Scream for Me by Karen Rose

I’ll let you know.”
    “Again, I appreciate it.” And as he walked away, he felt her watch him go.
    Atlanta, Monday, January 29, 1:15 p.m.
    When Daniel got back to his office, Luke was sitting in one of his chairs, a laptop in his lap and his feet up on Daniel’s desk. He looked up, studied Daniel’s face, then shrugged. “You’re making it damn hard for me to lie to my mama, Daniel. I can tell her you’re all right all I want, but those dark circles under your eyes tell a different tale.”
    Daniel hung his jacket behind his door. “Don’t you have a job?”
    “Hey, I’m working.” Luke held up the laptop. “I’m running a diagnostic on the chief’s machine. It’s been running ‘buggy.’ ” He quirked the air with his fingers, a smile on his face, but Daniel heard the tension in his friend’s voice.
    He sat at his desk and did some studying of his own. There were no dark circles under Luke’s eyes, but within them was a bleakness few got to see. “Bad day?”
    Luke’s smile disappeared, and closing his eyes, he swallowed audibly. “Yeah.” The single word was harsh and filled with a pain few truly understood. Luke was on the GBI’s task force against Internet crime, and for the last year he’d been focused on crime involving children. Daniel thought he’d rather watch a thousand autopsies than look at the obscenities Luke was forced to view every day. Luke drew a breath and opened his eyes, control restored even if serenity was not.
    Daniel wondered if any cop ever got to serenity.
    “I needed a break,” Luke said simply, and Daniel nodded.
    “I just came from the morgue. My Jane Doe went to Fun-N-Sun on Thursday and plays the violin.”
    “Well, the violin might narrow it down some. I brought you something.” Luke pulled a thick stack of papers from his computer bag. “I ran a deeper search on Alicia Tremaine and came up with all these articles. She had a twin sister.”
    “I know,” Daniel said wryly. “Too bad you didn’t tell me before she walked in here this morning and scared the ever-livin’ shit outta me.”
    Luke’s dark brows shot up. “She was
here
? Alexandra Tremaine?”
    “She calls herself Fallon now. Alex Fallon. She’s an ER nurse from Cincinnati.”
    “So she lived then,” Luke said thoughtfully and Daniel frowned.
    “What do you mean?”
    Luke handed the stack of papers over the table. “Well, the story didn’t stop with Alicia’s murder. The day Alicia’s body was found, Kathy Tremaine, that’s their mother, shot herself in the head. She was apparently discovered by her daughter Alexandra, who then took all the pills the doctor had prescribed for the mother, who was hysterical after having to identify her daughter’s body.”
    Daniel thought of Jane Doe on the table at the morgue and of a mother having to identify her child looking like that. Still, suicide was the coward’s way out . . . and for Alex to have discovered her that way. “My God,” he murmured.
    “Kathy Tremaine’s sister had come down from Ohio because of Alicia and discovered them both. Her name was Kim Fallon.”
    “Alex said she’d been adopted by her aunt and uncle, so that makes sense.”
    “There’s more in the stack, obits and articles about the trial of Gary Fulmore, the man they charged with the murder. But there was no other mention of Alexandra after the article on Fulmore’s arrest. I guess Kim Fallon took her to Ohio after that.”
    Daniel leafed through the pages. “Did you see mention of a Bailey Crighton?”
    “Craig Crighton, yes, but not Bailey. Craig was the man Kathy Tremaine was living with at the time of her death. Why?”
    “That’s why Alex Fallon came to see me today. Her stepsister Bailey went missing Thursday night and she thought she was the Arcadia woman.”
    Luke whistled softly. “Well, that had to have been a shock.”
    Daniel thought of the fists she’d squeezed nearly bloodless, and the way her hand felt in his. “I imagine it was, but