After she’d gone into the child welfare system at the age of four, she’d rarely had the money to go on a Ferris wheel or Tilt-a-Whirl, but she’d stood in the shadows watching. She’d seen laughing kids line up with their parents for the rides and been jealous.

  Once, when she was eleven and on the run from a particularly bad foster home, she’d seen the lights of a carnival and been drawn to the excitement. She’d found a roll of tickets on the ground by a food stand and rode a gilded horse on a carousel. She remembered the thrill of the turning merry-go-round, remembered her own forced laughter, before a pervert had walked between the bobbing wooden animals and wagged his penis at her.

  She’d bounced a Coke bottle off the creep’s head, but the magic had been ruined. Like my childhood, she thought. A real mess.

  She found an empty bench along the boardwalk, sat down, and studied the faces of the passersby. Was Christian Shepherd here? Would she know him if she saw him? Would he strike in this town, or was the Ocean City postcard a deliberate false lead? Had the TV broadcasts driven him underground?

  She hoped that Teresa’s sister had returned home or at least called. There was no reason to suspect the worst. Most missing persons reports were false alarms, and kids in their twenties were rarely where anyone expected them to be. She’d checked on the boyfriend. Teresa was right: Mike and his new love were still out of the country. If anything bad had happened to Lydie, it appeared Mike Malkiewicz was home free.

  Still, she mused, the coincidence of Lydie being the girl she and Reed had seen at the harbor and again on the highway was mind-bending. It went against logic that of all the young women in Baltimore, she had come upon Lydie Quinn twice, and now the girl had been drawn into the Nighthawk case in the worst possible way.

  Teresa seemed like a caring person. Lydie Quinn probably was too. Jillian didn’t want to have to see her lying on a slab in the morgue.

  There were times when she was tempted to quit her job, to do something else—anything else. She was tired of chasing psychopaths, tired of seeing the tearstained faces of loved ones after someone had discovered a mutilated body. She was tired to the bone of never having a town…a community where she could belong. And she was sick at heart that when she’d finally found a man she could have trusted…maybe made a life with, she had too much baggage to weight him down with it.

  In the distance, a Ferris wheel revolved, its colored lights playing against the low-hanging clouds. Strains of carnival music filtered through the clank and clatter of electronic games and the chatter of the crowd. Pangs of loneliness made her wish she’d never come to Ocean City, never requested Reed’s help on the case. The restless, hollow feeling troubled her. Her PTSD occurrences rarely happened in public places, but there was always a first time.

  She had a hunch that if Christian Shepherd was here, he’d be drawn to the excitement of the amusement park. Acting purely on woman’s intuition, she rose and strolled down the pier toward the Ferris wheel.

  Christian saw her as he stepped away from the stand with a banana smoothie in one hand and a blue cotton candy in the other. He hadn’t expected to find Jillian here any more than he’d expected to come across Lydie at the bar.

  Fate. He should have known, should have realized that the game had its own intelligence. This was perfect. Even the naysayer Baa-Bee would have to agree. Christian was meant to find Special Agent Jillian Maxwell here, within sight and sound of the sea. Tonight, he’d finish the game he’d begun over two years earlier.

  And the ending would be so sweet.

  Baa-Bee would burst his seams with pride.

  Kali recognized him instantly. Christian Shepherd couldn’t hide what he was, any more than she could. Even disguised as a tourist and carrying a cotton candy cone twice the size of his head, she knew him for what he was.

  Predator. Stalker of the innocent. Master killer.

  She couldn’t suppress a smile. What was he doing here? Scouting out his next victim? Hunting her? He was cocky, far too cocky. And in this game, cockiness brought a man down. Or a woman…

  If Christian was hunting to night, the missing kid she’d seen on the news was safe, probably drinking beer and screwing her boyfriend in the backseat of his car.

  Kali hoped he’d gotten her letters, the perfumed ones. If he knew her when she met him for the last time, it would be poetic justice.

  She didn’t buy a wrist band. Jillian had no intention of riding the Ferris wheel or any of the other age-appropriate rides. She wanted to go on the merry-go-round to see if she could find the frightened kid she’d lost so many years ago.

  She chose a horse with blue and silver banners, one that went up and down, and swung up into the carved saddle. The canned calliope music began and the carousel began to turn.

  A long arm held rings, and the riders ahead of Jillian laughed and grabbed at it as the carousel gained speed. She’d never gotten the gold ring, a prize that entitled the lucky one to a free ride. The gold ring had eluded her as much as love…as much as a sense of belonging to someone.

  Faces in the crowd flashed by. Strangers waved and smiled, and Jillian waved back. The PTSD was close now. She could feel her fingers tingling, hear Mommy’s shrill voice. “The lion’s going to get you!” she cried. “You’d better go faster.”

  Jillian hadn’t eaten anything, but she could taste saltwater taffy on her tongue. The merry-go-round seemed larger than it had been, the animals fiercer, the other riders more sinister. She looked around, half expecting to see the pervert unzipping his dirty shorts, but he wasn’t there. No one stood in the aisle between the giraffe and the unicorn but a gray-haired woman, clutching her chubby grandchild to keep him from falling. But off to the side, not twenty feet from the carousel, she saw a man standing in the shadows watching her. A sense of danger swamped her. Her heart kicked and she gripped the reins of the wooden horse tighter.

  Jillian held her breath as the merry-go-round made another circuit. The spot where the man had stood was vacant. Had she seen him at all, or was this just another trick her mind had played on her? The ride was already slowing, and when it had nearly stopped, she jumped off and hurried away through the crowd.

  Christian pushed past a fat woman. Where was she? One moment he’d had her in his sights and the next she had evaporated like a puff of smoke. He paced around the merry-go-round without finding her.

  This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. How could he lose her? Then he spied a woman with shoulder-length dark hair in line for the Ferris wheel. He hurried over, but by the time he reached the line outside the fence, the car with the lone occupant had risen high enough so that he couldn’t make out her face.

  “Get to the back of the line,” a boy in a skateboarding T-shirt said.

  Christian looked into his eyes, and the kid lurched backward. “Were you talking to me?” Christian asked.

  The wiseass muttered something and darted away.

  Good, Christian thought. You’re so skinny, you’d hardly bleed if I cut you. He glanced back at the Ferris wheel to see that the woman had already gone up again. He waited, and this time, when her car descended, he saw that she was Asian. Not his Jillian. Fuming, he began a search of the amusement pier.

  She was still here. She had to be. And he would find her.

  Kali didn’t understand how he could have vanished. One moment he’d been there and then he was gone. The area was crowded, but that was no excuse. She wandered around for perhaps a half hour and then retraced her steps to the boardwalk, where she’d first caught sight of him.

  Christian wasn’t there. Instead, two women stood toe-to-toe a few feet from the counter. They were arguing so loudly that people were staring.

  Kali was intrigued. She loved to see strangers making fools of themselves in public. She approached an adjoining shop, purchased a single-use camera, and an OCEAN CITY, MARYLAND T-shirt, and then listened to hear what the pair was arguing about.

  “Tits!” the petite redhead exclaimed. “You did her! Just like you did that bitch Tatum on my birthday. Any whore with a pair of thirty-eight Cs can lead you around by the short hairs.”

  Her opponent, a tall, muscular woman in a wife beater, green board shorts, and a platinum-blonde crew cut clenched her right fist and slapped her biceps with her left hand in a crude gesture. “Stuff it.”

  “Stuff yours, Shelly.” Red stalked away.

  Crew Cut charged after her, a little unsteady on her feet, and took a wild swing at the redhead that missed by a foot.

  Judging by her slurred voice and clumsiness, Shelly had obviously had one too many of what ever she’d been drinking or smoking, Kali decided. But she did have a nice butt. Kali watched the exchange with growing interest.

  “Who do you think you’re talking to?” Shelly demanded.

  “You, you dickhead. Forget you!” The little redhead shoved the bigger woman hard in the chest. Shelly stumbled back and landed on her butt on the boardwalk.

  Onlookers snickered as Shelly made an effort to rise and fell again. There was an audible rip as the green shorts came apart at the seam. Kali stepped forward as Red hurried away through the crowd.

  “Are you okay?” Kali asked, offering her hand to Shelly.

  Crew Cut swore.

  Kali slipped an arm around her waist. “Maybe you’d better sit down for a minute.” She steered the woman toward an unoccupied bench. Her breath smelled of whiskey and cigarettes, but the cords on her neck stretched taut and intriguing. “I’m Kali,” she said.

  Crew Cut’s bleary eyes lit with interest. “Shelly.”

  Shelly’s mouth was hard on Kali’s breast as she wrapped her sinewy legs around her thighs and thrust against her pelvis. Kali was breathing hard, her skin shiny with sweat. She sought the stranger’s breast and sucked, drawing her nipple between her teeth and biting down until Shelly cried out in a mixture of pain and pleasure.

  The concrete floor was damp and gritty under them. They’d chosen a folded tarp to lie on, but somehow in the action they’d rolled off so that Shelly’s head rested on the track bed and her hips on a heap of fake cobwebs.

  Voices, colored lights, and the grind and squeal of the amusement park filtered through the thin walls of the haunted house, but the ride was down for the night, the building deserted. Darkness, interspersed by a line of barely visible floor bulbs, enveloped the line of empty passenger cars and framed a monstrous ivory-toothed demon at the mouth of the tunnel of doom.

  Kali was having a blast. She’d gotten off in a lot of places, but never a fun house, and she had to give Crew Cut points for knowing where the nearly invisible fire door was. The woman might be drunk, might be a bitch on wheels, but she gave good head.

  Shelly jammed two fingers into her, and Kali gasped in pleasure. This was raw stuff, not as satisfying as the mid-shipman, but interesting. She sank her teeth into the woman’s breast hard enough to break the skin. Shelly howled, and blood welled up. Kali tongued the injury, savoring the taste of blood. Shelly tried to push her off, but Kali clung to her, grinding her pelvis against her partner’s hairy bush until she climaxed in a wave of multiorgasms.

  Panting, Shelly twisted free and leaned forward in a sitting position. “Fuck,” she muttered. “Damn.”

  Kali reached for her jeans. “Smoke?” she offered.

  Shelly let out a deep exhalation, ran a hand through her damp hair, and chuckled. “Where have you been all my life?”

  “Right here, waiting for you.” The ice pick was new, shiny, and sharp. Shelly didn’t see it coming until the last second.

  “Noo!” She threw up her hands to protect her face.

  Kali drove the point beneath Shelly’s hands into her throat. The ice pick pierced flesh and bone. Shelly squawked and blubbered, clutching futilely at the weapon, but it was too late. Kali jerked it out and plunged it in a second time. Blood spurted.

  “How’s that for a ride in the fun house?” Kali laughed as the woman flopped onto her belly and crawled over the tracks toward the door. She didn’t get far. She fell forward and twitched as blood pooled on the floor.

  “Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to talk to strangers?” Kali nudged her leg with one foot. Shelly didn’t move, but she made one final rasping groan.

  “Excuse you.” Kali found her bag from the boardwalk shop, removed the T-shirt, and tore the wrappings off the instant camera. She took several flash shots of Shelly’s body and the surrounding haunted house, then flipped the body and slid the ice pick back in the woman’s neck. “Smile!” She finished up the roll with close-ups. “Excellent.” She could think of several members of the brotherhood who would enjoy the shots, and would be happy to confirm her kill.

  Cleanup was her least favorite part. She gathered Shelly’s wife beater, her shorts, bra, and sandals, and her own smudged top, and stuffed them all in the bag. She pulled the new T-shirt over her head and tugged on her jeans. They were unstained. She’d taken care to drop them out of the range of spatter before she and Shelly went at it. A little preparation went a long way—she’d learned that from studying Christian.

  Doubtless they would discover poor Shelly tomorrow or the following day. It would make the papers. She hoped Christian would see the stories. It would give them something to talk about when they met.

  Kali dropped the bag into a fast-food restaurant Dumpster. With luck, the dumpster would be picked up and hauled away with Shelly’s clothes in it. She kept her own shirt. She liked it, and she wanted to see if that new spot remover they advertised on television would remove the bloodstain.

  She went back to her motel room to shower, but she knew she was too excited to sleep. She never slept after a kill. She wanted to be at the beach, near the ocean, where she could replay the evening’s fun in her head.

  It was too bad that Shelly hadn’t been nice. Like her namesake, the great Kali of Hindu lore, she could give life or take it. If Shelly hadn’t been quite so drunk or so obnoxious, they might have enjoyed an evening of togetherness and gone their separate ways. If she hadn’t used the ice pick, she would have taken it with her. They were hard to come by, and when she found a source, she usually bought several.

  Kali closed her eyes and licked her bottom lip. Shelly’s blood hadn’t been as light as some, but it had been tasty. She didn’t want to drive. She was close enough to Christian’s house. It was better to take the bike, leave it in the bushes somewhere, and approach his rental from the beach.

  Killing Shelly had been easy, but the evening had been draining. She needed calm; she needed to decide when and where to take Christian, and most of all, she needed to think what she should do about the other woman…the one they’d shown on the TV news…the one who wore her face.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Reed was in his driveway at the farm, buckling a fourth child into his SUV, when his cell rang. He snapped the shoulder belt around the five-year-old in the booster seat—a Hispanic boy whose face was unfamiliar but whom Benjamin had declared “my best friend”—and answered the call.

  Special Agent Holly Cole was on the other end. “Sorry to disturb you on your day off, but a body just washed up at a marina on the Indian River Inlet. Preliminary ID matches Lydie Quinn.”

  Reed closed the back door of the vehicle and turned away to ask Holly, “That’s in Delaware, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir, it is.”

  “Have you notified Jillian?”

  “Yes, sir. She was already in Ocean City. She’s on her way to the marina.”

  “Don’t sir me, Holly. You make me feel like a grandfather.”

  “Yes, sir…sorry, Reed. It’s just that…”

  “I’m an institution.” He cleared his throat. “I’d appreciate it if you’d call Jillian back and tell her I’ll be there as soon as I can. What police department responded to the call?”

  “Park rangers and Delaware State Police.”

  “Get hold of someone in charge and make certain no one moves the body until I get there. Beg if you have to. I’m not going to get into a jurisdiction fight.”

  “Right away.”

  He ended the conversation and glanced at the SUV. Ben was so excited, he was bouncing up and down and waving his arms. His boys would be disappointed that Pia and Edwardo would have to host the birthday party, but it couldn’t be helped. “I’ll make it up to you,” he muttered. “Scout’s honor.”

  Jillian’s car, four Delaware State Police vehicles, and the state medical examiner’s van were already in the parking lot when Reed pulled in. He got out of the car and took a deep breath of the salt air. He had a feeling he’d need it. He walked between two new cottages and flashed his government ID at a no-nonsense female trooper. The officer and her canine companion, a German Shepherd, held a knot of nosy onlookers at bay. The trooper examined his badge and waved him on. He raised a yellow crime-scene tape and ducked under to join Jillian at the water’s edge.