They had leads and theories, but hadn't been able to prove a thing. "You know how these things go. You said yourself it would be almost impossible for you to ID his face."

"Yes, but someone else could! The vagrant he picked up to help him that night. He was an eyewitness, for God's sake."

"Not a reliable one," he replied evenly. "Just a drugged-out guy from the street who could remember only that the man who picked him up was Caucasian and middle-aged."

Lily shivered a little, as if finally noticing just how cold and damp it was outside.

"Let's go in," he said.

She shook her head, grabbed a beach towel from the railing, and draped it over her shoulders, tucking her arms into the folds. "Why isn't this going any faster?"

"Do you really have to ask?" He said the words carefully. The woman already bore a lot of weight on her shoulders. He didn't want to add to it. But he did need for her to understand. "The world thinks you and your assailant were killed in that van crash. So not only is the case not a high priority right now, since they're assuming he's dead, but the official investigators are looking for anyone who went missing or died the same night you did. Only you, Brandon, and I know he did no such thing and might very well have gone back to his real life once he realized you weren't coming after him."

"But you can't tell anyone that," she whispered.

"No. I can't."

Moving slowly to the table, she dropped onto one of the chairs. "Of course."

Joining her, Wyatt noted the way she'd visibly deflated. "Look, it doesn't mean we won't find him. It just makes it a little harder."

"Maybe I should just come forward, let the media make a big deal out of the FBI agent who faked her death, and let the bastard come and find me."

Wyatt stiffened, not even wanting to consider that option. "You're not using yourself as bait."

"Don't coddle me, Wyatt."

He intentionally sneered, knowing the very last thing Lily wanted was to be treated like a fragile object. Besides, she wasn't fragile. Wounded, yeah. Weak? No way in hell.

He didn't like having to remind her that she owed him, but damned if he would let her take unnecessary risks and lose everything she had gained. "We didn't save your ass, put our careers on the line, just so you could go out and get yourself killed."

It was a cheap shot and he knew it. Lily flinched, but she also lifted her chin, glad he'd treated her as an equal, a strong woman capable of taking as much as she dished out. It wasn't difficult, because despite how much he wanted to keep her safe, he knew she was strong, his equal in every way.

"Understood." She tapped her fingers on the surface of the table and dropped the idea, as he'd known she would. "The owner of the vehicle he ditched before he grabbed me, did you talk to him? Make sure it truly was stolen?" she asked, going back to the case.

"She was a well-known, respected plastic surgeon. Very convincing, very reliable."

The unsub had stolen a car parked at a ritzy Richmond hotel, intending to break into a house where two young children were supposedly alone, unsupervised. He'd found the children, stalked them, by lurking on a kids' community Web site.

Those two unattended children had never existed. Lily had played the role of young girl irritated at having to babysit her little brother for the first time. She'd lured him in like a slimy fish on a baited hook. She'd called herself Tiger Lily, in answer to the handle he'd been using on the site: Peter Pan. The boy who never grew up.

Sick fucking bastard. At least the one he'd used at Satan's Playground. Lovesprettyboys-the identity he had admitted to using when he had Lily in his clutches-had been unambiguous. It had revealed him for the twisted degenerate he was.

On that January night, fearing a trap, the unsub had waited down the block from the undercover house, slipping a vagrant a twenty to scope out the place first. When he'd realized the whole thing was a setup, he'd tried to run, but he couldn't start the car. The closest vehicle was an FBI van doing exterior surveillance. Inside it, Lily had been watching, listening, waiting for the end of the investigation that had consumed her.

The rest of what had happened that night had been thought about, talked about, wondered about, by everyone on the team and others in the bureau. Considering Lily's memories were fuzzy, he doubted they'd ever know the whole story. How, for instance, the killer had stashed Lily in the dilapidated beach shack and then gotten back to the bridge to stage the crash. How he'd gotten away from the crash site without being spotted. If, perhaps, he hadn't gotten away and had just blended in as onlookers and rescue workers filled the scene.

One of the biggest questions: Had someone helped him?

He needed to know all those things. But the only one who could answer the questions was the unsub.

At first, as he'd told her, Wyatt and everyone else in the bureau had looked for any Richmond-area middle-aged man who had disappeared unexpectedly the same night Lily had. They'd thought, of course, that he had died. When Wyatt realized one week later that the unsub was still alive, he'd still looked at anyone who was missing, likely in hiding.

Then he'd realized the truth. The unsub might have hidden out at the shack with Lily for a day or two, waiting for any hint that his identity had been uncovered, despite all his precautions. When that day hadn't come, though, had the slime simply returned to his real world? Gone back to a normal life, believing no one would come after him? At least as long as nobody ever found out Lily was still alive.

How he must have panicked when he got back to the shack and found she had disappeared. Had he been somewhere on the long, deserted beach himself that night, searching for his victim even as Wyatt and Brandon were rescuing her? It was possible. Because he certainly hadn't returned later, when they had been staking the place out. Wyatt imagined that, like a character out of a Poe story, the unsub was tormented by the possibility of discovery, the chance that his victim might have her vengeance on him yet. That waiting and uncertainty would be enough to drive a sane person mad.

No one had ever called Lovesprettyboys-Peter Pan-sane.

"Tell me what you have." Apparently seeing the instinctive refusal about to come out of his mouth, she urged, "Please. I'm healed; I'm healthy. If you talk about it, maybe it'll spark something and give you a new lead."

He stared at her intently, unable to see the depths of blue in those eyes out here in the moonlight. The floodlights over their heads might brighten the cliffs and the stairs. But here they were almost caught in a small pool of night that existed between the house and her security perimeter. Caught between light and darkness, being in the open and remaining hidden in the shadows. Just as Lily was caught. And would be, until he captured the person who had tried to kill her.

"Please," she repeated.

Sighing heavily, he tried to give her what she wanted, knowing he could not reveal too much. Especially since he was currently investigating two cases that somehow involved Lily Fletcher: her own "murder"… and the murders of three men who had a lot in common with her attacker.

"As I just said, the owner of the car was a plastic surgeon from Williamsburg, Virginia, attending a medical convention at that hotel."

"Are you certain she-"

"She isn't a suspect. Just the owner of the stolen car. A number of people remember seeing her at the banquet at which her father received a humanitarian award that night, and her sister-in-law shared an elevator ride with her right around the time you were being attacked. We have the surveillance video to prove it."

"Where was the car?"