Free Vanished by Elizabeth Heiter

cop with the shield contributed as he came in the door hauling a cuffed and bleeding resident.
    “Is anyone hurt, Jack?” Evelyn asked as Gabe signaled a free cop and swapped the cuffs on the prisoner he’d brought inside.
    “Nothing serious.” Jack pushed the resident into a chair. “Stay there,” he told the man, then turned his gaze on Evelyn. “What the hell were you doing out there? Inciting them with the bullhorn? Are you crazy?”
    Kyle forced back a response, because he knew it would piss Evelyn off to have anyone stand up for her. It always did.
    “I was trying to calm them down, remind them what we all need to be focused on,” Evelyn replied, a lot more calmly than Kyle had expected.
    Jack snorted. “Yeah, that worked well.”
    Kyle couldn’t stay silent any longer, but he tried to keep his tone nonconfrontational. “The problem wasn’t trying to talk the crowd down. The problem was not planning better for that arrest.” He should know. He’d helped execute arrests on enough high-profile targets.
    Jack shot him a look, then turned pointedly to Evelyn. “How do you know those guys? Who are they? More feds?”
    Instead of answering Jack, she asked Kyle, “Can you give me a ride back to the hotel?”
    “You’re just going to leave now?” Jack cut in.
    What was this guy’s problem? Kyle stepped closer, angling into Jack’s line of sight with the kind of warning glare he liked to use on uncooperative targets.
    “Let me grab a file, okay?” Evelyn raced off as though she hoped her disappearance would make Jack lose interest.
    But Jack just moved forward, giving Kyle his own cop stare.
    “You might want to watch your prisoner,” Gabe said mildly as Jack got in Kyle’s face.
    “Shit!” Jack took after the bleeding resident he’d brought in a minute before, who was hobbling for the door.
    Then Evelyn was back, and Kyle ushered her out the door toward Gabe’s car. “What’s with that guy?”
    “Apparently he’s held a grudge for eighteen years.”
    Kyle steered her around the broken glass from the patrol car headlights since she wasn’t wearing shoes. “He had a grudge against a
twelve-year-old
?”
    Gabe looked questioningly between them as Evelyn shrugged. Evelyn had told Kyle about her past, but Gabe didn’t know what this case meant to her, or her history here.
    Kyle had tried to respect her privacy and keep it to himself, but if she was in danger—and with a town that fast to mob, she definitely could be—he’d have to tell Gabe soon.
    And he really didn’t like the atmosphere in the police station, either. There was definitely something off about Jack.
    To hell with sleep. When he got back to the hotel, he was going to check into the guy’s history. “What’s his full name?”
    “Jack Bullock,” Evelyn answered. Then she seemed to realize why he’d asked, and added, “I think it’s just this case. He was on it eighteen years ago and couldn’t solve it then. It’s probably haunted him ever since.”
    Like it had haunted her.
    She didn’t have to say it; the words were written all over her face.
    But considering why she was here, she was handling it a lot better than he’d expected. Maybe she was still too numb from learning that her best friend’s abductor was back to really take in what was happening, or maybe she was just burying it all.
    Either way, the calm wasn’t likely to last long.
    * * *
    Evelyn sat on the edge of her bed in her hotel room, a police file on her lap. She needed to remove her dirty, torn clothes and take a shower. She needed some ice for her forehead. But she couldn’t think about any of it until she looked in the file.
    Inside was the original FBI profile of the Nursery Rhyme Killer.
    She hadn’t reviewed it when she wrote her own, because that could have subconsciously influenced her analysis. Now that she’d given her independent profile, it was time to look at everything else—from the original suspects to the original profile.
    Since