Still, when all was said and done, my wife was safe, Constance was on an operating table, and the killer had been stopped. But, her capture had come at a steep and still not fully determined cost.

We’d been told the wounded federal agent had gone into cardiac arrest during the ambulance ride, but they had managed to stabilize her quickly. All we had heard since was that she had lost a lot of blood and that she was still in surgery. The phrase “touch and go” and the word “critical” had been stressed, but other than that, nobody was saying much of anything else.

Nobody, that is, except the disembodied voices in my head.

“ Book! What is your exact location?!”

“ Just outside the forest exhibit! Right before the path splits! Hurry!”

“ Found the gun,” Agent Frye’s voice blipped over the air. “But no shooter. The area is clear. She must have dispersed with the crowd.”

“ Washburn, cover southeast,” a voice ordered. “If she didn’t go past Book and Frye, then she has to be heading that way. I’m on the main path coming in toward you.”

“ Acknowledged.”

“ We’re locking down the park,” another voice added. “SWAT will be here in two.”

The device continued to burp and hiss with various voices for a moment, all of them reporting that there was no sign of Annalise Devereaux, the serial killer at the center of this evil. There was a quick burst of silence, then one of the agents came across the speaker, “I’ve got something. Red wig in a trashcan outside the restrooms near the stuffed animal workshop… Be advised the subject may have changed her appearance.”

“ WHERE ARE THOSE PARAMEDICS?!” Book’s frenzied words bled through on the heels of the announcement.

“ Where are those paramedics?!”

“ Where are those paramedics?!”

I struggled to ignore the echo of his fear-stricken voice repeating in my head. The conflicting emotions already had me on the edge of emptying my stomach with extreme prejudice. Constantly reliving the horror was only serving to make the nausea worse.