The hot, humid summer breeze did little to cool the heat of that July afternoon. Sweat beads dotted the faces of her playmates and trickled down her own neck and dampened her hair. At least keeping her almost waist-length hair in a high ponytail allowed the air to hit the back of her neck. As she did every morning, she had ironed her clothes and Hart’s and fixed their breakfast of cold cereal and fruit. She didn’t mind being helpful. And it was like Daddy had said—Enid had her hands full taking care of Blake, so he expected Audrey to pitch in and help. But sometimes, she missed just being a kid with no responsibilities, a kid who didn’t have to do laundry, iron clothes, prepare breakfast, run the vacuum, and make up her own bed. When her mother had been alive…But she’d been a little kid then. Now she was half grown. She was nine.

“Come on, Audrey,” Shanna Moore called. “We’re going to race around the block and see who’s got the fastest bike.”

Audrey jumped on the shiny new bike that Santa Claus had brought last Christmas. Her father thought she still believed in Santa and since Hart did, she pretended that she did, too.

“Hey, it’s your turn to check on Blake,” Hart hollered at her just as she lined up with the other three girls to start the big race.

“You do it this time,” she pleaded. “I’ll do it the next two times.”

“You’d better,” Hart grumbled. “I don’t see why we have to keep checking on the little spoiled brat. It’s not like he’s going to run off if he wakes up. He’ll come out here crying his head off.”

“Just go check on him, okay?”

And Audrey sailed off on her bike, determined to win the race.

Audrey came awake suddenly, her mind in a fog, her senses still reliving a day twenty-five years in the past. Her eyes flew open. She gulped for air.

The dream had seemed so real. But then, those dreams always were.

She shoved the sheet and blanket off her, slid to the edge of the bed, and sat up. It had been several years since she’d dreamed about the day Blake disappeared. As a child and teenager, she’d been haunted by dreams about that fateful day, but eventually the frequency of those nightmares lessened until eventually they had gone away completely, or so she had thought.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out why the dreams had returned. The possibility that one of the two toddler skeletons might be Blake had revived all the old memories.

Audrey glanced at the bedside clock. 5:06 A.M. Too late to try to go back to sleep. She slid her feet into her house shoes there by the bed and went to the bathroom.

If they had finally located Blake, did that mean her family would be able to find a sense of closure? Her father and Hart and Uncle Garth. And you, too, Audrey. Would holding a memorial service and burying him beside his mother give them—those left behind—some measure of peace? God, she hoped so.

And if neither toddler is Blake, what then?

Either way, whatever the DNA tests proved, the past had been resurrected, their grief and anguish and guilt dredged up from the murky depths of their souls.

An hour later, as Audrey finished her third cup of hot tea and downed the last bites of a whole wheat muffin, the phone rang.

Please, don’t let it be bad news.

Caller ID was a great invention. Audrey answered on the third ring. “Good morning.”

“I didn’t wake you, did I?” Tam asked.

“No, I’ve been up for a while and already had breakfast.”

“Have you talked to your uncle Garth this morning? Or—or last night?”

Oh, shit, what now? “No, why?”

“I guess he didn’t see any point in worrying you.”

“You’re worrying me right now. What’s going on?”

“Hart didn’t go home—back to Garth’s place—last night.”

Great. Just great.

“Hart’s okay,” Tam said hurriedly. “We don’t know where he’d been or who he’d been with. Garth was out looking for him well past midnight.”

“Where did he find him?” Not in an alley somewhere, please. “Was he…had he been—”

“Yeah, he’d been drinking.” Tam cleared her throat. “And Garth didn’t find him. I did. Sort of. Hart showed up here around two this morning, so drunk he could barely walk. Apparently somebody had dropped him off outside my house.”

“Oh, Tam, I’m sorry. What did Marcus say?”

“Marcus is still away, thank goodness.”

“I assume you called Garth and he came and got Hart.”

“I called Garth and he came over, but…”

“No, please, don’t tell me that Hart is still there.”

“Garth and I both thought it best to just let him sleep it off here, in my guest room. Garth’s coming back here around seven-thirty and he may need backup. He wants to put Hart in Parkridge again.”

“I’ll be over as soon as I can grab a shower and get dressed.”

Tam hadn’t slept a wink after her doorbell rang at two o’clock that morning. A staggering, blubbering, barely coherent Hart had fallen into her arms when he’d tripped over the threshold of her front door. She had draped her arm around his waist, pulled him inside, and somehow managed to hold on to him while she closed and locked the door.

“You’re so beautiful,” he had told her, his bloodshot eyes focused on her face as she’d helped him to the sofa.

“Why are you here, Hart?” she’d asked. “Why didn’t you go home?”

“Can’t. Don’t want to. I’m a mess, babe. Such a mess.”

He had curled up on her sofa and closed his eyes. She had sat on the edge of the coffee table and watched him for several minutes before she got up, took the afghan from the back of the sofa, and covered him with it. He’d mumbled her name in his alcohol-induced sleep.

She had called Garth and he’d shown up half an hour later. They had roused Hart enough to get him on his feet, but he had adamantly refused to leave with Garth. Short of knocking him out or calling for help to subdue Hart, they’d had little choice. Garth had helped her walk Hart into the guest bedroom.

“I’m damn sorry about this,” Garth had said. “I don’t know why he came to you. He knows to leave you alone. Even when he’s not himself, he knows better.”

“It’s all right. We’ll deal with things the best we can.”

“Maybe Audrey was right. Maybe I shouldn’t have told him about the toddler skeletons, but…”

No matter what Garth did for Hart, nothing seemed to help. If she hadn’t walked away from him years ago and done her best not to look back, she would be caught, as Garth and Audrey were, in the vicious cycle of Hart’s never-ending melodrama.

Showered, dressed, and ready for work, Tam paced the floor as she waited for Audrey and Garth to arrive. If Hart woke before they got there, how would she handle the situation? She had no idea what to expect.

“Morning,” Hart said.

Tam nearly jumped out of her skin when she heard the sound of his voice. He stood at the end of the hallway leading to the bedrooms. His golden hair stood on end as if it had been styled with an eggbeater, and an overnight growth of light brown beard stubble added to his disheveled appearance.

They stared at each other for several seconds before Tam broke eye contact. She didn’t know what to say. Apparently, he didn’t either. He walked into the living room in his sock feet. Garth had removed his shoes before putting him to bed at three this morning. When he approached her, she glanced at him and saw that his gaze was still locked on her face. Unnerved by the way he was looking at her, she backed away from him.

He stopped dead still. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come here.” His gaze shot nervously around the room. “To be honest, I don’t remember how I got here.”

“I don’t know either,” she replied. “Maybe a friend dropped you off or maybe you took a cab or—”

“Where’s your husband? I’m surprised he didn’t kick my ass out. Nobody could have blamed him.”

“Marcus is away on business.”

“Good. Uh…I mean it’s good I didn’t cause trouble for you with your husband. I want you to be happy. I don’t ever want to hurt you again. I swear.”

Steeling her nerves, Tam swore to herself that she could handle this situation, that she was in control of her emotions. “I believe you.”

The tension between them tautened with each passing second, like a wire tightening almost to the breaking point.

The doorbell rang.

Tam actually swayed on her feet as her body relaxed and she released a pent-up breath. “That’s probably Audrey.”

“You called in reinforcements,” Hart said.

Tam didn’t reply, nor did she glance back at him as she headed straight for the front door.

Audrey didn’t know who looked worse, Tam or Hart. Her stepbrother appeared to have sobered up after his drinking binge last night. Tam looked like she’d spent the night in hell.

“Go ahead,” Hart said. “Chew my ass out. I deserve it. I fucked up once again.”

Audrey shook her head. What a sad state of affairs for all of them. “Garth will be here soon and we’re taking you to Parkridge.” No need to beat around the bush. Straight talk was what Hart needed.

“One little slip and it’s back to the dungeon.” Hart grimaced.

“Do you have a better idea?” Audrey asked.

“Yeah, why don’t I just go jump off the Walnut Street Bridge and put us all out of our misery?”

Audrey cut her eyes toward Tam in time to see the stricken look on her face as she bit down on her bottom lip. Audrey glared at her stepbrother. “Damn it, Hart, think about how what you say and what you do affects other people, the people who love you.”

Hart stared at Tam, his gaze filled with a mixture of self-contempt and a plea for forgiveness. “I’m not worth loving.”

How many times had Audrey heard those words come out of Hart’s mouth?

And how many times had she heard him threaten to kill himself?

What could she say? How do you convince someone who hates himself that he deserves to be loved?

As the three of them stood there in Tam’s living room, the silence deafening, the doorbell rang. Tam sucked in a startled breath. Hart cursed.

“That’s probably Uncle Garth,” Audrey said. “I’ll let him in.”

When she opened the door, Garth stepped inside as his gaze swept over the living room. With a snarl on his lips and weariness heavy on his thick shoulders, he surveyed Hart from tousled hair to shoeless feet. “Get your shoes.”

Hart made no move to obey.

“He doesn’t want to go back to Parkridge,” Audrey said.

“Too bad,” Garth said. “He’s going.”

“He is in the room, standing right here,” Hart told them. “Don’t talk about me as if I’m not here.” He glared at Garth. “I’ll continue going to Parkridge as an outpatient. You can drive me over there yourself for the first available meeting today, but I don’t need—”

“You don’t know what you need!” Garth growled the words. “Were you or were you not drunk this morning when you showed up on Tamara’s doorstep?”

“Yeah, I was. And I admit that I didn’t handle the news about—” Hart glanced at Audrey and then refocused on his uncle. “The news about the toddler skeletons shook me up. But I’m okay now. I swear I am. I promise I won’t act crazy about this. I can deal with the possibility that one of them could be Blake.”

“Can you?” Garth asked.

“I can. I swear I can.”

Garth turned and faced Tam. “Did he say anything stupid or do anything that—?”

“No,” Tam replied.

“You don’t have to worry about anything, Uncle Garth,” Hart said. “I didn’t accidentally let any top-secret information slip out while I was drunk.” Hart laughed, the sound horribly hollow and sad.

“Shut up, will you? You’re talking nuts.” Garth grabbed Hart’s arm. “You don’t have to go back into rehab, but you’re going to continue with the outpatient program, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Understand?”

Hart saluted his uncle and tried to click his sock-clad heels. “Yes, sir.”

Fifteen minutes later, with Hart tucked in the front seat of Garth’s ’06 Mercury, Tam sat down on the sofa, leaned over, and placed her open palms on either side of her face. Audrey sat beside her and flung her arm across Tam’s trembling shoulders.

“He’ll never get any better, will he? He’s always going to be…” Tam’s voice trailed off midsentence as she looked at Audrey with teary eyes.

Audrey hugged Tam. “Don’t do this to yourself. Hart is not your problem. You don’t owe him anything. Do you hear me? You have a husband who loves you. Don’t do anything to risk your future with Marcus.”

Jeremy Arden faced himself in the mirror as he shaved. He was young, good looking, and reasonably intelligent. He shouldn’t be living in a dump like this, working as a busboy at a local restaurant, and fighting his inner demons every waking minute just to stay clean and sober. If his father hadn’t died and if his mother hadn’t married that jerk-off second husband, maybe things would be different for him. When a kid went through the kind of trauma he had, more than anything, he needed the love and support of his parents.

He really didn’t remember much about what had happened when he’d been kidnapped. Not consciously. But more than one shrink had made him realize that on some subconscious level, he remembered more than he was willing to admit. Occasionally, a thought crossed his mind—a memory?—and he was never sure whether what he was thinking about had actually happened or if somebody had told him it had happened.

The dreams weren’t real. They were just nightmares. Frightening nightmares that ate away at his brain like drops of acid. Only when he was drunk or high could he escape the reoccurring dreams, the night sweats, the sound of a voice singing inside his head.

Hush, little baby.

When he was seven, his parents, with the assistance of the shrink he was seeing at the time, had explained exactly what had happened to him when he was three. The psychiatrist had told his parents that he was old enough to understand and that knowing the basic facts would help him fully recover.

“Those bad dreams you have are because when you were three, this woman—this mentally unstable woman—kidnapped you,” his father had said. “She took you out of our car where you were sleeping while your mom went into the service station to pay for the gas she’d just pumped.”

“This woman kept you with her for a long time.” His mother had wrung her hands continuously as she talked. “Months and months. We nearly lost our minds worrying about you, but…” His mother’s voice had broken and she’d turned away from him in tears.

His father had taken his hand. “The police found you and took you away from this woman and brought you home to your mama and me. It was the happiest day of our lives.”

During the following years, Jeremy had learned more about the woman who had abducted him. Oddly enough, he had become fascinated by Regina Bennett. An unhealthy fascination. And he had visited her several times at the mental institution before she died. Even in her fifties, she had still been a rather pretty woman, bosomy and slender, with pensive brown eyes and thick, dark hair.

She had called him Cody.

And the last time he saw her, shortly before she died, she had caressed his cheek and hummed a familiar tune. “Remember, Cody? Remember how you loved for me to sing to you?”

Did he remember? He thought he did. Flashes of memory. Nothing definite. Maybe not even real memories, just thoughts planted in his head by an insane woman.

Ouch! Jeremy had cut himself with the razor and a spot of blood appeared on his chin. The momentary physical pain snapped him out of his thoughts and temporarily relieved him of the emotional pain that never left him.

He didn’t have time to question the past, to wonder what if. What if he’d never been kidnapped? What if his father hadn’t died? What if his mother hadn’t married an asshole? What if he’d never visited Regina Bennett and gotten to know her?

He needed to finish up here, grab a shower, and get dressed. He had places to go, people to see, things to do.

J.D. took a sip from his mug and frowned when the taste of the cool coffee reminded him how long it had been sitting on his desk. After dropping Zoe at school, he had come straight to the office, poured himself a mug of hot coffee, and tossed the two Baby Blue files he’d taken home with him on his desk. By the time he had finished thoroughly studying the Blake Sherrod files, it had been past eleven last night, so he’d never gotten around to the other file, the Jeremy Arden file.

This morning, he had decided to study the same aspects of each of the six cases simultaneously instead of going through each file separately, one at a time. First things first, the point where each case had begun—with the abduction.

Blond, blue-eyed Keith Lawson, twenty-nine months old, only child, abducted twenty-eight years ago from a sandbox in his grandmother’s backyard when she went inside the house to answer a ringing telephone and left the child alone.

Blond, blue-eyed Chase Wilcox, twenty-five months old, the younger of two children, abducted twenty-seven years ago when the teenage baby-sitter was in another room having sex with her boyfriend.

Blond, blue-eyed Devin Kelly, twenty-seven months old, only child, abducted twenty-six years ago when his divorced father’s girlfriend left him sitting in his stroller at a department store, outside the dressing room while she tried on a pair of jeans.

Blond, blue-eyed Blake Sherrod, twenty-three months old, one of three children in a blended family, abducted twenty-five years ago from his baby bed while his mother slept in her bedroom and his older siblings played outside.

Blond, blue-eyed Shane Douglas, thirty months old, younger of two sons, abducted twenty-five years ago from his hospital room where he was recovering after having minor surgery to put tubes in his ears because of chronic ear infections. The nurses had persuaded his mother, who hadn’t left his side, to go to the cafeteria for a bite to eat.

Blond, blue-eyed Jeremy Arden, thirty-four months old, only child, abducted twenty-four years ago from his mother’s car when she left him in his car seat to go inside a mini-mart to pay for the gas she had just pumped. Found four months later with Regina Bennett, who lived in a small house on her aunt and uncle’s farm in Sale Creek, not thirty miles from his parents’ home.

Regina’s aunt and uncle had sworn they had no idea that their niece had kidnapped Jeremy or any other child. Although the authorities doubted their complete ignorance, they had no proof of the couple’s culpability in the Baby Blue cases.

J.D. got up, went into the bathroom, and dumped his cold coffee in the sink. After pouring his mug full with semifresh hot coffee, he returned to his office. Standing beside his cluttered desk, he thought about the information he had just finished reading. The obvious came to mind first. Each child fit an almost identical profile. Blond, blue eyed, somewhere between two and three years old. Six toddlers, kidnapped a year apart over a period of five years.

No, that wasn’t right. Six kids, five years. Something didn’t add up. J.D. set his mug down as he flipped through the files until he found the exact dates. The five-year period was correct. That meant if Regina Bennett kidnapped all six boys, she had abducted two of them the same year. J.D. checked the abduction dates again and when he found the discrepancy, his gut tightened, but his mind cautioned him not to read too much into the information.

Blake Sherrod had gone missing in July and Shane Douglas had disappeared in August. Only a month apart.

J.D. triple-checked the dates.

Why had Regina Bennett changed her pattern of taking only one boy a year? Had something gone wrong with one of the kidnappings? Had she killed one of the boys too soon? Had someone else taken one of the boys?

Once again, J.D. skimmed through the files, checking the exact dates each boy had disappeared, thinking perhaps the month or the day might be the same. Keith and Chase had both disappeared in the month of June, a year apart. Devin and Blake had both disappeared in July, a year apart. Shane had disappeared in August, as had Jeremy Arden. The day of the month differed with each boy. The only similarity was that each of the boys had disappeared in the summer.

There had to be a reason that Blake Sherrod and Shane Douglas both went missing the same year. His gut instinct told him that this fact was significant. J.D. doubted that he was the first person to question why, if Regina Bennett had kidnapped both boys, she had changed her MO that year.

J.D. picked up the phone, removed the business card from where he’d clipped it to his desk calendar, and dialed George Bonner’s number.