Blake Pierce

Blake Pierce is author of the bestselling RILEY PAGE mystery series, which include the mystery suspense thrillers ONCE GONE (book #1), ONCE TAKEN (book #2), ONCE CRAVED (#3), ONCE LURED (#4), ONCE HUNTED (#5), and ONCE PINED (#6). Blake Pierce is also the author of the MACKENZIE WHITE mystery series, the AVERY BLACK mystery series, and the KERI LOCKE mystery series.

An avid reader and lifelong fan of the mystery and thriller genres, Blake loves to hear from you, so please feel free to visit www.blakepierceauthor.comwww.blakepierceauthor.com to learn more and stay in touch.

Copyright © 2016 by Blake Pierce. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the author. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Jacket image Copyright PhotographyByMK, used under license from Shutterstock.com.

BOOKS BY BLAKE PIERCE

RILEY PAIGE MYSTERY SERIES

ONCE GONE (Book #1)

ONCE TAKEN (Book #2)

ONCE CRAVED (Book #3)

ONCE LURED (Book #4)

ONCE HUNTED (Book #5)

ONCE PINED (Book #6)

MACKENZIE WHITE MYSTERY SERIES

BEFORE HE KILLS (Book #1)

BEFORE HE SEES (Book #2)

BEFORE HE COVETS (Book #3)

AVERY BLACK MYSTERY SERIES

CAUSE TO KILL (Book #1)

CAUSE TO RUN (Book #2)

CAUSE TO HIDE (Book #3)

KERI LOCKE MYSTERY SERIES

A TRACE OF DEATH (Book #1)

PROLOGUE

He glanced at his watch.

2:59 PM.

The school bell would ring in less than a minute.

Ashley only lived about twelve blocks from the high school, less than a mile, and almost always made the trek alone. That was his only concern – that today would be one of the rare occasions where she had company.

Within five minutes of school letting out, she was in sight, and his heart sank as he saw her walking with two other girls along Main Street. They stopped at an intersection and chatted. This wouldn’t do. They had to leave her. They had to.

He felt the anxiety rise in his belly. This was supposed to be the day.

Sitting in the front seat of his van, he tried to control what he liked to call his original self. It was his original self which emerged when he was doing his special experiments on his specimens back at home. It was his original self which allowed him to ignore the screams and begging of those specimens so he could focus on his important work.

He had to keep his original self well hidden. He reminded himself to call them girls and not specimens. He reminded himself to use proper names like “Ashley.” He reminded himself that to other people, he looked completely normal and that if he acted that way, no one could tell what lurked in his heart.

He’d been doing it for years, acting normal. Some people even called him smooth. He liked that. It meant he was a great actor. And by acting normal almost all the time, he’d somehow carved out a life, one that some might even envy. He could hide in plain sight.

Yet now he could feel it bursting in his chest, begging to be let free. The desire was getting the better of him – he had to rein it in.

He closed his eyes and took several deep breaths, trying to remember the instructions. On the last breath, he inhaled for five seconds and then exhaled slowly, allowing the noise he’d learned to escape his mouth slowly.

“Ohhhmmm…”

He opened his eyes – and felt a rush of relief. Her two friends had turned west on Clubhouse Avenue toward the water. Ashley continued south on Main Street alone, next to the dog park.

Some afternoons she lingered there, watching dogs tear across the wood chip–covered ground after tennis balls. But not today. Today, she walked with purpose, as if she had somewhere to be.

If she’d known what was coming, she wouldn’t have bothered.

That thought made him smile to himself.

He’d always thought she was attractive. And as he inched his way along the street behind her, making sure to give way to the cavalcade of high school jaywalkers, he once again admired her lean, athletic surfer’s body. She was wearing a pink skirt that stopped just above the knees and a bright blue top that hugged her close.

He made his move.

A warm calmness washed over him. He activated the unconventional-looking e-cigarette that had been resting on the van’s center console and pressed his foot gently on the gas pedal.

He pulled up next to her in the van and called out through the open passenger window.

“Hey.”

At first she looked taken aback. She squinted into the vehicle, clearly unable to tell who it was.

“It’s me,” he said casually. He put the van in park, leaned over, and opened the passenger door so she could see who it was.

She leaned in a little to get a better look. After a moment, he saw something like recognition cross her face.

“Oh, hi. Sorry,” she apologized.

“No problem,” he assured her, before taking a long drag.

She looked more closely at the device in his hand.

“I’ve never seen one like that before.”

“You want to check it out?” he offered as casually as he could.

She nodded and stepped closer, leaning in. He leaned toward her as well, as if he were about to take it out of his mouth and hand it to her. But when she was about three feet away, he clicked a little button on the device, which made a small clasp open, and which sprayed a chemical right for her face, in a small fog. At the same moment, he raised a mask to his own nose, so as not to breathe it himself.

It was so subtle and quiet that Ashley didn’t even notice. Before she could react, her eyes began to close, her body to slump.

She was already leaning forward, losing consciousness, and all he had to do was reach over and ease her into the passenger seat. To the casual observer, it might even look like she got in of her own accord.

His heart was thumping but he reminded himself to stay calm. He had come this far.

He reached across the specimen, pulled the passenger door closed, and properly secured her seatbelt and then his own. Finally, he allowed himself one last slow deep breath in and out.

When he was sure the coast was clear, he edged out into the street.

Soon he merged with the mid-afternoon Southern California traffic, just another commuter blending in, trying to navigate his way in a sea of humanity.

CHAPTER ONE

Monday

Late Afternoon

Detective Keri Locke pleaded with herself not to do it this time. As the most junior detective in the West Los Angeles Pacific Division Missing Persons Unit, she was expected to work harder than anyone else in the division. And as a thirty-five-year-old woman who’d only joined the force four years ago, she often felt like she was supposed to be the hardest-working cop in the entire LAPD. She couldn’t afford to look like she was taking a break.

All around her, the department buzzed with activity. An elderly Hispanic woman was sitting at a nearby desk, giving a statement about a purse snatching. Down the hall, a carjacker was being booked. It was a typical afternoon in what had become her new normal of a life. And yet that recurring urge was eating at her, refusing to be ignored.

She gave in to it. She stood up and wandered over to the window that looked out on Culver Boulevard. She stood there and could nearly see her reflection. With the dancing glare from the afternoon sun, she looked part human, part ghost.

That was how she felt. She knew that objectively, she was an attractive woman. Five foot six and about 130 pounds – 133 if she was being honest – with dirty blonde hair and a figure that had escaped childbirth relatively unscathed, she still turned heads.

But if anyone looked closely, they’d see that her brown eyes were red and bleary, her forehead was a knotted mass of premature lines, and her skin often had the pallor of, well, a ghost.

Like most days, she was wearing a simple blouse tucked into black slacks and black flats that looked professional but were easy to run in. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. It was her unofficial uniform. Pretty much the only thing that changed daily was the color of the top she wore. It all reinforced her feeling that she was marking time more than really living.

Keri sensed movement out of the corner of her eye and snapped out of her reverie. They were coming.

Outside the window, Culver Boulevard was mostly devoid of people. There was a running and biking path across the street. On most days in the late afternoon, it was choked with foot traffic. But it was relentlessly hot today, with temperatures in the high nineties and no breeze at all, even here, less than five miles from the beach. Parents who normally walked their kids home from school took their air-conditioned cars today. Except for one.

At exactly 4:12, just like clockwork, a young girl on a bike, about seven or eight years old, pedaled slowly down the path. She wore a fancy white dress. Her youngish mom trailed behind her in jeans and a T-shirt, with a backpack slung casually over her shoulder.

Keri fought the anxiety bubbling in her stomach and looked around to see if anyone in the office was watching her. No one was. She allowed herself to give in to the itch she’d tried not to scratch all day and stared.

Keri watched them with jealous, adoring eyes. She still couldn’t believe it, even after so many times at this window. The girl was the spitting image of Evie, right down to the wavy blond hair, the green eyes, even the slightly crooked smile.

She stood there in a trance, staring out the window long after the mother and child had disappeared from sight.

When she finally snapped out of it and turned back to the bullpen, the elderly Hispanic woman was leaving. The carjacker had been processed. Some new miscreant, cuffed and surly, had slid into his spot at the booking window, an alert uniformed officer standing at his left elbow.

She glanced up at the digital clock on the wall above the coffee machine. It read 4:22.

Have I really been standing at that window for ten solid minutes? This is getting worse, not better.