The vehicle was racing for the street exit. It crossed the lot in bare seconds, took the turn too fast and fishtailed, and then it was gone, speeding away down the two-lane road into the night.

Danica stopped running. She stood there on the wide open tundra of the outer lot, listening to the receding drone.

Her heartbeat felt like someone’s knuckle rapping against her ribs. Her breathing kept pace with it, ragged and uncontrollable. She raised the phone again, and found her hand shaking so badly she couldn’t tap the icon she wanted. After a few seconds she managed it; the phone’s number pad came up on screen. She pressed nine, then one—

And stopped.

She stared again in the direction the van had driven. Even the sound of it was gone now. She stood listening to her pulse beginning to ease. She stared at her car, far away in the milky light from the storefront, its tires bald and its paint faded.

“Why me?” she whispered.

The tone of the question surprised her a little—not petulant or even scared, but simply analytical. Why had they wanted her?

They had put careful planning into their attempt. The placement of the van, meant to conceal the abduction from any witnesses in the store. The timing of their exit, with their simple purchases, ensuring they would leave the place just moments after she did. They must have followed her here to begin with.

She pictured the couple again: young, attractive, non-crazy—they had been perfectly rational at every step. The idea that they had simply felt like abducting some random person, for no good reason, was ludicrous.

What explanation did that leave?

That they were professionals?

That someone had sent them to kidnap her? Someone with a reason? Did that make any more sense?

She wasn’t a star witness in some prosecutor’s case against a crime outfit. There was nothing like that going on in her life. She had no enemies that she could think of. She had no relatives with enemies, either, or with the kind of wealth that might inspire a ransom plot—she had no living relatives at all. Even the collapse of her marriage had drawn little in the way of bad blood. It had simply ended—two people with washed-out careers and washed-out feelings toward each other, decoupled and drifting. There had been nothing to fight over, in the end. No kids, not even alimony; Jason was as hard up as she was. He was living in Boston now, working at his parents’ restaurant, dating someone named Cammie. Danica was still friends with him on Facebook.

“Why me?” she said again.

Why would somebody want to abduct a dead-broke divorcée working two jobs to put herself through business school? Whether the young couple had been acting alone or for someone else—just why? Why any of it?