“Sorry, Ken,” he said to the agent at the board. “But we’re just spinning our wheels until they figure out who these kids are. Unless you want to do two profiles: one for a stranger as the UNSUB, one for a person known to the kids. That’s a hell of a lot of work when you’ve got how many other cases ongoing? Ten? Twelve?”

Ken looked at the end of his rope.

“But hey,” Vince said. “What do I know? I’m just an old cop from Chicago. I can reach out to a gal I know at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. They’re only up and running for a year, but they get a lot of anecdotal information we don’t. I can go make the call right now.”

Ken nodded. “Thanks, Vince. I appreciate it.”

Vince got up and left the room, going directly back to the men’s room where he puked up the coffee. He rinsed his mouth out and stood for a moment, assessing himself in the mirror, seeing what his colleagues were seeing.

He had always been a big, good-looking guy: six three, two hundred pounds, built to play football. Now he was a tall, raw-boned man, twenty pounds underweight. He hadn’t lost the chiseled bone structure of his face, or his large dark eyes, or his wide white smile, thank God. He had something to fall back on. And there was color in his face at the moment, but when his blood pressure returned to pre-puking normal, his complexion would be a pale reflection of the steel gray heavily threaded through his black hair.

The hair had grown back thick and wavy, thank God. Bald had not been a good look on him.

For a moment he flashed back on that late March evening, walking to his car with his groceries, his mind on a case. That was as much as he had been able to recall. And even that memory had probably been manufactured by his brain. Witnesses had stated a guy in a hooded sweatshirt with a gun in his hand had walked up to him, demanded money. He hadn’t reacted quickly enough. The assailant pulled the trigger.

Three weeks went by before he regained consciousness and was told by his doctors that he was a miracle. The .22-caliber bullet had entered his skull and never exited. Only time would tell the extent of the lasting damage to his brain.

He had found it ironic. All his years in law enforcement, and he had never been injured. He, Mr. FBI, had to get mugged in a Kroger’s parking lot, shot in the head by a junkie.