BOOKS BY BLAKE PIERCE

RILEY PAIGE MYSTERY SERIES

ONCE GONE (Book #1)

ONCE TAKEN (Book #2)

ONCE CRAVED (Book #3)

ONCE LURED (Book #4)

ONCE HUNTED (Book #5)

ONCE PINED (Book #6)

ONCE FORSAKEN (Book #7)

ONCE COLD (Book #8)

ONCE STALKED (Book #9)

MACKENZIE WHITE MYSTERY SERIES

BEFORE HE KILLS (Book #1)

BEFORE HE SEES (Book #2)

BEFORE HE COVETS (Book #3)

BEFORE HE TAKES (Book #4)

BEFORE HE NEEDS (Book #5)

BEFORE HE FEELS (Book #6)

AVERY BLACK MYSTERY SERIES

CAUSE TO KILL (Book #1)

CAUSE TO RUN (Book #2)

CAUSE TO HIDE (Book #3)

CAUSE TO FEAR (Book #4)

KERI LOCKE MYSTERY SERIES

A TRACE OF DEATH (Book #1)

A TRACE OF MUDER (Book #2)

A TRACE OF VICE (Book #3)

PROLOGUE

The man walked into the Patom Lounge and found himself surrounded by a thick haze of cigarette smoke. The lights were dim, an old heavy metal tune blared over the speakers, and already he could feel his impatience.

The place was too hot, too crowded. He flinched as beside him a short cheer arose; he turned to see a dart game being played by five drunks. Beside them there was a lively pool game going on. The sooner he got out of here, the better.

He looked around the room for only a few seconds before his eyes lighted upon a young woman sitting at the bar.

She had a cute face and a boyish haircut. She was just a little too well dressed for a dive like this.

She’ll do just fine, the man thought.

He walked over to the bar, sat on the stool beside her, and smiled.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

He realized that he couldn’t hear his own voice over the general din.

She looked at him, smiled back, pointed to her ears, and shook her head.

He repeated his question louder, moving his lips in an exaggerated manner.

She leaned close to him. Nearly yelling, she said, “Tilda. What’s yours?”

“Michael,” he said, not very loudly.

It wasn’t his real name, of course, but that probably didn’t even matter. He doubted that she could hear him. She didn’t seem to care.

He looked at her drink, which was almost empty. It looked like a margarita. He pointed to the glass and said very loudly, “Care for another?”

Still smiling, the woman named Tilda shook her head no.

But she wasn’t brushing him off. He felt sure of that. Was it time for a bold move?

He reached for a cocktail napkin and took a pen out of his shirt pocket.

He wrote on the cocktail napkin …

Care to go somewhere else?

She looked at the message. Her smile broadened. She hesitated for a moment, but he sensed that she was here looking for a thrill. And she seemed pleased to have found one.

Finally, to his delight, she nodded.

Before they left, he picked up a matchbook with the name of the bar.

He would need it later.

He helped her into her coat and they walked outside. The cool spring air and sudden quiet was startling after the noise and heat.

“Wow,” she said as she walked along with him. “I almost went deaf in there.”

“I take it you don’t hang out there a lot,” he said.

“No,” she said.

She didn’t elaborate, but he was sure that this was the first time she’d ever been to the Patom Lounge.

“Me neither,” he said. “What a dive.”

“You can say that again.”

“What a dive,” he said.

They both laughed.

“That’s my car over there,” he said, pointing. “Where would you like to go?”

She hesitated again.

Then, with an impish twinkle in her eye, she said, “Surprise me.”

Now he knew that his earlier guess was correct. She really had come here looking for a thrill.

Well, so had he.

He opened the passenger door of his car, and she climbed inside. He got behind the wheel and started to drive.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

With a smile and a wink, he replied, “You said to surprise you.”

She laughed. Her laughter sounded nervous but pleased.

“I take it you live here in Greybull,” he said.

“Born and bred,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve seen you before. Do you live somewhere around here?”

“Not far away,” he said.

She laughed again.

“What brings you to this boring little town?”

“Business.”

She looked at him with a curious expression. But she didn’t press the issue. Apparently she wasn’t very interested in getting to know him. That suited his purposes just fine.

He pulled into the parking lot of a dingy little motel called the Maberly Inn. He parked in front of room 34.

“I’ve already rented this room,” he said.

She said nothing.

Then, after a short silence, he asked, “Is this OK with you?”

She nodded a little nervously.

They went into the room together. She looked around. The room had a musty, disagreeable odor, and the walls were decorated with ugly paintings.

She walked to the bed and pressed her hand on the mattress, checking its firmness.

Was she displeased with the room?

He wasn’t sure.

The gesture made him angry – furiously angry.

He didn’t know why, but something inside him snapped.

Normally he wouldn’t strike until he had her naked on the bed. But now he couldn’t help himself.

As she turned around to head for the bathroom, he blocked her way.

Her eyes widened with alarm.

Before she could react further, he pushed her backward onto the bed.

She thrashed about, but he was much stronger than she was.

She tried to scream, but before she could, he grabbed a pillow and pressed it onto her face.

Soon, he knew, it would all be over.

CHAPTER ONE

Suddenly, the lights snapped on in the lecture hall, and Agent Lucy Vargas’s eyes hurt from the glare.

The students sitting around her started murmuring softly. Lucy’s mind had been focused deeply in the exercise – to imagine a real murder from the killer’s point of view – and it was hard to snap back.

“OK, let’s talk about what you saw,” the instructor said.

The instructor was none other than Lucy’s mentor, Special Agent Riley Paige.

Lucy wasn’t actually a student in the class, which was for FBI Academy cadets. She was just sitting in today, as she did from time to time. She was still fairly new to the BAU, and she found Riley Paige to be a source of limitless inspiration and information. She took every opportunity she could to learn from her – and also to work with her.

Agent Paige had given the students details of a murder case that had gone cold some twenty-five years ago. Three young women had been killed in central Virginia. The killer had been nicknamed the “Matchbook Killer,” because he left matchbooks with the victims’ bodies. The matchbooks were from bars in a general area near Richmond. He’d also left napkins imprinted with the names of the motels where the women had been killed. Even so, investigating those places had not brought any breaks in the case.

Agent Paige had told the students to use their imaginations to recreate one of the murders.

“Let your imagination loose,” Agent Paige had said before they started. “Visualize lots of details. Don’t worry about getting the little things right. But try to get the big picture right – the atmosphere, the mood, the setting.”

Then she’d turned out the lights for ten minutes.

Now that the lights were on again, Agent Paige walked back and forth in front of the lecture hall.

She said, “First of all, tell me a little about the Patom Lounge. What was it like?”

A hand shot up in the middle of the hall. Agent Paige called on the male student.

“The place wasn’t exactly elegant, but it was trying to look more classy than it was,” he said. “Dimly lit booths along the walls. Some kind of soft upholstery everywhere – suede, maybe.”

Lucy felt puzzled. She hadn’t pictured the bar as looking anything like this at all.

Agent Paige smiled a little. She didn’t tell the student whether he was right or not.

“Anything else?” Agent Paige asked.

“There was music, playing low,” another student said. “Jazz, maybe.”

But Lucy distinctly remembered imagining the din of ’70s and ’80s hard rock tunes.

Had she gotten everything wrong?

Agent Paige asked, “What about the Maberly Inn? What was it like?”

A female student held up her hand, and Agent Paige picked her.

“Kind of quaint, and nice as motels go,” the young woman said. “And pretty old. Dating to before most of the really commercial motel chain franchises came along.”

Another student spoke up.

“That sounds right to me.”

Other students voiced their agreement.

Again, Lucy was struck by how differently she’d pictured the place.

Agent Paige smiled a little.

“How many of you share these general impressions – both of the bar and the motel?”

Most of the students raised their hands.

Lucy was starting to feel a little awkward now.

“Try to get the big picture right,” Agent Paige had told them.

Had Lucy blown the whole exercise?

Had everyone in the class gotten things right except her?

Then Agent Paige brought up some images on the screen in front of the classroom.

First came a cluster of photographs of the Patom Lounge – a night shot from outside with a neon sign glowing in the window, and several other photos from inside.

“This is the bar,” Agent Paige said. “Or at least this is how it looked back around the time of the murders. I’m not sure what it looks like now – or if it’s even there.”

Lucy felt relieved. It looked much like she had imagined it – a rundown dive with cheaply paneled walls and fake leather upholstery. It even had a couple of pool tables and a dartboard, just like she’d supposed. And even in the pictures, one could see a thick haze of cigarette smoke.

The students gaped in surprise.

“Now let’s take a look at the Maberly Inn,” Agent Paige said.

More photos appeared. The motel looked every bit as sleazy as Lucy had imagined it – not very old, but nevertheless in bad repair.

Agent Paige chuckled a little.

“Something seems to be a little off here,” she said.

The classroom laughed nervously in agreement.

“Why did you visualize the scenes like you did?” Agent Paige asked.

She called on a young woman who held up her hand.

“Well, you told us that the killer first approached the victim in a bar,” she said. “That spells ‘singles bar’ for me. Kind of cheesy, but at least trying to look classy. I just didn’t get an image of some working-class dive.”

Another student said, “Same with the motel. Wouldn’t the killer take her to a place that looked nicer, if only to trick her?”

Lucy was smiling broadly now.

Now I get it, she thought.

Agent Paige noticed her smile and smiled back.

She said, “Agent Vargas, where did so many of us go wrong?”

Lucy said, “Everybody forgot to take into account the victim’s age. Tilda Steen was just twenty years old. Women who go to singles bars are typically older, in their thirties or middle-aged, often divorced. That’s why you’ve visualized the bar wrong.”

Agent Paige nodded in agreement.

“Go on,” she said.

Lucy thought for a moment.

“You said she came from a fairly solid middle-class family in an ordinary little town. Judging from the picture you showed us earlier, she was attractive, and I doubt that she had trouble getting dates. So why did she let herself get picked up in a dive like the Patom Lounge? My guess is she was bored. She deliberately went someplace that might be a little dangerous.”

And she found more danger than she’d bargained for, Lucy thought.

But she didn’t say so aloud.

“What can we all learn from what just happened?” Agent Paige asked the class.

A male student raised his hand and said, “When you’re mentally reconstructing a crime, be sure to factor in every bit of information you’ve got. Don’t leave anything out.”

Agent Paige looked pleased.

“That’s right,” she said. “A detective has to have a vivid imagination, has to be able to get into a killer’s mind. But that’s a tricky business. Just overlooking a single detail can throw you way off. It can make the difference between solving the case and not solving it at all.”

Agent Paige paused, then added, “And this case never did get solved. Whether it ever will … well, it’s doubtful. After twenty-five years, the trail’s gone pretty cold. A man killed three young women – and there’s a good chance he’s still out there.”

Agent Paige let her words sink in for a moment.

“That’s all for today,” she finally said. “You know what you’re supposed to read for the next class.”

The students left the lecture hall. Lucy decided to stay for a few moments and chat with her mentor.

Agent Paige smiled at her and said, “You did some pretty good detective work just now.”

“Thanks,” Lucy said.

She was very pleased. The slightest bit of praise from Riley Paige meant a great deal to her.

Then Agent Paige said, “But now I want you to try something a little more advanced. Shut your eyes.”

Lucy did so. In a low, steady voice, Agent Paige gave her more details.

“After he killed Tilda Steen, the murderer buried her in a shallow grave. Can you describe for me how that happened?”

As she’d been doing during the exercise, Lucy tried to slip into the murderer’s mind.

“He left the body lying on the bed, then stepped out of the motel room door,” Lucy said aloud. “He looked carefully around. He didn’t see anybody. So he took her body out to his car and dumped it in the back seat. Then he drove to a wooded area. Some place that he knew pretty well, but not very close to the crime scene.”

“Go on,” Agent Page said.

Her eyes still closed, Lucy could feel the killer’s methodical coldness.

“He stopped the car where it wouldn’t be easy to see. Then he got a shovel out of his trunk.”

Lucy felt stumped for a moment.

It was night, so how would the killer find his way into the woods?

It wouldn’t be easy to carry a flashlight, a shovel, and a corpse.

“Was it a moonlit night?” Lucy asked.

“It was,” Agent Paige said.

Lucy felt encouraged.

“He picked up the shovel with one hand and slung the body over his shoulder with the other. He trudged off into the woods. He kept going until he found a faraway place where he was sure nobody ever went.”

“A faraway place?” Agent Paige asked, interrupting Lucy’s reverie.

“Definitely,” Lucy said.

“Open your eyes.”

Lucy did so. Agent Paige was packing up her briefcase to go.

She said, “Actually, the killer took the body to the woods right across the highway from the motel. He only carried Tilda’s body a few yards into the thicket. He could easily have seen car lights from the highway, and he probably used the light from a street lamp to bury Tilda. And he buried her carelessly, covering her more with rocks than earth. A passing bicyclist noticed the smell a few days later and called the cops. The body was easy to find.”

Lucy’s mouth dropped open with surprise.

“Why didn’t he go to more trouble to hide the murder?” she asked. “I don’t understand.”

Shutting her briefcase, Agent Paige frowned ruefully.

“I don’t either,” she said. “Nobody does.”

Agent Paige picked up her briefcase and left the lecture hall.

As Lucy watched her leave, she detected an attitude of bitterness and disappointment in Agent Paige’s stride.

Clearly, as detached as Agent Paige tried to seem, this cold case still was tormenting her.