Chapter One

Remember, I will break you.

Special Agent Faith Bold stared at the shackled figure of Dr. Franklin West and replayed the last sentence he spoke to her over and over in her head.

Remember, I will break you.

"He's been sitting like that for the past four hours," the detective standing next to her said, a hint of admiration in his voice. "You think he's asleep?"

"No," she replied. "I don't."

Dr, West sat with his hands folded on top of the table, his shoulders back, his posture straight but relaxed. He wore a calm expression, the corners of his mouth upturned slightly in a smile.

"Gives me the creeps," the detective confided. "It's like I'm talking to a robot."

"That's common with sociopaths," Faith said. "They have a flat affect unless they're around the objects of their obsession or using emotion to manipulate others."

The detective looked at her with a paternal concern that irritated the hell out of Faith, mostly because the reason for that concern was justified. "You sure you should talk to him? I mean, you're kind of the object of his obsession."

Faith's lips thinned. Dr. West was more commonly known as the Copycat Killer, a media-shortened version of the Copycat Donkey Killer, the more prolific admirer of Jethro Trammell, the original Donkey Killer who had captured, tortured and nearly killed Faith before her partner, Michael Prince, shot him dead at the last second.

For some reason, West hadn't fixated on Michael other than as a connection to Faith. He had decided that Faith was Trammell's unfinished business, his one mistake, and he had taken it upon himself to rectify that mistake.

But not by killing her. No, he intended to take everything that mattered to Faith and leave her broken and defeated. And he had nearly succeeded. He had posed as Faith's psychologist for months and used the information he gained from those sessions to kill Faith's friend and mentor, Gordon Clark, and nearly kill her boyfriend, David Friedman. Then he had eluded capture for months, perpetrating several proxy assaults on Faith and her K9 unit, Turk.

It was during that last assault, one where he had once more overcome the two of them, that the police had finally caught him. Her neighbors had heard gunshots from her apartment and called the police. And just before they hauled West off, he had uttered those words.

Remember, I will break you.

She would have believed it was just a delusion caused by his inability to accept defeat, but he hadn't been defeated. He had been ready to kill her and Turk. The police wouldn't have even come close to stopping him.

But he had left them alive. She knew he had done so intentionally. He had left her alive, and he had told her that he would break her.

How? What was he planning? What could he plan? As soon as they were done with their initial interrogation, he was going to be moved to Florence and held there in solitary confinement under twenty-four-hour armed guard until his trial. When he was moved, it would be under so many layers of security the Navy SEALs would have a hard time breaking him out.

So what did he mean?

"You don't have to," the detective said. "We can handle everything from here. You might not even need to testify in court. This is an open-and-shut case if I've ever seen one. You can probably submit a written statement and watch them throw the book at him from the comfort of your living room."

It took Faith a moment to remember that he had asked her if she wanted to speak to him. She took a breath and said, "No, that's all right. I want to talk to him. Alone."

He frowned. "Alone?"

"Yes, please."

His frown deepened. "Well, I can have the guards wait outside of the room, but I can't send them away. The jail's policy is to keep flight risks like him under guard at all times."

"That's fine. I just want to be alone in the room with him."

He shrugged. "All right. If you ins—" he stiffened and looked at her sideways. "Um… you're not thinking of… I mean, I would understand if you were, but…"

She resisted the urge to roll her eyes. "No, I'm not planning to take matters into my own hands. I just want to talk to him."

"Oh. All right. Yeah, sure."

He picked up his phone and said something to the guards in the room. They opened the door, and Faith walked through to the other side of the two-way mirror.

West maintained his neutral expression until the guards exited behind Faith and she took her seat across from him. Then he smiled. "Hello, Faith."

"Hello, West."

West looked behind Faith. "No Turk today? Or did you leave him behind the mirror with our friends?"

"No Turk," she answered. She had left him with David for the day. She didn't trust Turk to maintain his cool in West's presence, and while she meant what she told the detective about not taking matters into her own hands, she didn't trust herself to stop Turk if he decided to go a different way.

"Pity," West said. "I like him."

Her lip curled slightly. "So what's the plan?"

He lifted an eyebrow. "Plan? For me? Well, I'm sure you can get a better answer from the officers, but I believe I'll be headed to ADX Florence after my initial interrogations. The police will talk to me, then I assume Desrouleaux and Chavez will want another crack at it. Then off to super jail I go."

Desrouleaux and Chavez were the two FBI agents assigned to West's case. They had met West at the precinct and spent fourteen hours grilling him to no avail before giving up and letting the police give it a shot. They were now five hours into the police investigation, and West had remained silent up until Faith walked into the room.

"I didn't mean that. I mean for me. You said you would break me. How do you plan to do that?"

He laughed. "Come on, Faith. I can't answer that question. If I do that, then you'll just make sure to stop me, and where's the fun in that? It's better if I leave you without knowing, wondering what it is I have in store for you. Then, when you finally discover the answer, it will hurt more knowing that even with me in prison, you couldn't stop it."

"You could have killed me," she said. "Turk too. You had us. You won. Again. So why am I still alive?"

He sighed. "We've been through this. I don't want to kill you. I thought I might have to eventually, but that wasn't the goal. The goal is to break you. The goal is to destroy you. That was Trammell's true brilliance."

He leaned forward as much as his bonds would allow, his eyes shining with excitement as they always did when discussing his mentor. "Anyone can kill people. Hell, children kill people. That's—if you'll forgive the pun—child's play. What Trammell did was strip away everything that made a person human, everything that elevated them above the goats and chickens he slaughtered on his farm." He leaned back, admiration filling his voice. "So simply too. He just cut people. He maximized pain and minimized damage and utterly broke them."

Faith was displeased to find that West's words didn't bring the revulsion they used to. She had spent so much time around psychotic killers that even hearing such horrible things from the closest person to an archenemy she ever had did little to unsettle her anymore.

"So why didn't you cut me? You had the chance several times. You could have tied me up and tortured me. Why didn't you?"

"Because then I truly would be only a copycat. I would just be another Jethro Trammell. More successful, perhaps, but not unique. His way was simply, brutally effective, and beautiful for that. Like the pyramids at Gaza: a simple, hard geometric form, stunning in its symmetry but not in its complexity.

"What I intend with you, Faith, is a masterpiece worthy of Michelangelo. It is through the intricacy of my work, the subtilty of my particular chisel, that I shall whittle away all of you but the parts I wish the world to see, the parts I wish you to see when you look in the mirror. I can't achieve that by simply brutalizing you until you expire. I need to break your mind. Your spirit. I need you to lose, Faith. Utterly. Completely. Irrevocably. I need you to come face to face with the enormity of your failure and know that even whole and free you couldn't stop me. I need you to know that even like this"—he lifted his shackled hands the two inches his bonds would allow—"I was in control and there was nothing you could do about it."

His eyes still shone, but with a different excitement now. His insanity, once so well-hidden, now revealed its face. It should have made him seem smaller, weaker, but it didn't. Somehow, he believed he was still in complete control of the situation, and Faith believed he was too.

"Have you hired others to work for you?" she asked. "Is that what you're planning? You're going to sic some more two-bit criminals on me and my friends and hope they catch us with our pants down? You must be really confident if you think they're somehow going to fight their way through all of the FBI agents and police officers protecting everyone I care about."

"You're not going to bait me, Faith," he said. "I'm not going to tell you what the plan is. Only that it's now set in motion. If it's any comfort, it won't change what's happening to me. You can hold onto that one sliver of joy." His smile faded, replaced with an almost childish look of annoyance. "That's the one regret I'll have as I go to my judgment. In order to beat you, I had to allow myself to be taken. How does the Bible verse go? ‘You shall bruise his head, and he shall bruise your heel.' Well, you've bruised my heel, Faith. So when your world is burnt to ash around you, you can know that I'm going to die for my crimes. Brilliant as I am, there's no way out of this trap."

His smile returned, "But that's all right. It's even more artistic, don't you think? You will be my last great work, my deathbed masterpiece. I'll have my way with you, but you've still put me away."

The door opened, and a very uncomfortable police detective cleared his throat and said, "Um, Bold? There's a phone call for you. Says it's urgent."

Faith looked hard at West. He grinned and said, "You should take that."

Faith's blood froze. She got to her feet and rushed from the room, tearing the detective's phone from her hands as she did. What had West done? Had he gotten to Turk and David somehow? Had he killed Michael?"

"Hello?" she said, her voice taut. "This is Faith Bold."

"Bold," the Boss said. "Is there a reason you don't answer your phone when I call? Get your ass to the Field Office. I have a case for you."

Faith blinked. "A case?"

"Yes. As in a job. As in your job. Get moving. And turn your damned phone on."

He hung up, and Faith handed the phone to the anxious police detective. Behind her, she could hear West laughing uproariously in the cell. Heat rose in her cheeks, but she kept her voice calm. "I have to go," she told the detective. "You can do whatever you need to do with him. I'm done talking."

"Yeah," the detective said. "All right. You okay?"

Faith listened to West's laughter for a moment. The sound echoed inside her head, threatening to drown out all other thought. "Yeah. I'm fine."

She left the precinct and started the drive to the field office. As she drove, the words echoed in her mind again.

Remember. I will break you.