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She headed through to the kitchen and saw him at the stove, head bowed over the pot, wearing the plaid shirt and slippers he liked to wear at home.
"Well, hello," she said, breathing in the aroma of food even more intensely now. "It was so nice coming home to this. Thank you."
She walked up to him. He turned. And Shiree took one astonished, appalled glance at the man who faced her.
It wasn't her husband. She took this in with a shocked, disbelieving gasp. This was not Evan's slightly weathered, pleasant face with the pale blue eyes and the messy fringe of brown hair.
It was someone else. Someone with a different expression in their eyes. Someone who was not holding a wooden spoon or a ladle in their hand as she had expected.
He was holding a knife.
Shiree screamed. A shrill, terrified sound. Her mind felt bludgeoned by shock as if reality had twisted on its axis and become nightmare.
He raised the knife, smiling slightly. That upward curve of this stranger’s thin lips was the evilest expression she'd ever seen. And finally, it was that expression that propelled her into action.
Gasping in panic, her stockinged feet slipping on the tiles, Shiree turned and fled. She ran for the front door, knowing that she had to get out, had to get away. She screamed again, calling for help, desperate to alert someone, or else for her voice to somehow shatter this waking nightmare.
She could hear his footsteps thudding behind her. She bolted for the front door and flung herself at the handle, knowing she had only a moment to get out.
It was locked. In a surge of panic, she remembered what she'd done and how she'd turned the key, thinking critically of her husband's carelessness. Now, her fingers were clumsy with terror, and she fumbled to open it, screaming again, hearing the footsteps in agonizing slow motion as this terrifying scene played out.
Her fingers slipped.
The key jingled to the floor. In her terror, she'd knocked it out of the lock.
"No! No, please!"
A plan flitted into her mind. She could turn, beg, and plead with him, somehow manage to save herself. But before she could do that, she felt a sudden, sharp pain in her back that seemed to pierce right through her body.
And then, abruptly, her knees became weak, and the world went dark.
CHAPTER ONE
Cami Lark couldn't believe it. She was here.
She got off the bus, slinging her laptop bag over her shoulder, and stepped out into the cool, breezy fall afternoon.
Just a few houses away, down this innocuous looking road in this quiet suburb an hour out of Boston, was where the ex-FBI agent Liam Treverton lived. He was the person who'd mishandled her sister Jenna's missing person case.
Cami felt a chill in the air and an equivalent coldness shivering its way down her spine as she stared in the direction of house number twenty. That was his place, the man she thought of as her bitter enemy. Her green eyes narrowed in hatred as she saw where he lived, where he actually lived. This man who'd been fired from the FBI for “conduct unbecoming.” That had been a couple of years after getting no results on Jenna's strangely incomplete case six years ago. So, maybe he’d had other misdoings on his record too.
There might be more to it. Cami suspected more, which was why she was here.
She was taking every precaution. She had been careful to look different when she arrived. If he happened to see a twenty-one-year-old girl with tattoos, piercings, and a black-dyed, partially shaven hairstyle lurking near his home, he might remember her later.
She couldn't afford for him to remember her, because she was a full-scholarship student at MIT about to do her final exams. And she was on call to the FBI to help them with cases in a bargain deal after they'd caught her hacking their website—which she’d done to show how angry she was about her sister's case.
But being with the FBI as an IT specialist on certain cases had allowed Cami to find out, at last, who’d been in charge of that case.
For this trip, she'd hidden her hair and her ear piercings under a black woolen beanie that staved off the chill, and she'd put on plain blue jeans and a dark fleece jacket. The only part of her usual wardrobe she hadn't compromised on were her trusty Doc Martens.
It was a simple, double-story home in a quiet neighborhood of similar homes. The houses all looked picture book, with their neat lawns, flowerbeds, and their pretty trees, with leaves now in their russet-gold fall glory.
Cami's lips tightened and she shook her head. She felt her anger rising. Her sister was missing, and she'd been missing for six years. Her life was most likely over. And yet, Liam Treverton was living his in a comfortable house in a good neighborhood with, presumably, a well-paying job, even though he didn't work for the FBI anymore.
In the last few days, she'd been planning her trip here. Because, she thought, this was the place where everything was going to change. Cami walked up to the house, clenching, and unclenching her fists, steeling herself.
Maybe now, she thought, she'd get some answers.
