And he asked himself the question that everyone else seemed consumed with: Why was he so fascinated with this case? A simple missing persons case, they’d all said. Why did Mac care about this one so much?

He still had no answer. Maybe he’d been a little in love, a little in lust, with the beautiful, mysterious girl he’d never met. He’d handled dozens of cases where kids disappeared, but this one was different. She was different. He’d followed all the leads he could, dreamed about her, even. Fantasized about her, for God’s sake, and he’d taken a lot of heat for it. At the time his friends on the force thought he’d gone around the bend. She was a sixteen-year-old runaway. He was an up-and-coming hotshot detective who was obsessed by a ghost.

In retrospect, maybe they hadn’t been that far off the mark.

Now, twenty years later, a single father working homicide, Mac knew he’d definitely mellowed. He didn’t really want this case now. Old wounds. And problems.

But those Preppy Pricks were still out there. He wondered how they felt, knowing Jessie’s body had been discovered. One, or several of them, must be sweating bullets now.

Mac smiled thinly. Well, maybe this was the way it should be after all. Him, heading up a homicide case, a cold case that put all the smug bastards on the hot seat.

It was sounding better by the minute.

Becca set the newspaper on the coffee table and sank back on the couch, still staring at the folded pages as if they were Satan’s diary. She felt cold inside and out. What was this? What did it mean?

Ringo circled her feet, tail down, a soft, nearly inaudible growl emanating from his throat.

“Stop it, there’s nothing out there,” she said softly, as much to soothe her own jangled nerves as to calm the dog.

Jessie Brentwood had disappeared twenty years earlier when she’d been sixteen and a student at St.