But she had never really wanted to launch. She liked what she did. She liked the people she worked with. They were a unit, a family. She couldn’t imagine going to work and not having Kovac right there, her anchor, her foil. They had been partners for years. He had practically raised her as a detective. They had gone from student and teacher to colleagues and equals. Their relationship was a marriage without the sex. The thought of leaving that brought on a whole wave of unpleasant emotions.

Eyes on the neon Rock & Bowl sign, she exited the freeway.

“Well, you’re not leaving me tonight,” Kovac grumbled. “And you’re not leaving me tomorrow or the next day.”

“No.”

“So get your head in the game. We’ve got a girl missing. We’ve got a girl dead. We’ve got a killer running around loose. If this is Doc Holiday, he could be out trolling while you’re sitting there mulling over your career choices. He’s already made his career. His career is torturing and killing young women. In the big scheme of badness, he’s way ahead of you.”

That was Kovac—crankiness as a defense mechanism. He was right, anyway.

“Thanks for the pep talk,” she said as she pulled into a loading zone in front of the sprawling building.

“You know I’m always here to kick you in the ass when you need it.”

She turned the car off and looked across at him. “Sometimes I would prefer a hug, you know.”

The corner of his mouth lifted in his trademark sardonic smile. “I don’t trust you not to pop me in the kisser afterward,” he admitted. “Sucker punch me for all the shit I give you.”

“That could happen. I’d like to hit somebody for something.”

He sighed and unbuckled his seat belt. “Oh, for the days when you could club the shit out of a suspect for looking at you the wrong way.”

She rolled her eyes. “You’re so full of it. You never did any such thing.”

“No,” he confessed. “But I saw it in a movie once. It looked like fun.”

They got out of the car, and Liska looked around, seeing the place as if she’d never been there before. She looked at the proximity to the freeway and the big gas plaza just down the frontage road.

The consensus was that Doc Holiday traveled the highways of the Midwest, possibly as a trucker. His victims had all disappeared from locations along major roadways. Rose Reiser, New Year’s Doe, had disappeared literally from the doorstep of a convenience store along a major highway in Columbia, Missouri. Her car had been found parked nearby—moved and hidden by her killer.

Kovac read her mind. “I’ve already got every unit in the vicinity looking for her car. We’ll hit the gas station after we leave here, and get the security tapes.”

They walked the length of the Rock & Bowl’s poorly lit parking area, their eyes scanning the cars, looking for Penny Gray’s Toyota, hoping against hope to catch an easy break. The parking lot ran down the side of the building going away from the frontage road and possible witnesses there. It was bordered by a chain-link fence with a parking lot of huge, heavy road equipment on the other side. Giant, hulking machines that stood like abandoned dinosaur carcasses with snow blown up around them.

A small knot of the Rock & Bowl patrons stood near a side exit toward the back of the building, braving the cold to have a smoke. Their voices rose and fell. The sound of music went from muffled to clear and back as the door opened and closed.

The place was busy despite its being a weeknight. The colleges were still on break even if most of the high schools had gone back to business already. No one paid any real attention to Kovac and Liska as they walked past and kept going, all the way to the dark, narrow street that ran behind the Rock & Bowl property. The businesses on that street were places that closed early—a body shop, a glass shop, a tire store. There would be no one lingering on the sidewalk back there, no one glancing out a window this time of night.

“No witnesses handy back here,” Kovac said. “A good escape route.”

“So where’s her car?” Liska asked. “If someone grabbed her out here and took her, where’s her car?”

“He could have followed her away from here. Or she might have stopped for gas or had car trouble or went to a Starbucks and he nabbed her there.”

Liska looked down the dark, deserted street, unease drawing a bony finger along the back of her neck at the thought of being a woman alone, unsuspecting, unaware that a predator was following her away from the safety of a busy place.

That was something her male counterparts would never truly get—that sense of absolute vulnerability when a woman realizes the potential for danger from a man with bad intentions. She always harbored the secret hope that victims like their ninth girl never saw it coming, that it was over before they could know what terrible thing fate held for them. Of course she knew that was almost never the case.

For an animal like Doc Holiday, the kill itself was almost secondary to what preceded it. For a sexual sadist, inflicting pain and instilling terror were like foreplay. He relished the chase, the cat-and-mouse game, the rush of holding the switch on life or death. His highest high was seeing that look of abject horror in the eyes of his victim as she fully grasped the sure knowledge that he had all the power to do with her whatever his sick heart desired—and the sure knowledge that what he desired was her pain . . . and her life.

The idea of a sixteen-year-old girl being put in that position made Liska feel physically ill.

The idea that she could be instrumental in bringing down the animal that perpetrated that kind of crime was what kept her on the job. What they did mattered. They’d come to the party too late for the victim at hand, but if they did their job well, they took a killer off the street before he could claim another life, and another, and another.

“Let’s go see if there’s a camera on this parking lot,” Kovac said, starting back toward the building. “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

Liska forced a laugh. “Well, that would be something. The last time I got lucky, gas was a buck fifty.”

•   •   •

THE MANAGER OF the Rock & Bowl was a small, nervous guy in his early thirties with thinning hair and round brown eyes. He took the news of having detectives in his business like a mouse facing a pair of hungry cats.

“We haven’t had any trouble here,” he said, leading the way down a hall away from the noise of the bowling alley. “We run a clean family business. I don’t want people thinking this isn’t a safe place. We’ve never had an incident. I mean, the odd scuffle. Nothing crazy.”

“Anything happen the night of the thirtieth?” Kovac asked.

“I was off that night. Nobody called me. You don’t think this girl was snatched from here, do you?” he asked, throwing a worried look back over his shoulder. “I mean, somebody would have seen something, right? We can’t have people thinking something like that would happen here. That’s terrible.”

“We’re trying to piece together what might have happened,” Liska said. “We need to establish a timeline. This was the last place she was seen by the friend she was staying with, so this is where we start. We don’t know what happened after she left here.”

“Last seen at the Rock & Bowl,” the manager said. “That’s great. That’ll look good on the news.”

“Do you have any cameras on the parking lot?” Kovac asked.

They went into the cramped and cluttered office. The manager turned and faced them like he was facing a firing squad. “Ordinarily we do. I’m really sorry to say this, but that camera went down right after Christmas. It developed moisture behind the lens, which then, of course, froze. The thing is shot. The security company is supposed to come change it out, but with the holidays and all . . . it hasn’t happened yet.”