A Trace of Crime (a Keri Locke Mystery--Book #4)

PROLOGUE Carolyn Rainey could sense something was wrong. It was hard to explain the feeling. But as she walked along the winding residential street to meet her twelve-year-old daughter, the skin on the back of her neck tingled. On the surface, nothing was out of the ordinary. Carolyn always left the house around 2:30 to meet up with Jessica. She enjoyed the solitary, if brief, walk. It allowed her to clear her head for the second half of the day. Playa del Rey Middle School let out at 2:35 and Jessica biked home every day. By the time she got everything from her locker into her backpack, made it to the bike rack, said goodbye to her friends, and got on the road, it was usually around 2:45. Mother and daughter invariably met up at about the halfway point between the school and house around 2:50. Then they would return home together, Carolyn walking, Jessica biking slowly beside her, occasionally circling her mom playfully. They would talk about the events of the day: who had a crush on whom, which teacher accidentally used a curse word, what song they were working on in choir. When they got home, there was always a snack waiting, after which Jessica would dive into her homework and Carolyn would get back to her own work. They had their routine and it was always the same, give or take a few minutes. But Carolyn had been walking for close to a half hour now. It was almost 3 p.m. and she was nearly two-thirds of the way to the school. She should have run into Jessica by now. Maybe her daughter had needed to go to the bathroom. Or maybe she had gotten caught up in a conversation with Kyle, the cute boy from her English class. But the tingling sensation on her neck told Carolyn that something else had happened. When she rounded the next corner, she saw that she was right. Jessica’s purple bike, covered in stickers from the live-action Beauty and the Beast movie and photos of her favorite singers, Selena Gomez and Zara Larsson, was lying on its side, half on the sidewalk, half on the road. She ran over to it and stared, frozen with fear. Looking around desperately, she caught a glimpse of something in the bushes of the nearest house. She hurried over and pulled at it. A branch snapped and the thing came loose. She looked at it, almost unable to process what she was seeing. It was Jessica’s backpack. Carolyn dropped to her knees, her legs suddenly unsteady. Her heart pounded nearly out of her chest as the realization hit her: her daughter had vanished.