“Probably why he was wearing long sleeves in the middle of July,” Michael commented. “Wonder if the long pants were for the same reason?”

“More tats?” Byers asked.

Michael shrugged. “Possibly.”

Jamie’d had enough of being on her back and having people speak down to her. “Sit me up.”

Michael gently pulled her into a sitting position and steadied her with a hand on her back. And left it there. Its heat soaking into her skin felt heavenly.

“I don’t recall getting a glimpse of his legs or even ankles.” Jamie mentally reviewed her struggles with the assailant. “But he looked weird.”

“Define weird.” Michael’s lips curved up on the right.

She paused. “His eyes weren’t right. The color seemed fake.”

“Lenses?” Byers asked.

She nodded slowly. “Maybe. It was the same with the hair. The color seemed forced. Like a home dye job.”

“Christ. Vain,” Michael said wryly. “Can’t handle a little gray hair?”

“Maybe his hair was actually really dark, almost black. And he lightened it to throw her off. Same with the eyes. Maybe they’re brown or hazel,” Byers theorized. “You feel positive about the colors being changed? I mean, I had no idea my wife’s been coloring her hair for the last five years until her sister mentioned it. How can you tell?”

Uncertainty crept into Jamie’s brain. Maybe she was wrong. “Women look at hair. Most men don’t. It’s just a gut instinct with this guy.” She fumbled about for a way to explain. “You asked for his hair color. I pictured it and stated what I remembered, but something bugged me about my answer. I think it didn’t feel accurate because I’d imperceptibly picked up that it was colored. And that didn’t register till a minute ago.”

Both men stared at her. Byers’s pencil hung motionless above his notebook.

“Women can tell these things,” she asserted.

Byers recited as he wrote in his notebook: “Female instinct says hair colored and colored contacts.”

Gerald crammed his latex gloves in his pants pocket. That hadn’t gone well.

Rephrase that. It’d been a fucking disaster.

Sitting in his car in the McDonald’s parking lot, he sucked on a Coke and took inventory of his injuries. His legs were going to be bruised for a week, and he had a finger sprain that’d swollen to twice its size. Damn thing had better not be broken.

Christ, she’d fought hard.

He’d never had a woman fight so hard. Surprisingly, in the past it’d been the women who put up the biggest fights. For some reason the men hadn’t. Maybe he’d simply picked men who didn’t mind being victims. The women had all minded. For prostitutes, they’d pissed off easily when they realized things weren’t going as planned.

Jacobs had surprised the crap out of him when she returned early from her run. From his observations, this woman never varied her routine. He should have left. Attacking her hadn’t been the smartest move, but he’d been frustrated with his empty search of the house. And his “interrogation” hadn’t accomplished anything either.

Except that the Jacobs woman had seen his face.

It didn’t matter.

He bit at the inside of his cheek. It didn’t matter. He kept his hair colored and his real eye color covered up. Maybe it was time for a change? Darken the hair a bit? Eyes too? He had every contact lens color available. He usually stuck to nondescript blues and greens. The people he worked with never noticed that his eye color slightly varied some days. Lots of people’s eyes normally do that.

No fucking way was he telling his boss that she’d seen him.

And he still didn’t know where Chris Jacobs was. He’d found nothing in the house. No addresses, no mail, no pictures. Nothing that indicated she had a brother.

If she hadn’t said she didn’t know where Chris was living, he’d almost think the guy was dead. People don’t vanish. There’s always a record, somewhere.

Now what?

Angry pale jade eyes filled his brain. She’d been scared, but determination had also shone from those eyes. Jamie Jacobs was quite a specimen. She was tall and lean and fit. No spare fat on that woman’s body. He could still feel her muscles under his fingertips. And her long, glossy dark hair. She reminded him of her brother a little bit. Chris Jacobs had been tall and lanky. Well, he’d grown tall and lanky during his two years. To start with, he’d been kind of a pudgy kid. At the end, both boys had been incredibly thin. Gerald had found it was easier to control them if they didn’t have much energy. He kept their calorie intake at a minimum.

How they both had managed to escape was a mystery.

Their escape was a personal affront to him. A score he’d wanted to settle for a long time. No one else had ever humiliated him like that. Not since he was a teen.

He’d been visiting the boys about once a week before they vanished. His day job was a nine-to-five requirement, and sometimes he was simply too tired to make the long drive to visit the boys. Truth be told, just thinking about his captives in their prison was enough mental fantasy fuel to get him to the weekend. He’d kept people before. Adults. Both men and women. People he’d found on the streets of Portland or Salem who seemed like they wouldn’t be readily missed.

Disposable people.

Male or female didn’t matter to him too much. Both were useful. Both served the needs he had. He’d been surprised to find that almost-teen boys worked as well. The younger children he’d snatched were a waste of time. He’d disposed of them quickly. But the older boys…that had been different.