This was real.

Fact: Someone had knocked her out in front of her house as she was coming back from a night of dancing.

Fact: Someone had removed her jeans and T-shirt, and she was now in her bra and underwear.

Fact: Her hands and feet were bound with giant plastic twist-tie strips, and she was being held against her will in what felt like a crypt.

All the facts were bizarre, horrible when you got right down to it, but very, very real. She suddenly remembered something that Lance, her Big Country eco-psychologist, had kept stressing. You make your own reality.

At the time, she’d thought it was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard, but now, as she considered it, maybe this was what he meant. When you were in a very bad situation, you could either feel sorry for yourself or you could-

Chelsea stilled herself as the lights went on. The door to the dilapidated room she was locked in creaked open. The saliva in her mouth evaporated.

At the threshold stood a man wearing a suit and a ski mask.

This isn’t happening, she thought as the man stepped in and knelt down beside her.

“Hey, Chels,” the man said in a polished voice. Then he head-butted her in the face and the world dimmed.

She gained consciousness to a zipping sound. The man in the ski mask was tightening the last of the straps of the appliance hand truck that she was now lashed to. He rolled her out of the room and bumped her up some steps and whirled her dizzily around a long, tiled corridor.

The room they entered had a low ceiling and a long stainless-steel counter that ran the length of one wall. She came to a clanking stop.

“I didn’t-,” Chelsea said, shaking now. “I d-d-didn’t do anything.”

“Exactly,” her abductor said from behind her. “Maybe you should have. Have you considered that? Have you considered what you have failed to do?”

As she watched, the man went over to the sink. He lifted an orange five-gallon Home Depot bucket from underneath it and opened the tap.

“Now, I want you to take a little test,” he said as he filled the bucket. “The subject is water. Did you know that one-point-one billion people worldwide lack access to fresh drinking water? That’s a lot of folks, wouldn’t you say? Now, my question is this: How much clean water does it take to wash your Abercrombie and Fitch T-shirt and Dolce and Gabbana jeans?”

I am having a nightmare, Chelsea thought, staring at the man as he turned off the tap and stepped back, holding the heavy bucket easily in his left hand.

I am Alice, and I have dropped down the rabbit hole and eaten the wrong slice of cake.

Chelsea finally lowered her eyes.

“I don’t know,” she said in an almost whisper.

Without warning, the man grasped the bottom of the bucket and swung it forward. The water that hit her full in the face was frigid. If she thought she was cold before, she was out of her mind. She was Arctic Sea-cold now. Deep space-cold.

“It takes forty gallons!” the man in the ski mask screamed. “In the villages of rural Cambodia and northern Uganda, two to three hundred people struggle daily to share one hand pump in order to get the water they need to survive. Families die for water. The only time you give it the foggiest thought is when a waiter asks you if you want yours sparkling or not!

“Now, question number two: How many thousands of children die every day throughout our world from water-related illnesses, like cholera, dysentery, and hepatitis?”

Chelsea was no longer listening. She was too cold to hear, to think. It was like a glacier was moving through her body now, petrifying her muscles and tendons and bones. It would reach her heart soon, she thought, and the cold would make it seize up like a frozen engine.

The man went back to the sink with the bucket. He began whistling the theme from final Jeopardy! as he squealed open the tap again.

Chapter 20

A MIGRAINE HEADACHE woke Emily Parker at the ungodly hour of six a.m. Now that’s what I call a wake-up call, she thought, wincing as she sat up. She’d been suffering from migraines on and off ever since she was in college. The pulsating, stabbing sensation was always in the same place, above her left eye, as if something were trying to dig its way out of her skull with an ice pick.

Sometimes it was so bad, it made her vomit. Sometimes, for some inexplicable reason, it made her extremely thirsty. Before he left, her New Age husband, John, had suggested that it was the price for her investigative skill, the price for her ability to make intuitive leaps that saved people’s lives.

Or maybe it was the stress brought on by my no-good husband, she wished she could tell him now.

She found her bag and fished out an Imitrex, her headache prescription. Swallowing it dry, she saw a flashing image of Jacob Dunning dead in the South Bronx boiler room.

What was she still doing here? she thought. Her boss told her to hang tight up in New York, at least until the results from the medical examiner were in, but she wasn’t sure. Thirty-five was definitely too old for this shit in the Bureau’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. She found herself missing her cozy beige cubicle and cinder-block walls. Or maybe she should get out altogether and try to get a teaching job. Something that coincided with Olivia’s schedule. Give some fresh, young world beater the chance to go after these monsters, deal with these poor families.

She was shaking another Imitrex into her palm when her cell went off.

“Hey, it’s Mike,” Bennett said. “Sorry to wake you up.”

She found herself smiling. His calm voice was like a lifeboat against the nauseating waves of tightness in her skull. She remembered dinner, his crazy kids. At least that had been fun.

“Tell me something good, Mike,” she said. “The media coverage jogged someone’s memory?”

“I wish,” he said. “I just got off the phone with my boss. Looks like we got another missing kid. Her name is Chelsea Skinner. She’s seventeen, and her father is the president of the New York Stock Exchange. Friends let her out of a cab on the corner of her street early this morning, but she never made it home.”

“Already? My God! Even for a serial, that’s unbelievably fast to do it again,” Emily said. “Should we head to the family’s residence?”

“No,” Bennett said. “Schultz and Ramirez are already on their way. Our presence has actually been requested at the task force meeting they’re putting together down at headquarters. I’ll pick you up at eight-thirty so we can get our game faces on. You like lox on your bagel? I don’t think the Jewish deli I go to has grits, but I can ask. What are grits, anyway?”

“Tell me, Mike,” Emily said with a smile. “Are all New York cops wiseasses twenty-four/seven?”

“Just the good-looking ones with double-digit kids,” Bennett said. “See you in a few hours, Agent Parker.”