Stalked

If you’re reading this, I’m already dead...

That’s the note seventeen-year-old Haley Cooke leaves behind when she disappears from inside her high school. FBI profiler Evelyn Baine is called in to figure out who had reason to hurt her. On the surface, the popular cheerleader has no enemies, but as Evelyn digs deeper, she discovers that everyone close to Haley has something to hide. Everyone from estranged parents, to an older boyfriend with questionable connections, to a best friend who envies Haley’s life.

Secrets can be deadly...

One of those secrets may have gotten Haley killed. If she’s still alive, Evelyn knows that the more the investigation ramps up, the more pressure they could be putting on Haley’s kidnapper to make her disappear for good. It’s also possible the teenager isn’t in danger at all, but has skillfully manipulated everyone and staged her own disappearance. Only one thing is certain: uncovering Haley’s fate could be dangerous—even deadly—to Evelyn herself.

Praise for the novels of Elizabeth Heiter

“A terrific, gripping, page-turning debut by a talented new voice in suspense!”

—New York Times bestselling author Allison Brennan on Hunted

“This is a really excellent thriller—fast-paced and exciting!”

—New York Times bestselling author Suzanne Brockmann on Hunted

“Hunted is a nonstop, thrilling read that will leave you breathless, and Evelyn Baine is a sharp and gutsy heroine you’ll want to follow for many books to come.”

—New York Times bestselling author Tess Gerritsen

“Want to read a top-rate thriller? Vanished had me turning page after page. Wow. When you talk about our most-promising new thriller writers, put Elizabeth Heiter on the list!”

—R. L. Stine

“Elizabeth Heiter does her research, and it shows in this superb FBI thriller. With a ripped-from-the-headlines plot and excellent characterization, Seized is a true winner. Don’t miss it.”

—New York Times bestselling author J.T. Ellison

“The riveting and virtually impossible to put down Seized establishes Heiter in the upper tier of thriller writers.”

—The Providence Journal

“Seized...is a taut thriller that could be torn from tomorrow’s newspaper headlines.... Heiter’s latest is a thought-provoking thriller by a rising star in contemporary crime fiction.”

—The Lansing State Journal

Stalked

Elizabeth Heiter

www.mirabooks.co.uk

This book is for Paula Eykelhof,

an incredible editor and an even more incredible person.

I am a far better writer for having worked with you.

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the world of The Profiler! If you’ve already read the first three books in the series, thank you for returning. In this book, a teenager disappears, leaving behind a note foretelling her own death, and FBI profiler Evelyn Baine must unravel the girl’s secrets...before one of those secrets leads to her own death.

If this is your first visit to the series, Evelyn’s story began in Hunted, in which she tracked down a deadly serial killer known as the Bakersville Burier and learned just how deadly it can be to get inside the head of a killer. In the sequel, Vanished, Evelyn tackled the case she’d waited most of her life to investigate—the disappearance of her best friend—when the Nursery Rhyme Killer resurfaced after eighteen years of silence. After Vanished, the short story “Avenged” (free through my website) takes Evelyn Baine and her new boyfriend, HRT agent Kyle McKenzie, on an island trip together...but their vacation is interrupted when bodies begin washing ashore. And in the third book of the series, Seized, Evelyn tackles what looks like a routine investigation—until it lands her on the wrong side of a hostage situation and in the middle of an emerging terrorist threat.

Stalked marks new challenges for Evelyn and former HRT agent Kyle McKenzie, who’s now in a new role...with a partner you might remember from Hunted. I hope you enjoy following Evelyn and Kyle as they navigate their newly revealed relationship and two very different cases that may have a deadly connection.

After Stalked, I’ll be back with three more books in my romantic suspense series, The Lawmen! You can keep up with me and all the books, as well as get extras and join my newsletter, on my website at www.elizabethheiter.com. You can also find me on Facebook at Facebook.com/elizabeth.heiter.author and Twitter as @ElizabethHeiter. I love to hear from readers.

As always, my heartfelt thanks for reading!

Elizabeth Heiter

FBI TERMS AND ACRONYMS

BAU—Behavioral Analysis Unit. The BAU is where FBI “profilers” (the official name is Criminal Investigative Analysts) work. BAU is part of CIRG (Critical Incident Response Group) and is located at Aquia. BAU agents provide behavioral-based support to the FBI, as well as other federal, state, local and international law enforcement agencies, including profiles of unknown subjects (UNSUBs).

CIRG—Critical Incident Response Group. CIRG provides rapid response for crisis situations around the country and integrates tactical, negotiations, behavioral analysis and crisis management resources. BAU (Behavioral Analysis Unit) and HRT (Hostage Rescue Team) are part of CIRG.

ERT—Evidence Response Team. ERT agents are specially trained FBI agents who collect evidence at crime scenes. Being on ERT is a secondary position, so these agents also work regular Special Agent duties.

HRT—Hostage Rescue Team. Under CIRG (the Critical Incident Response Group), HRT is part of the FBI’s tactical response for crises. Unlike SWAT, their members work full-time as HRT agents and respond to incidents involving hostage rescue, barricaded subjects and high-risk arrests. Their motto is Servare Vitas (To Save Lives).

SA—Special Agent. Special Agents investigate violations of federal laws and assist state and local law enforcement. There are more than thirteen thousand Special Agents (as part of more than thirty-five thousand FBI employees).

SSA—Supervisory Special Agent. SSAs run squads. Each field office of the FBI has numerous squads, broken up by type of investigation—white collar, intelligence, civil rights, counterterror, violent crime, etc.

SWAT—Special Weapons and Tactics. All the FBI field offices have SWAT teams, and Special Agents who are SWAT members do so as an ancillary duty—in addition to work on a regular squad. SWAT agents handle high-risk tactical operations. Some police departments also have their own SWAT teams.

UNSUB—Unknown Subject. UNSUBs are targets of investigations where the person who committed the crime is not known by name.

WFO—Washington Field Office. The FBI has fifty-six field offices across the US and Puerto Rico, as well as approximately 380 Resident Agencies (smaller offices). The WFO and its connected Resident Agency have jurisdiction in Washington, DC, and northern Virginia.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Praise

Title Page

Dedication

Dear Reader

FBI Terms and Acronyms

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Copyright

Prologue

“You’ve got to stop this.”

Her husband’s voice reached her slowly, as if from a great distance, even though she knew he was standing at the doorway to her daughter’s room. Instead of turning, Linda Varner continued methodically pulling things out from underneath Haley’s unmade bed.

A red-and-white cheerleading pom-pom. A bright pink sweatshirt Haley wore over everything. A stack of glossy magazines, dedicated to the things a teenage girl worried about, like how to know if a boy had a crush on her.

Linda suppressed a sob before it passed her lips. Still, she felt her body shudder and knew her husband had seen it.

“This won’t bring her home,” Pete said softly, in the kind of careful, muted tone usually reserved for funeral homes and grave sites.

Linda squeezed her eyes tight, bringing the sweatshirt up to her nose. She inhaled, hoping to breathe in some of the too-sweet vanilla scent her daughter loved to wear, but there was only a slight musty smell.

How could Haley’s perfume have faded so quickly?

Linda sat there, the sweatshirt crumpled against her nose, her body hunched protectively, until she heard her husband sigh and walk away. Only then did she open her eyes and look around Haley’s room. Everything seemed so untouched. The police had been careful not to disturb anything, wearing their sterile gloves and their solemn expressions as they’d searched for some hint of where Haley could be.

Linda glanced back at the doorway. It was empty.

Pete would be back later. They did this routine every night. He’d give her another hour, then he’d coax her to bed. Some days she’d stand and follow him willingly; when she felt glued to the floor, he’d carry her. Then he’d hand her a glass of water and those pills her doctor had prescribed and she’d dutifully swallow two, let the blackness consume her.

Pete had stood by her. She knew it hadn’t been easy—that she hadn’t been easy to live with lately. But he could only share so much of the loss. He loved his stepdaughter, but he’d only been in her life for a few years.

“Where are you, Haley?” Linda whispered into the stillness.

Today marked exactly a month since her daughter had gone missing. Since Haley’s boyfriend, Jordan, had dropped her off at school for cheerleading practice. Since her best friend, Marissa, had waved to her from the field on that unusually warm day, watched her walk into the school, presumably to change before joining Marissa at practice.

She’d never walked out again.

When she hadn’t reappeared, Marissa had been sent to the locker room to get her. Only she hadn’t been there. A search of the school hadn’t turned her up. Now, thirty days later, they still hadn’t found her.

How did a teenage girl go missing from inside her high school? No one could answer that for Linda. As time went by, the cops seemed to have fewer answers and more questions.

But Linda knew. She knew with some deep part of her she could only explain as mother’s intuition that Haley was out there somewhere. And not buried in an unmarked grave, as she’d overheard two cops speculating when day after day passed with no more clues. Haley was still alive. Linda knew it. She was alive, and just waiting for someone to bring her home.

So every day, Linda forced herself out of bed, dressed in her most professional clothes and a heavy layer of makeup to hide the haggard signs of grief and went to the police station for an update. When she finished there, she talked to the news channels, begged them to do another feature or even a small mention of Haley, so she wouldn’t be forgotten. So people would keep searching for her.

Then she moved on to social media, the places her daughter had visited and which she’d never had any interest in until now. Each day, she posted two new messages. One requesting any information about her daughter’s whereabouts, which was shared thousands of times because of all the press. And one directly to her daughter, letting Haley know she’d never give up, never stop looking.

Only at night, after she’d shown the world how strong she could be, did she come here, and indulge her weakness. Her fears.

Why wasn’t there more information? Why hadn’t anyone spotted her and come forward? How could a seventeen-year-old girl just disappear?

Linda clutched the sweatshirt tighter, feeling the sobs well up again. She fell against Haley’s bed, trying to hold them in, and the mattress slid away from her, hard enough to move the box spring.

Linda slipped, too. Swearing, she sat up, then froze as the edge of a tiny black notebook caught her attention.

The book was jammed between the box spring and the bed frame. The cops must have missed it, because she’d seen them peer underneath Haley’s mattress when they’d looked through the room, assessing her daughter’s things so matter-of-factly.

Linda’s pulse skyrocketed as she yanked it out. She didn’t recognize the notebook, but when she opened the cover, there was no mistaking her daughter’s girlie handwriting. And the words...

She dropped the notebook, practically flung it away from her in her desire to get rid of it, to un-see it. She didn’t realize she’d started screaming until her husband ran into the room and wrapped his arms around her.

“What? What is it?” he kept asking, but all she could do was sob and point a shaking hand at the notebook, lying open to the first page, and Haley’s distinctive scrawl.

If you’re reading this, I’m already dead.

1

Kyle McKenzie leaned across the table in the tiny Italian restaurant with the dim, romantic lighting, and said in a too-calm voice, “I start my new job at the Washington Field Office tomorrow.”

Evelyn Baine felt the same surge of regret she always felt when this topic came up. “I’m glad they had a spot open up for you there.”

They both worked for the FBI, her as a profiler in the Behavioral Analysis Unit, and Kyle, up until a month ago, as an operator for the Hostage Rescue Team. He’d been off work since taking a bullet on a mission. She’d known how risky the mission was and couldn’t help but think she hadn’t pushed hard enough to stop HRT from going in. Now here they were. Kyle pretending he was okay with leaving the job he’d loved. And her pretending she didn’t feel guilty as hell over it.

He shrugged his good shoulder, the one that hadn’t been torn up by a bullet. “Yeah. I’m surprised I got it, but I wanted to stay close. To you, of course, and...”

He trailed off, but she knew the rest, anyway. He wanted to be close to his old team. The FBI’s Washington Field Office was only a forty-five minute drive—with a siren—from Quantico, where HRT was located.

Evelyn worked in Aquia, the town right beside Quantico, herself. The entire time she’d been at the BAU, she’d gotten used to Kyle making the eight and a half-mile drive to see her at her office. He’d pretended he wasn’t coming to see her. But everyone around him had seen through it. Eventually, so had she, and she’d decided to act on it. Now, they’d been dating for six months, and even though she saw him more often, she’d missed seeing him at work, missed their old office banter, over the past month.

He missed the team. She knew it, even if he wasn’t saying it out loud. As an HRT agent, he got sent out on critical missions—everything from stopping a prison riot to rescuing hostages from inside a survivalist compound to assisting with overseas rescues in war zones. The rest of the time was spent training for those missions. It was completely different from being a regular Special Agent.

She wasn’t sure if he’d be able to return to that life. She couldn’t imagine doing it herself, even though she’d worked in a Violent Crimes Major Offenders squad for six years before coming over to the BAU.

She stared across the candlelit table at him now, seeing the tension he was trying to hide. Maybe he could go back to HRT someday. But more likely, his career was going to head in a different direction.

She fiddled with her napkin, reflexively looking at the door of the near-empty restaurant as it opened. Until very recently, she and Kyle had hidden their relationship. It felt strange to be out in public, in Virginia, where someone from the FBI might see them.

Ironically, they’d only been able to officially tell the FBI because he no longer worked in the Critical Incident Response Group, which included both the BAU and HRT. He’d wanted to announce it from the start. She’d been sure that would mean reassignment for one of them. And she didn’t have quite two years in at the BAU—where she hoped to stay until mandatory retirement, which was still twenty-seven years away.

She gave him an embarrassed smile when she realized it was just another patron that had drawn her attention to the door. Some habits were hard to break. “This feels weird.”

He smiled back at her, making crinkles fan out from his ocean-blue eyes, and the slightest hint of dimples dent his cheeks. “Maybe you enjoy your secrets a little too much.”

Maybe he was right. She’d always been a private person, and in an office full of profilers, keeping anything to yourself wasn’t easy. It was ingrained in them the same way it was in her: assess everyone you meet, try to see through the mask to what was underneath. Dig up those secrets.

She tried to relax, unbuttoning the loose-fitting suit jacket she’d worn straight from the office. It hid the SIG Sauer she always kept strapped to her hip, but didn’t exactly scream “date clothes.”

When the restaurant door squeaked open again, and she instantly looked over, Kyle twined his fingers through hers across the table, and the light contact brought her attention back to him.

“What do you say we get dinner to go?”

His big, calloused hand seemed even paler wrapped around her tiny, darker one. So different, just like their personalities—but somehow they worked.

She nodded, but before she could add, “Let’s go,” her phone buzzed from her pocket.

She pulled it out, but the instant she saw Dan Moore’s name pop up, she regretted grabbing it. Her boss calling her at nine at night meant a new case had come in, one that couldn’t wait.

Six months ago, she’d been his go-to agent for urgent cases, because she didn’t mind the late-night calls. Hell, she lived for the job.

But right now? With Kyle McKenzie’s deep blue eyes staring back at her? “This better be good,” she muttered before answering, “Dan? What’s up?”

“Remember the case file that made the rounds in the office last month?” Dan replied without preamble. “The missing teenager?”

“Right,” she said slowly. She’d been through fifty cases since then, but that one stuck out.

A seventeen-year-old girl last seen walking into her high school had gone missing, no signs of foul play. The BAU had passed the police file around the room, but there hadn’t been enough to go on to give a solid profile, and they hadn’t been able to spare a profiler for more in-depth involvement.

“Did they find her?” Evelyn asked.

“Would I be calling you if they had?” Dan snapped, then said, “Sorry. Look, we told the police department this was probably a stranger abduction since no body had turned up, and the noncustodial parent hadn’t run. But now they have a note, suggesting the kidnapper was someone in the girl’s life, after all.”

“Okay,” Evelyn said slowly as Kyle unthreaded his hand from hers and walked over to the waiter. Undoubtedly he was ordering food to go, knowing their evening had just ended.

“So, if it’s someone in her life, shouldn’t—”

“Yeah, normally that would make it more of a straightforward police matter. But we can spare a profiler for a week or so, and the note was disturbing. The girl left it herself. She predicted her own death.”

Evelyn let the words sink in. “They have a body?”

“No. Still no sign of the girl. But the mom is hysterical, and she’s gotten close with the local news stations. The police need help getting in front of this.”

“If she predicted her death, there’s more to the case than it seemed.”

“You got it,” Dan agreed. “Detective Sophia Lopez is expecting you.” He hung up, as details of Haley Cooke’s missing-persons case came back to Evelyn.

“Nice talking to you, too,” Evelyn muttered. Her boss was usually terse—at least with her—but lately he’d been abrupt with everyone. She tucked her phone into her jacket as Kyle returned with to-go bags of food.

“Duty calls?” Kyle guessed, glancing around the still-empty restaurant. “I guess our big debut night on the town will have to wait.”

She nodded ruefully. Apparently they weren’t the only ones who had been hiding something from the people around them.

So had Haley Cooke, the seventeen-year-old girl whose background had revealed a popular, straight-A student whose most dangerous pastime seemed to be standing on top of a cheerleading pyramid.

What had she gotten involved in that she thought would get her killed?

* * *

The Neville, Virginia, police station looked interchangeable with hundreds of other stations Evelyn had been to in her BAU tenure. But the detective standing in front of her in figure-hugging blue jeans and an elbow-length red blazer better suited to an afternoon luncheon than hiding the Glock at her hip definitely didn’t resemble the average police officer.

“Detective Sophia Lopez.” The woman held out her hand, complete with deep red polish, and stared expectantly at Evelyn. She was already tall—topping Evelyn’s petite five-foot-two by at least eight inches—but a pair of high-heeled boots gave her an extra boost. Her long, dark hair dangled in a loose ponytail that seemed impractical for crime scenes, and her bright red lipstick looked out of place in a police station. But her intense stare was 100 percent cop.

“Special Agent Evelyn Baine,” she replied, shaking firmly.

To the mostly male officers around them, they probably seemed to have a lot in common. Two women in law enforcement—one biracial and the other Latina—giving the typical first-impression handshake. Hard, so the other person would know they weren’t to be messed with. Matched with solid eye contact, projecting seriousness.

But if Sophia’s clothes were similar to a clerk at a trendy boutique, Evelyn dressed more like the male officers, in a baggy, solid-black pantsuit. Her heels were always under two inches; enough to give her a little extra height, but not so high she couldn’t run in them. While Sophia seemed to want to stand out, Evelyn liked to blend in—hide in the background where she could watch and analyze everyone.

She studied the detective in charge of the Haley Cooke case, taking in the incongruities, trying to decipher her from just a greeting.