He had to do something before it got out of hand. But what?

He felt like he was trying hold on to a fish as it squirmed and wiggled. Things were sliding out of his control, and he was in an unfamiliar position. Powerless.

Who was doing this to him?

Jack paced the perimeter of his office, hands deep in his pockets as he concentrated. He needed more information. Some big pieces of the puzzle were missing. He was tempted to call the reporter, Michael Brody, but he knew better. The timing couldn’t be worse. Besides, anything he asked Brody about would turn up in the man’s next article.

He thought of Lacey Campbell and her dark brown eyes. The one victim who escaped the killing hand of DeCosta. She was as deeply involved as he was. Maybe she could answer some questions. Like why Trenton’s badge had been with the Mills remains, and why both were hidden on his property.

His mind was a mass of confusing, tightening knots.

He had to fight back, make a stand. But how?

He needed to go back to the beginning, to over a decade ago, when this mess all began. The best source was the person who’d been there. Hopefully, Lacey Campbell had some insight about the past, and why it was colliding with the present. He knew exactly where he could track her down. His questions for the protection of his business were the only reasons he’d seek her out.

Not because her brown eyes had been haunting him for two days.

The two dead girls were severely burned. Caught in a fire while sleeping in an abandoned, decrepit Portland house that had pulled in runaways like a magnet. Cheap barbeques had been used for heat while ten to thirty kids slept on the dirty floors each night. It was a well-known location to score every imaginable drug. Each week police cleaned out the house, scattering kids and drugs, but both always came back. Boarded-up windows and doors were nothing to determined teens searching for a place to escape the freezing temps.

Lacey paused before hitting the auto button on the double door to one of the bright, sterile autopsy suites of the medical examiner’s building. Burn victims. Her legs shook slightly as she squeezed her eyes shut and sucked in deep breaths. She’d rather do floaters than burns. She shoved two cotton rolls up her nose under her mask. The scent of burned flesh had a freaky way of making her stomach growl that just seemed wrong. Clutching her clipboard to her chest, she hit the auto button with a hip.

Her father’s silver head bent over a body. The smell seeped through her cotton rolls and she stopped just inside the door.

“Hey, there. You want to take a look first? Jerry already took the films for you.” Dr. Campbell straightened and twisted his back with an audible series of cracks.

“I’ll be quick.” She nodded at Jerry, her dad’s assistant, who recorded weights and measurements on a chalkboard as her father called them out. She commanded her legs to cross the room.

Standing next to the metal table, her digital camera tight in one hand, she studied the length of the pale body that contrasted with the blackened skin of the head. The hands were as severely burned as the head, but the rest of the body wasn’t too bad. Clothes and shoes must have offered some protection. The girl’s hair was mostly gone. Its color not readily obvious. Looked black, maybe Goth. Maybe simply burned.

“Smoke inhalation?” Her voice sounded high.

“Probably. I’ll know soon.”

Soon was right. Dr. Campbell drove through autopsies like Jeff Gordon. He was incredible to watch. His hands steady and sure as he whipped through the Y-cut and peeled back the flesh. He snapped the ribs with pruners identical to the ones Lacey used on her trees and sliced up each organ like the tomatoes on the Ginsu commercial, checking for abnormalities. Every body was handled with dignity; every body was given his best work. Her father was a physically and emotionally skilled examiner.

He opened the jaws of the burned girl for her. Lacey flicked on the digital recorder clipped to her waterproof gown and pointed a tiny, powerful flashlight into the gaping cavity.

Just look at the teeth.

“You need a shield,” her father stated.

Jerry reached over and slipped the band of a clear face shield onto her head, the plastic covering her from forehead to chin. He grinned and winked through his own shield. She already had on protective glasses and a mask, and now she felt like she was in a hazmat suit. She didn’t complain. Dead bodies could expel freaky things at surprising moments.

She quickly took pictures of both arches while her father pulled lips and cheeks out of the way, burned skin tissue peeling and flaking at the movements. Using a dental mirror, she did a quick check of the palate, tongue, and soft tissues, looking for any abnormalities. Her stomach settling, she rattled off the restorations into her recorder.

“Six through eleven have veneers.” Her eyebrows rose. “Same with the anteriors on the mandible. Twenty-two through twenty-seven. No other restorations, but victim had had obvious orthodontics. Posteriors show decalcification on the posterior buccal surfaces in the shape of ortho brackets. Probably used the veneers to cover the scarring on the anterior teeth.” Her heart dropped. “Somebody spent a lot of money on this kid’s teeth,” she whispered.

Her father nodded. “Coat and boots were expensive too.”

Eleven antemortem dental charts lay on her desk back in her office. Charts requested for comparison to the current victims in the morgue by grieving parents with runaway teenage daughters. Lacey hadn’t looked at the charts. She liked to complete her postmortem workup and then compare to the charts. But she had a hunch this was the daughter of the big software executive. The girl had run off two months ago. Her perky picture and wide perfect smile had been plastered on the five o’clock news for a week.