A tidy, fastidious crime scene, Hayes thought as he leaned over the folded clothes. This was all too familiar. On top of each pile was a copy of the birth certificates, the date and time of their births highlighted with pink marker. Probably the same pink ink that would be found on the girls’ bodies, Hayes suspected. Assuming, of course, this was the killer who’d torn through L.A. years ago.

“Lucille and Elaine Springer,” Martinez said. “I already called Missing Persons. They’re checking now.”

Jonas thought of his own kid. Twelve years old and going on thirty, as they said, but still an innocent. It would kill him to lose Maren, but to have someone intentionally take her life…Bile rose in his throat and he turned his attention away from his personal life to the situation at hand.

The photographs had been taken, body temperatures recorded; the victims were ready to be moved. But Jonas knew, with chilling certainty, what they would find when the bodies were rolled over onto their backs.

Oh, sweet mother.

“Remind you of anything?” a gravelly voice asked. Hayes looked over his shoulder to see Detective Andrew Bledsoe in the doorway.

Jonas straightened and nodded. “The Caldwell case.”

“And isn’t that a coincidence with our friend Bentz back in town?” Somehow Bledsoe managed a smug smile, as if the twin girls had never been more than corpses, just another case to solve.

Martinez scowled, her lips tight. She glared up at Bledsoe, her eyes dark with a seething rage. “Is there a reason you’re here?”

Though he was in his fifties, he was one of those guys who looked a decade younger. At five-ten and under two hundred pounds, Bledsoe cultivated a perpetual tan and kept his jet-black hair slicked back. His suits were usually tailor-made and his steely blue eyes didn’t miss much. He was a good cop. And a pain in the ass. “I was on my way back from a scene in Watts, heard it on the scanner.”

“Well, we’re busy here.” Martinez didn’t conceal her disdain for Bledsoe. The guy had always bugged her. Hayes knew it; everyone in the department did. Riva Martinez wasn’t one to hide her feelings.

Turning her back on Bledsoe, she knelt near one of the bodies while Hayes studied the other.

“Ligature marks around the neck,” Martinez noted, almost to herself, “and numbers and letters scrawled across each torso, just under their breasts.”

The message written heavily in neon pink on their torsos was clear. Each victim was marked with her time of birth twenty-one years ago, and her time of death this morning—which was exactly twenty-one-years later. To the minute. As if the killer found pleasure in snuffing out their lives the moment they became adults.