“What just happened?” Charlie asked. From the savage look in Garland’s eyes, it had been something that he found profoundly disturbing.

“There was a man, okay? You heard the kid: his dad. The man said, ‘Come on, Trev,’ and held out his arms, and the kid went running. Satisfied?”

“Oh, that’s wonderful.” As some of the awfulness that had weighed heavy as a boulder on her heart lightened, Charlie felt a tiny easing of the grief for the boy who she had been carrying around with her. The horror of what had happened to him could not be undone, but at least Trevor was at peace now, and that provided a degree of solace. “His father came for him. Loved ones do that, you know.”

“Wonderful,” Garland echoed in a tone that was profoundly different from hers. “Made my night.”

“You’re upset, I can see.” At the look on his face, Charlie instinctively went into professional mode, projecting empathy and understanding to the best of her ability. “Something obviously touched a chord.” The stone-cold gaze he turned on her was not encouraging, but she persevered. “Did what you just saw remind you of anything you experienced at around eleven years old? Some kind of interaction with your father or a father figure, maybe?”

Garland’s face could have been carved from granite. “Don’t start your shrink shit on me, Doc. I’m not in the mood.”

“Sometimes it helps to talk about things. If this bothers you—”

Garland cut her off. “You want to know what ‘chord’ got touched? You want to know what kind of interaction with my ‘father figure’ I had when I was eleven years old? I’ll tell you: I shot the bastard dead.”

Shocked speechless, Charlie stared at him. Before she could regroup enough to respond in any meaningful way, he strode past her and out of the room, passing right through the closed door.

Charlie’s heart did a weird little stutter. Beneath Garland’s anger and truculence, she sensed a tremendous amount of buried pain.

And it touched her.

Realizing that it touched her bothered her.

Don’t you ever forget what he is, she warned herself fiercely.

Left alone to stare at the solid, white-painted panel that was the closed door, she took a minute to regain her composure.

When she did, she went out into the hall. Garland was nowhere in sight. Charlie didn’t know whether to be worried or relieved—but in any case, she didn’t have time to think about it. Bartoli was waiting for her, leaning back against the stair rail with his arms crossed over his chest, looking cool as a cucumber, as was Haney, who was standing grim-faced in the center of the hall. Bartoli smiled when he saw her. Haney didn’t.

“Anything new jump out at you?” Bartoli asked as, doing her best to allow nothing of what she had just experienced to show, Charlie walked toward him. Haney just gave her an unfriendly look.

She took a deep breath. Any residual emotions she might still be experiencing weren’t for their eyes. She needed to get her game face on, and interact with these men like the professional she was.

“I’m almost sure this is a copycat.” With no more than a glance at the master bedroom—Charlie recognized that she had reached her limit: she just wasn’t up to dealing with another spirit’s anguish right then—she headed down the stairs. To Bartoli, she would reveal everything she had learned. But while Haney listened in, Charlie wanted to be careful about what she said: the last thing in the world she wanted was for him to start in on questioning how she knew what she knew again.

Believable, off-the-cuff lies were, she feared, beyond her at the moment.

“What makes you say that?” Bartoli was right behind her, with Haney behind him. As she reached the lower steps, she could see into the pretty, beach-y living room. The other cops—four patrol officers and Haney’s partner, Simon—were standing around the TV.

“This perpetrator didn’t use duct tape.” Charlie kept a firm grip on the banister as she glanced at Bartoli over her shoulder. Something had been bothering her about the killer’s MO from the beginning. This, she had realized as she had replayed Trevor’s words in her mind, was it: her memory of the duct tape over the mouths of Holly and her mother were vivid. It was an important point, and one she could have easily arrived at using only facts that she herself knew, possibly jogged by her visit to Trevor’s room. So this was what she was going to give to Bartoli while Haney was within earshot. “The original Boardwalk Killer put duct tape over the mouths of his victims to keep them quiet.”

The sounds of the TV had apparently masked their steps until now, but as she, Bartoli, and Haney reached the entrance hall at the bottom of the steps, a couple of the cops in the living room became aware of their presence and glanced their way.

“How the hell can you know that?” Haney demanded.

Before she could formulate a reply, or Bartoli could weigh in, the cops in the living room, who were still focused on the TV, stiffened almost as one. Then Simon, who was about Haney’s age, tall and stocky with short, thick, light brown hair, let out a low whistle and looked around at his partner.

“Lou, you’ll want to come here and see this,” he called. “Bartoli, you and the lady, too.”

As they obediently approached the group, the cops rearranged themselves a little so that the newcomers could see the TV screen. On it, in vivid color and high definition, was a picture of the Palmers’ house. Charlie’s heart started to pound as she realized what she was seeing: old footage of the day after the killing of the Palmer family and the kidnapping of Holly.

Everything being shown on that TV was etched into her mind and heart. Even the yellow crime scene tape fluttering in the ocean breeze was the same. She remembered the sound—flap flap flap flap—as she had taken the police officers around, shown them where Holly had been chained, where Mrs. Palmer had died. That night—the first night after the attack, the first full night she had spent in the hospital—it had rained and rained and rained.

The rain had smelled like worms, and death.

“… investigation into the Boardwalk Killer serial killings that have struck terror into the residents of the Outer Banks in recent days has taken a fascinating new turn: the last victim of the previous Boardwalk Killer murders, the sole survivor of the attacks that took place in beach towns a little farther north fifteen years ago, has resurfaced,” the anchorman said. “Any longtime viewers, or longtime residents of the coastal towns in the area, may remember the seventeen-year-old girl who managed to hide from the killer and thus survived the attack on the family she was visiting. That girl”—Charlie was struck dumb when a picture of her teenage self, taken from her high school yearbook, flashed on the screen—“is now Dr. Charlotte Stone, a psychiatrist and expert on serial killers. She has been recruited by the FBI to assist in identifying the Meads’ killer and locating seventeen-year-old Bayley Evans, who has now been missing for almost forty-eight hours.”

The footage taken earlier that day of Charlie hurrying toward the van with Bartoli holding her arm while Kaminsky and Crane brought up the rear and the media peppered them with questions filled the screen. Watching, Charlie felt her chest go tight. Her stomach dropped. Her pulse shot through the roof.

“You know what they say about the first forty-eight hours, Craig,” a woman anchor intoned weightily as the camera pulled back to allow a wider view of the news desk; in the Meads’ living room, the cops standing around the TV all cast covert glances at Charlie. As they looked at her, Charlie realized she was holding her breath. Her hands had clenched into impotent fists at her sides. “If a missing person is not found within that time frame, their chances of being recovered alive are cut almost in half.”