The photographs that Bryce showed me had a lot to do with that picture, but I had to squeeze my eyes tight to clear it from my mind.

Pulling out my phone, I switched the power on and stabbed out Imogen’s number.

“Who are you calling?” Bryce sat up in the chair as if he was going to snatch the phone from my hand.

“Shut up, will you?” I snapped, and listened for the ringtone. Bryce watched me intently.

The phone rang and rang, and I expected it to go to a messaging service. But then there was a metallic ping as someone picked up the handset. I heard breathing.

My first thought was that the police had made the connection between us and that I was being listened to by a roomful of detectives or FBI agents. They’d try to trace my call, and in my hurry to warn Imogen I hadn’t taken any precautions. But, somehow I knew that wasn’t the case. If the police were there, they’d have given Imogen instructions to act natural and to engage me in conversation. Listening to each other breathe into the mouthpiece was not natural.

“Imogen?”

There was a grunt: too masculine a sound to have come from Imogen. Fleetingly I wondered if she had found herself a new friend since last we’d spoken, but that thought was a non-starter.

“Where’s Imogen?”

The man holding the phone wasn’t ready to answer me yet. The chance of me phoning like this might possibly have shaken him. Or maybe he’d been sitting by the telephone waiting exactly for that.

“If you’ve harmed her . . .”

The man cut me off curtly, “It’s enough that you fear that I might.”

“ . . . I’m going to kill you.”

“No, Joe Hunter. I will kill you, but first I will kill all that you hold dear.”

“Imogen means nothing to me.”

“I’m expected to believe that? If that was true, why would she be the first person you thought to call?”

“Don’t hurt her.” I wasn’t begging. It was one thing that I was being targeted—in some respects I could expect some people to hate me enough to want to hurt me—but now that that had spilled over to include innocent people, it added new urgency to my need to stop this man.

“I don’t fear you, Hunter. Your threats mean nothing to me.”

“So face me. Leave Imogen alone and meet me.”

“You would like that, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“It wouldn’t change a thing. I would kill you.”

“You’re so sure, let’s do it then.”

“I could have killed you yesterday. I could have killed you a dozen times while I’ve followed you unobserved. I could have killed you when I shot those two idiotic policemen.”

“But instead you ran away. Like a coward.”