Something was going to happen. Soon.

After all these months, all the manipulation, all the effort, this whole ordeal was going to come to an end. The uncertainty, the fear, the worry that one day Lily Fletcher would crawl out of whatever hole she'd hidden in and ruin everything, would stop. No more worrying. No more waiting for a knock on the door from the police or the FBI. No more speculating about what the agent knew, what she remembered, how much she'd heard, or whom she could identify.

Fletcher had been badly injured during that entire week. Incoherent most of the time. Feverish and in pain, she'd held conversations with her dead sister and her sister's kid, and she should, by all rights, have died all on her own.

'Did you die?"

At first, in those early months, it had seemed the most likely scenario. That the media didn't report what would have been a pretty major story didn't mean anything. Maybe the FBI agent had staggered out onto the beach, died of her injuries, and been swept away by the tide. Or buried in the blowing sands of the dunes swept wildly on a cold winter's night.

A month had gone by.Two.Three. But instead of growing more at ease, more confident that no one would ever find out, the tension had built Because, wouldn't something have been found? If she'd been buried in a dune. wouldn't she have been discovered come spring when people started filling Virginia's beaches? Or if she'd been swept away, wouldn't her remains have washed up somewhere? Why had there never been a single piece of evidence, as if the woman had simply never existed?

Because you're hiding, aren't you, Lily?

Yes. Lily Fletcher was in hiding. Even though she had had no family and no close friends, she'd still found someone to help her get away. Then she'd stayed away, managing to remain dead in the eyes of the world for seven long months. The more time that passed, the more certain that seemed. The passing days of silence didn't comfort; they merely increased the insane uncertainty until it had become nearly all-consuming.

Until Lily was found, and dealt with, life could never go back to normal. Not really. Because, despite her injuries, the woman might have seen something, could remember something damning. If not an outright physical description, then the clothes, the eye color, the height, the build, the voice, a chance incriminating word. Something.

Damn it. Why hadn't he just killed the blonde when he'd had her at his mercy?

Weakness. Panic. Fear. Vindictiveness. Who knew?

And it was far too late to dwell on now. Fletcher would be found, one way or another. All that had been set in motion this past summer would come together to force her out of her hiding place and put her in position for elimination.

Scenario one: Jesse Tyrone Boyd, with his excellent legal representation, no eyewitness, and an alibi provided by Will Miller, would be released. That release would serve to draw out the woman who would want to see him put back behind bars.

If not that, the other option would put a whole lot more people on Lily's trail and make finding her ever so much easier. Somebody at the FBI would finally bother paying attention, do his job, and connect the murders of those three men with their own supposedly dead agent.

God, they must be complete fools not to have done it so far. How much more obvious did the crime scenes need to be? Would leaving the former agent's picture, writing her damned name on the wall in blood, do it? How about dropping off her tattered bulletproof vest, kept hidden all these months? What in heaven's name would it take?

It had all been so carefully planned. Easy enough that a child could put it together. But apparently not a police officer.

There'd been the specific victim type. The Internet connection. The obviously vengeful crime scenes- passionate, planned, full of rage. The names of the supposed children. The flowers, eventually even a damned tiger lily, which had been the fake online name the agent had used when trying to capture the man Lily Fletcher had known as Lovesprettyboys or Peter Pan.

All of that and they didn't even suspect yet. There'd been not one news story, not one speculative article, about the FBI's involvement in a tristate murder investigation. Local outlets were covering the cases, but hadn't put them together. It truly seemed that nobody had noticed the perfectly chosen clues.

So perhaps it was time to be just a little more obvious. If the FBI couldn't figure out subtle hints, it was time to drop some not-so-subtle ones.

You could wait for Boyd.

Yes. If Boyd got out next week, Lily would come slinking back into town on her own. There could be no doubt about that. She would never let the guilty man walk free as long as she had breath in her body.

But if the appeal failed, and the man didn't get out to serve as a lure for the woman, even more time would have been wasted. And this had gone on long enough. Hiding the secret, keeping Lovesprettyboys' true identity locked away forever, returning to the real world and a real life, had been a tremendous strain. The pressure had become nearly unendurable and just couldn't continue.

This had to end. Maybe it would, with Boyd's release. Yet it never hurt to cover all bases. Meaning the lily murderer needed to act once more. And this time, there would be no ambiguity whatsoever. Only raw, bloody violence and blatant clues nobody could miss.

Perhaps a strand of hair from Agent Fletcher's own blond head-kept ever since that last night before she'd disappeared? Or something even more blatant?

It was, perhaps, time to look through a few mementos of Lily Fletcher's stay in Virginia last January. They were locked away in a storage locker, had been all along. Just in case of emergency.

"Smart. So smart. Always thinking ahead." Everyone said so.

There was only one thing left to do: reel in the prey. It was soon, mere days after the last killing. But the irons were already in the fire, the contacts established. The Internet connection was live, secure, and untraceable. Which meant it was time to ramp up the e-mail communications with one Frank Addison, a truck driver out of North Carolina, who loved to hang out at a site with a triple-X-rated name any search engine would warn against visiting. They’d already exchanged many pleasant e-mails. Even an IM session, during which they'd compared stories. Shared fantasies society frowned upon.

Now it was time to bring the matter to a close. Set the date, the time, the location. The trucker thought he was arranging to meet a drug-addicted mother and her son.

A mother named Lily Fletcher.

"And if that doesn't wake you the fuck up, not a single one of you deserves to carry a badge."

Chapter 7

Once she'd recognized the voice on the conference audio recording Friday, both Lily and Wyatt had expected he'd go immediately to Williamsburg to find out whom it belonged to. Unfortunately, that hadn't happened as quickly as they'd wanted. Because when he'd tried calling to arrange a meeting, they'd learned Drs. Kean and Underwood, who needed to listen to the recording, had gone away for the holiday weekend. Several other members of their family, many of whom also worked at the same private practice, had gone as well. Meaning there was no one around to tell them how to reach either woman. Since an outside physician was covering any emergency medical calls, the answering service hadn't been helpful, either.

They'd looked up the other speakers in the panel workshop-all of them were from faraway states, one even from another country. None was likely to remember one question from a long-ago convention. Kean, who had seemed to know the person questioning her, was the best bet.