LITMIR.BIZ

      To Shelley most of all. Loved. Missed. Remembered.

       To James McCowan, my healer. To Bailey, for the joy.

      ABOUT THE AUTHOR

      Jenna Ryan loves creating dark-haired heroes, heroines with strength and good murder mysteries. Ever since she was young, she has had an extremely active imagination. She considered various careers over the years and dabbled in several of them, until the day her sister Kathy suggested she put her imagination to work and write a book. She enjoys working with intriguing characters and feels she is at her best writing romantic suspense. When people ask her how she writes, she tells them by instinct. Clearly it’s worked, since she’s received numerous awards from Romantic Times BOOKreviews. She lives in Canada and travels as much as she can when she’s not writing.

      CAST OF CHARACTERS

      Vanessa Connor—A San Francisco homicide detective who attended Berkeley College. She’s marked for death.

      Rick Maguire—An FBI agent assigned to track down a serial killer while he protects Vanessa.

      Bobby Valley—He owns a day spa in Haight-Ashbury, and he knows all the Berkeley victims.

      Orrin O’Malley—An aspiring politician, he had many secrets at Berkeley.

      Geri Kruger—A friend now, she was jealous of Vanessa and her friends at college.

      Willis Reed—Former Berkeley professor, now presumed dead. But is he?

      Edna Reed—Does the professor’s wife know more than she’s letting on?

      Senator Graham—His niece was an embarrassment to him. Now she’s dead.

      Contents

      Prologue

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

      Chapter Eleven

      Chapter Twelve

      Chapter Thirteen

      Chapter Fourteen

      Chapter Fifteen

      Prologue

      Wisps of black fog drifted in and out of Vanessa Connor’s head. They obscured the face of a man she desperately wanted to see. She called his name, but that only added knife blades to the darkness. The shiny tips jabbed gleefully at the edges of her brain.

      It was like a dream, but not really. Someone had hit her, caught her hard with the butt end of a gun. As the darkness began to crack, vague memories slithered in to hiss at her.

      The walls around her groaned. She heard a bird croaking overhead. “Beware,” it warned again and again.

      With an enormous effort, Vanessa clawed her way through one of the cracks and forced her eyes open. Think, she ordered herself. Breathe. Focus.

      Because the literal darkness hadn’t altered, the only thing she could focus on was a tattered spiderweb in the corner of a high, rectangular window. The air smelled damp, vaguely musty. The bird’s voice floated downward again.

      “Don’t talk to strangers!”

      Having succeeded in raising her head, Vanessa let it fall back. She stared at the unfinished ceiling. Cobwebs dangled like broken threads. Her mind became a whirlpool, sucking in thoughts and tossing them back out at random.

      She pictured the man again. Was he calling her name? Probably. Would he find her here in this dank northern California cellar? Unlikely.

      On a more chilling note, she recalled four dead women, college friends once who’d turned into strangers with the passing years.

      She visualized their killer. Her killer unless she could find a way out of here. But the ropes around her wrists were cinched tight, and the ones binding her ankles weren’t much looser.

      Behind her, the cellar door creaked. A protracted silence followed. Then a foot hit the first stair tread.

      Vanessa’s heart thumped. She counted the steps, fourteen to the bottom. And finally…

      “Hello, Vanessa.” The disembodied voice was soft, like a caress. Oh, but there was a definite whip of fury in her name.

      The eerie approach continued, leather soles on the smooth concrete floor. Gradually, a form took shape. A gun emerged from the darkness. A hand appeared and caught her chin. The fingers that dug in jerked Vanessa’s head higher. Cold eyes glittered down at her.

      “Awake and aware, are we, Sleeping Beauty? I must have hit you harder than I realized. But then I’m so close to the end, you see, so very, very close.”

      The killer’s face came into view. Smiling lips dipped to kiss her left cheek, then her right.

      “You glow, even in the dark, Vanessa. Such a temptation for a weak, mortal male.”

      Vanessa knew better than to react. Any sign of fear or revulsion would send the killer over the edge. Of what, she wasn’t sure, since insanity was a given at this point and mercy an impossible dream.

      “Watch out!” the distant bird shrilled, and the killer laughed.

      “I’ll shoot that crow before I leave.”

      “But…”

      “For fun. For the sake of confusion. Because I hate birds. But not as much as I hate you.” The hand holding the gun rose, touched Vanessa’s forehead. “Say your prayers, gorgeous.” The freakish smile returned. “You have five short seconds. Then you’re dead.”

      Chapter One

      Two weeks earlier…

      “Hi, Van. Working late?” A woman in a blue linen suit smiled as she passed Vanessa near the nerve center of police headquarters. “Whoa, wait a minute.” She hooked a hand through Vanessa’s arm. “That’s awfully formal detective gear you’re wearing.”

      “I’m off duty.” Vanessa slipped out of her pinstriped jacket, baring her arms to the relative cool of the station house air. “I swear the temperature hasn’t dropped five degrees since sunset.”

      “Uh-huh.” A suspicious light entered the other woman’s eyes. “You’ve been in court, haven’t you?”

      Vanessa couldn’t resist a smile as she pushed through the door. “Guilty, Counselor Kruger.”

      “Testifying against my partner’s client?”

      “He robbed a credit union at closing time, Ger. He was red-faced, high, and he stabbed one of the tellers.”

      “With a needle.”

      “Which he claimed was infected with HIV.

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