Joe turned away first.

“Hey,” Rick had said. “We need a pact. We need to agree to never talk to anyone about this.”

Troy glanced at the other faces. “We need to go to the police,” he whispered.

“No! Rick’s right,” Carson stated. He held his hand, palm down, in the center of the circle of boys. “We all swear right now to never speak of this again.”

Rick laid his hand over Carson’s. “I swear.” He met Troy’s gaze, his own triumphant.

Of course you swear. You’re the one who did this.

Aaron’s hand joined the other two. “I swear to never breathe a word of what happened.”

Troy glanced at Joe, whose hand slowly covered the rest. “I swear,” he said in a small voice.

Troy did the same. His brain screaming for him to run to the police as his mouth proclaimed, “I swear.” The other boys looked relieved.

Rick dug out the knife he’d used to cut Colleen’s wrists. “This needs blood.” He ran the blade across his palm and a thin line of red welled. He let it drip over the other boys’ hands. Aaron and Carson immediately presented their palms. Rick looked expectantly at Joe and Troy. They reluctantly turned over their hands.

The blade stung and Troy blinked back tears. Rick rubbed his palm against it, and Troy placed his hand back in the messy pile.

“We’ve sworn in blood,” Rick said in a harsh voice. “No one speaks about it or they face the same punishment that was given to her.”

Troy’s head jerked up. Punishment?

“Wh-what?” asked Joe, his wide eyes rapidly blinking.

“We swear to punish whoever speaks of this. This is a pact we have to take to the grave.”

Fingers of fear strangled Troy’s spine. How did this happen?

“I swear,” said Carson and Aaron together. They looked at Troy and Joe.

“I swear,” Troy forced out at the same time as Joe. The look in Rick’s eyes terrified him. Troy would have sworn to anything at that very moment, because he knew that Rick would use his knife across Troy’s neck to protect himself.

“Good. Let’s clean up,” suggested Carson, taking charge again. “Break off some branches to sweep the ground and get rid of our footprints. Let’s work our way back to the site. Look carefully. Let’s not leave anything behind.”

Aaron shoved a fir branch in Troy’s hands, and he started to automatically brush at the footprints. He walked backward, moving farther and farther away from Colleen. The other boys were silent, concentrating on their work.

Colleen’s body slowly rotated from the rope in the quiet woods. Troy’s last glimpse was of the back of her burned, shorn skull.

Zander watched Mason pace in the old conference room in the Yamhill County Sheriff’s Office. Ray sat next to Zander in one of the rock-hard plastic chairs and cracked his knuckles until Mason shot him a dirty look. Ray sighed and shifted his muscle-bound bulk. Zander felt like a stick next to the former college football player.

The VICAP hit had led them to the sheriff’s office that had investigated the young woman’s death. Neither he nor Mason nor Ray recalled the case, which was surprising. An attack that violent on a young woman should have received a hell of a lot of publicity, and all three of them had lived in Northwest Oregon at the time of the crime.

Zander’s media checks had uncovered only small local stories about the death. The crime hadn’t made it to the larger Portland area news stations or newspapers. Instead a bombing of a federal building by American terrorists had dominated the headlines. Yamhill County was relatively small in population, primarily made up of rural towns. It sat southwest of Portland, outside the crowded suburban areas. Farms dominated much of the county.

“Where is he?” Ray muttered.

Zander glanced at his phone. They’d been waiting ten minutes for the county detective who’d handled the case. The man was probably digging the case file out of storage and refreshing his memory, concerned that the FBI and state police were going to look for errors in his investigation.

“Joe Upton grew up in Newberg. That’s only a dozen miles from where this young woman was found,” said Mason, briefly pausing in his pacing.

“Right,” said Zander. “But he moved away about two years after this murder happened. I gave his name to Detective Kenner. We’ll see if they had any encounters with Joe or his family.”

Mason looked haggard. He hadn’t mentioned Ava’s name for quite a while, but Zander could tell his stress level was in the danger zone. Mason was the type to internalize his anxiety and focus on the work at hand. Zander was the same way. Logically he knew the best way to get Ava back was to solve the crime at hand. Find the Bridge Killer; find Ava. Quickly.

But he saw it was eating Mason from the inside out. The man was head over cowboy boots in love and to know Ava was in danger and out of reach could push him over the edge. Mason was the type who needed action; he needed to see that progress was being made.

Zander understood perfectly. A silent, invisible killer had taken his wife. She’d fought hard while Zander was powerless to do more than hold her hand and cry with her. He’d wanted to see the assailant and strangle it, destroy it the way it was destroying his wife. Instead she’d wasted away over a matter of months, her doctors admitting she had no way to win.

Nothing compares to that lack of power when a loved one is being hurt. But not knowing what’d happened to Ava McLane was coming in a close second. The tortured bodies of the Bridge Killer’s victims kept flashing through Zander’s mind.