Gone Read Free Page A

4:05 a.m. PST
    T HUNDER OUTSIDE.
    Quincy woke up too fast. His breath caught, his hands grabbing the mattress, his body steeling for the blow. In the next instant, he rolled fluidly onto his side and was up out of the bed.
    His chest was heaving. He had to force himself to look at the heavily floral wallpaper, to remember where he was and how he’d gotten here. The conclusion of those thoughts took the rest of the fight right out of him. His shoulders sagged. His head came down. He leaned heavily against the window and watched the rain slash hard diagonal lines across the glass.
    He’d been in the cute country bed-and-breakfast for seven days now, which was about seven days too long. The owner was kind, at least. She didn’t comment on a lone man renting a room in an inn obviously intended for lovers. And she didn’t pry when each morning he quietly asked to extend his reservation one more day.
    Where was this leading? When would it end? He honestly didn’t know anymore. And that thought left him tired. It made him feel, for the first time in his life, very, very old.
    Quincy was fifty-three, at the stage of his life where his dark brown hair held more salt than pepper, where the crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes had dug in deep, where he felt more and more distinguished and less and less handsome. He still ran twelve miles four times a week. He still trained each month at the firing range. Twice in his lifetime he had dealt with serial predators up close and personal, and he wasn’t about to go soft just because he’d passed the half-century mark.
    He wasn’t an easy man. He understood that. He was too smart, spent too much time living inside his head. His mother had died young and his father hadn’t been a talker. There were entire years of his life that had passed in silence. A boy who grew up like that was bound to turn into a particular kind of man.
    He’d joined law enforcement on a whim, starting his career with the Chicago PD. Then, when it turned out he had a natural gift for pursuing unnatural minds, he’d joined the FBI as a profiler. He’d logged the miles, working over a hundred cases a year, traveling from motel to motel, always studying death.
    While his first wife left him. While his two daughters grew up without him. Until one day, he’d looked around and realized that he’d given so much to the dead, he had nothing left.
    He’d transferred to some internal projects within the bureau after that, tried to be home more for his girls. He’d even worked on repairing the fractious relationship with his ex-wife, Bethie.
    Maybe he’d made some progress. It was hard to know. It seemed the next time he blinked his eyes, he was receiving a call from Bethie. There had been an automobile accident. Mandy was in the hospital. Please, come quick . . .
    His oldest daughter had never regained consciousness. They’d buried her shortly before her twenty-fourth birthday, then Quincy returned to his windowless office at Quantico, once again wading through photos of death.
    That had been the hardest year of Quincy’s life. Worse had been the horrible realization that someone had killed Mandy, and that that same someone now stalked Bethie and his younger daughter, Kimberly. He had moved quickly then, but still not quite fast enough. The killer had gotten to Bethie first, and maybe would’ve succeeded in killing Kimberly as well, if not for Rainie.
    Rainie had fought that day. She had fought for Kimberly, she had fought for herself, and she’d fought simply for the sake of fighting, because that’s what she did and that’s who she was and he’d never met anyone quite like her.
    He had loved that Rainie. He had loved her big mouth, her wiseass manner, her quick-fire temper. He loved the way she challenged him, provoked him, and infuriated the living daylights out of him.
    She was tough, independent, cynical, bright. But she was also the only woman he’d ever met who understood him. Who knew that he