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In a smooth movement, he dipped both hands in his pockets. “Honestly, I’m not sure why she ran off. I came down here to check in on my old partner and was told to talk to Detective Gray when I arrived. I haven’t heard from her in a while, and she isn’t responding to my check-in calls or texts, so I figured I’d make the quick drive down and talk to her in person.”

“Check in? Why would you need to check in on your old partner?” Slade asked.

“She wasn’t herself when she left, and I….” Detective Mott’s gray gaze slid around the office, noting the detectives within listening range. “Is there somewhere we can talk in private? It’s not something I want to air to her colleagues. I assume she left to be somewhere no one knew what happened.”

Turning on his heels, Slade searched the room and then stalked off to one of the empty offices. Mott and I followed, and once the door closed, Mott continued. “After three years together, my partner left abruptly, put in a transfer to Santa Coasta PD without even telling me and moved here with that damn massive house cat of hers.”

“What made her leave?” A memory nagged in the back of my mind, but I shrugged it off, needing my full attention on Detective Mott.

“The long story? Over a year ago, we were investigating a string of sexual assaults in the area. All the women were at home, in bed for the night, when attacked. We worked the cases hard, out there every day to drum up fresh leads, and….” His jaw worked back and forth like he hated saying his next words. “I guess we got too close, so he targeted Beth. The bastard broke into her house and did the same to her as he had all of his other victims, but this time he inflicted physical torture.” Lifting his hands, Mott cracked his knuckles, stare focused just over my shoulder. “He carved the wordmineinto her stomach and left her for dead. After she came back to work, the stares and whispers were too much, and the fact that I still hadn’t caught the bastard while she was healing—”

“Wait. Did you say Beth?” Slade asked, eyes wide.

“Yeah, Beth Savage. She was my partner. Do you two know her? Don’t let her know I told you about—”

I held up a hand, stopping him. “Holy fuck. It’s her.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” he demanded, straightening to his full height, which was just a few inches shorter than Slade. But that didn’t diminish any of the terror his predatory stillness inflicted. “I asked that detective about Beth when—”

The door swung open, and Slade and I turned toward it. Detective Gray stood in the doorway, just as pale as she was before. A light sheen of sweat lined her upper lip.

“I didn’t know,” she whispered. “Please believe me, I had no idea. I thought… I thought she was doing drugs or something, not—” She rushed to the corner of the room and vomited into the trash can.

“Someone tell me what the fuck is going on,” Mott stated in a tone that demanded no hesitation or risk a very painful death as he stared at the vomiting detective. “Where the fuck is Beth?”

“Like I stated earlier, I’m Special Agent Bend, and I’m with a Dallas-based profiling team.” His steel-gray eyes bored into me, clearly telling me to get to the fucking point. “I was brought in to help identify an unsub who had murdered four men by that point, who we recently learned were all sexual predators on various levels.”

Mott continued to stare at me. Right, he didn’t know our profile and how we’d all just connected the dots of our unsub being his old partner.

“Our profile for this unsub is late twenties to mid-thirties, Caucasian female, with recent trauma which pushed her to commit these vigilante-type murders on men who were accused or at least identified in an assault but never arrested. We still aren’t clear how she’s picking these men, but we found out a few minutes ago that Detective Gray’s login was used to find the victims’ personal information before they were victims.”

Mott’s nostrils flared with each restrained breath. “She wouldn’t do this.”

“The woman, your friend you knew her as before, didn’t commit these crimes. I agree with you. But she’s not that person anymore. The trauma changed her. Twisted up the way she views right and wrong. She’s taking the law into her own hands to find justice—”

“We never caught him.I,” he gritted out, “never caught him.”

“Why Santa Coasta?” Slade asked.

“After she put in the transfer, I asked the same question, along with a few more than that, but she said there was an excellent support group down here. A group of women met up once a week at a local center, all of them women who’d either reported an assault and nothing came of the statement, or the assailant was never caught….” He locked his stare on me. “Fuck.”

“Fuck,” I reiterated. “That answers the question about how she’s identifying her victims.”

“You don’t get it,” Mott said through his clenched jaw. “She’s one of the good ones. Fights for advocacy for the victims. She makes every voice heard, no matter who they are. Beth is a damn good detective, a hell of a partner—” He cut himself off and cleared his throat.

Fuck, this was hard to watch. I couldn’t even imagine the internal turmoil going through the man.

“Where is she?” Slade demanded. “Savage. Where is she right now?”

“I don’t know,” Gray responded, still bent over the trash can. “She should be here, but she didn’t show up for our shift. I’ve called her all morning. I even drove by her house. Her car wasn’t there, and no one answered when I knocked.”

My cell was in my hand between blinks, calling the one man who could find a needle in a stack of needles.

“Charlie,” I barked the moment he picked up. “Ping Detective Beth Savage’s cell. We need her exact location right now. We’re almost certain she’s our unsub.”

“Plot fucking twist,” Charlie whispered over the sound of his fingers flying along the keyboard. “Okay, her cell is on, which is good for us. It’s pinging about twenty minutes away. Give me two seconds and I’ll have an exact location for you and real-time satellite images so you know what you’re walking…. Okay, address sent. Satellite image pulling up now. It looks like a row of older homes. What does Savage drive?”

“Her car?” I asked Detective Gray.

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