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Chapters (50)
  1. Front Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Contents
  5. Part I
  6. Chapter One
  7. Chapter Two
  8. Chapter Three
  9. Chapter Four
  10. Chapter Five
  11. Chapter Six
  12. Chapter Seven
  13. Chapter Eight
  14. Chapter Nine
  15. Chapter Ten
  16. Chapter Eleven
  17. Chapter Twelve
  18. Chapter Thirteen
  19. Part II
  20. Chapter Fourteen
  21. Chapter Fifteen
  22. Chapter Sixteen
  23. Chapter Seventeen
  24. Chapter Eighteen
  25. Chapter Nineteen
  26. Chapter Twenty
  27. Chapter Twenty-One
  28. Chapter Twenty-Two
  29. Chapter Twenty-Three
  30. Chapter Twenty-Four
  31. Chapter Twenty-Five
  32. Chapter Twenty-Six
  33. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  34. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  35. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  36. Part III
  37. Chapter Thirty
  38. Chapter Thirty-One
  39. Chapter Thirty-Two
  40. Chapter Thirty-Three
  41. Chapter Thirty-Four
  42. Chapter Thirty-Five
  43. Chapter Thirty-Six
  44. Chapter Thirty-Seven
  45. Chapter Thirty-Eight
  46. Read on for a sneak peek at the next Violent Crime Investigations Team mystery!
  47. Chapter One
  48. Acknowledgments
  49. About the Author
  50. Back Cover

She studied her spreadsheet. What had she learned? At a time when Partridge was living in Vallejo, one of the victims there had been killed in the same way as both victims two years ago in Santa Rosa’s Spring Lake Park and had the same distinctive signature. The latest Jane Doe victim was killed in a different way, maybe by a different killer.

Eden carefully replaced the photos in their respective binders, stacked them neatly, and closed her laptop. In the hallway, a world away, a phone rang. Sitting alone in the interview room, she noticed her hands shaking; she folded one hand over the other to steady them. She thought: Maybe I don’t have to resign. Then: Did I just find the quality of light?

Chapter Thirteen

(i)

(WEDNESDAY, 8:15 A.M.)

In his dream, Rivas gripped the steering wheel of a speeding car. The road rushed forward, oncoming cars swerving across the centerline, roadside tree limbs scraping the trim off the doors. Was he moving toward something, or was it coming at him? All the while, an old woman sang “Rock-a-Bye Baby”—with new words about the death of a policeman named Rivas.

He woke in the parking lot of the county’s adult detention facility, his face bathed in sweat. For a moment he forgot where he was. He blinked and checked the time on his cell. Thirty minutes had passed since he closed his eyes. Above the hills on the eastern side of the valley, the sky had lightened. The early morning sun spread across the parking lot, climbing the jail’s brick walls and dark eyelet windows.

Rivas stared at the building’s looming facade. On any given day, he could recognize more than half the men inside, shuffling the corridors in their baggy cotton jumpsuits. He knew in perfect detail their crimes, victims, and arrest records. The department’s memory, Eddie called him. But Rivas also knew them like a man knows the members of his extended family—their girlfriends, ex-wives, and children. It was the special gift his grandmother, Maria-Elena, had taught him.

For the past year, Rivas heard her voice two or three times a week when he closed his eyes. The singsong voice recounting the deaths of relatives—and more and more his own dying. How was it possible for memory to foretell the future, and to be remembered before he died?