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Coughing, Roger tried to rise, but the traitor kicked him between the legs three times with steel-toed boots. Excruciating pain froze him. It was worse than when he’d been raped in prison. And then, he’d had his revenge. This time he wouldn’t get the chance. Panic and self-preservation rose with the pain as he tried to stand, only to be knocked back down.
“Mr. Morton.” The quiet, cultured voice didn’t belong to his attacker. Roger hadn’t heard another man approach, and the idea that two—or more—men stood over him made him tremble even as he tried to get up one last time.
A boot in his balls had him seeing nothing. He almost didn’t hear the slide of the nine-millimeter.
“I wish this hurt you more, but in this case expediency is more important than my personal satisfaction at seeing you suffer. Rot in Hell, bastard.”
Roger Morton was dead before he registered the sound of the gunshot.
ONE
Present Day
Brad Prenter thought he had a get-out-of-jail-free card, but Lucy Kincaid would set him straight.
She glanced at the clock on her computer and frowned. It was nearly six, and she’d promised her brother Patrick she wouldn’t be late after canceling their dinner plans twice last week.
“Come on, come on,” she muttered as she split the large screen into six open chat windows that she could monitor simultaneously. “You’ve been here every day this week at five. Why are you late tonight?”
Out of the corner of her eye, Lucy saw Women and Children First! director Frances Buckley walking toward her desk. Fran had retired from the FBI nine years ago after putting in twenty-five years, and though she was sixty, she looked and acted a decade younger. After Lucy had started volunteering for WCF three years ago, Fran quickly became her mentor. She’d written a glowing recommendation letter for Lucy’s FBI job application and had helped her prepare for both the written and verbal tests. And for the last three months, Fran had helped Lucy cope with the anxiety of waiting to hear whether she’d made it to the next stage in the hiring process.
Lucy didn’t allow herself to think that she could be rejected. Still, she knew the process could take months, and not knowing either way was frustrating. For the last six years, all she’d wanted was to be an FBI agent. Everything she’d done—her double major in psychology and computer science; her internships with the U.S. Senate, the Arlington County Sheriff’s Department, and now the D.C. Medical Examiner’s Office; her volunteer work at high schools and here at WCF—was calculated to help her get into the FBI. She hoped the hiring panel could see that what she’d learned would make her a strong addition to the Bureau.
Fran put a hand on the back of Lucy’s chair. “Tick-tock. It’s six o’clock, Lucy.”
“Five more minutes. Prenter isn’t online yet, and he always logs on in the late afternoon.”
“Life happens. You can’t sit here all night waiting for him. You have a life, too. Don’t you have dinner plans with your brother tonight?”
“Yes, but—”
“Lucy, Prenter will be here tomorrow.”
She said, “I have some time—twenty minutes and I’ll make it to Clyde’s by seven.”
“If you sprint to the Metro.”
“I’m a fast runner.” She smiled at Fran, mentally crossing her fingers.
The older woman shook her head but returned the smile. “I’ll pull the plug if you’re still here at six-fifteen.”
That wasn’t an idle threat—Fran had literally cut the power before. Lucy crossed her heart with her right index finger and blew Fran a kiss before she turned back to the fast-moving chat rooms.
WCF had a secure bank of computers, as secure and untraceable as any in the FBI, where they investigated the illegal sexual exploitation of women and children. When they collected enough evidence to identify a victim or perpetrator, they turned over the files to the FBI or local police for further investigation.
Aside from their primary charter, WCF tracked paroled sex offenders. By law, felony sex offenders had to register with local law enforcement after release from prison and with every subsequent change of residency.
Yet, depending on the state, on average half of all sex offenders required to register either never did or moved and didn’t re-register. These parolees were the most likely to commit another sex-related crime, and therefore were the target of WCF’s tracking project. Creatures of habit, these guys often made small changes to their online profiles but still targeted the same types of children or women; they thought because they’d moved to another town or state, they wouldn’t be discovered. And if it were solely up to law enforcement, the predators would be right: they’d get away with it. There wasn’t enough time or manpower to track down every sex offender who skipped registration.
For her master’s thesis, Lucy had deduced that while most sexual predators may modify their behavior after serving time in prison, usually these changes were superficial. They could still be identified by vigilant trackers by scientifically breaking down the creeps’ past activities: how they were caught, coupled with their victim preference—which rarely changed after incarceration. Lucy’s research told her that predators could still be spotted even if they changed their location or online identities. Since graduating, she had continued to develop her database to incorporate all known data as well as a psychological scale that factored in minor behavioral changes. The more information she added, the more powerful—and effective—the system became.
Groups like WCF could use their private resources and volunteers to identify predators online and, if a parolee, it was much easier to put a predator back in prison if he violated parole. Lucy’s database, though still technically in beta testing, had been instrumental in finding and tracking parolees most likely to reoffend, resulting in more than a dozen arrests to date.
For the past two weeks, Lucy had been working on one specific parolee, Brad Prenter, a convicted rapist who’d been paroled after serving only half his time. Normally, WCF targeted predators who hunted children and skipped town after parole, but Prenter was a special case. He used homemade GHB—Liquid X—on his dates. Mixed with alcohol, GHB was especially dangerous. The victim who’d sent him to jail—a Virginia college freshman he’d met because he was the teaching assistant in her chemistry class—had had the wherewithal to text her roommate when she started feeling strange. Otherwise Prenter would most likely have gotten away with his crime.
During the investigation leading up to his trial, authorities learned that Prenter had been suspected of raping another girl in his hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, but there had not been enough evidence to go to trial. He’d given that victim such a high dose of GHB that it had left her in a coma. Due to a delayed investigation—the police weren’t immediately called, because the hospital didn’t find signs of forced sex and didn’t initially test for date-rape drugs—Prenter had time to dispose of his home chemistry lab.
There had been circumstantial evidence that Prenter targeted other victims online. He’d hook up, drug and rape them, then drop them at their house. Waking up, the women remembered very little. The only reason Prenter’s name came up in another investigation was because a friend of the victim had seen him with her the night she was raped.
