The rain had been falling for three days straight when Vivian Cross got the call. She was sitting in her office above a Chinese restaurant in downtown LA, eating cold takeout and watching the neon sign across the street flicker through the water-streaked window. The sign said PALM in letters that had died one by one, leaving only P_L_M, which was probably fitting.

The phone rang. She let it ring four times before picking up.

"Cross."

"I have a job for you. And I think you are the only person in this city who can do it."

The voice was male, soft, precise. Like a scalpel.

"Depends on the job," she said.

"My name is Dr. Marcus Hale. I am a forensic pathologist at County Hospital. I need you to find out who you are."

She set down her chopsticks. "That is a big question for a first date."

"This is not a date. It is a proposition. I will pay you ten thousand dollars to find your parents. Not the people who raised you. The people who gave you birth."

Vivian looked at her reflection in the dark window. She was twenty-five, with sharp cheekbones and eyes that had seen too much and remembered too little. She knew her name. She knew how to shoot a gun. She knew how to break a man's wrist without thinking about it. But she did not know where she had come from, and she had stopped trying to find out five years ago.

Until now.

"What do I have to do?" she said.

---

Marcus was exactly what she expected: young, pale, intelligent in the way that makes other people uncomfortable. He met her at a bar on Sunset Boulevard, and they talked until the bartender started wiping down counters they had not touched in hours.

"Your birth certificate is fake," Marcus said, stirring his whiskey. "The hospital where you were delivered has no record of you. The orphanage that raised you has records, but they... stop. When you were twelve, the records simply end."

"Sounds like someone did a good job."

"Or a bad job. There is a pattern, Vivian. A pattern of missing children in this city from 1968 to 1972. Seven girls. All taken between the ages of eight and thirteen. All from the same orphanage."

Vivian felt something cold move through her stomach. "And you think I am one of them."

"I know you are. And I think the person who took them is still alive. And I think he might be the reason I hired you."

She laughed, but it came out wrong. "You think your employer is a kidnapper?"

"I think the man who runs the orphanage—the one who signed me into the world, the one who raised me—has blood on his hands. And I think you are the only person crazy enough to find out."

She found the first body two days later.

It was a woman, sixty-something, found in her apartment in Koreatown. No signs of struggle, no forced entry. She had simply stopped breathing, and the coroner's initial report said natural causes. But Marcus had called her before the official report came in, and his voice had been different—shaken, almost afraid.

"Her name was Rose Chen," he said. "She was one of the seven. She was taken in 1969."

Vivian went to the apartment. She stood in the doorway and looked at the dead woman's life spread across a small room—photographs, a Bible, a jar of coins on the windowsill. She looked like a grandmother. She looked like someone's mother.

When she left, she found a note slipped under her door. It said: *Stop looking.*

She smiled for the first time in weeks. Good. That meant she was close.

She found the second body a week later. Then the third. Each one was a girl who had been taken from the orphanage, each one had lived a quiet life, and each one had died alone. The killer was getting careless, or he was getting old, or he was trying to send a message.

Vivian did not know which. She only knew that she was running out of time.

The night she found the truth, she sat in her office and stared at the photograph Marcus had given her. It was a group photo from the orphanage, 1971. Seven girls standing in a row, smiling at the camera. She was fourth from the left, wearing a dress that had been too small and hair that had been cut too short.

And standing behind them, his hand resting on the shoulder of the girl next to her, was Marcus Hale.

He had not been a child in that photograph. He had been a young man. And he had been there when the taking started.

She called him. He answered on the first ring.

"I know," he said.

"You knew. You knew all along."

"I suspected. But I needed you to be sure. Because if I am right, Vivian, then I have been in love with the daughter of the man who destroyed my life. And that is a complication I do not know how to handle."

She looked at the photograph one more time, then dropped it in the trash. "Meet me at the pier. Midnight. Come alone."

"I always come alone."

"No, Marcus. Not this time."