He lifted an imaginary glass and sadly murmured, “Thanks for the tip, old friend.”

Shrugging out of his jacket and loosening his tie, he glanced at the room. Simply furnished, it held the most basic of hotel accommodations. He’d traveled enough to have predicted the number of drawers in the dresser and to visibly assess the comfort of the bed. He’d wager there was a Gideon Bible in the top drawer of the nightstand, and that somewhere within was a hand-drawn phallic symbol left there by a bored former occupant.

Fortunately, though, the whole place looked-and better yet, smelled-very clean. No greasy dust coated the slats of the air vent above the bed. No visible stains marred the worn carpet, and not a smudge of dirt or mildew darkened the bathroom tile. All in all, things could have been much worse.

Deciding to ask Dean to just bring him back a sandwich, he reached for his cell phone. But before he could even lift it and dial the number, it rang in his hand. “Blackstone,” he answered.

The slightest hesitation and the quick, almost surprised inhalation told him even before she spoke that Lily Fletcher was calling. He smiled just a little. Lily, the newest member of the team, hadn’t quite gotten used to him and never appeared to know how to act. Had he ever been so young and untried? So enthusiastic and eager to please?

Once. And look where it had gotten him.

“It’s Fletcher, sir. Sorry to bother you; you’re probably at dinner or something.”

He sighed. “Please, Lily, call me Wyatt-especially on the phone and after hours.”

“Sorry.” A sudden hollow sound and subsequent knocking told him she’d dropped the phone and was fumbling to pick it back up.

His smile widened. He could almost see her at her desk, her petite form swallowed up in the oversize office chair they’d scrounged up for her from some old storage closet. Her blond hair would be mounded on top of her head, the small, wire-framed reading glasses perched on the end of her nose. Behind those glasses her eyes would be shining with intelligence or moist with heart-felt emotion-the latter not the best trait to have in this line of work, but no matter how often he warned her to remain detached, she was helplessly enslaved to her feelings.

Actually, those feelings had been one reason he’d brought her over to his team. She’d recently suffered a personal tragedy, the loss of her nephew and her sister. Almost desperate to get out of a closed-in office and into the field, if only to rebel against the impotence every crime victim felt, she’d asked for a shot, and he’d given it to her.

So far, he hadn’t regretted it. Her personal history hadn’t interfered with her job. Though he couldn’t deny that whenever office conversation turned toward child abuse, like some of the sick goings-on at Satan’s Playground, Lily Fletcher went whiter than any of the monuments gracing the city where they worked.

“Sorry, I dropped the phone,” she mumbled a moment later.

Of course she had.

Before she’d dropped it, her desk phone would have been tucked in the crook of her neck so she could leave her hands free. The slim fingers would be flying across the keyboard as she coaxed miracles from the machine, just like Brandon Cole often did.

And that was the other reason he had hired her, despite her lack of field experience and her tendency to get too involved. The woman was as brilliant as Cole, but she played by the book. Brandon Cole did not. Frankly, Wyatt needed them both for exactly that reason. “It’s all right.”

“Listen, Brandon asked me to call you. Hold on; I’ll put you on speaker.”

He held, then heard, “Hey, boss! Hear you may have ID’d the first victim?”

“It appears so. You got the message that I want you and Lily here tomorrow?”

“Yeah, uh, about that.”

“Yes?”

“Not sure we should leave. Something’s happening, boss.”

“What is it?’

“Hold up. I might have…”

Containing a sigh of irritation, he waited, hearing the clicking of keys in the background. As if realizing he was growing impatient, Lily explained, “He’s trying to get back into the Playground.”

“Bastards went underground again a couple of hours ago,” Cole added.

Damn. In the week since Brandon had brought Satan’s Playground to their attention, the group had changed servers twice. Brandon kept following them, like a child following a trail of bread crumbs, all over cyberspace. He wouldn’t find anything as sweet as a gingerbread house at the end of his journey, and the evil waiting on the other side was darker than any children’s tale could conjure up.

Finally, he heard a triumphant whoop. “Got you!”

“He’s back in,” Lily explained.

“I heard.”

Brandon jumped into the conversation. “Okay, here’s why I wanted to talk to you. It looks like the unsub is gearing up for a new auction.”

“It’s only been a month since his last one.”

“I know. He’s accelerating.”

Never a good thing. “When will it take place?”

“I’m not sure,” Brandon replied. “I haven’t been able to break into the actual auctions yet; I don’t even know whether they’re real-time or silent. But I started seeing chatter about it right before the site went dark.” More clicking. “I guess everybody gets excited when the Reaper gears up for his next kill.”

Breaking into the auctions was on top of Brandon ’s priority list. If they could get inside and find a way to trace the money trail, they’d be able to nail somebody, either the auction winner or the Reaper himself. Right now, they wanted the killer very badly. But every member of his team also wanted to bring down the twisted clients who paid to have their evil fantasies carried out.

“How soon will you know?”

“I’ll stay here all night if I have to.”

Wyatt nodded, closing his eyes and rubbing at the corners of them. They hadn’t expected this additional pressure, not so soon. The first auctions had been two or three months apart, the last few narrowed to about six or seven weeks. Now, barely a month. “What are the chances of disrupting the auction? Doing something to crash it?”

“Only if you want these sickos to know we’re watching them,” said Lily.

“Then they’ll close up shop and dive into a hole so deep it’ll take months to find them again,” Brandon added.

Damn. A cold rush of helplessness spread over him and Wyatt sank to the bed. All the other auctions had ended in someone’s horrible death, which had been put on display at Satan’s Playground within seventy-two hours. Meaning they had only days now, not weeks, in which to find the unsub and stop him.

Or else have front-row seats to another brutal, sadistic murder.

5

They started the search early. With a lot of land to cover, and only seven people-Stacey, Taggert, three of her deputies, and two other FBI agents who’d arrived last night-to do it, the job was shaping up to be a major one. Better, in Stacey’s opinion, to get started just after dawn and take advantage of whatever brief amount of coolness the day might provide. Despite their being shaded from the vicious sun by a thick canopy of pine, oak, and cedar, the woods hugging Warren Lee’s fence had a closed-in, cavelike feeling that held the heat in and made even the simple act of breathing difficult.

Besides, it wasn’t as though she’d slept for more than twenty minutes at a stretch all night, anyway. She’d lain awake, staring at the ceiling, trying to fathom what Dean Taggert had told her: that there might very well be a serial killer living right here in Hope Valley. It was so far beyond her comprehension, he might as well have told her aliens had landed.

That wasn’t the only thing that had inhibited her rest. The mourning she’d done for poor, sad Lisa hadn’t helped. And when she had fallen into minutes of fitful slumber, she’d found herself dreaming of Dean Taggert. Odd dreams she couldn’t quite remember, but which had left her feeling tense and uncomfortable.