Excerpt of Included!

Chapter ThreeDetective Hunt sat at the cluttered desk in his small office. Files spilled fromcabinet tops and unused chairs. Dirty coffee cups, memos he’d never read.It was 9:45. The place was a mess, but he lacked the energy to deal with it.He scrubbed his hands across his face, ground at the sockets of his eyes untilhe saw white streaks and sparks. His face felt rough, unshaven, and heknew that he looked every bit of his forty- one years. He’d lost so muchweight that his suits hung on his frame. He’d not been to the gym or theshooting range in six months. He rarely managed more than one meal a day,but none of that seemed to matter.In front of him, he’d spread his office copy of the Alyssa Merrimon file.A well- thumbed duplicate was locked in a desk drawer at home. He flippedpages methodically, reading every word: reports, interviews, summaries.Alyssa’s face stared out at him from an enlarged copy of her school photograph.Black hair, like her brother’s. Same bone structure, same dark eyes.A secret kind of smile. A lightness, like her mother had, an ethereal qualitythat Hunt had tried and failed to identify. The way her eyes tilted,maybe? The swept- back ears and china skin? The innocence? That’s the onethat Hunt came back to most often. The child looked as if she’d never hadan impure thought or done an ill deed in her entire life.And then there was her mother, her brother. They all had it, to one degreeor another; but none of them like the girl.Hunt scrubbed his face one more time.He was too close, he knew that; but the case had a grip on him. A glanceat the office showed the depth of his fall. There were cases here that neededwork. Other people. Real people who suffered just like the Merrimonsdid; but those cases paled, and he still did not know why. The girl had evenfound her way into his dreams. She wore the same clothes she had on the28