I started off with a couple of abductions—both in Texas—that I thought could be related to the one in Atlanta. Just reading the accounts got my blood boiling again, though. Marianne Norman, twenty, had disappeared in Houston on August 6, 2001. She’d been staying with her college sweetheart in a condo owned by his grandparents. Marianne and Dennis Turcos were going to be seniors at Texas Christian that fall and had planned to be married in the spring of ’02. Everybody said they were the nicest kids in the world. Marianne was never seen or heard from after that night in August. On December 30 of that year, Dennis Turcos had put a revolver to his head and killed himself. He said he couldn’t live without Marianne, that his life had ended when she disappeared.

The second case involved a fifteen-year-old runaway from Childress, Texas. Adrianne Tuletti had been snatched from an apartment in San Antonio where three girls said to be involved in prostitution lived. Neighbors in the complex reported having seen two suspicious-looking people, a male and a female, entering the building on the day that Adrianne disappeared. One neighbor thought they might have been the girl’s parents coming to bring their daughter home, but the girl was never seen or heard from again.

I looked at her picture for a long moment—she was a pretty blonde and looked as if she could have been one of Elizabeth Connolly’s daughters. Her parents were elementary school teachers back in Childress.

That afternoon, I got more bad news. The worst kind. A fashion designer named Audrey Meek had been abducted from the King of Prussia Mall in Pennsylvania. Her two young children had witnessed the kidnapping. That piece of information stunned me. The children had told the police that the abductors were a man and a woman.

I started to get ready to travel to Pennsylvania. I called Nana and she was supportive for a change. Then I got a message from Nooney’s office. I wasn’t going to Pennsylvania. I was expected at my classes.

The decision had obviously come from the top, and I didn’t understand what was happening. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to.

Maybe all of this was a test?

Chapter 27

Chapter 27

“DO YOU KNOW what they say about you, Dr. Cross? That you’re close to psychic. Very imaginative. Maybe even gifted. You can think like a killer.” Those were Monnie Donnelley’s words to me that very morning. If that was true, why had I been taken off the case?

I went to my classes in the afternoon, but I was distracted, maybe angry. I suffered a little angst: What was I doing in the FBI? What was I becoming? I didn’t want to fight the system in Quantico, but I’d been put in an impossible position.

The next morning I had to be ready for my classes again: “Law,” “White-Collar Crime,” “Civil Rights Violations,” “Firearms Practice.”