She nodded, then reached for more toast. Anger was beginning to build in her, and it was driving her appetite. She couldn’t afford to let her feelings get in the way of clear thinking, but she could indulge for a little while.
Being in the army had exposed her to some of the very best in human nature, people willing to give and risk everything for an ideal. But her job in the army had unfortunately given her too much exposure to the dregs, people who polluted the uniform simply by wearing it.
She was no wide-eyed naïf—she’d seen plenty of violence—but this guy was so low she had discovered she could still be shocked. He shocked her. Horrified her. Sickened her in ways she’d never felt before.
The mere fact that he was still drawing breath infuriated her. Out there somewhere, sitting in his hideous web, probably already planning his next abduction. Maybe already making the contact with some boy.
Seldom had she felt the urge to commit cold-blooded violence with her own hands, but she did right then.
That shocked her, too. She knew she wasn’t that kind of person. She could do plenty with provocation. Her history was littered with it. Being an MP wasn’t always a nonviolent job. But never without direct provocation, and only to the extent necessary to bring a situation under control.
This was different.
“DeeJay?”
Cade’s voice seemed faraway. She shook herself and answered, “I’m having some unholy thoughts.”
“So am I.”
She met his gaze at last and saw a cold anger there for the first time. Apparently, his calm explanation of his theory had belied his feelings about it. Bad enough to think of these youths being kidnapped and killed. Worse to plumb the insanity and depravity behind it.
The phone rang, jarring DeeJay so much that she almost jumped. Her mind had been far away from the mundane, looking into one of the pits of hell.
Cade twisted and grabbed the receiver. A moment later, she heard him say, “Lew. Good to hear from you. How’d it go?”
She glanced at the clock, registering Cade’s noncommittal responses. Shortly after six here, but eight in the morning at Quantico. Lew must have just hit his desk and found something. She waited impatiently, but Cade’s end of the conversation revealed nothing. When he grabbed for a nearby pad and began scribbling things down, she knew only that Lew’s digging had yielded some kind of treasure.
Get a grip, she told herself. Stop thinking about what those boys must have endured and think about how good it would feel to catch their murderer. About how much they still had to do, how they needed to turn slender threads of information into ropes they could use against this guy. About how important it was not to waste any precious minutes. Some kid could already be in the killer’s sights.
At long last, Cade hung up the phone.
“Well?” she demanded.
“We’ll have to thank our sheriff. He apparently put all the information from five years ago into the national database, so Lew even had photos to work with. I can tell you for sure our guy hasn’t been in prison for the last five years.”
She closed her eyes, nodding slowly. “So there have been other victims.”
“Minneapolis, Chicago, Houston and Boston.”
“Timing?”