My heart clenched, and my gut twisted. What now?

   Bria frowned. “Do you mean . . .”

   Ryan gave a sharp nod. “Yeah.”

   “And you think that this girl . . .”

   “Yes. Unfortunately.”

   I looked back and forth between the two of them, not understanding their shorthand sentences, but they stared at each other instead of me, once again having some silent conversation that I couldn’t follow.

   “What’s going on?” I asked.

   Bria sighed. “Nothing good.”

   Ryan turned to me. “Follow me, please, and I’ll explain it all.”

   • • •

   Curious and more than a little wary, I followed Ryan out of his office and through the waiting room, with Bria trailing along behind me. Sophia and Jade were gone, although Sophia had left a note on the waiting room table saying that they were in the restroom and would be back in a few minutes.

   Ryan left the waiting room and led us down a couple of hallways before stopping in front of an old wooden door that was set in the very back corner of this level. I looked over at Bria, but her face was grim, and she stood right alongside Ryan like the two of them were soldiers in some battle that no one else even knew about.

   There was no sound this far back in the basement, not even the faint hum of the distant elevators or the gurgle of water running through the overhead pipes. The air was absolutely still and even colder here than it had been in his office, as though this part of the basement was completely cut off from all heat, life, and ventilation.

   Ryan pulled out a ring of keys, flipped through them, and stuck one of them into the lock. He opened the door and stepped aside so that Bria and I could enter first. Then he slipped into the room behind us, closed the door, and hit the switch on the wall.

   The overhead lights slowly winked on one by one, as if waking up from a long winter’s nap. I blinked against the harsh glare and studied the area before me. Floor-to-ceiling metal shelves covered all the walls, and several more free-standing shelves took up a good portion of the back of the room. Heavy-duty cardboard boxes lined each shelf from top to bottom and side to side, and each box had its own unique numbers and names written on the cardboard in permanent black marker. The air smelled old and musty, and a heavy coating of dust covered many of the boxes and shelves, as though they’d been brought down here years ago and totally forgotten.

   “This is the cold-case storage room,” Bria said. “One of them, anyway. For crimes that go unsolved. Lots of those in Ashland.”

   I nodded. I’d heard her talk about this room in passing, about sending evidence down here for safekeeping or bringing up the boxes when she got a long-awaited break in a case, but I’d never been here myself. Then again, I wasn’t a frequent visitor to the police station; it was one of the few places in Ashland that I avoided like the plague.

   Ryan disappeared back behind a row of shelves. Several faint scrape-scrape-scrapes sounded, as though he was pulling a cardboard box down from up high on one of the shelves. A few seconds later, he reappeared with a box in his arms, walked over, and set it down on a metal table in the center of the room. He looked at Bria, who nodded. Ryan pulled a small knife out of his pants pocket and used it to carefully slice through the red evidence tape that was wrapped around the box.

   “A knife in your pocket? You’re a man after my own heart, Colson,” I drawled, trying to lighten the mood.

   He flashed me a grin and continued his work. A few seconds later, he slid the knife back into his pocket, pulled the lid off the box, and set it aside. I stepped forward and peered down inside, not quite sure what to expect, but all I saw were thick manila file folders.

   One by one, Ryan pulled out the folders and carefully, neatly arranged them on the table. Once all the folders were out of the box, he flipped them open and drew out a photo from the top of each file. He turned the photos around so that I could see them and lined them up side by side. There were a dozen of them, and they all showed the exact same thing.

   A dead woman.

   At first, I wondered what the point was, but then I took a closer look at the photos, and I began to see the similarities. Each woman was lying on a metal slab in the coroner’s office, cold and still in death. Each one had long blond hair and had probably been young and pretty—until someone had beaten her face to an unrecognizable pulp. Ugly, purple bruises also ringed each woman’s throat from where she had been strangled.

   I moved down the row of photos, staring at them all in turn. But they were all so similar that they could have been carbon copies, and one face melted into the next and the next until they all seemed to solidify into a single dead woman. My breath caught in my throat, and my stomach churned as I realized exactly what I was looking at.

   “All these photos, all these women. You’re saying that this girl tonight and all the rest of these poor women are connected . . .” My voice trailed off for a moment. “You’re saying that there’s a serial killer in Ashland.”

12

   For the second time in the last ten minutes, my mind spun around and around, trying to make sense of this startling new revelation.

   Even in Ashland, where violence was sadly so very common, serial killers were exceptionally rare. The only one that I knew of recently had been Harley Grimes, the Fire elemental who’d kidnapped and tortured Sophia, and had done the same to dozens of other men and women before Sophia had finally killed him last year. But even then, Grimes had just been a mean son of a bitch who liked to hurt everyone who crossed his path. He hadn’t been a true serial killer, driven to hunt, abduct, torture, and murder the same kind of person over and over again.

   But all these young women, all roughly the same age, with roughly the same features, and all killed in roughly the same way. It was a stunning new horror.

   “How many?” I whispered. “How many women?”

   Bria looked at Ryan, letting him take the lead.