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violent deaths that had crisscrossed the country, the nature of the fatalitiessuggesting that the deaths were related, possibly by interstate cult activity.
    The murders were showing up in clusters all over the States, but the highest percentages were in dense urban areas, which made sense if the FBI’s gang- and/or cult-related theory was accurate. Somewhere, though, there was a ground zero. There had to be a leader who was organizing all of this. Some David Koresh–type nutjob with a Dracula complex who was telling his followers to go out and suck the blood from his victims—yes,
suck—
and to do it from the neck.
    It was sick. It would be one thing if all these folks did was drink blood from a butcher store and wear black and file their teeth to points. Weird, perhaps, and certainly not Alexis’s thing. But harmless enough. That’s not what they were doing, though, and they’d crossed a line. A very dark, very scary line.
    Unfortunately, whoever these people were, they weren’t stupid. They were operating under the radar and doing a good job of it, too.
    The case had been occupying her time 24/7, but when her college roommate flew into town to audition for a soap opera, Alexis took a rare day off. They’d been out shopping—playing a game where they picked the tourists out from the locals—when Antonio Gutierrez had called. He was the SAC—Special Agent in Charge—and he’d offered no niceties about interrupting her day off. “Get your ass down to the First Precinct,” he’d said. “Ask for Detective Lanahan.” He’d clicked off, and Alexis had turned to Brianna.
    “Let me guess. You’ve got to go.”
    “The exciting life of an FBI agent.” She spoke ironically, but the truth was that she loved it. The job. Theexcitement. It was what she’d worked toward since she’d turned twelve. That was the year her sixteen-year-old sister Tori had gone missing, and even though her parents and the police had told Alexis that Tori had run away, Alexis refused to believe that her sister would leave. Not Tori. Sure, life was shit at the Martin house, but Tori had always been the one who stuck up for Alexis. Who comforted her when their dad went off on one of his tears. Who’d dried Alexis’s eyes when their mom had thrown out all of Alexis’s favorite books because she’d caught Alexis reading under the covers with a flashlight, and rules were rules were rules.
    No, Tori wouldn’t leave Alexis. Not on purpose. She’d been taken—Alexis was certain. And for years she’d fantasized about joining the FBI and tracking down the son-of-a-bitch who’d abducted her sister. After her parents died six years ago in a Colorado plane crash, Alexis had discovered Tori’s diary in a box in their attic, and she’d been forced to acknowledge that maybe her sister
had
run away. It had been a hard reality to swallow, but not as hard as the horrible truth that the diary had revealed—a pattern of physical and verbal abuse from both parents, with the worst being the way their father would creep into Tori’s bed at night.
    The words had been practically etched onto the page, Tori’s pencil pushing so hard that it sometimes ripped the paper. The scrawled, rambling sentences were accompanied by strange splotches—dried tears, Alexis assumed—along with awkward, violent sketches that were enough to make Alexis nauseated. Remembering, Alexis shivered. She’d been boxing up her parents’ personal effects when she’d found the diary, and the uncomfortable emptiness that accompanied the loss of her parents hadmorphed into anger when she learned what they’d done to drive the older girl away. If Alexis could have taken some of that abuse onto her own shoulders, she would have, but she hadn’t even been aware it was going on, even though Tori’s diary made clear that it had been a pattern since she was in first grade. She’d run because she couldn’t take it anymore, but she’d stayed as long as she could to protect her