Night Tides - By Alex Prentiss Page 0,1

not yet ten o’clock, and most of the houses were lit up with activity. She was completely unafraid for her safety.

So she did not see the old truck parked beneath the shadow of a large tree.

She was yanked into the pickup so fast that she had no chance to scream, and duct tape was immediately slapped over her mouth. Her assailant muscled her facefirst into the passenger floorboard and put one foot on her backpack to hold her down. “Sit still or I’ll fucking kill you,” he rasped breathlessly as the truck pulled away from the curb.

She did as ordered, curling into a terrified ball. She smelled oil, gas, and some sort of mold. Oh, my God, she thought, I’ve been kidnapped! Surely someone had seen what happened and would call the police. Surely.

Her chest began to ache as her asthma threatened to kick in. Her inhaler was in the outer pocket of her book bag, but it might as well have been on Mars. She closed her eyes and concentrated on slow, even breathing through her nose.

They drove for what felt like an eternity. Finally the truck stopped, and her abductor yanked her up by the hair. He pushed her out the passenger door ahead of him. When she tried to look back at him, he slapped her over one ear.

She saw no lights from houses or other cars, only the dark shapes of trees. After an awkward march downhill, she heard water lapping against rocks. The hand released her and a flashlight blazed in her face, blinding her.

“Try to run, try to hurt me, try to do anything other than exactly what I tell you, and I’ll kill you,” her captor said, his own voice wheezy with exertion. “Understand me?”

She nodded.

Then she heard the command that she was certain meant her death was near.

“Now, undress. Or I’ll undress you.”

DETECTIVE MARTIN WALKER stood inside the big rectangle of yellow police tape. Behind him stretched 1,200 acres of untouched wilderness known as the Arboretum, located on Madison’s west side. Although he saw no sign of life in any direction, the soft hum of traffic reminded him he was still inside the city.

He looked down the hill at the swampy, overgrown shore of Lake Wingra before him. It was the smallest of the three lakes within the city limits and the only one not connected to the Yahara River. The waterlogged trees and weeds stretched out from the bank for fifty feet, blurring the actual edge of the lake. From this spot on shore, though, the effluent from a natural spring cut through the marshy obstructions and made a shallow clear channel out to the open water. He could just make out the surface of Wingra at the far end, rippling in the summer breeze as the sunrise twinkled off the waves.

Of the three lakes, Wingra was the one that always made the hackles rise on his neck. Strange stories clung to it. It once housed a lake monster that wildlife officials debunked as a large sturgeon. Divers supposedly found a submerged stone pyramid that experts insisted was just a pile of rocks left behind by retreating glaciers. And although people died in all the lakes, usually from alcohol-related foolishness, only the bodies pulled from Wingra consistently gave him the willies.

Two officers stood guard while technicians from the crime lab took photos and samples. A few people out for their morning hikes had paused on the trail at the top of the hill, then gone back the way they’d come. Otherwise, the police had the area to themselves.

Marty was descended from the Hmong—the indigenous people of Laos—which meant he was a smallish, dark-skinned Asian. He’d been adopted as an infant by a white family, though, so his behavior bore no trace of his racial ancestry. But he hoped being slant-eyed wasn’t the reason he’d been assigned to this particular case—though he wouldn’t have bet against it. To some of his superiors, all Asians were the same and functioned almost as a different species.

Once more he looked over the pile of clothes: tank top, brassiere, jeans, socks, shoes, and a book bag. Conspicuously missing were panties, which, if they matched the bra, were black and lacy.

“Good morning, Detective Walker,” a woman’s voice called. “Hell of a way to start the week, isn’t it?”

He turned to see a tall, professionally dressed blonde descending the hill toward him. She ignored the marked trail and cut straight through the trees, her white running shoes a