LITMIR.BIZ

       ONE

      The scream was high-pitched and terrified, shattering the muggy darkness of predawn July and sending Senior Airman Chase McLear shooting straight out of bed like a bullet from a gun before he’d even fully woken up. Furious howls from his K-9 beagle, Queenie, sounded the alarm that danger was near. Chase’s long legs propelled him across the floor, clad in gray track pant civvies. He felt the muscles in his arms tense for an unknown battle, as the faces of the brave men and women who’d been viciously killed by Boyd Sullivan, the notorious Red Rose Killer, flickered like a slideshow through his mind.

       Help me catch him, Lord, and end the fear that’s gripped the base!

      Sudden pain shot through his sole as his bare foot landed hard on one of the wooden building blocks his daughter, Allie, had left scattered across the floor. He grabbed the door frame and blinked hard. His eyes struggled to focus on shapes in the darkness as his throbbing foot yanked him back to consciousness.

      He was standing in the bedroom doorway of his modest Canyon Air Force Base bungalow. A humid breeze slipped in through the thick screen at the very bottom of his bedroom window where he’d left it ajar just a couple of inches to save using electricity on air-conditioning. The clock read twenty after five in the morning. His three-year-old daughter was crying out in her sleep from her bedroom down the hall.

      Seemed they were both having nightmares tonight.

      He started down the hall toward her, ignoring the stinging pain in his foot. The beagle’s howls faded to a low warning growl, which he suspected meant in Queenie’s mind the danger had passed. Had she just been howling because of Allie’s cries?

      “No!” His daughter’s tiny panicked voice filled the darkened air. “Bad man! Hurt man! No!”

      His brow creased. “Bad man” and “hurt man” were common themes in his daughter’s nightmares these days. He wasn’t sure why. Her preschool teacher, Maisy Lockwood, had assured him that many parents on base had told her their children had been having nightmares since Boyd had broken out of prison, killed several people and released hundreds of dogs from the K-9 kennels back in April.

      But he’d done everything in his power to protect Allie from hearing anything about it—including the fact that because someone had apparently used his name when they visited Boyd before he escaped prison, Chase had been recently questioned as a suspect. It had been a little over three weeks since Air Force Investigations had first put him through the ringer, questioning his alibi for the night Boyd had broken onto the base. They seemed determined to pick a hole in Chase’s story that he’d been on a video call with a buddy he’d worked with in Afghanistan at the time. Even he had to admit the fact that he couldn’t provide

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