Read The Girls He Adored: A Novel for Free Online Page A

job and his pension along with his wife.
    In time Pender had managed to pull his life together, but neither his marriage nor his career ever recovered. After the divorce, and a leave of absence to dry out, he spent most of his time behind a desk searching the national crime databases, looking for patterns that might indicate a serial killer was plying his trade.
    Occasionally McDougal would send him out to interview a convict who was suspected of multijurisdictional crimes, but it was understood by all concerned that Ed Pender would never work another case as a field investigator, not after the fiasco back in 1994. In fact, he'd been lucky to keep his job at all in light of the stunt he'd pulled, holding a press conference in Reeford, Pennsylvania, after the special agent in charge had expressly forbidden him to go public with the investigation.
    The missing woman was over eighteen, the SAC had argued, she had left behind a moonstruck note to the effect that she was eloping with the man of her dreams, and there was no evidence of a forced abduction: nothing, in short, to justify alarming the public by declaring that a new serial killer was on the loose.
    But Pender, who had searched the NCIC missing persons files, was able to inform the SAC that as far as he could determine, this particular missing woman, Gloria Whitworth, just happened to be at least the sixth strawberry blond in the past six years to “elope” with the man of her dreams, then drop from sight.
    “The whole thing stinks to high heaven,” Pender had argued. “We have these women, their looks range from plain to downright homely, except for their hair—they all have beautiful strawberry blond hair. None of them has much in the way of a social life—no boyfriends.
    “Then suddenly they fall in love with a mystery man. He avoids being seen by the women's friends and families. No photographs, no prints left behind, but the descriptions tally for the sightings we do have—short, slight, good-looking, dark eyes, hair either dark or bleached.
    “And within a week of meeting this mystery man—two weeks at the outside—they run away with him and are never seen again. My God, man, what more do you want?”
    “How about a body?” the SAC had responded. “A sign of a forced abduction? Something better than a vague general description that would prove it's even the same man? A single piece ofevidence to indicate any of the women was even harmed, much less killed? The bureau hunts serial killers, not serial seducers.”
    Pender had been with the FBI long enough to understand the reasoning behind the SAC's decision. The bureau had always been a reactive, not a proactive, organization. An ambitious manager moved up through the bureaucracy by padding his stats, allocating his resources to investigations like interstate car thefts that produced quantifiable results, and letting the local authorities handle the loser cases.
    But every instinct Pender had—and by this time he had been hunting serial killers for the better part of two decades—told him that going public in order to warn all the girls with the strawberry curls to beware of short, dark, charming seducers, could do nothing but save lives.
    So he did, SAC or no SAC. And within an hour of that first and last press conference, broadcast only on one local TV station before the bureau put the kibosh on it, Pender had been summoned back to Washington to face disciplinary action from the OPR—the Office of Professional Responsibility. McDougal managed to save his ass again, but he'd spent the next stretch of his career performing routine background checks of prospective federal employees—the classic FBI punitive assignment.
    In the years following Reeford, several more strawberry blonds disappeared, but in none of these cases had anyone caught so much as a glimpse of the mystery seducer. So in the long run all Pender's press conference had managed to accomplish was to drive the already wary Casey deeper