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to death. One was nine, the other eleven. Both had blonde hair. Both were playing with friends and wandered only a short distance away. He wished he could picture them alive, playing, laughing. Instead, he could only picture them under the coroner’s knife.
    The first, Jenny Benedict, had been in a park with neighborhood friends. She went to get water from the fountain and two girls saw her willingly walk off with “some guy.”
    When Zack learned the father was allowed only supervised visitation with his daughter because of a bitter and prolonged custody battle, he wanted the man to be guilty. He tried everything to get him to confess. But in the end, Paul Benedict wasn’t a murderer. He was a father beyond grief, as destroyed by the news of his daughter’s murder as any innocent man would be. More so, perhaps.
    I should have been there. Protecting her
. Benedict’s words haunted Zack. Too close to the way Zack felt about his sister Amy.
    I should have been there.
    But what could he have done? Amy hadn’t been a little kid, and she sure as hell hadn’t wanted anything to do with her brother, the cop.
    The second girl, Michelle Davidson, had been riding her bike when she raced ahead of her friends, trying to beat them home. Her bike was found in the yard of her next-door neighbor. Michelle was found dead three days later.
    That was early yesterday morning, thirty-six hours ago. Now the press was all over him. They didn’t care that the parents were grieving or that he’d slept no more than four hours a night since the first victim was murdered three weeks ago, or that he spent two hours yesterday afternoon watching the autopsy of someone far too young to die.
    “Did you run the killer’s M.O. through the computer?” Zack asked Boyd. The single best thing about the young rookie was his skill with all things electronic, in particular, computers. It would have taken Zack endless hours to plug in the information with his hunt-and-peck-and-erase system, and then he’d probably have to redo it because of mistakes. But Boyd was of the next generation. He was a whiz with the damn thing and took over that end of their work.
    Boyd nodded. “I printed out the report. There are several unsolved cases. Seven years ago in Austin, Texas, four blonde girls were abducted in a six-month period. No suspects, no witnesses. The bodies were displayed in the same manner.”
    “Fully clothed, underwear missing, hair cut,” Zack mumbled.
    “Ten years ago in Nashville four girls were killed who matched the M.O. An eyewitness gave a description, but it didn’t lead anywhere.”
    “Do you have it?”
    “Nashville is digging it up and said they’d fax it by the end of the day. But there wasn’t enough information for a composite.”
    “At least it’s something.” Like hell it was. Zack glanced at his watch. It was already five o’clock here; there’s no way Nashville would be getting them anything tonight. “What about the tattoo?”
    Jenny Benedict’s abductor had some sort of tattoo on his upper left arm. The two girls who watched her leave couldn’t tell what it was, but a tattoo was better than nothing.
    “The Nashville witness also mentioned a tattoo, but no description of it was in the file. I asked them to check on it.”
    “Two cases?”
    “You said go back ten years. That’s what I found.”
    Zack’s instincts screamed that this guy had left a lot more than eight dead girls in his wake before hitting Seattle. He was too damn slick; he had to have had practice. And since Zack suspected that he’d been at this for a long time, the killer might have left something more of himself at the beginning of his crime spree.
    Serial killers worked hard to perfect their murders. They preyed on humans for their own sick pleasure. Though they often looked normal, acted normal—even charming, like Ted Bundy, or attractive, like Paul Bernardo—beneath the surface they felt no remorse, no empathy for their fellow human beings.