Though it had been a while, she hadn’t forgotten how attractive Jack was. With dark hair and dark eyes he had a devilish quality to him, maybe even more so with his just out of bed appearance. He had to bend down to hug Val. She only came up to just above his chest. “I’ve missed you!”

“I’ve missed you too,” he said.

Once Val let go, Gwen snatched a hug from Jack. “Our gang rides again!”

“I told you we’d get together again soon,” Jack reminded them.

Val put her hands on her hips. “You promised that nearly eight months ago.” Though it had been more than half a year, with Jack in her home, the familiarity of being around him again, it was as if time had stood still. It seemed like only eight hours had passed. Jesus, had it really been eight months?

“I can’t believe how quickly time goes,” he said. “A blink of an eye and we’re here, today. It seems like yesterday we were catching Buffalo’s newest psychopath. Not many cities get more than one of that kind of caliber. Have you developed a reputation?”

“Let’s get the food ready and we’ll fill you in on the latest,” Val said.

Jack looked confused, his gaze traveling from Val to Gwen and back to Val. “What have the two of you got yourselves into now? The case when I was here last spring was bad enough.”

“Go sit, and we’ll talk.” Val’s skin crawled. She refused to think about the lunatic from last spring that Jack was referring to.

The other psychopath he mentioned… Well the other was just as bad, though that one had been almost thirty years ago. Val herself had been a child at the time. A man was raping and murdering women, abducting them along secluded bike paths and the media had given him a nickname, “The Bike Path Killer.” One path in particular, the University at Buffalo bike path, was one that Val had been on many times in recent years. And as she cycled along its long stretches of quiet, desolate, insulated trails she felt an eerie reminder of “what could happen”—how someone could be snatched without warning, with no one witnessing it. No one to help. The signs advising “do not bike alone” still existed today. Fear had run rampant through the city back then, so Val had been told. The warnings to “not go anywhere by yourself and keep doors locked,” and the questions about who would be next, then seeing the next on the news all created the reality that I could be next. And someone was always next until the murderer is caught. “The Bike Path Killer was over thirty years ago.” Val shuddered: terror and fear are the same no matter the era.

“And the wrongfully convicted man released from prison twenty years after,” Gwen reminded.