Book excerpt: The past has come back to haunt P.I. Jack Carpenter, former head of the Broward County Missing Persons Unit. As a young cop he failed to stop the kidnapping of a college coed by a shockingly large assailant—and neither victim nor attacker was ever seen again. But eighteen years later, when his daughter, Jessie, asks him to bird-dog a creep who’s been shadowing her college basketball team, Carpenter’s pursuit of the voyeur leads him smack into another run-in with his old nemesis, who abducts one of Jessie’s teammates. With the assistance of the kidnap victim’s tycoon father and precious little time before the trail goes cold, Jack and his dog, Buster, hit the ground running—following a twisted trail from the ruins of a shuttered mental asylum with an infamous past to the streets of a sinister small town with a ghastly secret.