PROLOGUE

AUGUST 2001

In his dream they are still alive. In his dream they have blossomed into beautiful young women with careers and homes and families of their own. In his dream they shimmer beneath a golden sun.

Detective Walter Brigham opened his eyes, his heart a cold and bitter stone in his chest. He glanced at the clock, although it was unnecessary. He knew what time it was: 3:50 AM. It was the exact moment he had gotten the call six years earlier, the dividing line by which he had measured every day prior, and every day since.

Seconds earlier, in the dream, he had been standing at the edge of the forest, the spring rain an icy shroud over his world. Now he lay awake in his bedroom in West Philadelphia, a layer of sweat covering his body, the only sound his wife’s rhythmic breathing.

In his time, Walt Brigham had seen many things. He had once seen a drug case defendant try to eat his own flesh in a courtroom. Another time he’d found the body of a monstrous man named Joseph Barber—pedophile, rapist, murderer—lashed to a steam pipe in a North Philly tenement, a decomposing corpse with thirteen knives in its chest. He had once seen a veteran homicide detective sitting on a curb in Brewery-town, quiet tears etching his face, a bloodied baby shoe in his hand. That man was John Longo, Walt Brigham’s partner. That case was Johnny’s.

All cops had an unsolved case, a crime that haunted their every waking moment, stalked their dreams. If you dodged the bullet, the bottle, the cancer, God gave you a case.

For Walt Brigham, his case began in April 1995, the day two young girls walked into the woods in Fairmount Park and never walked out. It was the dark fable that dwelt at the foothill of every parent’s nightmare.

Brigham closed his eyes, smelled the dank brew of loam and compost and wet leaves. Annemarie and Charlotte had worn matching white dresses. They were nine years old.

The homicide unit had interviewed a hundred people who had been in the park that day, had collected and sifted through twenty full bags of trash from the area. Brigham himself found the torn page of a children’s book nearby. Since that moment the verse had been a terrible echo in his brain:

Here are maidens, young and fair,

Dancing in the summer air,

Like two spinning wheels at play,

Pretty maidens dance away.

Brigham stared at the ceiling. He kissed his wife’s shoulder, sat up, glanced out the open window. In the moonlight, beyond the night-bound city, beyond the iron and glass and stone, was the dense canopy of trees. A shadow moved through those pines. Behind the shadow, a killer.

Detective Walter Brigham would face this killer one day.

One day.

Maybe even today.