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his voice deepened and he held the edge of his desk, knuckles white, anger about the old case still evident.
    Kidnapped from her bedroom.
    In a low, emotion-filled voice, Tony said, “It was one of those cases that stay with you because it was senseless and so many lives were ruined.”
    â€œDid you catch the killer?”
    â€œBenjamin John Kreig. He’s serving life without parole.” Tony rolled his shoulders and leaned back in his chair, purposefully relaxing. Lucy had often done the same thing. If she could relax her body, she could relax her mind.
    But Lucy was focused on what Tony had said.
    Kidnapped from her bedroom and murdered.
    â€œLucy?” Tony prodded.
    â€œYou know my nephew was killed when I was seven.”
    By Tony’s expression, he had known. Lucy didn’t expect that her life was private, however much she tried to keep her past to herself. Just one more reminder that she’d never escape.
    Lucy continued, “Justin was a few days younger than me, and sometimes I made him call me Aunt Lucy just to tease him. I was closer to him than my brothers and sisters, who were all older than me. My sister, Justin’s mom, grieved so long, she couldn’t stay in San Diego. She moved to Idaho and became a hermit for more than a decade. She called our mom once a week, but Mom was always so sad afterwards, because Nelia wasn’t really living. Justin’s murder changed all of us. Dillon, for example, changed his focus from sports medicine to forensic psychiatry. When I asked him why, he said he wanted to understand what happened to Justin.”
    â€œIs that what drives you? Answers?”
    â€œMaybe.” No.
    â€œJustice?”
    Maybe. “I can’t sit by and let bad things happen.”
    â€œIf we can save one, we have succeeded.”
    But there would always be evil in the world, and there would always be victims. “If it was just saving one person, I don’t think I would be here,” Lucy said truthfully. “Putting killers and rapists in prison saves all their potential victims. It’s not so much justice I crave as protecting innocents.”
    Lucy asked, “Did you talk to Weber about your case?”
    â€œNo. She wrote most of the articles about the investigation and trial, and I didn’t like how she sensationalized the tragedy. The parents deserved to be exposed, but they had lost their daughter, and they realized they were culpable.”
    Her stomach turned at all the awful possibilities of parental involvement in the girl’s death. “How so?”
    â€œThe McMahons were swingers. They had a party the night their daughter Rachel was killed. They lied about the nature of the party. The critical hours that Rachel was missing immediately after she was abducted were wasted because they misled first the responding officer, then the FBI. Their nine-year-old son was the one who finally told me about the party.”
    Lucy frowned. “He knew what was going on?”
    â€œUnfortunately. Once we confronted the parents and interviewed witnesses, we learned that Krieg hadn’t been invited to the party but two guests saw him. At first he denied being there, so it was easy to bring him in for questioning. It took sixteen hours to break him, but he eventually led us to her body. Six days after he killed her.”
    Lucy absorbed the information with both revulsion and interest. “And Weber wrote a book?”
    â€œShe focused on the sensational—the swinger parties, the history between Aaron and Pilar McMahon, the guests at the parties—and the worst was that, as far as I was concerned, she kept bringing it back to Rachel being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Which was just asinine considering she was in her own bedroom in the middle of the night.”
    Tony pounded his fist once on the desk, then looked at his clenched fingers and slowly stretched them. “I refused to help her after reading