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  For the briefest moment, Kendra considered telling him to forget getting his own room and instead to come to her room and stay the night. And part of her wanted that—the part that tingled between her legs and made her nipples hard beneath her white blouse.

  But that wasn’t the way it worked between them—that wasn’t the way she worked.

  “Sounds fine,” she answered.

  There was a pause, an expectant pause, and for a moment, Kendra thought that maybe Brett had picked up on something in her voice. But that was impossible, even for someone as observant and astute as Agent Brett Cherry. If nothing else, Kendra was an expert at keeping her emotions wrapped up tight.

  “Anything else?” she asked, suddenly anxious to hang up.

  “Yeah… just a question: was it really the little girl’s birthday? Four years old?”

  Kendra’s mind flicked to the girl’s pale hand, the fingers stretched out, spotted with blood, reaching out from beneath the two bodies that were crushing her.

  Four years old. When I was four, my father abandoned me at the church.

  But at least he didn’t murder me.

  “Yeah.”

  “Fuck.”

  There was another pause.

  “I’ll see you in the morning, Brett,” Kendra said, then hung up.

  For a moment, she just sat there in silence with the TV off, the only sound the phantom noise of children laughing; party sounds. But before these could coalesce into a solid daydream, Kendra forced them away and chugged the bottle of Jack.

  Then she got up and headed for the shower.

  She felt dirty.

  * * *

  The cold water felt good on Kendra’s skin, like tiny ice pellets bouncing off her body.

  That was okay; her chest and stomach were nearly numb from the scars.

  After washing with the horribly fragrant bar of soap that the motel provided, she washed her long, straight black hair with motel shampoo. She had her own stuff in her bag, but she had forgotten to get it and the water just felt too good to get out. She would regret this, she knew, as her hair would dry into a completely unwieldy mess, but at the moment this was one of the furthest things from her mind.

  The day had been hot enough to tickle triple digits, and it felt damn good to have an ice-cold shower, even if this was her norm regardless of the weather.

  Kendra waited a few more minutes, allowing the water to cascade over the top of her head, collecting her hair into a long, dark, and sudsy point that nearly reached the center of her chest, bent over the way she was.

  Eventually, long after the water had run clear, she turned off the tap and stepped onto the grungy bathmat, not bothering to wrap a towel around herself.

  The other advantage to a cold shower was that she didn’t have to wait for the fog to clear from the mirror before getting a good look at herself.

  As always, her eyes were drawn to the thick pink scars that wrapped their away around her torso, crisscrossing in places, and then to the other scars, the shorter ones that resembled tiny pink maggots.

  All told, she counted fifty-four scars on her body, all of them on her torso, filling the space between the tight ‘v’ of her stomach muscles right above her mound, to just beneath the undersides of her breasts.

  The cold water had turned Kendra’s pale skin white, as her blood had drawn inward to protect and feed her vital organs.

  It also made her scars stand out more.

  One in particular, a nearly complete circle above her right hip, looked almost like a balloon.

  A balloon…

  With one of her nails, she drew a four in the center, the red mark staying for a second before fading to white.

  She wondered what was worse, being murdered by your father or not knowing who your father really was.

  Or your mother.

  Or where you came from.

  Her red fingernail traced the outline of the scar, digging deeper with each pass. The thought was childish and downright insulting.

  Still, not knowing who she was or where she came from often left her feeling less than alive inside.

  And the horrors that she experienced on the job didn’t help, either.

  She pressed her finger into the scar and scratched upward. Her finger slipped off the raised flesh and dug into a small area of pristine white skin.

  A dot of blood, the color of which was nearly a perfect match for her nail polish, leaked onto her finger.

  Kendra didn’t flinch; instead, she just stared, images of Roger Black’s throat, blood gushing out, hot and sticky, coating the bodies of his dying and dead family beneath him, flooding her mind.

  Pulsating, his life eking out of him one heartbeat at a time.

  She brought her finger to her lips and sucked the blood away. Almost fully dry now save her wet hair, Kendra left the bathroom and collapsed on the bed, not bothering to put on a nightie or even pull back the covers.

  The latter was probably for the best, she decided; if the bathmat was any indication, she was better off on top of the sheets than within them.

  Kendra fell asleep in less than five minutes, another tiny bottle of cheap whiskey clutched in her hand.

  Chapter 5

  “You have to try this—it’s incredible.”

  Kendra tried not to let the disgusted feeling in her stomach make its way to her face.

  Brett was staring at her, smirking. The man had steel-blue eyes, a round face, and shortly cropped brown hair that, while not quite thinning, was on the verge of it. Not handsome, not quite—his lopsided ears kept him from gaining that trophy on Kendra’s shelf—but he was cute.

  And he had a charisma that most women, Kendra included, found attractive.

  She was out of his league, of course—at least, when she was fully clothed—but that didn’t matter much to her. She liked him, and he served a purpose.

  And he wasn’t a bad agent, either. But like his looks, he fell just short of being a great one.

  “C’mon, Kendra, just one bite.”

  Brett scooped up half of a runny egg with his fork and dangled the sloppy mess at eye level. It quivered in mid-air for a moment, its gelatinous surface shaking, before slowly sliding off and falling back onto his plate. A small dot of yolk splashed up and landed on his gray striped tie.

  “Shit,” he swore, putting his fork back down and dipping his napkin in the glass of murky water before dabbing at his tie.

  Now it was Kendra’s turn to smirk.

  “Serves you right,” she said, leaning forward and taking a sip of her coffee. “That shit’ll kill you, anyway.”

  Brett, to prove a point, abandoned tending to his now stained tie and attacked the eggs, shoveling a forkful into his mouth.

  He smiled at Kendra, flashing his teeth covered in yolk.

  Kendra grimaced.

  But despite her expression, the injection of childish humor was just what she needed. It had been a fitful sleep for her, a sweaty nocturnal rollercoaster, filled with nightmares of the like she rarely remembered.

  Screams—I remember screams echoing down a damp hallway. A fire glowing brighter and brighter…

  “You’re a child, you know that, right?” she said, forcing the dreams away. The truth was, she envied Brett, what with him being able to laugh and joke after what they had seen. Either he was insane or he had some amazing cognitive dissonance skills—or maybe he was a compartmentalizing genius… a dexterity she had never been able to master.

  “Director Ames said you had more info,” she said, and the smile fell off Brett’s face as well. He licked some egg from the corner of his mouth, then casually picked up a piece of heavily buttered toast and took a bite as he looked around.

  Kendra followed his gaze.

  They were two of five patrons in the greasy spoon, which was odd for a Saturday morning, even if it wasn’t quite eight yet.

  Kendra assumed that the small town of Torrance, West Virginia, population forty-five hundred, had heard about the crime overn
ight. And if they hadn’t, she knew that they probably just felt that something was wrong.

  Small towns like Torrance were not benign, innate objects, she knew. They were organic; information traveled through the air, the trees, the kite that a child had lost and floated up to the hot sun like an Icarus incarnation.

  Even if word hadn’t spread, the feeling had, keeping parents in bed longer, keeping children playing among themselves, weary to wake their tired folks.

  They just knew something was wrong.

  Brett, satisfied that they were unlikely to be overheard, pulled out a manila envelope and put it on the empty table before Kendra.

  She opened it and began reading.

  The first file, heavily marked with the ominous red letters “CLASSIFIED”, referred to a four-year-old girl from another small town, out east this time, who had gone missing on her birthday: Meghan Miller.

  Kendra skimmed the file, an uncomfortable feeling of dread settling in as she realized that she was familiar with the details even before her eyes skipped across the hand scrawled notes.

  Young girl, missing, parents teary, no leads, no suspects, no nothing.

  An all-too-common narrative that had become almost clichéd over the last twelve years.

  Missing… and that was seven days ago.

  Her experience told her that if they found the girl at all, an unlikely proposition, she would be dead.

  She flipped to the next file, and it was the same story.

  Four-year-old girl, Taylor Harper, missing the week after her birthday; again, no leads.

  The third file drew a little more of her attention.

  ‘Lacy McGuire, lived alone with her father, her mother institutionalized with schizophrenia. Peter McGuire, the father, was sleeping at the time of the alleged kidnapping. The man appears normal, distraught—a grieving and concerned parent.’

  Kendra felt her face twisting into a sneer.

  ‘Not a suspect; churchgoing pillar of the community, perhaps vying for mayorship.’

  But despite her incredulity of the claim, this case was different, if only because the girl’s mother hadn’t been home at the time of the kidnapping—only the father. A tip-off if there ever was any; it was almost always the father in these cases… and even if he wasn’t directly involved, he was tangentially or incidentally implicated.

  And yet the interviewing agent had been so quick to jot the note: not a suspect.

  Kendra searched for who had signed off on the field notes: Agent Paul Grover.

  The man’s face flashed in her mind; he was one of the few agents that she knew well, aside from Brett, of course. And while Brett was cute, Paul was handsome—almost too handsome, which was one of the reasons why she had turned him down as a potential partner when Director Ames had offered him up.

  In addition to the fact that he was too young, too green.

  She recalled the officer outside the Black home, the one trying to hold down his breakfast, which was probably of the same nature as the slop that Brett continued to shovel into his mouth.

  She wasn’t here to babysit; she was here to solve crimes.

  Not a suspect.

  Kendra closed the file and looked up, surprised to see that Brett was staring intently at her, a strange expression on his face.

  Her mind worked quickly, trying to figure out how the crime at the Black house related to these cases, as both the director and Brett had alluded. Notes furiously began to mentally collate in her mind:

  1. Young girl as the victim, on or around their fourth birthday.

  2. Mostly good parents, except for the schizoid mother in case three.

  3. No suspects.

  Outside the first point, there didn’t seem to be much to connect the Black case to the others.

  Missing children, kidnapped or other, was a far cry from murdered by one’s own family.

  As if reading her mind, Brett spoke in a hushed tone.

  “The milk, Kendra. It’s the milk.”

  Her eyes whipped up, her mind turning back to her conversation with the director and his preoccupation with the milk… the still cold glass of milk on the counter, and the lack of a container in the fridge or in the garbage.

  She made a mental note to follow up with Detective Tennison about the search for such a carton around the house.

  The milk.

  Kendra looked down at the files again, this time searching for something specific.

  A moment later, she found the link.

  “All three cases—”

  Kendra cut her partner off.

  “But what does it mean? We have an apparent murder/suicide and three missing girls… what do they have in common? A glass of fucking milk?” She chewed her lip. “Fucking osteoporosis? What?”

  Brett shrugged, and then took another bite of his toast.

  “Dunno,” he said with his mouth full. “But the director thought that there was enough of a link to pull Agent Grover off of it and give it to us. It was no accident that we were sent here, Kendra.”

  Kendra furrowed her brow as she recalled the surprise in the director’s voice when she had mentioned the milk.

  Did Brett know about that already?

  It wouldn’t be the first time that her partner had feigned surprise when he had given her a report. There was a time, back in her early years as an agent and with a different partner, that she had thought this a technique the director was using to test her. Knowing him as she did now, however, made her feel silly for this assumption. It wasn’t about her, she realized. Instead, the director used this tactic for the simple reason that he believed an agent was better served unbiased, that getting to the facts and truths about a crime on their own was far more valuable and insightful.

  Unbiased.

  The scars that covered her torso suddenly started to itch.

  No, unbiased was not a state of mind that she would ever be privy to. But Kendra wasn’t discouraged by this fact. After all, everyone was biased by something… in the very least, they were beholden to their genetics and their environment.

  Nature and nurture, as it were.

  In her case, however, her tainted memories left her leaning heavily on the former.

  Like small towns, information had a way of just spreading from law enforcement to the Agency. Still, she was wise enough to know that it wasn’t just the milk that linked these cases—there must be something else.

  Kendra closed the file again and raised her eyes.

  “You almost done with your meal?”

  The man scarfed another bite of toast, then bit a piece of sausage.

  “Almost,” he said.

  Kendra’s phone buzzed and she picked it up immediately.

  “Agent Wilson?” She recognized Detective Tennison’s gravelly tone.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ve got something you’re going to want to see.”

  Kendra nodded.

  “Be there in ten.”

  Brett raised an eyebrow, then rubbed the grease off his hands on the napkin he had used to dab his tie. He swallowed and signaled for the check.

  Kendra stood, her expression grim.

  “Let’s go. Detective Tennison found something at the Black house.”

  Chapter 6

  Detective Clark Tennison met the two agents at the police tape. Just looking at Agent Kendra, he knew that she had slept as little as he had the night before. Younger and without doubt more attractive, she hid this fact better than he did, but the telltale signs were there: the caked makeup beneath her eyes, the way her hair was not as straight or smooth as it had been yesterday, and the way her hands shook just a little bit, as if she had too drunk too much coffee.

  And maybe she had, which was telling in and of itself.

  But what she hadn’t done was spent the morning fending off reporters with their perfect teeth and perfect smiles that had never—and probably never would again after this case was done and gone—stepped foot in the sleepy town that was Torrance.

/>   “Agent Wilson,” he said with a curt nod, raising the tape so that the two agents could pass beneath. On the other side, Kendra indicated the man beside her.

  “This is Agent Cherry.”

  Tennison held out his hand and the other man shook it. He had a disarming smile on his face, one that seemed strangely out of place in this venue, and he had to take a moment to collect himself.

  “Just Brett,” the man said, and Tennison nodded. “You have something to show us?”

  Tennison nodded, his lips forming a tight line across his face.

  “Come with me.”

  They began walking toward the door, all three doing their best to ignore the spotlights glaring down on the many reporters and their babble as they began their morning ritual.

  “Yesterday, the quaint, small town of Torrance, West Virginia, was rudely awoken by two words that most residents never thought they would hear: murder/suicide…”

  As they neared the door, Tennison spied a man with a camera ducking around the side of the house, somehow having slipped by the half dozen officers that he had ordered to stand guard, to prevent this very thing from happening.

  The detective turned to the nearest officer and grabbed the man gruffly by the shoulder. He was younger and much stronger than Tennison, but he still winced when Tennison’s fingers bit into his arm.

  “Go get that guy, and throw him the fuck out of here,” he hissed.

  The officer, who looked barely old enough to grow facial hair, turned, a shocked expression on his smooth face. He caught sight of the smarmy man with the camera, who was frantically snapping pictures through the window of the Black residence, all the while trying to stay partially hidden behind the side of the house.

  Tennison let go of the officer’s arm.

  “And take his fucking camera,” he ordered.

  The officer didn’t hesitate; he turned and sprinted after the man.

  “Hey!” he shouted, and the man with the camera turned and ran, the officer hurrying after him.

  The three of them took several more strides toward the house.