She’d made it this far before only to be pulled back by Dr. Mattingly’s voice, betrayed by her rapid heart rate and hyperventilating lungs. Megan had prepared herself for this moment, studying as she sat in the empty filing room of the courthouse the nuances of meditation and the methods used to calm her pulse and slow her heart rate and settle her lungs. She knew, even without hearing Dr. Mattingly’s voice, that if her vitals went wild, the good doctor had ways of reaching a patient lost in hypnosis. So, in order to avoid being saved by Dr. Mattingly, Megan put to use all the tools of meditation she had learned during the long, boring hours spent at the courthouse.

Now, despite the fear that overwhelmed her as his footsteps thumped overhead and the cellar door opened and the stairs creaked, Megan worked to keep her heartbeat at a slow and controlled grandfather-clock rhythm, her breathing at a measured in-and-out, and her eyelids at a reasonable state of flutter as she listened to him descend the stairs.

His comings and goings had told her there were thirteen stairs into the cellar, and she listened to every noise, each sound that came and went as he made his way down them, closer and closer and closer.

Ten, eleven, twelve . . . thirteen.

Then he was there. But Megan had arrived as well. Finding after so long what she had been searching for. Uncovering that thing she needed. She let go of all her breathing techniques. Abandoned all the methods she had utilized to keep her heart from racing, and let her eyes run wild under her lids. It had the effect she wanted. She heard Dr. Mattingly’s voice, not the calm, collected voice of her psychiatrist, but the hurried and troubled voice of a hypnotist who had lost control of his subject.

“Right now, Megan! I want you to come to my voice!”

But returning was not as simple as in the past. She was stuck in the cellar. Unmoved by the pull of Dr. Mattingly’s voice. And her captor was there, in the darkness. Placing her meal on the table. Ready to make his advance upon her after she was properly sedated.

“Come to my voice, Megan!”

Megan shook her head, tried to move her arms as she sat up in the bed of the cellar.

She heard snapping and clapping. “Megan! Come. To. My. Voice!”

Her captor stood in the darkness. A black ghost against a black background.

Her eyes suddenly opened. Dr. Mattingly was kneeling in front of her in his tailored suit. Snapping his fingers and clapping his hands. His forehead was beaded with the same dots of perspiration that covered Megan’s flushed face.

“What are you doing?” he asked. “You’re supposed to respond to me when I engage you.”

But Megan was paying no attention to her doctor. She had a beat on the thing she had so long searched for. That elusive item she knew was there in her memory but until now had been unable to reach. She stood from the plush chair and brushed past Dr. Mattingly.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

Megan ran a hand over her mouth, her eyes wide and wandering the room. She swallowed hard, her saliva rough against her dry throat.

“I’ve gotta go,” she said, heading for the door.

“Megan. We need to discuss this. It’s unhealthy to leave a session without vetting what was learned.”

But without turning back, she was gone.

*

She tore out of the hospital’s parking lot to a chorus of horns. The startle filled her with a burst of adrenaline, and the screeching tires brought Megan closer to consciousness. She had no memory of fleeing Dr. Mattingly’s office. She could not recall if she’d taken the stairs to the lobby or ridden the elevator, and she had no mental picture of climbing into her car until the horns and weaving cars brought her focus back to the present. Her mind fought to retain what she had discovered in her rogue therapy session, but despite her efforts those images were slipping from her memory the more the world swerved around her.

The stimulus of the traffic and the highway suddenly became too much for her hypersensitive mind to tolerate. Without consideration she crossed two lanes of traffic, generating more screeching tires and blasting horns, to swerve onto the ramp that would take her to Points Bridge, across the Roanoke River and into West Bay. Her eyes were frantic and unblinking as she remembered the dark cellar from moments ago and the noises that were there. She fought against it, refused to go back there, while at the same time unwilling to let go of the images and sounds and smells she had discovered.

The battle lasted thirty minutes until Megan found herself in West Bay. As the images and sounds spinning in her head tugged her back to her therapy session, back to the cellar, her car slowly veered to the left and crossed the middle line. An oncoming vehicle squealed its brakes and slid onto the shoulder to avoid the collision. Megan jerked the wheel to her right and momentarily lost control of her car in a wild fishtail. The near miss finally brought her back, the trance passing entirely so that she became wholly aware of her surroundings. She pulled onto the gravel shoulder, setting loose a dust storm as she stepped too firmly on the brake pedal and skidded to a stop.

Taking deep, heavy breaths, Megan looked around and wondered how she’d gotten to West Bay. A sign told her she was outside a subdivision named Stellar Heights. It was nearly four p.m.; her session with Dr. Mattingly had started at two o’clock. Almost two lost hours. Megan pieced together what she remembered after she had untethered herself from Dr. Mattingly’s voice and walked unfettered through the cellar of her nightmares. Assembling those memories was more difficult than she imagined, and after ten minutes she began to cry. She thought she’d found a way to locate the thing she was looking for, and she could briefly remember making a breakthrough while on her own in the cellar of her captivity. But now, parked on the shoulder outside a subdivision in West Bay, Megan felt no closer to the truth than she had the day before.

CHAPTER 40

Livia pulled to the curb of the dilapidated house again and knocked on the screen door. Daisy went berserk, barking and clawing at the front door. She heard scrambling and hollering until the pit bull was corralled, then Nate Theros opened the door.

Livia held up the book for him to see, as if presenting ransom money.

“Signed?” Nate asked.

Livia opened the cover of Missing to display Megan’s signature.

“She even wrote you a note.”

Nate pushed through the screen door and took the book. He read the cursive on the first page.

“Cool,” Nate said, reading and rereading the words.

“So, will you help me?”

Nate closed the book, ran his hand over the cover that depicted the dark woods and the bunker from where Megan had escaped. “Yeah. Let’s do it.”

Inside Nate’s home, Daisy panted and whined as she did circles in her crate, her nails scraping against the plastic lining. The kitchen table stood in the middle of an epic explosion of waste and garbage. The countertops were invisible beneath dirty dishes, old pizza boxes, empty milk cartons, cereal boxes, and dog food. The table where Livia set her folder was sticky, and she got the sense Nate had just recently cleared the space.

There was no apology or embarrassment. Nate, she could tell, felt this was the way most people lived. And if it wasn’t, he didn’t care—it was the way he lived. Take it or leave it. The whole scene confirmed for Livia that Nathaniel Theros was a different breed. She hoped it would pay dividends.

He pulled a chair out from the table, spun it around, and sat on it backward, resting his arms over the spine. A smile came to his face.

“Let’s see,” he said.

Livia opened her folder, which contained everything she had gathered over the last few weeks about Nancy Dee and Paula D’Amato, and laid the contents in front of him. The detectives who work cases such as these utilize profilers—criminologists who review the details and come up with conclusions about the perpetrator. Livia had no privileges with the detectives on these cases, and no clout with any criminologists. She wasn’t even sure she had Terry McDonald’s full cooperation. She did, however, have Nate Theros. Tattooed and creepy, he wasn’t the perfect match for the job. But he had an odd fetish with following missing persons cases and studying the demented men who took women. He had a binder full of cases he’d followed through the years, and Livia was sure he possessed a vast knowledge—much greater than her own—about these women and the man she believed took them.