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Seventeen years ago.
The acrid air stung Jocelyn’s lungs as she walked into her two-story home just outside the city. Smoke grated at her eyes. The fire alarm in the kitchen blared.
She coughed and waved away the haze in front of her face. “Honey? Something’s burning!” Her husband was not the best cook, but lord, how she loved him for trying. And with her often-late hours, she could stomach a casserole filled with undrained tuna or a hockey puck burger in exchange for all his miraculous help around the house. She snickered. Looks like it’s burger night tonight.
Her humor tempered when she noticed the unnatural quality to the smell—a chemical odor of something burning that had no business being over a flame at all, like plastic or rubber, noxious and overwhelming. She pulled her shirt over her nose.
A tingling came to her arms, a tightness to her chest. Sweat slickened the hair above her ears. “Honey?” Maybe he can’t hear me over the alarm.
Jocelyn dropped her bag on the sofa and hurried into the kitchen. Thick fumes rose from the stovetop, where a pot had been left unattended. A flash of anger quickly transformed into worry as she rushed to turn off the burner. Sliding the pan over, Jocelyn cried out as her palm sizzled against the steel handle. She dashed to the sink and ran cold water over her fresh burn. A line of blisters and smooth pink tissue formed over her lifeline, erasing it from existence. Her eyes already watered from the smoke, but she bit back her pain and kept her tears from falling. Where are you, Peter?
Her palm felt as if it would tear open if she stretched out her fingers, but slowly, the pain dwindled with the smoke. After she wrenched the smoke alarm off the wall and removed its battery, the house went quiet. She returned to the mess on the stove, her short, quick breaths the only sound. The eerie stillness offered her a moment to catch them.
Jocelyn examined the saucepan. Its bottom still glowed hot red, but the billows of bright orange and black clouds had shrunk to asthmatic puffs of charcoal gray. Keeping her nose covered and blinking away the sting in her eyes, she peered at the charred remains in the pan. A plastic bottle and rubber nipple clung like melted cheese to the pan’s sides and bubbled like swamp gases at its bottom.
Adrian’s bottle? But it’s after five. Peter, her husband, was like clockwork. He always gave their six-month-old his bottle at four o’clock sharp. All the water had long since evaporated out of the saucepan.
Did he fall asleep? Jocelyn shook her head and fidgeted. Not with that alarm blaring. Fighting back her worry, she grabbed a dishrag and used it to lift the pan and douse it in the sink. When she turned the water off, she again paused to listen. The house was eerily silent. No SportsCenter. No shower running or toilet flushing. No giggles from the baby to light up the house or cries to draw their family together. No life, no Peter, no Adrian.
“Peter?” The alarm would have sent Adrian into a fit, at least when it first started to blare, but she heard no bellowing and wondered if he was all cried out. She hurried back to the living room and rummaged through her purse for her phone, then plodded back to the kitchen while dialing her husband. “Come on. Pick up!”
Maybe he doesn’t have it with him. But Jocelyn didn’t need to be a detective—five years on the job, and several more as an officer preceding—to know she was fooling herself. Peter was safe and sturdy, perfectly solid when it came to their child, her calm through every storm. He didn’t forget things like bottles on stovetops, he didn’t miss Adrian’s dinner time, and he didn’t misplace his phone. But he does leave it on vibrate so as not to wake up a sleeping baby. The thought offered a smidgeon of comfort.
She studied her kitchen. Chairs were pushed in tightly against their small, circular table. The mail sat in a stack upon its surface. Adrian’s high chair shined as if spit-polished, and it had been moved back into the corner. Dishes dried on the dish rack. The floor shined as if it had been waxed, not a Cheerio or macaroni noodle in sight. Other than the ruined saucepan, the kitchen looked clean and orderly and utterly norm—
Jocelyn gasped. She pressed a trembling hand hard against her mouth to hold back a scream. When she removed it, her shirt fell away from her face. “No... no, no, no, no.” She paced the length of her floor, her thoughts a jumbled mess as she squeezed her temples with her thumb and forefinger.
A bloody handprint smeared the wall near the hallway leading to the bedrooms. Heart racing and mind screaming with terror, she struggled not to let her emotions conquer her. Jocelyn battled back images of worst-case scenarios not yet supported by hard facts, knowing too damn well that she would be no good to her family if she lost her mind. She took long, deep breaths to steady her nerves then drew her gun.
“Peter?” She crept toward the hall. Her pistol out in front of her, she peeked down the hallway before entering. Seeing no one, she edged forward. Her chin quivered as her foot landed with a squish. Blood? Her heart told her so even before she looked down. A tear fell down her cheek. More battered at her dams as her emotions threatened to unravel her. All her worst fears, spawned from a career of making enemies, had come to fruition. A piercing blizzard racked her insides, and she shuddered violently as if the icy bleakness of space had filled the hollowness inside her.
She swallowed hard, trying to choke down her rising despair. Redialing Peter, she slipped her phone into her pocket and listened for a buzz.
An electronic vibration came from her bedroom. Following the sound, she found a bloody streak as smooth and even as if it had been left by a paint roller over the hardwood floor. She turned the corner into the room. Blue-suede shoes—the pair she had given Peter last Christmas—peeked out from the end of their bed. His legs lay motionless, the rest of his body hidden behind the bed. The tone coming from his direction died.
Grief flooded her, carrying with it waves of guilt. It convinced her that her career choice had led her family to that day, that moment—their undoing. Biting her knuckle, her body jerking as if she had the hiccups, she let out a low moan. Her knees buckled, and she would have fallen had her shoulder not caught the doorframe and posted her upright. She raised a hand over her mouth to stifle a sob. Tears poured freely, obscuring her vision.
Across the hall, a giggle came from the darkened nursery, where the shades were drawn for naptime. Adrian! She snapped up, a renewed vigor pulsing through her, wild and enigmatic. All her fear and hopelessness succumbed to a mother’s intrinsic need to protect her child. The jerky-hiccupy sensation—the sobs and moans and tears—was gone. She held her breath, tightened her grip on her weapon, and forced her disassembled mind back together through sheer will and the desire to annihilate whoever threatened her boy.
Still, her training kept her cautious where others’ resolve might have broken. After peeking around the doorframe, she swept the hall then proceeded toward Adrian’s room.
It’s him. Jocelyn’s lips curled into a snarl. Somehow, she kept silent when all she wanted was to scream. She’d faced off against a hundred or so of the worst felons New England had ever known, but it was the one who got away who terrified her far more. Even after four years and half a dozen sightings many, many miles away, she knew it was him. It wasn’t due to anything rational but instinctive—a hunch, an inner voice, a mother’s intuition, she didn’t know—something that had always served her well as an investigator. And if this is him...
Her service pistol clacked as it rattled in her hand. Facing that monster alone was the stuff of nightmares. She needed her partner, Bruce.
She rounded the corner. A man dressed in black stood with Adrian cradled in the crook of his arm. In his other hand, he held a large steak knife, twirling its point under her son’s chin. Adrian giggled and drooled, grasping at the spinning object just out of reach. The man’s face, shrouded by a hood, was familiar but different—older, altered. But his eyes, those were the same: glossy black but with something behind them shining like a sharpened spear point. Those eyes could belong to no one but him.
He smiled, the dull light from the hall glinting off large canines, the teeth of an apex predator. “Hello, Detective. So nice to see you again.”