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apart.
    “What about that drawing?” Rayne asked the agent.
    “It’s being disseminated. Law enforcement in all nearby states will be on the lookout. I wish it were a better picture. The hat keeps us from seeing his hair or the shape of his head. But it’s something.” Agent Scarrow leaned toward them, hands clasped and forearms on his legs. “The van is still being processed. Technicians are going through every square inch of it, searching for evidence. They’ve lifted fingerprints and taken samples of the blood. These samples can be sent to a local lab for a quick test to determine if the blood is human. If it is, the techs can then pretty quickly tell the blood type. Typing will give us a fair indication if it’s Shaley’s.”
    Rayne nodded. Brittany couldn’t speak. She knew it was Shaley’s. She knew.
    Agent Scarrow gestured toward the upper level of the mansion. “You know a tech collected some hair from Shaley’s brush in the bathroom so we can check DNA. If the blood type matches Shaley’s, we’ll need to run DNA tests to be sure it’s hers. Those results take weeks. The other possibility, if the blood type doesn’t match Shaley’s, is that it might have come from the suspect. Maybe she scratched him and drew blood. If we get lucky and discover that we may have a sample of the suspect’s blood, we can run DNA tests on the samples, then run the results through CODIS, the national DNA databank. If our suspect has been convicted of a felony, he’ll be in the system. Or, if he’s even been so much as arrested for a felony in California since the beginning of 2009, he’ll be in the system. We’ve also extracted some hair samples from the driver’s seat. These could belong to oursuspect or to the original driver of the van. We obtained hair from the original driver. Technicians will examine the hairs to see if he can be excluded.”
    “Shaley and I were fingerprinted in school a few years ago.” Brittany turned to Rayne. “Remember? It was voluntary. You signed her up.”
    “That’s right, I did.”
    “Good to hear that.” Agent Scarrow nodded. “We’ll be able to check them against prints in the van. We’ll also run any fingerprints lifted, especially those from the driver’s area, through the California database. If the suspect has been arrested within this state, he’ll be in there. If we don’t find a match there, we’ll widen our search to western states, then the whole country.”
    Gary leaned forward and ran his hands up and down his face. Then heaved back in his chair. “All this is fine, but this is evidence. We don’t want evidence. We just want Shaley back.”
    “I under—”
    “No, you don’t understand!” Sudden anger seized his face. “You can’t understand! We just need her found. And now we don’t even know what car they’re in!”
    Rayne squeezed Gary’s arm—hard. He was usually so calm, and Brittany knew Rayne needed him to stay that way. Right now everything he said and did seemed to flow into her.
    Agent Scarrow looked down at the marble floor and cleared his throat. “Mr. Donovon, I do know what it’s like to have a child snatched away. It happened to my own daughter fourteen years ago. She was three.”
    Rayne’s mouth sagged open. She and Gary both spoke at once.
    “I’m so sorry—”
    “We didn’t know—”
    “It’s okay.” Agent Scarrow held up his palm. He had long fingers. “We’re not here to talk about that. We’re here to find your daughter. I just want you to know I’m going to do everything I can to find Shaley. I will give this case everything I’ve got.”
    Rayne surveyed him, as if afraid to ask the same question that hung in Brittany’s mind. “What happened to your daughter?”
    Agent Scarrow swiveled his head to look through the rear wall of glass out to the back gardens. Regret pinched his face. Brittany knew before he spoke what his answer would be.
    “Her body was found four days later.”
    “Oh.” Brittany