“No, I can’t.” Her gaze was held by those faces, by those staring eyes … “They’re looking at me. Can’t you see? They’re all looking at me.”

“Kendra, it’s not that they’re—” Jeff stopped. “This is too rough. You should go back to the car.”

“Too late.” She closed her eyes. But she could still see those faces. Particularly the faces of the two little children. She opened her eyes. “Too late for them. Too late for me.” She fought back the nausea and took a step forward. “And they know it. They know someone has to make him pay. I have to make him pay.”

“Kendra, I didn’t think that you would—”

“Get me closer to those heads. Maybe he left something, did something, that will let me find a way to help them.”

“Forensics will do that. It’s not your—”

“Don’t tell me that.” Her eyes were blazing as she whirled on him. “You brought me here. You almost made me come. Now you get me the help I need to make sure the monster responsible will never do this again.”

Jeff hesitated. “Stay here. I’ll talk to Griffin and the local police and get permission. I’ll be right back.”

She watched him start across the room, then forced herself to turn and look back at those heads.

She was becoming accustomed to the horror now that she had made her decision to not let herself be helpless before it. Sadness, anger, shock were still present, but there was also a burning desire for justice … and revenge.

Staring eyes. Broken hearts. Broken lives.

“I’ll find him,” she whispered to them. “Give me a little time. I’ll find him for you.”

Staring eyes …

San Diego International Airport

Present Day

6:40 A.M.

STARING EYES.

Block it out, Kendra told herself, as she looked up from her coffee. She had spent the night before being attacked by memories of that fever dream of a night at that factory and had gotten very little sleep. Now that the decision was made, she must not dwell on it any longer.

Easy to say. She had been able to suppress but never forget the eyes of those two little boys, seemingly following her around the factory floor.

Their faces were frozen, forever seven and eight years old, but their eyes were pleading, begging.

Dammit.

She parked herself at the Stone Brewing Co., well away from the Terminal 2 gate of the San Francisco flight. She didn’t want to run into any of the FBI agents yet.

In case she changed her mind.

She checked her watch. The plane was already boarding. She imagined Griffin standing on the jetway, neck craned, looking around the gate for her.

“Everyone knows you’re here, Kendra.”

She whirled around. It was Lynch. He was already at the restaurant, sitting with his back to the concourse.

He swiveled to face her. “Your bodyguard phoned Griffin the second he dropped you off at the curb outside.”

“Of course he did.” She shrugged. “Which would make it even more awesome if I decided not to go.”

“True.” He smiled faintly. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.”

“You sure?”

She nodded. “I didn’t get much sleep. I was just thinking about my first night on the Eric Colby case. It was hideous, and I wanted to strike out at everyone and everything. I don’t know if I could have held it together without Jeff there. He believed in me so much … I didn’t want to disappoint him.”

“You didn’t. You made him proud.”

“I hope so.”

Lynch closed the newspaper app he’d been reading on his tablet computer. “Do you think about him a lot?”

She nodded. Of course she did. She had watched him die only a year before, in the case that had first brought her and Lynch together. Jeff had been abducted during the course of a murder investigation, and Lynch had made her believe she could save him. He was wrong.

“I miss him.” She hesitated. “But not in the way you might think. We’d broken up almost a year and a half before he died. We didn’t have a future together. But even though I never saw him anymore, I liked living in a world with Jeff Stedler in it. Does that make any sense?”

“It does.”

“And the world is somehow sadder without him in it. He was a good person.”

“So are you.” Lynch motioned toward the concourse. “Are we gonna do this?”

She braced herself and nodded. “Yeah. Let’s go.”

San Quentin State Penitentiary

Marin County, California

“THERE’S A CROWD UP AHEAD.” Kendra was gazing out the window of the rental van she was sharing with Lynch, Griffin, Metcalf, and Reade. Metcalf was driving, and they had just completed the forty-five-minute drive from the airport. As they approached the penitentiary’s East Gate, they were greeted by the sight of twenty protestors. “They all have anti-death-penalty signs. Are they here for Colby?”

“They’re here for everybody on death row,” Lynch said. “But yes, Colby’s upcoming execution is what brings them here now. There will be hundreds more this weekend. By Monday night, there will be thousands. On both sides of the issue.”

For an instant, those staring eyes were once more with Kendra, haunting her. “Thousands…”

“It’s their right,” Griffin said.

“I know that.” She looked straight ahead and away from the protestors. “Just as it was our right to put that bastard here in the first place.”

After checking in at the gate, they were escorted to a two-story administration building where they soon found themselves in the office of Warden Howard Salazar, a sixtyish Latino man with wire-rimmed spectacles and close-cropped gray beard.

“When people ask what I do for a living, I say I just take meetings about Eric Colby,” Salazar said sourly as he hung up his phone and rose to his feet. “Or answer the phone from journalists about what happened at the last meeting. It’s pretty much all I do these days.”

“Sorry to make you take this one more meeting, Warden.” Griffin shook his hand and introduced him to the team.

“At least you may have a different agenda.” Salazar motioned for them to join him in a seating area beneath a large leaded-glass window. “I’m curious about your agency’s sudden interest in Colby. When law-enforcement officials come to see me about a prisoner this close to his being executed, it usually means he may be responsible for more killings than those for which he was convicted. Are you trying to close some old cases while you can?”

“No, nothing like that. But it is possible there’s some connection between him and a current investigation.”

“I see. Well, we’ve pulled together the information you requested. I hope it will help you.”

Reade leaned forward. “Mr. Salazar … What kind of prisoner has Colby been?”

Salazar shrugged. “From the moment he arrived, he’s been a model prisoner. He keeps to himself, he reads, he writes in his notebooks, and that’s about it.”

“How can you say that?” Kendra said. “I’ve been keeping track of him. I know for a fact that he murdered a man within these walls.”

“Self-defense. Child murderers aren’t treated kindly by the general prison population. Over the years, he’s been targeted a few times, but he’s always been able to take care of himself. One of those attacks involved a sharpened railroad spike that had been smuggled in from a work detail. It happened at the athletic track. During the confrontation, Colby wrested it away from his attacker and almost decapitated him with it. There were plenty of witnesses, two of whom were guards. They testified that it was a clear matter of kill or be killed. Of course, the media just saw ‘Eric Colby’ and ‘decapitate’ in the same sentence, and all those other details receded into the background.”

“Does his family visit him?” Lynch asked.

“He won’t allow it. His parents, sister, and a few other relatives have submitted applications to be included on his visitor list, but he won’t approve them. They tried again just last month. They wanted to see him before the execution. He hasn’t laid eyes on anyone in his family since his trial.”