Free All the Pretty Faces by Rita Herron

tired eyes.
    Hell, it didn’t matter if he’d done it a thousand times. He’d do it again. This time he’d look for clues that the unsub in her case and the current one were the same.
    Remembering Betsy should be here now—helping kids, having kids of her own—made him renew his vow to find the truth.
    The date on the file took him back ten years.
    He was twenty-one, Betsy nineteen at the time of her death. They’d lived in Knoxville and had lost their father three years before to a heart attack.
    Guilt pressed against his heart.
    Betsy was just a teenager when he’d died. After that, Dane was supposed to be the man of the house, but he’d been wrapped up in his own anger and grief. Instead of being there for her, he’d searched for love and comfort from any girl who’d crawl into bed with him.
    The school counselor had suggested he and Betsy volunteer in the community. Unlike him, his sister had listened. The next three years while she finished high school, she’d worked at a ranch for troubled kids and adolescents.
    Ironic that she’d been murdered when she was the good child. It should have been his body in the ground, not kindhearted, selfless Betsy’s.
    He opened his desk drawer and removed the folder of photographs he’d brought with him.
    Different shots of Betsy through the years. A baby photo, a picture of her playing soccer at five, her first fishing trip with their father, Christmases and birthdays, and her first date to homecoming.
    His heart ached as he looked at her sweet face—she was funny and freckle-faced with a laugh that had made him smile even when he was in a pissy mood.
    While most girls would have been upset over the scar on her forehead she’d gotten in a car accident, she laughed about it, saying if people didn’t like her because of a little scar, they weren’t worth having as friends.
    He’d been so proud of her attitude.
    Grief clogged his throat, and he grabbed a beer from the refrigerator. He walked to the back door. The woods behind the cabin rose into the mountains, thick with trees and wildlife.
    The howl of a coyote resounded off the sharp ridges, and the wind roared like a mountain lion, the sound eerie as if a warning that danger lurked in the hills.
    He swallowed a sip of the cold beer, then returned to the file and forced himself to press on.
    His sister had been murdered in Chattanooga on a chilly spring night when a storm was brewing just like tonight.
    Earlier that day, she’d phoned to tell him she’d arrived at the campus and planned to tour the school and meet with the director of social work.
    According to the detective who’d investigated her murder, she’d kept that appointment. The hours after that were murky. Notations in her pocket calendar indicated that she’d planned to attend a couple of parties.
    The police questioned the girls at the first sorority house, but no one had seen her. The second was a big spring blowout at a frat house. With alcohol and possibly other recreational drugs flowing, the attendees hadn’t offered much information at all. One or two claimed they’d seen Betsy around eleven o’clock, but they didn’t know who she’d left with.
    Police suspected that she’d met up with someone on campus at that party and willingly left with him, but there were no witnesses.
    They were wrong.
    His sister never would have left with a stranger.
    Frustration knotted his belly. He was supposed to be looking for comparisons to his current case. The woman in Graveyard Falls hadn’t been in a college town or at a sorority party.
    Although it was possible she’d been murdered in another city like Knoxville and then dumped here.
    Jesus, he needed that ID.
    He looked back at Betsy’s autopsy report. No narcotics or evidence of roofies in her system.
    What would the tox screen reveal on the girl they’d found at the motel?
    Dane rubbed a hand over his eyes again.
    Ten years since Betsy’s death. That in itself was a problem. Even if someone