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There she is.

Captured in fleeting seconds of blurred security video, staring in horror. Frozen in the single frame, her face filled the monitor of Luke’s laptop.

Using every tool at his disposal, Derek had skillfully extracted from a blizzard of dots, a sharper, colored enlargement. The woman appeared to be white, in her midtwenties, with high cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes. Her dark hair was partially matted from the rain, and strands snaked off wildly as she rose from the ditch.

“Luke?” Derek’s face asked from the small upper-right corner window of Luke’s monitor. “Did you get it?”

“I’m looking at it. I— Wow. This is incredible.”

“It’s the strongest image I could pull from the footage. I did some enhancing and adjusting. I sent you a secondary image I worked on as well.”

Luke clicked on an enhanced full-body photo of the woman in the rain. Head to toe. Pink shirt, jeans.

Here she is.

The woman I hit. The woman who may or may not be alive.

Seeing her made it real, overwhelming him, quickening his pulse.

“Luke?”

He was at a loss.

“Luke, buddy, are you okay? Are we okay doing this? Is this part of an investigation?”

“Sorry, yes. It’s okay. It’s something I’m looking into quietly—it might be connected to a crime, but I’m not sure yet. I really can’t thank you enough for this, Derek.” The truth of that night trembling over him, he asked: “So what’s next? Who is she?”

Derek half laughed to himself. “So far, we have a face but no name. But I’m confident our photo is strong enough to query databases to help determine who she is.”

“Can you do that and still keep it on the q.t.?”

“It’ll be a challenge.”

Derek explained how facial recognition worked: a subject’s features were compared against millions of others in a range of databases. Computers then provided a list of candidates for a potential match. But a human examiner analyzed them to determine if there was a match.

“Sounds time-consuming,” Luke said.

“It can be,” Derek said. “And since this is not a formal investigation and we’re doing it under the radar, it becomes dicey.”

“Right,” Luke sighed.

“I have contacts across the country.”

“But I don’t want to get others involved until we know exactly what we have.”

“Don’t worry. I got friends who owe me. I’ll take care of getting it queried through national databases, DMVs, missing persons, military, deceased identification, criminal histories, parole, corrections, everything. All on the down-low.”

“What can I do?”

“You can be the amateur examiner, manually checking our images safely against the local databases and open-source sites you have easy access to—wanted, missing person databases, whatever.”

“I can do that.”

“I’ll get things moving on my end. Buddy, I gotta go.”

“I appreciate this.”

“No worries.”

Derek’s face vanished, leaving Luke alone with the image of the mystery woman.

Staring at her pulled him back to that night. Blood pulsed in his brain, elevating the reality of the instant he’d struck her. The sickening thud, her face streaking over his windshield.

He swallowed hard. She definitely wasn’t Brenda Gwen Jones, Raylin Nash’s ex. So he could rule her out.

Whoever she was, Luke begged heaven to let her be alive.

Searching her face for answers, he felt time running out on him. Yes, he’d been monumentally stupid about the way he was handling this. Stupid about everything. Ensnared by panic, paranoia, post-traumatic stress, fear and guilt, he’d taken too many risks and let it go on for too long. Sooner or later, someone was going to find out.

His palms were sweating, just like they were when he killed the young mother in LA.

He fought to think. There was another aspect here. Rec-ords from the cell tower warrants showing cell phone numbers should be coming in soon. He opened the full-body photo of the woman in the rain. Then, from the kitchen table, through the window, he glimpsed Carrie’s SUV arriving.

Closing his laptop, he went to the front door. She’d gotten groceries. He hurried out to help while she got Emily from her car seat.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi. You take her; I’ll get the groceries.”

She passed the baby to him. Luke kissed his daughter, then joined Carrie. “Let me take some,” he said, one-handing bags while holding Emily.

After they got everything into the kitchen together, Luke set Emily down to play with toys. He glanced at Carrie. Rooted where she stood, the full grocery bags before her on the counter, she stared in silence at nothing.

“Carrie?”

She didn’t move.

“You okay?”

Without speaking, she waved off his concern.

“Carrie, what is it? Tell me.”

She took in a shaky breath.

“I went to the dance hall today and…and…”

“What happened?”

“Memories came back.” She buried her face in her hands. “Awful memories about Abby and Erin.”

“What memories?”

“I can’t—I can’t.”

Luke looked at her for a long moment.

“Carrie, I know I’ve been distracted.” His voice was soft. “Like I’ve checked out, and I haven’t been supportive when you need me.”

She stared at him in silent confirmation, inviting him to continue.

“And these new patches of remembering that have come to you, especially after the execution and all the media attention—I know things have been hard for you, and we haven’t talked, and I’m sorry. For everything. You know you can talk to me.”

Carrie nodded, and soon her shoulders shook as she cried. Luke held her as Emily stared up from the floor at her mom and dad.

At that moment, Carrie’s phone vibrated on the counter, the screen blooming with a text from Opal Wells.

Hi Carrie: It’s Opal. Sorry I missed coming over before. Want to meet for coffee soon? I came across something you should see.