“We forgot to get coffee,” Jolie told me when I entered the kitchen via the patio. Greer was at the table in the breakfast nook, bathed in sunlight. She looked so alone, even with Jolie and me right there.

“I cannot function,” I said, “without coffee. I’ll go get some, and you look after Greer.”

Jolie nodded and handed over her car keys. “Drive carefully,” she said. “I’m still making payments.”

I grinned. “Careful,” I said, “is my middle name.”

“Like hell,” Jolie retorted, but she was grinning.

I’d picked up two cans of java and all the stuff that makes it palatable, and I was headed back to Greer’s when suddenly I got that tingly feeling, and the little hairs stood up on my arms and legs.

Somebody was in the car.

Besides me.

Impossible. Like any good paranoid, I’d checked for stowaways when I put the coffee in the backseat. Thanks to Heather, Geoff and Barbara Larimer, I was in a semipermanent state of mistrust.

Still, the air felt almost electrified.

I risked a glance into the rearview mirror, gasped and bumped off the road, onto the shoulder, coming to a jostling stop. The driver of a blue Escalade honked furiously as he/she/it roared by, narrowly missing my back bumper.

I turned in the seat, my heart pounding.

My passenger was about seven years old.

She wore a tutu, leotard, tights, all pink, and one ballet slipper.

“Gillian?” I asked.

Her gaze sought mine, landed.

Ice formed in my veins.

She nodded.

“Please tell me you’re not—”

A tear trickled through the grime smudging her face. I noticed the grass stains on the knees of her tights, the rip in one side of her tutu.

“Can you talk?” I scrabbled for my cell phone, remembered I’d left it at the apartment, plugged into the charger.

Gillian said nothing, but her eyes were round and eloquent, and their message was clear.

Help me.

She was dead.

Tucker and the others hadn’t found her in time.

How could I help her?

I wanted to climb into the backseat and gather her into my arms, tell her everything would be all right, but I sensed that she didn’t want to be touched.

“Nick?” I asked hopefully, looking around the interior of Jolie’s Pathfinder.

Nothing. By now, Nick had his ticket. He was onboard the glory train.

I swallowed painfully.

“Honey, can you tell me what you want?”

Her eyes pleaded with me, but she didn’t make a sound.

I watched as she faded slowly away.

And then I sat there, beside the road, shaking.

When I felt I could drive again, I drove to the nearest phone.

It was outside a convenience store, and I wondered distractedly if this was the place where Greer had almost been forced into a madman’s van.

I fumbled for change, dropped it, gathered it and tried again.