As she looked across the table at Shane that night, Grace couldn’t help but remember that day she’d first laid eyes on him. It had been years ago, but not long enough to be a distant memory. Shane was on leave from the FBI at the time, promoting his book, Birth of a Serial Killer, a compendium of cases he’d worked on at the Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico, Virginia. Shane wasn’t a “profiler,” at least he didn’t like to use the label. He felt that the status that came with that particular moniker was beyond the true grasp of those working in the field trying their best to catch a killer. He considered himself “more of a criminal genealogist” than a profiler.
To understand what makes a serial killer, he’d written in the introduction to his book, law enforcement and other interested parties need to dig in to the killer’s family tree. No one becomes the ultimate evil merely because they were born bad; they become evil because it is almost a part of their DNA.
As he talked to a sizable group in the auditorium on the campus of Pacific Lutheran University the night he met his future wife, Special Agent Alexander showed slides of the crimes that he’d worked in his relatively young and exulted career at the FBI.
“Toni Caswell, nineteen, was the first victim of the Naperville Strangler, Ronald Chase Mitchell,” he said, his voice projecting low and deep in the darkness of the auditorium. “The nineteen-year-old college student was not the first victim to be discovered, but actually the fourth.” He paused, not for dramatic emphasis, as Grace would later learn, but because of the devastating guilt that came with his next words, an admission of sorts.
“Had her body been found earlier,” Shane said, pausing to click to the next image, one of a young woman with a halo of blond hair and piercing green eyes, “I think that Cassandra Kincaid would likely not have been killed.”
A hand shot up.
It belonged to a young Tacoma Police detective named Grace O’Hare. It was the first time she’d spoken to the man who she had considered an idol, then later, her husband.
“Yes, in the front row,” Shane said, his blue eyes squinting a little in the dark.
Grace nodded, and a woman with a microphone came toward her.
“Yes, Special Agent, I still don’t understand why-with all of the vast resources at the bureau-that you were unable to ascertain what became obvious years later, that Toni was Ronald Chase Mitchell’s girlfriend and that all the victims after her were dead ringers for her?”
Shane Alexander nodded a little. He’d heard that question before.
“Look,” he said, his tone even and not the least bit defensive, “we are really learning the truth of what’s behind the mask. What is obvious after the fact is sometimes painfully so.”
The comment was a none-too-subtle reference to the New York Times profile that had led to his book deal.
“I guess,” Grace said, holding on to the microphone. The young woman next to her, whose job it was to pass it to the next person, made an irritated face. “What you’re saying is that as much as we know about sociopathic personality disorder, we really don’t know enough to actually stop them from killing.”
Shane stepped closer to get a better look at her. She wasn’t going to back down. He knew he hadn’t seen the last of her, and in that minute, that was just fine.
“No, I guess we don’t,” he said, as politely as possible. He turned around and indicated a young man in the second row. “Question?”
After the lights went up, Grace found her place at the end of the line for the book signing. She let several others go ahead of her, even putting up with the crime groupies and their over-the-top gushing about the agent’s work at the Behavioral Analysis Unit.
One young woman, a reasonably attractive redhead who had a too-heavy hand with her eyeliner and slashes of blush that looked like they’d been applied with a stencil, served up the line of the night.
“That analysis would be above my pay grade,” he said.
“I don’t know which is sexier,” she cooed, “serial killers or the hotties who catch them.”
Grace watched the special agent deal with the crime groupie. He smiled and signed her book.
After she departed, clutching a book that she’d likely fall asleep while reading, he looked up at Grace.
“I don’t know what is more repulsive, serial killers or the groupies they attract,” he said.
“Your job puts you in danger a lot. I guess that’s sexy to some,” she said.
“We’re well trained,” he said.
“I didn’t mean the FBI. I meant your job as an author and lecturer. That’s the scary one.”
He laughed. “I’m Shane Alexander,” he said, stating the obvious, but doing so to break the ice and get her to say her name-without being too forward.
Grace nodded. “I know. I read your book.”
“And you are?”
She looked at him with those eyes that could never tell a lie. “Grace O’Hare. My sister, Tricia, was one of Ted Bundy’s victims. At least we think so.”
“You want to talk?”
Grace, back in the moment, offered Shane the last crab cake. The sun was down and the water had turned from golden to black.
“You made ’em, you have the last one,” he said, patting his slightly expanding midsection.
“You could burn off the calories by going up to my car. I left my book up there.”
“You need to get an e-reader, Grace. We don’t have the storage for any more books around here anyway.”
He was right about that. The north wall of their small house was floor-to-ceiling books, most of them nonfiction crime, though there was the occasional serial-killer thriller-more for a diversion from the reality of the dark professions they’d both chosen.
Grace had always been interested in crime, murder especially.
“I think it’s in my blood,” she’d told Shane when they first met.
“Me too, but not because of personal connection. Just a deep need to be close enough to the bad stuff to be able to stop the bad guys from doing whatever it is they’re doing again.”
“I understand,” she’d said. “For me, for my family, murder has always been personal.”
Some saw their strange alliance as a linkage between two individuals who were obsessed with crime. What those people missed was that they needed each other. He loved and understood her.
She loved him with all her heart, but she also knew that he could help her.
CHAPTER 3
It was dusk when Lisa Lancaster looked at the newspaper vending box. The headlines of the day’s News Tribune touted a state legislator’s brilliant/bogus idea to sell the naming rights of the Narrows Bridge to ease a disastrous state budget shortfall. She wondered why Tacoma was so provincial. Why Washington was so backwards. New Yorkers would never think to sell the naming rights to the Empire State Building. No one would ever give voice to such a ridiculous scheme.
While Lisa got most of her news from Internet sites like Gawker and TMZ, she did crouch down to read a little of a news story that caught her interest in that kind of ghoulish way that some stories do.
HUMAN BONES FOUND: WHO IS JANE DOE AND HOW DID SHE DIE?
The article detailed the discovery of the bones and how the Tacoma Police Department was looking into a number of missing persons cases involving young women from as far back as the 1950s.
Lisa, a willowy brunette with shoulder-length hair and forget-me-not blue eyes, stopped reading because the idea of an old body grossed her out. She turned her thoughts inward as she stood outside the student union building on the Pacific Lutheran University campus near Tacoma and tried to determine what she should do.
With her hair.
Her major.
Her life.
Lisa had been a history major, a communications major, a songwriter, a papier-mache artist, and even a
