CHAPTER ONE

Turk was the first to sense that something was wrong. The big German Shepherd, a K9 veteran of the Marine Corps and the FBI, came instantly to alertness when Faith turned into their neighborhood.

When Turk came to alertness, Special Agent Faith Bold also came to alertness. Like her canine partner, Faith was also a veteran of the Marine Corps and the FBI, and she had learned in both organizations to trust her fellow warriors.

"What is it, boy? What's wrong?"

Turk looked at Faith with concern, then turned his head back toward the front. Faith reached into her shoulder holster and pulled her service weapon, laying it over her lap. She kept one hand on the wheel and one hand on the butt of the gun.

Several months ago, Faith had been attacked in her apartment by a ruthless serial killer named Franklin West, the infamous Copycat Killer who had obsessed over Faith for years. West was now in prison, where he would remain for the rest of his life, but Faith had made it a habit ever since to never leave home without her weapon, even when she wasn't on duty.

As it happened, Faith had just returned from a case, so she would have had her weapon anyway. She also hadn't been in her apartment in over a week. She had a state-of-the-art security system that was supposed to send an email to her if there were any disturbances, but West had gotten in without triggering it somehow, so she wasn't going to put her life in its hands.

She turned the final corner down her cul-de-sac. That's when she saw the lights. There were a dozen law enforcement vehicles in front of the building: police cruisers, SWAT vans, a K9 truck and the coroner's wagon.

She pulled to the curb and got out, Turk at her side. "Hey," she called to the officer nearest her. "What's going on?"

She holstered her weapon and pulled her FBI ID out as she asked. No need to scare anyone.

The officer looked at her ID and his eyes widen. "Oh shit." He turned around and called to another officer. "Hey! This is her!"

Faith rolled her eyes. Since her work bringing West to justice, she had become mildly famous to the citizens of Philadelphia and very famous to the law enforcement of Philadelphia. She didn't care for the attention.

The other officer approached, and Faith saw the stripes of a sergeant. "Sergeant, what's going on here? Did something happen in my apartment?"

"Not in your apartment," the sergeant replied, "but it's better you don't go upstairs right now."

"What's going on?" Faith repeated.

"We have it under control, ma'am. Just let us handle it."

Faith's eyes narrowed. She nearly snapped at the officer, but it would be terrible publicity for the Bureau if she got caught haranguing a police sergeant. Still, she needed to know what had happened.

"Sergeant, I appreciate that you have a job to do. You need to appreciate that this isn't the first time something serious has occurred in my home, and I'm not going to sit around and wait for someone to get around to telling me a sterilized version of the truth. Now, do you tell me what happened, or do I walk upstairs and see it for myself?"

The sergeant appeared to wrestle with his decision, but after a moment, he shrugged. "Be my guest."

He led the two agents into the building. Turk caught the scent of the other dogs and whined at Faith.

"It's all right, boy. They're here to help."

He whined again. Faith reached down to ruffle his fur. Then she smelled it.

It wasn't dogs. There were K9s there, three of them, but the rancid, coppery odor Faith smelled wasn't German Shepherd.

The door to her apartment was cordoned off and surrounded by the K9s, their three handlers, and a detective in plainclothes. The detective was squatting down, examining the body propped in a sitting position against Faith's door.

Faith gasped when she got a good view of the body. "Oh God."

The body was that of Faith's neighbor, Eleanor Fields. Eleanor was a sweet, seventy-eight-year-old grandmother who baked the most delicious snicker doodle cookies Faith had ever eaten. She always had a dog treat waiting for Turk whenever the two of them returned from their morning runs.

She had been badly treated. Her face was brown and purple with bruises. Her nose had been broken and her throat had been cut so deeply, that her head was nearly severed.

The worst part was the hands, or rather what was in the hands. Eleanor's eyes had been gouged out and placed in her open palms. Written in blood on her blouse was the message ARE YOU LOOKING NOW, FAITH?

"You're Faith Bold?" the detective asked.

Faith turned to him, and he answered his own question. "Yep. That's you. I recognize you from the news." He pulled out a notepad and a pen and gestured with them toward the body. "Sorry about her. Were you two close?"

"We, um… I suppose so. She would bake cookies and give Turk treats every now and then. When did this happen?"

"About five hours ago."

Or about an hour after her plane home from Chicago took off. "Jesus. No one heard her?"

"Not according to the other neighbors. They only found her because the neighbor down the hall was gonna run to the liquor store for smokes. Stepped outside and boom, there she was."

Faith stared at the body of her neighbor and said nothing. The night before she left for Chicago to solve a string of murders, an electronics store clerk had been murdered and a note left for Faith on the screen of a portable tv resting in his carved-out torso. This new murder was at least as gruesome.

The first murder had been dismissed as a robbery gone wrong. The killers, it was believed, used Faith's name to throw the police off the scent.

There could be no mistaking it now. This message had been left for Faith. Someone else was out there picking up where West had left off. Someone wanted to torment Faith, and they had chosen to do so by taunting her with murders.

Faith had been kept away from the first case, but this one was too close to home. She needed to investigate this one herself.

"All right. As of right now, this is officially an FBI case. Are we clear on that, detective?"

The detective sighed. "Sure. I figured you'd take over once you showed up. Can't say I'm too upset about it. I've been a homicide detective for eleven years, and this is by far the worst I've ever seen."

Not the worst I've seen, Faith thought grimly. I'm sorry, Eleanor. "Has anyone been inside the apartment?" she asked aloud.

"No. We got the call an hour and a half ago. CSI just finished examining the scene, and the coroner should be on his way up to take the body."

As if on cue, the elevator opened and the coroner and a team of four orderlies entered the hallway. "Back up, everyone!" the coroner—a stern woman of around fifty—called. "Give us room!" She saw Faith and said, "Oh. I thought you were out of town."

"Good evening, Dr. Brenner," Faith said. "I just got back."

"I see. Hell of a homecoming present."

Faith didn't reply to that.

"You want to take a look before I wheel her out of here?" Dr. Brenner asked.

Turk was sniffing around the body, but when Faith asked, "Got anything, boy?" he snorted and dipped his head, a negative.

"Go ahead and take her," Faith said. "I want every piece of information you get the moment you get it. Someone's targeting me, and unlike West, they're not discriminating in who they target."

"Boy, you sure have a way with men, don't you?" Brenner said drily.

Faith didn't appreciate the joke. She turned toward the detective. "You said CSI's been over the scene already?"

"Yep. No prints, no bodily fluids that didn't come from Ms. Fields. CSI thinks the killer wore latex gloves, but they have to wait on the coroner's report to know for sure."

Faith nodded. "All right. Dr. Brenner, she's yours. Detective, you and I are inside the apartment looking for any sign of disturbance. Sergeant, get this floor roped off. No one enters unless they live here and can prove it. If that means someone gets locked out, I'll take the heat. If someone lives here, and you haven't talked to them yet, you talk to them. I want a timeline of tonight ASAP."

They hurried to comply, and Faith, not wanting to watch as they took her neighbor away, turned toward the detective. "What's your name?"

"Fatts." She lifted an eyebrow, and he grinned. "Yep. Reggie Fatts. You can call me Reggie or Fatso."

"Reggie's fine," Faith replied. "Who have you spoken to so far?"

"The neighbor that called it in, his wife, and the kid down the hall." He chuckled. "Never seen someone run weed through a garbage disposal before. You should have seen the kid's face when he opened the door, and we told him it was decriminalized up to thirty grams."

"Let's stay focused on the murder, Reggie."

Reggie's grin faded. "Right. Sorry. Yeah, no one heard anything. I mean, they all heard people coming and going, but they hear that all the time. No one thought anything of it. It wasn't until Mr. Young stepped out for smokes that anyone saw anything."

Faith sighed. "Okay. I want you to go talk to them again. I want you to ask them if they noticed anything different about Eleanor's behavior over the past week. Any changes in mood or behavior, was she expecting someone, did she have an unpleasant interaction with anyone… actually, an interaction of any kind with anyone new."

"I'll do that," Reggie replied. "While we're on the subject, I actually want to talk to you. You can do your thing first, but since this killer knows where you live and all, the going hypothesis is that the killer knows you."

"They don't," Faith said. "I have very few friends, and none of them are capable of this."

"You have acquaintances, though, right? The barista who serves your coffee, the groomer who keeps this guy's fur so nice and shiny, the mechanic who replaces your engine every ten thousand miles ‘cause it's a Ford… Someone has to be close enough to you to know where you live."

Faith pressed her lips together. She hadn't considered that, but now that Reggie brought it up, it made sense. "Okay. We'll talk after I'm done—"

"Faith," a familiar voice called.

Normally, that voice was a welcome voice, but since Faith knew what hearing that voice now meant, it wasn't welcome here. She turned to Special Agent Desrouleaux, her colleague at the Philadelphia Field Office, and frowned. "This is my case, Desrouleaux. This asshole left a body on my door with a message for me."

"That's exactly why it's not your case," Desrouleaux replied. "And it's why you can't go inside." In a softer voice, he added, "I'm sorry, Faith. You know it's not me making this call."

Faith glared at Desrouleaux. His partner, Special Agent Chavez, paled even though Faith's glare wasn't aimed at her. "I'll deal with the Boss in the morning," she told him, "but I'm going in now."

"Actually, you're going to talk to him tonight. He told me to tell you to take your phone off silent and go to the office right now. He told me to use a few colorful words to make the point, but I left them out."

Faith sighed and rubbed her temples. "How thoughtful of you."

"I'm sorry, Faith."

"I'm getting sick of hearing that."

She looked at her door, then at Reggie. The city detective had adopted the impassive stare of an experienced police officer who had no opinion whatsoever on the actions of his superiors.

Faith pulled her phone from her pocket and saw that she had ten missed phone calls from the office. She sighed and sent the Boss a text. On my way.

"Come on, Turk," she said. "Time to get our asses chewed out."