Tommy’s father was sitting in jail awaiting trial, suspected of being the See-No-Evil killer, though he had yet to be charged with any of the murders. He would first stand trial for assault and the attempted murder ... of Anne Navarre Leone.

“Tommy doesn’t live here anymore,” was all she said.

She rose from her plastic chair, grabbing her purse.

“I have to step outside for a minute,” she said. “When I come back in, I want to see your math homework. If you haven’t done it, you’re going to sit here until you do.”

The boy looked up at her, a little bit shocked by her sudden steely attitude.

“I’m trying to help you, Dennis,” she said. “You need to do your part.”

Chapter 5

5

Anne walked out of the room and down the hall, past a man in his pajamas talking to the fire alarm. She walked past the nurses’ station without exchanging glances with the staff she had come to know well. She needed to be alone, even if only in her head. The too-familiar pressure was building in her chest. She couldn’t get a good breath. She remembered the feeling of a hand around her throat.

She buzzed herself out the security door.

The day was sunny and quickly turning hot. Another day in paradise. Anne had grown up in Oak Knoll, far enough north and west of Los Angeles to escape the city’s uglier vices. Most of the time. She had left to attend UCLA, despite the fact that her father had been a professor at the highly respected private college in Oak Knoll—or, perhaps, because of it. She hadn’t planned on coming back, but life had had other plans for her.

She sat down on a concrete bench along the front of the building and rested her head in her hands as the emotions rocked through her. Post-traumatic stress syndrome: Not just for war veterans. Victims of violent crime suffered the same way.

The memories flashed strobelike through her mind: hands around her throat, choking her; fists punching her; feet kicking her, breaking her ribs, collapsing a lung.

Even a year after her abduction and attempted murder, the first and strongest feeling that assaulted her when she thought of what had happened was fear. Raw, primal fear. Then anger—rage, in fact. Then a profound sense of loss.

Her therapist told her to let the emotion come like a wave and wash over her, not to fight against it. The sooner she accepted the feelings, the sooner she could let go of them.

Easier said than done. The fear of drowning in that wave was strong; the sense of losing control, overwhelming; the swell of anger for what she had lost, crushing.

She tried again to take a deep breath. She felt like there were bands of steel tight around her chest.