James Patterson - I, Alex Cross

"So Caroline hadn't been on drugs, and she hadn't been poisoned. That wasn't much of a surprise to me. "What about other causes?" I asked Carbondale.

"I'm more and more certain that's going to be an unanswerable question. All I can do is rule out certain possibilities. There's no way of determining, for example, if she was beaten or strangled or -"

She stopped short.

The words came out of me like bile. "Or put right into that machine."

"Yes," she said tightly. "But there is one other thing to tell you."

I gritted my teeth and wanted to hit something with my fist. But I had to listen.

"We've isolated the remaining fragments. There's some indication of antemortem bite marks."

"Bite marks?" I looked around for a place to pull over. " Human bite marks?"

"I think so, yes, but I can't be certain at this point. Biting can look almost identical to bruising, even under the best of circumstances. That's why I'm bringing in a forensic odontologist to consult. What we're working with is bone fragments where some of the tissue survived, so I can only see -"

"I'm going to have to call you back," I said.

I pulled to the side of Pennsylvania Avenue and just let people honk their horns and go around me. This was too much – the unfairness, the cruelty, the violence, all those things I'm usually so good at dealing with.

I threw back my head and cursed at the car ceiling, or God, or both. How could this be allowed to happen? Then I laid my head against the steering wheel and I started to tear up. And while I was there, I said a prayer for Caroline, who didn't have anyone with her when she needed it most.

EDDIE TUCCI KNEW he had screwed up really bad this time. Unbelievable! It was a terrible mistake to give that job – or any job – to his nephew Johnny. Not for nothing did they call the kid Twitchy. Now he'd gone AWOL and Eddie had spent the past three days waiting for the rest of the shitstorm to hit the fan.

Even so, when the lights in his bar went out just after closing on Wednesday night, Eddie didn't think too much about it. The building was going to shit, the whole neighborhood. Breakers popped all the time.

He slid closed the register drawer and walked out from behind the bar in the dark. Through the swinging door to the back room. If he could manage to find it, there was an electrical box on the wall.

Eddie didn't get that far.

Out of nowhere, a bag came down over his head. At the same time, something hit his right knee from the side, hard. Eddie heard the joint pop just before he went down, moaning from the pain.

His moans didn't stop them. Somebody put him in a powerful headlock, while someone else tied his ankles. He couldn't even get off a punch, a kick, nothing. He'd just been hog-tied.

"You fuckers! I'm going to kill you. You hear me? You hear me? "

Apparently not. They hoisted him up onto the big table in back and cuffed each hand to the wooden legs underneath. Eddie yanked at the cuffs, but they only cut into his wrists. Even if he could get up, his knee felt like it was never going to work right again. He'd be a cripple now.

Then a faucet was turned on – full force.

What was that about?

WHEN THEY PULLED the bag off his head, the lights were back on. That was good, right?

Well, not exactly. Eddie saw two upside-down faces looking at him, a white guy and a brown one, maybe Puerto Rican. They were dressed right for the neighborhood, but their short haircuts and the way they operated marked them as suits or military, maybe both.

And Eddie knew right then just how scared he ought to be. This thing, his nephew's screwup, had obviously gotten way out of hand.

"We're looking for Johnny," the white guy said. "Any idea where he is?"

"I haven't heard from him!" It was the God's honest truth. These were not people to screw around with. He was sure of that much.

"That's not what I asked you, Ed. I asked if you knew where he was." The voice was cool, the two of them watching him like he was a specimen in a lab.

"Hand to God, I don't know where Johnny is. You gotta believe me on that."

"Okay, I hear you." The dark one nodded. "I believe you, Ed. Let's just be sure, though."

Eddie's heart jumped into his throat before they even moved on him. The white one put him in another powerful headlock, grabbed his jaw, and forced the handle of a screwdriver into his mouth. Then he pinched Eddie's nose closed with two fingers.

The other dude came back into view, holding the running end of a green rubber hose. He held it over Eddie's face and let the water pour into his mouth.

Eddie gagged hard. This was bad! The water was coming too fast to swallow. He couldn't breathe; he nearly bit through the screwdriver handle trying to spit it out.

Pretty soon, his chest began to burn and his lungs were pulling for air. He bucked on the table, but the cuffs yanked him right back down. Pressure was building behind his eyes and nose, and he realized suddenly that he was going to die.

That's when the panic really took over. There was no pain anymore, no sound of him choking – just overwhelming fear. It was worse than any nightmare he could imagine, because this was real. It was happening in the back room of his own gin mill in Philly.

Eddie didn't even know that the water had stopped at first. The white guy tilted his head to the side, pulled out the screwdriver, and let him hack it out for a minute. It felt as if he were going to cough up a lung.

"Most people last a couple of minutes before they cave. Of course, these are soldiers I'm talking about." One of them patted him on the belly. "That doesn't quite describe you, Ed. So let me ask you again. Do you know where Johnny is? "

Eddie could barely talk, but he choked out a fast answer. "I'll find him. I swear to God I will!"

"See, this is what I hate about the mob." The voice came a little closer to his left ear. "You people just say whatever you need to say, whenever you need to say it. There's no integrity. Nothing you can depend on."

"Give me a chance! I'm begging you!"

"You don't get it, Ed. This is your chance. You either know where Johnny is or you don't. Now, which is it?"

"I don't know!" He was blubbering, half out of his mind. "Please… I don't know ."

They broke a couple of teeth getting the screwdriver back in his mouth. Eddie clenched his jaw and thrashed and begged for his life, but only until the torrent of water cut him off again. It didn't take long before he was right back where he'd been a minute ago, absolutely convinced he was about to die.

And this time he was right.

THE BIZARRE MURDER case was spreading out like spidery legs around me, but one question hung over the rest: Were there others who had died like Caroline? Was that a possibility? A probability?

Obtaining a credible account of missing persons in DC is harder than it might seem. After speaking with someone at the Youth Investigations Bureau, which has a centralized database, I had to go district by district, personally talking with detectives all over the city. Incident reports are public information, but what I needed were PD252s, which are private case notes.

That's where I could start to filter for students, runaways, and above all, anyone with a known or suspected history of prostitution.

I brought home the files I'd gathered and took them to my office in the attic after dinner. I cleared off one entire wall and started tacking up everything – pictures of the missing, index cards with case vitals that I'd written up. Plus a DC street map, flagged everywhere that victims had last been seen.