She was twelve. Blue eyes. Long blond hair. Then she vanished into the fog, and into a killer who knew exactly how to leave no trace.
Then father came to Dan Murphy's office clutching Melissa's photograph like a lifeline. Dan didn't want the case. He was already busy. But the desperate man slid a thick check across the desk, and Dan took it, and the guilt.
He worked the edges, chasing shadows between other jobs. Then the world collapsed. Melissa's entire family was found slaughtered. Throats opened. Eyes frozen in horror.
Dan almost walked away. What's the point? But his own rule burned in his chest, 'Always finish a job you start.'
The killer was a nightmare, a man who posed as a priest while working as a police forensics technician. He knew exactly how to erase his sins. He snatched the girls. Used them. Then fed their small bodies into an industrial furnace. Their ashes drifted down a river like cursed dust.
Dan pieced together the fragments through shadows and silence. The hunt ended in an abandoned factory. Bullets tearing through the gloom. A folding cot. A little naked girl, drugged, but alive.
Dan shot the killer. The monster kept coming. A police detective flanked him. One shot dropped him, face still defiant. Dan pressed his weapon against that face, grinding it into the dust.
Melissa was already ash. Her family gone.
But as red and blue police lights cut through the night, Dan whispered a silent prayer, not for justice, but that he would never see anything this depraved again.
