Prologue
Gulfport, Mississippi, 2013
Sheriff’s Deputy Jayden Brooks had just driven past Bayou High School when the call about a suspicious person came across the radio. Someone had reported a big man lurking around the school’s gym with a knife. Mill Road was deserted at this time of night, so he pulled a U-turn across the median and raced back in the other direction, flipping on his lights as he called his response in to dispatch.
By the time he got to the gymnasium parking lot less than three minutes later, a dozen high school kids were running out of the building. Based on the day of the week and the limited number of vehicles there, it was probably the tail end of volleyball practice. It was late, but schools in this part of the country were serious about their sports.
Cursing as a group of four more teens ran out of the building, some with blood on their clothes, Brooks shoved the car in park and jumped out. On the radio clipped to his shoulder, other Harrison County deputies were calling in their ETAs to his location. Sounded like he was on his own for at least the next five minutes. But that didn’t stop him from racing toward the gym. It didn’t take his eight years of experience on the job to know there was something bad going on in the school.
Brooks caught the arm of the first kid he crossed paths with. A girl about sixteen, she was tall and slender with blond hair.
“What happened?” he asked.
It took several long, excruciating seconds for the girl to focus on Brooks. Her hazel eyes were wide and so filled with terror that Brooks thought she might pass out. “We were finishing up practice when this big, scary guy with these crazy eyes and a knife came into the gym. Coach Ellis got between him and the rest of us and told us to run.” The girl’s eyes filled with tears. “She hasn’t come out yet. I-I think he hurt her.”
Shit.
“Where’s the guy now?” Brooks asked.
“He went after Cassie.” More tears came, spilling down the girl’s cheeks. “She’s the captain of the volleyball team. I think she was trying to get him to follow her so he wouldn’t come after us.”
Brave, but crazy,Brooks thought.
“More cops are on the way,” he told the girl. “You and your friends get out of here, okay?”
She nodded, her bottom lip trembling. “What about Coach Ellis and Cassie?”
“I’ll find them,” he promised.
Taking his Glock from the holster on his hip, he sprinted toward the gym. The cold air fogged in front of his face, and his right knee immediately started to throb. It always did when the temperature dropped quickly like it had tonight. He’d torn up some ligaments playing college football, and while it had healed well enough for him to become a cop, it hurt all the time.
Two teenage girls came out of the school just as he was going in, a woman he assumed was Coach Ellis between them, her arms draped over their shoulders, blood on the front of her shirt.
“Which way?” he asked, moving past them without slowing.
Despite being injured, it was Coach Ellis who answered. “Down the hall, then turn left. There’s a door that leads to the football field. Cassie led him that way a few minutes ago. Hurry. He’s crazy.”
Brooks nodded and ran, his boots pounding on the floor and echoing off the walls. He radioed dispatch on the way, giving them an update and requesting an ambulance. When he got to the door the coach had mentioned, he shoved it open, swinging his weapon and his flashlight in a wide sweep into the darkness behind the school.
He moved as cautiously as he could but picked up the pace within a few feet. His gut shouted at him that Cassie didn’t have time for him to waste being careful. From the sirens in the distance, backup was on the way, but Cassie could be dead long before they arrived.
The gate that led onto the field and the bleachers was locked with a big looping chain. Brooks looked up in the darkness, wondering if the girl—and the man chasing her—had climbed over. The fence was at least twelve feet high with two strands of barbed wire atop it. He didn’t know about the psycho with the knife, but there was no way the girl would have gone up and over the thing.
He looked left and right, past the small ticket booths and food stands, toward the other small outbuildings and occasional row of pine trees farther along the fence line. He cursed. The girl could have gone anywhere.
Brooks shone his flashlight one way, then the other, looking for some indication of which way to go. He was about to give up and pick a direction at random when a cracking sound from his left made him spin in that direction. Any country boy who’d spent time in the woods would recognize that sound. Someone had stepped on a big stick and snapped it underfoot.
He headed in that direction, keeping the fence to his right as he moved toward the noise. When he rounded the corner of a small food stand, he swung his flashlight over the woods behind it. He would have missed the girl if it wasn’t for the soft squeal of fear she let out as his light swept over her hiding place behind a large pine tree.
Thank God.
Slim with curly red hair pulled back in a ponytail, she was huddled down on her knees in the pine needles, blood running down her leg from a deep gash in her left thigh even though she had both hands clamped over the wound. She was shaking, but Brooks couldn’t tell if it was from the cool night, fear, blood loss, or a combination of all three.
Brooks threw a quick glance over his shoulder to check for the crazy guy with the knife, then dropped down on one knee beside the girl, checking her for other injuries while calling in their location to dispatch and trying to keep an eye out for the psycho at the same time.
“Cassie, I’m Deputy Brooks,” he said when he got off the radio. “I’m going to get you out of here, but I need to know where the guy who hurt you is.”
She sniffed and shook her head. “I don’t know. When I ran over here to hide, he was right behind me, but then he just disappeared.”
