She smiled in spite of herself. "You're not laid-back, Mr. Grier," she returned.

He glanced at her curiously. "How old are you?"

Her eyebrows lifted.

"Tell me," he persisted.

"Twenty-four."

He smiled. "I'm thirty-six. That doesn't qualify me for a rocking chair. You can call me Garon."

She gave him a long look. "That's a name I've never heard before."

"My mother had four children, all boys. My father says she used to sit on the porch and go through baby name books for hours. At that, my name isn't quite as bad as Cash's."

"Cash isn't all that unusual," she pointed out.

"His real name is Ca.s.sius," he replied with a smile.

"My gosh!"

"That's why he uses 'Cash,'" he chuckled.

"Are the two of you close?"

He shook his head. "We've had some family problems since my mother's death. We're in the process of getting to know each other. Cash went off to military school when he was about eight or nine years old. Until this past year, we didn't really speak."

"That's sad, to have a family and not speak."

He wondered about her parents, but it was too soon to start asking personal questions. He didn't want any more contact with her than necessary. He was married to his job. On the other hand, he'd just talked to her about his work, and that was something he'd never done before. She had an empathy about her that was hard to resist. He felt at home with her. That was dangerous, and he wasn't going to let anything develop between them.

GARON DROPPED GRACE OFF and went back to work. Marquez's captain had called and the senior ASAC called Garon into his office and authorized the Bureau's a.s.sistance. Garon would head up the task force as they searched for a murderer who killed little girls. n.o.body was saying it out loud, but it was very possible that they had a serial killer on their hands. At least four cases shared the same basic pattern of death.

"I'll get started, then," Garon told him.

"Marquez's captain said the case needs to be solved as soon as possible," ASAC Bentley remarked. He was older than Grier, near retirement and had asked for a.s.signment to San Antonio, where he had relatives. He was a kindly man, with a good heart, and he was a superior agent. Garon respected him. "The captain has an open mind, but Marquez's lieutenant doesn't. He thinks it's all coincidence."

"I don't. The cases are too similar," Garon said doggedly.

The ASAC smiled. He'd known Garon a long time. He knew how determined the agent could be. "That would be my gut feeling, too. Stay out of trouble."

"I'll try," he replied. The grin gave him away.

HE PHONED MARQUEZ and they met at a local diner. Marquez looked tired. There were dark circles under his eyes.

"You look like you've been burning the midnight oil," Garon remarked.

He laughed, a little hollowly. "I take these homicides seriously. I phoned the Oklahoma P.D. where the other red ribbon murder occurred. That was an eleven-year-old girl. They found her facedown in a patch of brown-eyed Susans near a cemetery."

"a.s.saulted?" Garon asked.

Marquez nodded curtly. "Yes. Strangled, as well. And then stabbed about twenty-five times. Just like this one we're working on. Too similar to be unrelated."

Garon's lips made a thin line. "A very personal attack."

"Exactly my feeling. The perp hated the child, or what she represented. It was overkill, plain and simple. Something else-there was another victim, same basic MO, over near Del Rio, about ten years ago, killed with a knife and left in a field. I was looking for similar cases and happened to run into one of our older investigators who remembered it. It wasn't even fed into a database, it was so old. I e-mailed the police department over there and asked them to fax me the details." he ran a hand through his thick, straight black hair. "Little girls. Innocent little girls. And this monster may have been doing it since the nineties, at intervals, without getting caught. I'd give blood to get this guy," Marquez added. He paused long enough to give the waitress his order and wait until she could pour coffee in his cup before he spoke again. "He's got to be a repeat s.e.x offender. He's too good at what he does for a sloppy amateur. It takes a wily so-and-so to take a child right out of her own bedroom with her family in the house. And he does it over a period of years, if the cases do match, without getting caught or even seen."

"That piece of red ribbon?" Garon murmured, sipping coffee, "must have something to do with a fantasy he's acting out."

"That's what I thought," the younger man said. "The detective who told me about the Del Rio case also remembered hearing of a similar cold case, from twelve or more years back, but he couldn't recall where it happened. He thinks it happened in south Texas."

"Did you look in the database for that case?"

"Yes, but the Del Rio case wasn't there. G.o.d knows how many others aren't, either, especially if they happened in small, rural towns." He smiled. "I told my lieutenant about that Del Rio cold case, and about the other two children in Oklahoma who were taken from their homes and found dead. I said we needed to get the FBI involved so you guys could do a profile of the killer for us, and he laughed. He said the deaths had no connection. So I went to the captain, and he called your ASAC. Thanks."

"No problem," Garon mused. "Most veteran cops hate paperwork and complications. n.o.body wants to be looking for a serial killer. But we might catch this one, if we're stubborn enough."

Marquez pursed his lips. "I asked one of your squad members about you," he said. "He says that you'll chase people to the gates of h.e.l.l."

Garon shrugged. "I don't like letting criminals get away."

"Neither do I. This guy's a serial killer. I need you to help me prove it."

Garon paused while their steaks were served. "What sort of similarities are we talking about, with that cold case in Del Rio?"

"All I have is sketchy information," came the reply, "but the manner of abduction was the same, and they narrowed the suspects down to a stranger. The victim was a.s.saulted and stabbed. I don't know about red ribbons. I filled out our case on the form for VICAP and I did turn up several child murders in other states. But none of the children were strangled and stabbed, which may signify some other perp."

"Or he might have changed his habits. Maybe a gun gave him more power in an abduction." As they both knew, a murderer might change the way he killed, but if the crime had a signature, it usually wouldn't vary from crime scene to crime scene.

"Any red ribbons in those other cold cases?" he asked, because the ribbon did seem to serve as a signature in at least one case.

"No. At least," he added, "there were none in the information I accessed. As I said earlier, we always hold back one or two details that we don't feed to the media. Maybe those detectives did, too."

"Did you try calling the detectives who worked the Oklahoma cases?"

"I did. The first Oklahoma one was sure I was actually a reporter trying to dig out unknown facts in the case. I gave him my captain's phone number, and he hung up on me. He said anybody could look that information up online. n.o.body at the second police department knew anything about a cold case."

"How about the other Texas case?"

"That's a doozy of a story," Marquez told him with pure disgust in his tone. "It's in Palo Verde, a little town up near Austin. I couldn't get their single policeman on the phone at all. I tried e-mailing him, along with my phone number. That was week before last, and I'm still waiting for an answer."

"We get a lot of kooks e-mailing us for various reasons," Garon told him. "And we get about two hundred spam messages a day. The captions are so misleading that you occasionally open one without meaning to. It's always a scam or a link to a p.o.r.no Web site. Even with filters, they get through. Maybe your message ended up in the deleted files."

"I hate spammers," the younger man muttered.

"We have a cyber crime division that spends hours a day looking for scams and shutting them down."

"Good for you, but that still doesn't solve my problem."

"You can fly to Oklahoma and show your credentials in person, can't you?"

"I can barely pay my rent," Marquez said miserably as he finished his steak. "I can't afford the airfare."

"Your department would pay for the tickets," Garon said.

Marquez's eyebrows met his hairline. "Like h.e.l.l it would," he shot back. "Didn't I tell you that I had to buy my own d.a.m.ned digital camera because my lieutenant wouldn't authorize the expenditure? He likes his job and the city manager goes over departmental budgets with a microscope."

"I know how that feels."

"No, you don't," the younger man a.s.sured him. "Unless you've had to bring in a receipt for a cup of ice water you bought from a convenience store to back up claiming it on your expense account!"

"You have got to be kidding!" Garon exclaimed.

"I wish I were," the other man said sadly, shaking his head. "I guess they'd lock me up for a whole giant c.o.ke."

Garon chuckled helplessly. "You need to come and work for us," he told Marquez. "You could even have a Bucar."

"A what?"

"A bureau car," Garon told him. "I get to drive mine home at night. It's like moving storage for all my equipment, including my guns."

"Guns, plural?" the detective exclaimed. "You have more than one?"

He gave the detective a wry look. "Surely you have access to body armor and stop sticks and a riot gun...?"

"I'm wearing my body armor," he muttered. "It's called a suit! As for stop sticks, I pull my service weapon and try to blow out tires as long as the suspect isn't near anything I might conceivably hit by mistake. As for a riot gun..." He pushed back his jacket to display his shoulder holster. "This is it."

"They let you wear a shoulder holster?" Grier asked. "We aren't allowed to."

"I don't know if I want to apply to the Bureau if I can't wear a shoulder holster. Besides, they move you guys around too much. I like being near home."

"To each his own."

"Who else is going to be on this task force you're setting up?" Marquez asked.

"We've got the sheriff's department, because the murder took place out of town in the county, along with a K-9 unit, a Texas Ranger..."

"A Ranger? Wow," the other man said with a wistful sigh. "I tried to get in, five years ago. I pa.s.sed everything except the marksmanship test, but two other guys had higher scores than I did. That's quite an outfit."

"Yes, it is. My brother was a Ranger, before he came down to work in San Antonio. He was with the D.A.'s office as a cybercrime expert, then he moved to Jacobsville."

"He's chief of police there," Marquez nodded. "Quite a guy, your brother. He's making some major drug busts."

Garon felt a ripple of pride. He was proud of his brother.

"Who else?' Marquez persisted.

"We have an investigator from the D.A.'s office who specializes in crimes against children. We've volunteered our crime lab at Quantico for trace evidence."

"We have one of the best forensic units in the country."

Garon smiled. "I know. I don't have a problem with letting them process data."

"When do we meet?"

"Tomorrow afternoon, at El Chico's. About one o'clock. I found one policeman who knows the family of the victim and used to live in the neighborhood. He'll meet us there."

"I'll have the Texas Ranger on hand and the D.A.'s investigator," Garon told him. "I hope we can get this guy."

"No argument there." He glanced at his watch. "I've got a couple of hours off after this, but I should be back in my office before quitting time, if you need to contact me. I forgot to give my numbers. If you can't reach me at the office," he added, pulling out a business card, "my cell phone number is on this."

"Thanks. I'll be in touch."

Marquez reached for his wallet when they were finished and the waitress had produced the bill, but Garon waved him away and pa.s.sed his credit card to the woman.

"My treat," he told Marquez with a smile. "It was a business lunch."

"Thanks. I wish I could reciprocate, but my lieutenant would send me out to solve stolen gas station drive-off cases if I presented him with a lunch bill."

Garon just laughed.

THE LAUGHTER FADED when he got home. Miss Turner was looking worried and standing by the telephone.

"What's going on?" Garon asked her.

"Nothing, I hope," she replied. "It's just that I can't get Grace on the telephone. I'm sure she's all right. Maybe she's just not answering her phone."

"I'll drive over and see," he replied, and was out the door before Miss Turner could ask to go with him.

He pulled up in the front yard of the old Victorian house, noting again how little maintenance had been done on it. He took the steps two at a time and rapped hard on the door. He did it three times, but there was no answer.

He started around the side of the house. And there she was. In the rose garden, with pruning shears, cutting back her rosebushes. She was talking to them, as well. Obviously she hadn't heard him drive up.

"I know she never liked you," she was telling the roses. "But I love you. I'll make sure you get all the fertilizer and fungicides you need to make you beautiful again, the way you were when Grandaddy was still alive." She sniffed and wiped her wet eyes on the sleeve of the flannel shirt she was wearing. "I don't know why I'm crying for her," she went on after a minute. "She hated me. No matter what I did for her, she never wanted me in her life. But now she's gone and it's just you and me and this enormous house..."

"Are the roses going to live in it with you, then?" he asked curiously.

She turned so fast that she almost fell over. Her hand went to her chest. She was almost gasping for breath. "You move like the wind," she choked. "What are you doing here?"

"Miss Turner couldn't raise you on the phone. She was worried."

"Oh." She went back to tr.i.m.m.i.n.g the rosebushes. "That was kind of her."

He glanced around at the bare landscape. There was a garden spot behind the house that looked as if it had just been plowed. He wondered if she kept the garden, or if her grandmother had grown vegetables.

"Did you find the man who killed that little child?" she asked.

He shook his head. "It's not that simple to solve a murder. This is one of several similar crimes, some from years ago. It takes time. We're forming a task force to investigate it."