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Suspect is in his mid- to late twenties, single, with a stable job and income. He is intelligent and likely to be charming and/or good-looking, the kind of man most women don’t distrust on sight.

While he’ll have superficial friendships and relationships, he’ll permit no one close enough to see through his mask.

He is, at heart, a loner who can pretend to be social to fly under the radar.

He will also prove emotionally immature—his letters reveal an almost juvenile obsession with his image, a kind of sneering petulance.

“Talk me through how she vanished.”

“The boys decided to jump into the pond. They’d dared each other in front of the girls and so of course juvenile testosterone meant they had to do it—pond’s fed by an underground spring; it’s freezing no matter what time of year.”

Just kids showing off, playing, doing what they should at that age.

There should’ve been no worse outcome than freezing off their nuts and regretting their choices as they sat shivering in the sun.

And maybe a sweet first kiss for their bravery.

That’s what the boys would’ve been hoping for, dreaming about.

“Malia and Polly were cheering them on when Malia said she was feeling a chill because of the clouds and would run back to their picnic blanket to get her date’s sweatshirt to put over her clothes.

” Another part of the ritual of teenage courtship, another sign to the date that he was on the right track.

“Polly said she’d keep cheering on the boys as they swam to the other side of the pond and back. When she turned, she was yelling for Malia to hurry up because they were getting to the end of the race, and that’s when she realized Malia had vanished.”

Confused, the fledgling had run over at once to look for her friend, thinking that maybe she’d decided to duck into the public facilities—even though Malia was notoriously fastidious about never using those.

“I knew something was wrong. Because we’re best friends,” Polly had said through her tears.

“We’re going to grow up and find our mates at the same time and be each other’s maids of honor because maybe we’ll have human mates and they’ll want the wedding ceremony, and then have babies at the same time and we planned it all but she wasn’t there and I knew she wouldn’t just shift and fly off and leave me alone! ”

After he shared that with Eleri, she said, “An intense and immediate response, given that it was broad daylight in a public place.”

“Girl friendships at that age? They bond on a level where they become each other’s shadows.” He’d seen it with countless other young clanmates. “Polly knew without a single doubt that Malia wouldn’t ditch her, and that she’d never miss seeing the end of the boys’ race.”

Oddly enough, Eleri understood what he meant when it came to such deep friendships. The Quatro Cartel would have all reacted as fast. “Who found the bracelet?”

“One of the boys. I talked to the kid myself—he was afraid but only for Malia. I’ve talked to enough fledglings who’ve been up to mischief to know he had nothing to do with it.

” He shoved both hands through his hair.

“It’s the speed and the silence of the abduction that gets me—Malia was loud even when she was Ollie’s size. ”

“We’ll figure it out,” Eleri said, her tone stripped bare of anything but pure concentration—but her hand came to his, her fingers weaving through his own in a promise before she let go and walked to the tree line.

“Someone could’ve waited here, watched, waved her over. Bracelet could’ve fallen off by accident and been unnoticed in the excitement of the day—how badly was the clasp broken?”

“Minor.” Adam scanned the area, but there was nothing to see, his niece gone without a trace.

“I haven’t received a message from the Sandman about Malia.”

His gut twisted. “Could it be a copycat?”

“No—not Malia, and not at this time.” Eleri’s gaze still that endless black, she said, “Pulling me into his perversion is important to him, helps him achieve whatever it is he achieves with these acts.”

Adam saw it, the road she was walking. “There’s no need for a letter this time.” Because the bastard was right in town, watching, listening, mocking them all with his mask of neighborly concern.

Adam’s jaw worked. “Be careful, Eleri. I can’t lose you again.”

“Malia comes first.”

He cupped her face, too thin, dark shadows below her eyes. “You were meant to be a wing leader’s mate. You understand what it is to hold a clan inside the heart.”

She spread her hand over the organ that beat in his chest. “I’ll contact the task force, get them on this—they should already be en route, but they’ll have their gear on them, can run computronic cross-checks as they move.

“I also saw traffic cameras on the way into Raintree. I can access them through the local Enforcement computers if Detective Beaufort will let me—the task force will have to clear it through various channels, but the locals should have the cameras set up as an auto feed into their systems.”

“Wait.” Adam pulled out his phone. “If you need more eyes to scan the footage, call Dahlia—I’ll send you her number. We have people who can’t assist in the physical search, but their eyes are plenty sharp, and I don’t fucking care about toeing the judicial lines right now.”

Eleri nodded. “I’ll start it up, see how many feeds there are, then speak to her.”

Beaufort answered the call Adam had put on speaker and offered no resistance to Eleri’s request for access, even gave her the code to get into the locked Enforcement offices.

“Our admin’s still out sick, but call me or Whitten if you have any trouble accessing the feeds.

” Unspoken was that he understood the falcons would be helping review the footage—the detective knew their team was too small to move on this as fast as they needed to move.

Malia’s life was what mattered, not protecting evidence for a future trial. Because once Adam knew who this was, the killer wouldn’t be standing trial. Brutal justice. Wild justice.

“We need roadblocks,” Eleri said to Beaufort. “It’s already—”

“First thing I ordered when I heard Malia had been taken,” Adam interrupted.

“Main access road isn’t changeling territory, but fuck that.

I have wings stopping vehicles in both directions in and out of Raintree.

You want to go after us for that once we have Malia, Beaufort, you go ahead.

We’ll accept the necessary consequences. ”

“No need, Adam. I’m the acting chief, and as far as I’m concerned, I deputized the lot of you when this began.” The detective sounded on edge. “He doesn’t get to get away with this just because we’re a small force. We’ll find our girl.”

After thanking the other man and hanging up, Adam said, “You should only need to review the first half hour after her abduction,” to Eleri.

“That’s how long it took for the news to get to me and my wings to get out onto the road.

” After checking his phone, he told her the exact time his falcons had reported in as having their roadblocks up and running.

Eleri nodded. “Once I’ve scanned that half hour, I’ll go back, review movements at night—just in case I’m wrong and he isn’t based in Raintree, but came into the town in preparation.”

Adam saw the sense in that. “While you’re at the station I’m going to check on the roadblocks, then fly a wider circle, look for and investigate any places where he could be keeping Malia.”

“Don’t disregard ordinary neighborhood garages, sheds, anyplace where only one person has relatively private access. I’ll make a list of those with the assistance of the cops and Mi-ja. She’ll know.”

“I’ll attach a small comm device to my leg in falcon form,” Adam said. “It acts like a long-range beeper and will alert me to priority messages on my phone. Call me the instant you get anything.”

She nodded again…then hugged him tight, her thin body tense with determination. “We’ll bring Malia home. I promise.”

I don’t make promises I don’t intend to keep.

Crushing her to him, Adam said, “I know,” his faith in her absolute.

···

When she called Tim, the task force lead said, “I really wish your instincts had been wrong, Eleri.”

“Me, too.”

“We’ll run every search we can on the residents of Raintree, see if we can pinpoint anything that might give you a starting point. See you in a few hours.”

Once at the Enforcement station, it took Eleri only five minutes to get the traffic surveillance up and running on the station’s two large screens. Four feeds, two from either end of the main road in and out of Raintree, the others from the two major intersections in the town.

Seventy-two-hour memory capacity.

The latter pair of feeds would be unhelpful at this juncture—too much local traffic, no way to tell the origin or destination of the vehicles.

Calling Dahlia, she explained the situation. “If we can run and clear all the vehicles heading in or out of Raintree in that critical half-hour window, we might be able to confirm whether Malia is still in town.”

“We have enough people to do all four at the same time,” Dahlia said. “But we can run the data on the intersections after we’ve cleared the main route.”

After a short discussion, they worked it out so the falcons would review the taped section of the feed, which Eleri was able to forward to them; the reviewers would in turn send Eleri the plate numbers as well as the makes and models of all the vehicles they spotted in the relevant window of time.

Eleri would then use her J Corps credentials to log into Enforcement’s ID database to run the vehicles.

“We begin from the time of Malia’s abduction,” she said.

“We can always go backward later, check for vehicles coming in. Right now, we need to know if she’s here or if we need to be looking for a vehicle on the road.

” The girl had been gone for over an hour now, the clock counting down at frightening speed.