times he had burned her with his cigarette. The really, really bad times when he had slammed her against walls, thrown her across furniture, tossed her about like a doll, and all the while she could hear the roaring fury of his drunken rage.

And the words, over and over, hateful words.

"Stupid little bitch!"

"… good for nothing…"

"…ugly…"

"…runt…"

"… pity you were ever born…"

Pain blazing along every nerve ending and the bone-deep aches of afterward when she could barely move. Dragging herself to her room, to huddle beneath the covers and choke back the whimpers she never let him hear.

When she could drag herself to bed. When he didn't toss her into the tiny closet and shove a chair under the doorknob, leaving her in there for hours and hours…

The remembered terror stirred in Samantha, so cold, so awful, and as it did the scene she saw changed abruptly. She found herself staring at a man she'd never seen before. He was standing at the open door of a hulking ATV and seemed to be looking past her. Then he moved suddenly, reaching for the gun on the vehicle's seat.

He got off at least one shot, the loud report of it hurting Samantha's ears. And then there were other shots, scarlet bloomed abruptly on his chest, bubbled from his lips, and he opened his mouth to gasp-

Blackness swallowed Samantha before she could hear whatever it was he said. It seemed to last forever, or maybe it was only seconds. She didn't know. Didn't really care. Blackness and silence and a chill that followed her up, slowly, so slowly, out of limbo.

"Sam?"

She hurt. She was cold and she hurt. And he, she thought dimly, would not make it better. Maybe could not. Maybe nobody could…

"Sam!"

Conscious then of the weight of her body, conscious of being back, she forced her eyes to open.

"Hey," she whispered. Funny how rusty and unused her voice sounded.

"Christ, you scared the hell out of me," Lucas said.

Vaguely surprised, she said, "I did? How?"

He showed her a bloody handkerchief, and said roughly, "You've been out for nearly an hour."

"Oh. Sorry." Samantha realized then that she was lying on a sofa in the lounge of the sheriff's department. Lucas was sitting on the edge of the sofa, and Caitlin and the sheriff were standing a few feet away.

When she met the other woman's gaze and saw her pallor, Samantha said with more contrition, "I really am sorry, Caitlin. I knew it'd be bad, but I had no idea-"

"Then why the hell did you do it?" Lucas demanded.

She looked back at him and winced. "Not so loud, please. My head is splitting." And she felt incredibly weak, dizzy, and nauseated.

Wyatt said, "Are you sure she shouldn't be in a hospital? I've never seen anybody so pale."

"There's nothing a doctor could do for her, otherwise she'd be under the care of one now," Lucas said, but in a quieter voice. He frowned down at her and held the handkerchief to her nose, adding, "But if this bleeding doesn't stop soon…"

Samantha took the cloth from him and held it herself. "It'll stop. Listen, about this killer-"