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cynicism and, to a certain extent, bitterness.
    These latter qualities were not unlike those of most of the detectives in the homicide bureaus in almost every precinct. You just knew someone with a twinkle in his or her eye and a bounce in their step hadn’t been homicide detectives for long.
    As he looked out the window, Grady was thinking about the Loomis girl, wondering what her fate might be, knowing what was most likely the case.
    There was nothing concrete to tell him she had been the victim of a serial killer, just like there wasn’t anything to tell any of the other detectives working the other cases involving missing little girls that they had also met a similar fate. But 20 years working homicides had also developed in him a kind of sixth sense about things like these. And this one felt wrong, really wrong.
    He supposed that seven girls gone in three weeks, all taken in broad daylight, usually in front of dozens of people, could be a coincidence. It could be, but he knew it wasn’t. One of the first things to go after working some years in homicide was the ability to believe in coincidences.
    Where to go from here, though? It was just a matter of time before one of the local beat reporters put two and two together or until someone in the department let something leak and then they would have a serial kidnapper/killer story on their hands with every jackass, talking head news anchor speculating on what might be going on in the darkness of New York City, all accompanied by the usual calls from crackpots and false confessions.
    Whoever this guy was, he had to be good to be doing this the way he was. He had to blend in perfectly and not raise any red flags. He had to have impeccable timing to know just when to strike and at least some rudimentary knowledge of police response in order to have a ready way out.
    There was nothing to go on, though, no witnesses, no physical evidence, no trail to follow.
    As hard as it was to acknowledge, he knew that there would most likely be another girl missing before long, and as callous as he knew it was to think, he knew that to catch this guy they would have to be waiting for it to happen and for the guy to make some sort of mistake that would give them something, anything, to go on.
    In most cases, Grady was able to distance himself from the families of the victims. After years of delivering the worst news anyone could get and of seeing some of the worst things man was capable of, he had been able to build a wall around his emotions, but talking to Steven Loomis that night had done something to him. In a sense, he had seen what he himself would look like if one of his girls had been taken.
    Loomis had the hard eyes of someone who had more than a nodding acquaintance with death, someone who had overcome it and who in spite of hoping for the best knew and was prepared for the worst.
    So, in spite of his best efforts to look at this as just another case, Detective Robert Grady felt closer to this one than he was comfortable with. Loomis had gotten to him because he had given Grady the impression that he wasn’t planning on just waiting on the police to do something to find his little girl, and the detective knew that an obsessed parent could compromise a case. While Steven Loomis didn’t appear to be an obsessed parent, he certainly appeared to be a parent that, in spite of his best intentions, could get in the way.
    As he was lost in thought, Mark Mullins walked into his office, “Hey, Bob, did a Steven Loomis come talk to you?”
    Grady looked back from the window, “Yeah, he did. How exactly did he know to come talk to me?”
    Mullins hung his head sheepishly, “I know, I know, but you met the guy, he would have detected bullshit in half a second and he would have gone on to do something on his own.
    “Hell, I don’t know he still won’t go do something on his own, but I know that if I had lied to him, we would have lost his trust and this shit is getting deeper. So maybe