With that, he turned, marching back down the hill with Sergeant Faber and Detective Lopez sighing and moving after him again. He heard Lopez muttering behind him, quiet, but not so quiet he couldn’t hear. “Is it true? Did he punch an FBI director in Oakland? I hear that’s why his wife left him. I don’t blame her.”

Sawyer glowered, one hand rubbing at the knuckles on his left hand. Then he picked up the pace, marching back down the hill toward where the police cruiser was parked.

He’d volunteered for the case, of course. Perhaps things hadn’t worked out perfectly with his marriage or last post. By the sound of things, the news was making the rounds even among those outside the Bureau.

Then again, it had always been plain to Sawyer and his ex.

His first love, his first marriage, was to the job. Everything else took second place. He stepped over the swirling brown puddle on the side of the road, asphalt crunching beneath his boots as he marched on, considering the two crime scenes.

Both women were victims of opportunity. A premeditated crime, then, but not targets.

A killer looking simply to kill. Indiscriminately. He jammed his hands in his dusty jeans pockets, hunching his shoulders against a sudden breeze.

An indiscriminate killer meant they’d hunt again. Predators like this never stopped, not until they were put down. But such ambition took leg work. Good thing Sawyer had never balked at late nights or slow drives through mountain roads. If he had to comb every inch of the area himself, he’d do whatever it took for a bloodhound’s whiff of the murdering bastard.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Ilse double- and triple-checked the locks to the front door. She waited, listening to the sound of the Jeep pulling away from the driveway as it moved on to the dusty road, slicing through the forest paths, away from the lake house.

As she stood there, Ilse breathed slowly, in and out. In her mind’s eye, she glimpsed memories, shadows, attempting and threatening to surface.

“Doss. Eleven victims. Blackouts, depression. Poison.”

But even the memory trick didn’t serve to calm her nerves.

She glanced down at the tattoo around her wrist. Take captive every thought.

Sometimes it was easier said than done.

The sound of the Jeep had faded now. But the effect left behind still lingered. Samantha Wright had remembered some things. Remembered the trauma, the danger. Remembered, at least in part, what had occurred all those years ago, in the basement of the Seattle home.

Ilse shivered at the thought. It was all so eerily similar to her own past. Also twenty years ago. Also in a basement. In the Black Forest, in Germany.

Ilse shivered, shaking her head, standing by the door and closing her eyes for a moment.

And then she saw him.

The mismatched eyes, the scraggly beard, the sound of gristle crunching, and his bloody smile as he stared at her over the broken animal.