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appetite—especially at night during a storm. Screams would be swallowed by the wind; shouts for help snatched away and consumed by the landscape.
    It was the perfect place to kill. The perfect place to get rid of a body.
    This region was generally considered safe. Low crime rate. Low density of permanent residents over the winter months. Was it a local? He didn’t know yet. People imagined a killer would stick out, but they rarely did, unless they were psychotic. Then they were usually easy to track from the wild eyes and blood trails.
    He raised the collar of his FBI windbreaker but it did little to keep out the icy breeze. His navy-blue, fine wool three-piece suit might be sufficient for the office but it wasn’t designed for facing down a winter squall. When he’d awoken this morning the last thing he’d expected was a road trip to a windswept island.
    Life was full of surprises.
    The scene below was textbook how-not-to-preserve-a-crime scene, and he didn’t bother disguising a sigh. From what he understood, they didn’t even have photographs. At eight AM that morning an officer from the Department of Natural Resources had seen a car parked illegally on the side of the road and gone to investigate. The guy had found the naked body of his own seventeen-year-old daughter and that of a badly beaten young man. He’d tried unsuccessfully to revive his kid. When EMTs arrived they’d rushed both victims to the ER hoping they could be saved. Miraculously, the young man had been. The girl was DOA.
    Frazer pushed away his compassion for the man. What was done was done, and nothing he could say would ease his burden. Doing his job might, but that job included viewing the father as a potential suspect.
    The father, the EMTs, the cops, and not to mention the weather, had degraded the integrity of the scene, making his job infinitely more difficult. What remained was churned up sand, a pair of jeans turned inside out, underwear, a t-shirt, socks, a wallet lying open, a down jacket, and a spade. The items had likely been shifted from their original position, but they all needed to be catalogued and entered into the chain of evidence so they could at least be analyzed by forensics and used in court should it come to that.
    Frazer’s job was to make sure it came to that.
    A pewter sky stretched overhead, ominous clouds boiling with suppressed energy. Rain might destroy even more evidence, and they had precious little to start with. Crime scene techs were photographing the area inch by inch. The clothing and the autopsy would hopefully reveal who’d done this to the teens, but it was certainly not Ferris Denker. He sat rotting on Death Row in Ridgeville, South Carolina, four hundred miles away.
    Maybe, when Jesse Tyson woke up, he’d name the attacker or attackers, and fast-forward the investigation, getting the perpetrator off the streets before anyone else was hurt. Assuming the kid wasn’t in a coma or brain damaged.
    Even without seeing the bodies, Frazer could imagine the sort of harrowing experience the teenagers had probably endured. He eyed the girl’s clothes. He’d been told there were indications she’d been raped, but he’d know more later, after the autopsy. The kids had been treated like garbage, vessels for the unsub’s personal gratification and pleasure. The elements should have killed them, and the bastard had known it.
    People called these perpetrators monsters, but they were just humans, humans who did inhuman things. Psychopaths who knew better, and did it anyway.
    What would having a live victim do to this unsub?
    Frazer narrowed his eyes. They’d need security on the boy until they figured out exactly how, but they could use that. He needed to talk to the teen as soon as he woke up. The attack would leave a mark. What kind of mark depended on the young man himself. At the age of fifteen, Frazer’s own world had shattered when his parents had been murdered during a home invasion. He’d never gone