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whose body had been found in a field beneath an old, burned mattress near Plano, Texas.
    Sweet and his young family had been living in Mesquite at the time of Meeks’ kidnapping, and like any parent, especially one with young daughters, the case had resonated with him. After Roxann was abducted, he’d wondered if the three cases were connected, but he’d never heard anything more about them.
    Nine years had now passed since Roxann’s murder. Sweet’s three daughters were sixteen, eleven, and three, happy and safe, a joy to him and his wife. Picking up and reading the Reyes case report, he recalled how sorry he’d felt for Roxann, whose fate it had been to be raised in a neighborhood rife with drug dealers and prostitutes, and then murdered by a cold-blooded monster. But he also couldn’t imagine the devastation heaped upon the girl’s mother and father, Tammy and Sergio Reyes, or their lingering sorrow, exacerbated by the lack of resolution. It troubled him that justice for Roxann and her parents moldered in the murder closet of the Garland Police Department.
    Glancing through the Reyes case evidence, Sweet was appalled to find that it was mostly an unorganized collection of papers, photographs, notepads, and sticky notes with undecipherable messages on them, newspaper clippings, and a few recordings. It would take more time to make sense of it than he had during his lunch hour, but one folder caught his eye; it contained records pertaining to a long list of possible suspects.
    Some of the records had little more than a name and a few notes in them. Others had a bit more, and one of those was labeled “David Elliot Penton.” Sweet read that in April 1991 Penton was convicted in Columbus, Ohio, for the murder of Nydra Ross, a nine-year-old black girl, who’d disappeared in March 1988 and whose remains were discovered in September of that year in a heavily wooded creek bed. According to a Columbus newspaper story in the file, Penton, then thirty-two years old, was a fugitive from Texas, where he’d been convicted in 1985 of involuntary manslaughter after shaking his own infant son to death in Fort Hood. He’d been sentenced to five years but had been released on a bond pending appeal and subsequently fled the state. Nydra had been murdered by Penton while he was a fugitive.
    What got Sweet’s attention was that Roxann’s mother, Tammy Reyes, was also from Ohio and that her parents, Joyce and Paul Davis, lived in Minford, near Columbus. Apparently, Paul had seen the newspaper article about the Ross case and noticed that Penton’s mug shot closely resembled the composite police sketch from Julia Diaz’s description of the man who’d abducted Roxann and that he was a fugitive from Texas. Davis had driven to the Columbus Police Department and told them about his granddaughter’s murder in Texas.
    Sweet saw that at some point in time—it was difficult to tell exactly when from the disorganized file—the Columbus investigators called the Garland Police Department. But there was nothing more in the file to indicate what, if anything had come of that call. In fact, he couldn’t tell from the file if Penton remained a viable suspect in the Texas murders or had been cleared. Except for the connection to the Columbus murder case and the suspicions raised by Roxann’s grandparents, he was just one of maybe a hundred names in the suspect folder.
    The Reyes case intrigued Sweet, but there were six other detectives and a supervisor in his unit, all of who had more experience than he did. Even if he’d wanted to work a cold case, he didn’t think he’d be allowed to or was qualified. So he closed the box on Roxann Reyes and left the murder closet to return to his regular caseload. Justice for the little girl and her family would have to wait.

CHAPTER SIX

    July 1998

    A s the next two years passed, Sweet’s thoughts often turned to Roxann Reyes. Sometimes other crimes against children would bring her to mind. But it