Six years before, he’d been doing laps on the dirt track at Quantico when he’d gotten the call that his daughter had gone missing. Danni was a freshman at University of Miami in Coral Gables, and had disappeared while out running near her dorm. There had been no witnesses or signs of foul play. Danni had simply stopped existing, the earth swallowing her up in one huge gulp. He’d been looking for her ever since.
Standing beneath the shade of a royal palm, he drank a bottled water and cooled down. A pretty brunette on a wind sail caught his eye. Watching her skip across the waves, he thought of his daughter and choked up. Time was supposed to heal all wounds, except that was a lie. Time was the enemy when loved ones went missing, each passing day a reminder of what might have been.
Back at his condo, he made coffee and used it to wake his wife, weaving the cup below her twitching nose. Muriel was small and fine-boned, with hair gone prematurely gray and a soft Virginia accent. Her eyelids flickered awake.
“My, what a handsome waiter,” she said.
“Good morning, madame,” he said. “How are we today?”
Muriel sipped the coffee with a brave smile on her face. She knew what this day was as well. In the kitchen, the phone rang. “You going to get that?” she asked.
“No. It’s probably work,” he said.
“Still planning to take the day off?”
“Yes. I’ve got everything planned for our little soiree.”
His wife perked up. “Tell me.”
“We’re going to take a leisurely drive to Key Largo, and have lunch at a four star restaurant called Song of the Sea that was written up. They’re holding a table for us.”
“That sounds wonderful. Do you want to shower first?”
“You go ahead. I need to cool down some more.”
The bathroom door clicked shut. Linderman stripped down to his shorts and walked out onto the balcony. The ocean breeze felt good against his overheated skin. He watched a school of brightly-painted catamarans race toward the mouth of the bay while thinking how ironic his life had become. He was a profiler, and had helped crack hundreds of cases, yet he could not solve the mystery of his daughter’s disappearance.
He had not started out wanting to be a profiler. Twenty-six years old, and fresh out of the FBI academy, he’d been doing clerical work for an agent named Robert Kessler when something called the Criminal Personality Research Project had been dropped on his desk. Kessler had been visiting prisons around the country, persuading serial killers to talk to him. Those interviews had been given to Linderman to put into cohesive form.
The job had been daunting. Kessler had talked to a hundred of the worst killers, his subjects including cannibals, blood-drinkers, necrophiliacs, crazed giants, demented stranglers, mutilators, and child-killers. There had been no simple way to group them. They were all monsters.
Linderman had decided to chronicle the killers based upon the year they’d been caught. The oldest cases would go first, the newest last. And that was when he’d noticed something no one in the bureau had seen before. Of Kessler’s killers, sixteen had been arrested between 1965 and 1975, the remaining eighty-four between 1975 and 1985. During those last ten years, the number of serial killers had dramatically increased, with an average of one being caught every six weeks.
It was nothing short of an epidemic.
Linderman had written a lengthy memo to his superiors, explaining what he’d found. It had created an uproar. The FBI was spending millions of dollars trying to catch serial killers, yet their number was rising.
No one liked the bearer of bad news. His superiors had kicked him upstairs to Behavioral Science, and told him to “go figure out the problem.” He’d become a profiler overnight.
Only being a profiler was not a job that Linderman had desired. Profilers led difficult lives, and suffered from a variety of medical problems, including bleeding ulcers, anxiety attacks, and rapid and unexplained weight loss. The medical profession called it situational stress, but the gang at Quantico had another name for it. They called it staring into the abyss.
But there had been a plus side to his new position. He’d gotten to work alongside Kessler and Douglas Johnson, two of the finest profilers the FBI had ever produced. They’d taught him the ropes, and over time, Linderman had learned how to cope with the nightmares and health issues, and had started catching serial killers like no one before him. It was his calling, and he might have kept doing it until retirement, only Danni had gone missing.
For four years, Linderman had searched for his daughter while working at Quantico. Then, out of frustration, he’d moved to South Florida with his wife, and taken a job running the Child Abduction Rapid Deployment unit in the FBI’s North Miami office. It was a step down in both pay and stature, but he didn’t care. He was determined to find out what had happened to Danni, no matter what the cost.
Muriel came onto the balcony in a bathrobe, her hair dripping wet. He put his arm around her shoulder and started to kiss her.
“You got a phone call. Several, actually.” She sounded angry.
“I’m sorry.”
“It was Vick. She asked that you call her right away.”
“I’m not working today, remember?”
“It sounded urgent.”
“What about my plan to run away for the day?”
“Oh, Ken, I don’t know.”
He lowered his arm. Muriel looked out of sorts. The day had caught up to her, just like it’d caught up to him during his run. His dream of running away to Key Largo suddenly seemed awkward and foolish. Muriel would stay in the condo, bury herself in a romance novel or watch the programs she’d Tivoed, while he’d go throw himself in a case. It was what their lives had become, and there was no escaping it.
“Are you sure you want to be here by yourself?” he asked.
“I can manage,” his wife replied.
“That’s not what I asked you.”
She nodded stiffly. Her brave face was back. It said she’d manage just fine.
“I’ll do whatever you want, Muriel,” he said.
“Call her back. She needs you, Ken.”
His wife pulled the cordless phone from her robe, and went inside. He punched in Vick’s cell number from memory and heard the call go through. Rachel Vick belonged to the spirited crop of recruits who’d joined the bureau after 9/11. Rachel was smart and brash and wanted to change the world. She’d started as a field agent in Jacksonville, then transferred to North Miami to work under him. Vick was ambitious, and did not hide the fact that she wanted to become a profiler one day, and move to D.C.
Vick answered on the first ring. He could hear the tremor of excitement in her words. “Another violent teenage boy has been abducted in Fort Lauderdale,” she said.
“Same abductor as before?” he asked.
“It appears so. The boy’s name is Wayne Ladd. He’s seventeen, and matches the profile of the other two victims.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“Ladd was being dropped off for an anger management class at a rehab facility this morning,” Vick said. “The abductor took Ladd from the parking lot, and killed the driver when he tried to interfere. A surveillance camera from a convenience store across the street captured the whole thing. I need you to come here, and watch the surveillance tape. I think I know who the abductor is.”
Now he understood the excitement in Vick’s voice. She wanted confirmation. “Who do you think it is, Rachel?” he asked.
“Killer X.”
Linderman sat down on a metal chair on the balcony and ran his fingers through his thinning hair. Killer X had been murdering prostitutes in Broward County since the mid-1980s, slicing their throats and tossing their bodies away like trash. To date, over fifty deaths had been attributed to his lethal hand. As killers went, he was an enigma. He left no meaningful clues or fingerprints, and had never contacted the police or the media to boast about his crimes. Few details were known about him, except that he was a man. Every profiler in the FBI had studied the case at one time or another, and no one had been able to stop him.