“You have any idea who’s inside?” Janet asked Maggie.

“No.”

The woman looked at her and raised an eyebrow like she didn’t appreciate secrecy when they were ankle-deep in mud.

“We’ve been tracking a killer for about a month now,” Maggie said, but she wasn’t willing to tell anyone about the map that had led her and Tully here. “We suspect this farm might be his dumping ground.”

“Yeah, we heard about the bones.”

Janet glanced around the property but Maggie saw her attention go to the woods that lined the back of the farmstead. She was thinking the same thing Maggie and Tully had.

Before she could say anything more, Maggie told her, “We have a cadaver dog team on its way.”

“Don’t forget to have them check if there’s a storm cellar.”

It was Maggie’s turn to raise an eyebrow.

“Most of the old farms have them somewhere on the property for tornado shelters. Last year we found a woman and two kids. Husband claimed his wife had left him and taken the kids.”

She shook her head at the memory and Maggie could see it was still fresh.

“One of them was just a baby, not even two years old.”

Janet stopped digging. Shadows started devouring the last streams of daylight. They didn’t have much time if they hoped to remove the garbage bag before dark, but Maggie stopped digging, too, waiting, giving the woman time to do what she needed to put the image away and return to the task at hand.

“But hopefully we got enough evidence to nail the bastard.”

She offered Maggie a weak smile, more a thanks for understanding than an indictment on the weight of the evidence.

They were almost to the top of the black garbage bag when Maggie’s trowel met something more solid than a clump of dirt. She set the trowel aside and with gloved fingers she raked at the dirt until she saw white.

Janet had noticed and set her trowel aside, too. She watched Maggie slowly unearth what appeared to be another plastic bag. This one was smaller. Through the smears of mud Maggie recognized the major retail store’s logo. Janet helped her uncover it but both of them stopped, sitting back on their haunches when they were finished. There was definitely something inside. The bag bulged like the black garbage bag beneath it. This one was sitting upright with the top handles tied haphazardly in a loose knot. And it also smelled like rotten meat.

“We found something else,” Maggie yelled to the men below, and immediately her eyes searched for Tully.

CHAPTER 13

QUANTICO, VIRGINIA

It didn’t seem like that long ago that Dr. Gwen Patterson had been to the FBI facility at Quantico. Her boyfriend and best friend worked there, so she heard about the place on a weekly basis. But when the guard at the security hut scrutinized her driver’s license—eyes darting from her face to the plastic ID card—she realized it had actually been several years. The guards used to hear her name and wave her through. A few of them would recognize her and lift the gate before she’d had a chance to roll down her car window.

She was no longer a recognizable figure. And for a good reason. Gwen had purposely tried to distance herself from the place. The last time she had worked as a consultant on an FBI case, a psychotic young cult member had attempted to stab a sharp pencil into her throat.

The scrutiny started all over again at the front desk.

“I don’t have a name badge for you,” the receptionist said, making it sound like it was Gwen’s fault. “Who are you here to see?”

“Assistant Director Raymond Kunze. In the Behavorial Science Unit.”

“And what is the nature of your business?” the woman asked, holding on to Gwen’s driver’s license while giving her a full body search with her eyes. This was worse than the guard at the hut, and Gwen wondered how the woman thought she had made it this far if she was a threat.

She needed to calm down. She had been through tougher interrogations. This was simply more annoying than intimidating. She kept still, containing a sigh and resisting the urge to shift her weight and cross her arms. Gwen had spent most of her career compensating for her petite frame by wearing three-inch heels and fine tailored power suits—skirts, never trousers, and dark or bold colors, never pastels. She had refined her Brooklyn roots to create a classy, don’t-screw-with-me attitude. She believed confidence and poise more than made up for her lack in stature. But being back at Quantico reminded her only of vulnerability and of that split second of mind-numbing fear.

The receptionist continued to stare at her, and Gwen fought the unexpected flicker of nausea in the pit of her stomach.

“It’s okay, Stacy, I’ll vouch for Dr. Patterson.”

Gwen turned to find Detective Julia Racine coming in through the front doors.

“She’s on the Highway Serial Killings Task Force,” Racine told the receptionist, who was already pulling out a different stack of folders.

“I wish people would tell me these things ahead of time.” The woman now seemed irritated by both Gwen and Racine as she riffled through one folder and then another.

Racine positioned her back to Stacy and rolled her eyes for Gwen to see. Gwen smiled but tried not to show the young detective how terribly relieved she was. Julia Racine was cocky enough without knowing that she had just saved the District’s number-one psychologist to the politicos from launching into a panic attack over a misplaced name badge. And Gwen suddenly realized—and did not like it—how much she had changed since her last visit. What had become of her lately?

Turning fifty had sent her into a tailspin. Instead of focusing on her accomplishments, all she could think about were her physical challenges: tired, moody, uncharacteristically second-guessing herself. Not just herself, but second-guessing her choices, her career, her relationship, her life.

Focus on the here and now, damn it!

“So you’re on the task force, too,” Gwen said after she and Racine signed in and pinned on their badges.

She let Racine lead the way, though it hadn’t been so long ago that Gwen would have forgotten how to get to the BSU conference room.

“The homicide that tipped off this investigation is my case. Remember those arsons back in February? Three warehouses and a church in Arlington?”

“Of course.” The same arsonist had torched her friend Maggie O’Dell’s house before he turned himself in.

“We found a body in the alley next to one of the warehouses.”

Racine pulled open a door to the walkway and held it for Gwen to go through. It was a polite gesture that threw Gwen off coming from Racine. The detective was anything but polite. She’d built a reputation on being tough as nails, one she reinforced by wearing trousers and leather jackets and keeping her short hair spiked just enough to give her an edgy look. Yet the knit T-shirt beneath the bomber jacket couldn’t hide full breasts and the trousers only accentuated her long slender legs.

“The body,” Racine continued, “was Gloria Dobson. We’re pretty sure she and her traveling partner were murdered at a rest area in Virginia, just off the interstate.”

“I remember Tully and Maggie talking about it.”

But Gwen was careful not to mention just how much she knew about the case. It still unnerved her to remember how upset Tully had been when describing the crime scene he and Maggie had stumbled upon at that rest area.

R. J. Tully was a veteran FBI agent. He was one of the most centered and even-tempered men Gwen knew. He had seen and witnessed some gruesome murders, so this scene had to be horrendous to leave him shaken. And now he and Maggie were somewhere in the Midwest searching for the killer who had ripped apart that strong, healthy young man and left Gloria Dobson’s bashed-in body in a District alley.