Vanished in the Night

Praise for
Hold Back the Dark

“Carr’s romantic suspense debut starts off like a rocket. . . . The characters are engaging and distinct, with complex motivations, and the pacing of the thriller is so inexorable it almost overshadows the romance.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Suspense lovers will be delighted with Carr’s tightly woven and tense plot. The chemistry is tangible and realistic, and the intricacies of the murder plot are masterfully crafted. Carr will have instant fans.”

—
Romantic Times

“Gripping suspense . . . a heart-pounder.”

—Roxanne St. Claire,
New York Times
bestselling author

“A definite winner in the romantic thriller category.”

—John Lescroart,
New York Times
bestselling author

“An excellent addition to the genre.”

—Kwips and Kritiques

“If you’re looking for good romantic suspense, look no further.”

—Book Binge

“Carr has truly mastered the art of romantic suspense and is a force to be reckoned with in the future.”

—Romance Reviews Today

“The suspense and drama were intense and kept me reading till the very last page. . . . Hold on to your hats, ladies and gentlemen, as there is a new author in town, and her name is Eileen Carr.”

—Fallen Angels Reviews

“A chilling and intense suspense about the realities of a pedophile and the lasting results.”

—Fresh Fiction (Fresh Pick)

ALSO BY EILEEN CARR

Hold Back the Dark

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and
incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used
fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons,
living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2011 by Eileen Rendahl

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or
portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address
Pocket Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the
Americas, New York, NY 10020

First Pocket Books paperback edition August 2011

POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of
Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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Designed by Jill Putorti
Cover design by John Vairo Jr.
Woman running © Jan Mammey/STOCK4B/Getty Images;
forest © Nacivet/Getty Images

Manufactured in the United States of America

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

ISBN 978-1-4391-8387-8
ISBN 978-1-4391-8391-5 (ebook)

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

To Debbie, Naomi, Marian, Elizabeth, and Kathy
and all the many nurses I’ve been blessed to know.
You are my heroines every day.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to my sister Diane, who gave this book its original title. We didn’t get to use it, but it kept me focused as I wrote the story. Thank you to my sister Marian, who devised ways to kill many of the victims in the book. Thanks to Susan and Virna for help in fleshing out the story, coming up with nicknames, and providing general moral support at a very crucial moment. Of course, many thanks to the usual suspects—Andy, Spring, Deb, and Carol—who talk me down, cheer me up, create backstories, and generally keep me sane.

As always, many, many thanks to my wonderful editor, Micki Nuding, who keeps me from disappearing down too many literary rabbit holes, and my ever-patient agent, Pamela Ahearn, for encouraging me to explore some of them.

VANISHED
IN THE
NIGHT

1

Whoever the poor bastard was, he’d been dead a long time. All Sergeant Zach McKnight of the Sacramento Police Department could see in the bottom of the hole were bone and some hair held together by a few shreds of cloth. Crap, was that a 49ers jersey? He hadn’t seen one of those since 1989.

This case was beyond cold. It was freaking arctic.

His partner, Frank Rodriguez, came to stand beside him at the edge of the construction pit. “I think the first forty-eight hours have totally passed.”

“Gee, Frank, what was your first clue? The nearly total decomposition? Or the rotted clothing?” Zach slid down the side of the pit to crouch next to the body, which rested on top of a ripped black plastic bag on the dirt. Morning dew shimmered a bit on the exposed bone and dampened the red-and-gold jersey.

A dump job, for sure. No way had this skeleton been buried in this pit. Somebody had put it there.

“I’m going with the decomp. That’s always a dead giveaway.” Frank pulled the collar of his coat up around his ears. It was chilly this early in the morning.

All around them crime-scene techs combed the area, gathering bits of garbage that would probably amount to nothing, but which had to be collected and cataloged. Outside the chain-link fence the construction workers loitered, trying to figure out if they were going to have an unexpected day off or not. Uniformed cops were asking questions and looking for familiar faces amidst the crowd that had gathered.

Zach scanned the remains. The likelihood that he’d find anything helpful was between slim and none, but the job was 80 percent going through the motions, 20 percent making a difference. On a
good
day. “Who found him?”

“Foreman.” Frank slowly descended into the pit. “Swears on his mama’s grave that it wasn’t here at the end of the day yesterday. Then poof! It magically appeared overnight.”

“Magically? He said that?” Zach glanced up with narrowed eyes. Did he have whack jobs on his hands? Satanists digging up dead bodies? Halloween was right around the corner, so it wasn’t totally out of the
question. At least he’d be looking at a crime that had happened recently enough that someone might care. As it was, would anybody give a rat’s ass about this poor son of a bitch? Zach would be lucky if he could even get an ID on the dude.

“Of course not, I’m embellishing slightly to make the story more compelling, moron. He didn’t swear on his mama’s grave, either. Keep up, will you?” Frank folded a piece of Juicy Fruit into his mouth and crouched next to Zach. “At least he don’t stink.”

Amen to that. The lack of
eau de corpse
was about the only advantage to working a cold case. Pretty much everything else about them sucked. Most people couldn’t remember what they were doing last Tuesday, much less some random day five, ten, or fifteen years before. Most of the forensic evidence had probably rotted along with the flesh off the body. “They have security cameras? A guard? Anything?”

“They’re getting the tapes from the security cameras together for me now. There’s a rent-a-cop who drives by all their sites in the area. I got his name and number. Uniforms are canvasing, but there’s not much to canvas.”

True enough. They were in the middle of downtown Sacramento; nobody lived down here. There were administration buildings, offices.

Frank shook his head. “It looks like a dump job to
me, but why bother dumping it after all these years? And why here?”

Good questions. Zach looked around. “What’s this site going to be, anyway?” You didn’t see much construction anymore; nobody had the cash.

“Some kind of medical office building.”

Figured. The only people with money to build something these days would be doctors.

Something shiny near the leather belt that hadn’t fully rotted caught Zach’s eye. Reaching down with a pencil, he fished a metal chain out of the shredded fabric around what must have been hips.

Military dog tags flashed in the weak morning sunlight. They were dirty and a little corroded, but Zach was pretty sure a little cleaning would make them readable. His day brightened slightly. “I think IDing him just got a little easier.”

“Nice,” Frank said. “I’ll call in the crime-scene geeks and see what else they can find.”

The two of them scrambled out of the pit. Outside the construction fence, the media was starting to gather. Zach saw Marianne Robar from Channel 4 climbing out of a van with a giant satellite apparatus on top of it, and sighed. He couldn’t really blame them; it was more interesting than covering what little weather Sacramento had. But it would be a pain in his butt on a case that would be a pain in the butt all on its own.

To the side of the news vans, he spotted Ben Stephenson from the
Sacramento Chronicle.
The guy had been born in the wrong era. He should have been working at a newspaper back in the days when reporters smoked cigarettes and drank whiskey, not when they sat behind their desks and tapped computer keys all day.