“Barn, get this,” Winston said, her voice up a notch from the previous monotone. “We’ve got writing or something on the tape, on the gag.”

She had noticed it while manipulating the head. The camera moved in. McCaleb could make out lightly marked letters on the tape where it crossed the dead man’s mouth. The letters appeared to be written in ink but the message was obliterated by blood. He could make out what appeared to be one word of the message.

“Cave,” he read out loud. “Cave?”

He then thought maybe it was only a partial word but he couldn’t think of any larger word – other than cavern – that contained those letters in that order.

McCaleb froze the picture and just looked. He was enthralled. What he was seeing was pulling him backward in time to his days as a profiler, when almost every case he was assigned left him with the same question: What dark, tortured mind did this come from?

Words from a killer were always significant and put a case on a higher plane. It most often meant that the killing was a statement, a message transmitted from killer to victim and then from the investigators to the world as well.

McCaleb stood up and reached to the upper bunk. He pulled down one of the old file boxes and let it drop heavily to the floor. Quickly lifting the lid, he began combing through the files for a notebook with some unused pages in it. It had been his ritual with the bureau to start each case he was assigned with a fresh spiral notebook. He finally came across a file with only a BAR form and a notebook in it. With so little paperwork in the file he knew it was a short case and that the notebook should have plenty of blank pages.

McCaleb leafed through the notebook and found it largely unused.