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into the shadows—and that hurt Ed Pender far worse than the official reprimands.
    By the time McDougal agreed to form the Casey task force (or exploratory committee, as he preferred to call it—McDougal, too, knew how to cover his ass: you didn't get as far as he had in the bureau without a Ph.D. in CYA), Pender was out of the doghouse. And as recognition for his apparently having been right about Casey's existence all along, McDougal had given him a seat at the table.
    As time wore on, however, and no bodies were discovered, Pender's judgment was called into question again. Eventually the task force evolved into a one-man crusade. At least once a week Pender would search the NCIC missing persons database and a half dozen other systems to see if any more women with hair described as reddish blond or strawberry blond had turned up missing.
    When Donna Hughes's name popped up on the NCIC database in June 1998, Pender's first reaction was that she was too old, too good-looking, and too married to fit the victim profile. But the more he reviewed the file forwarded from the Dallas field office, the more convinced he was that Casey had struck again. Though he was unable to persuade McDougal to send him to Texas, he was successful in having Mrs. Hughes added to the list of Casey's possible victims.
    Now there was Paula Ann Wisniewski, the young woman from Santa Barbara whose death had resulted in the first decent Casey suspect since the investigation began. Only a man as obsessed as Pender would have had Thom Davies, an FBI database expert, compiling lists of all disappearances or violent deaths involving females with red or blond hair on a weekly basis, or noticed, on his follow-up, the discrepancy between the hair color on the police report—blond—and that on the coroner's—red.
    Pender had immediately asked for the postmortem photos to be color-faxed to him. Unfortunately the coroner's flash Polaroids, though gruesome enough, were not much help, chromatically speaking. But since the man in custody fit the description of the suspect in the first seven suspected Casey abductions and had used a knife purchased in Texas, the state where the last Casey abduction had taken place, and most important, because McDougal had no one else available, he had reluctantly agreed to send Pender out to California to interview the suspect.
    And after talking to Deputy Jervis, so strong was Pender's hunch that the man in custody was Casey that if he could have been equally as sure that all the victims were accounted for, Pender would never have put his own life in jeopardy trying to tie him to the other crimes.
    Instead he'd have flown back for a VICAP interview after the trial, gotten what he could out of the monster, then returned to D.C. to accept the retirement that the bureau was so anxious to foist upon him, and let California take care of Casey. They had lethal injection in the Golden State now; too good for scum like that, but what could you do?
    But in addition to the probability that Casey's victim count was higher than currently suspected, there was something else to factor in: the possibility that one or more of the strawberry blonds still survived. Admittedly far-fetched, still it was a fantasy of Pender's, never to be spoken aloud, barely acknowledged even to himselfexcept as a vague mental image: he'd open a cellar door, and there they'd all be, Gloria, Donna, Dolores, and the others, staring up at him through the darkness, somewhat the worse for wear, but alive. Alive.
    It was that image—that and the autopsy photos—that made up his mind for him. Fortunately, a seasoned player like Pender knew the first rule for getting along in the bureau-cracy: Better to ask forgiveness than permission. So when he called his office later that afternoon after checking into the Travel Inn in Salinas, he reported only that he had scheduled a jailhouse interview the following afternoon, Wednesday, July 7, and expected to be back home no later