1280 miles away in Omaha, Nebraska, no one at KNOC-TV knew yet who Daniel Forester was. It was a hectic day, even for the newsroom. Reporters ran to and from the producer's desk with scripts. Tape editors raced videotapes to the control room and in the midst of it all, the assignment editor barked out orders to the field crews through his two-way radio as the police scanner crackled out its garbled chatter. Everyone rushed around hurriedly as though theirs was the biggest story of the day. Everyone, that is, except News Director Bob Manson and Senior Reporter Susan Jensen. They had learned long ago that getting all hyped up over a story wasted valuable energy. They chose to take a more serene approach . . . even to big news.
        "Reporters are hooked on the adrenaline-rush," Susan liked to say, "the frenzied pace and a lot of them act this way even with more routine, humdrum stories. Urgency makes them feel important, even when their story is of absolutely no importance. After all, if you're in a big hurry what you're doing must be important . . . right?" But that wasn't the case on this day in this newsroom.

*        *         *

        "Dan, Mike never came home from school and I'm going out of my mind! I called all his friends and the last they saw of him, he was walking home!" Jan spit the words out all in one breath. It was her voice alright, as Dan subconsciously visualized her worried-but-beautiful, slightly freckled face framed by flaming red hair. But so terrifying were her words that, to Dan, the last few sounded like they were being spoken through a megaphone from the other end of a tunnel. He had a sickening feeling that this would be a tunnel of no return.

*        *         *

        After five years of doing stories about the search for a missing Omaha boy named Jeremy Fenner the big day had finally arrived. His remains had been found and KNOC-TV Reporter Susan Jensen was on it like a pit bull. The child had been kidnapped, mutilated and murdered. Authorities suspected a pedophile had kidnapped and killed him. Every TV newscast in the state was leading with the story and the Omaha stations were devoting most of their early newscasts to it. But because of Susan's efforts KNOC was better prepared than the competition.
        Susan had followed the Jeremy Fenner story the closest. Every step of the way she produced stories and special series reports on missing children. Twenty-eight years old, pretty and shapely, she looked like a cross between a beauty queen and a college professor. Her smooth, golden hair ended in soft curls that bounced around a ravishing-yet knowing face with soft eyes that seemed to look right through you. This was a beautiful and intelligent woman whose love was her job. Fenner and the missing children issue had become a cause for her and she had spent years researching it. She had also grown close to Jeremy's parents . . . some of her colleagues thought too close.

*        *         *

        Normally it was just a good-looking, well-built man with jet-black hair and fiery-yet- icy eyes inside Dan Forester's insurance office window. But at this moment the glass housed a tight-skinned mask of horror. Every muscle in his body went instantly taut and a blaring alarm shot off in his head. A silent but deafening siren that only he could hear. He felt panicked and paralyzed and it was several seconds before he could speak. "Are you sure he didn't go home with one of his friends?" he finally managed to ask his wife.
        "Yes, I called them all . . . and besides, you know he wouldn't do that without calling me," came Jan's inevitable answer.
        Dan suddenly went hollow as if the breath was being sucked out of him by a high-powered vacuum. It was his worst nightmare. As a former policeman he had seen too many kidnapped, mutilated and murdered children.
        A familiar odor then slowly began creeping into his nostrils. A subtle, metallic scent that he hadn't smelled in a long time. It was frightening, yet he couldn't quite place it. "Could he have stayed late at school for something?" he asked apprehensively, wanting to explore every hopeful possibility.
        "That's the first thing I thought, but . . . but I called the school and . . . he didn't," she stammered.
        What's that smell? It was foreign, yet familiar and he was afraid of the answer.

*        *         *

        Like many people Ross Huggins wanted better cards than life had dealt him. His was a little known job with the FBI doing background research on all kinds of strange and mysterious subjects. Most of the bureau's employees were involved in some type of research at one time or another, but Ross was given the really off beat stuff to look into. It could be interesting work, but he often wished he was out on the front lines of investigation instead of buried in the bowels of the Bureau's dark, dank, vomit-green research basement in Quantico, Virginia. He longed to get away from his cave, as he called it, and get into the real world of FBI fieldwork. Three times he had requested a transfer to a field investigation unit, but had been told each time he was too valuable where he was. This is irony, he thought. He figured if he wasn't so good at his job he would be investigating instead of back-grounding. But he had the patience of a fisherman and day after day he did his job in an office strewn with books and papers alongside the most advanced computer hardware and software available. He did it extremely well, waiting for the break that some day would make him a field investigator.
        Unfortunately for him he looked much more like a research librarian than he did an FBI field agent. At a slight 5" 8' with a crewcut and glasses he didn't exactly cut an imposing figure, but the key to Ross was his eyes. They were calm, yet intense. Most people who knew him would have been surprised to learn that along with an IQ of 148, Ross had a black belt in karate and knew how to use his deadly skills. His job wasn't glamorous and he often got bored stiff. But things were about to change as his boss Don Westerhoff walked into his office.

*        *         *

        It hit Dan like a hard slap in the face as he heard his wife whimper on the other end of the phone. The odor in his nostrils was fear itself and he hadn't smelled it since just before his last fierce, death-ridden firefight in Vietnam. His buddies had thought him crazy when he told them he had actually smelled fear. "More of Forester's cosmic crap," one of them snarled, referring to his natural tendency toward existential philosophy, which often seemed out of place in the cruel reality of war. Dan was probably the only deep-thinker in his company and most certainly the only one who often put his deep feelings into words, both in conversation and in the journal he kept. But he was also the first one to charge an enemy position or go after a sniper. He had always been contradictory, combining firebrand behavior with well-read, intellectual awareness. But at the time he knew what he had smelled. It was so vile that he had lain awake nights saturating his cot with sweat and worrying that at any moment the fetid sewer of horrors, as he called it, would wind its sickening way back into his nostrils and take its unsweet time to leave.
        Even now, as he gazed dumbly at his busy co-workers through his office window, he felt the sweat again. His shirt stuck to him like wet paste and the telephone receiver slid on his ear. "Are you sure he's not over at Bill's?" he asked hoping Mike may have gone to the neighbor's house.
        "No, I checked."
        "Think hard a minute Jan," Dan pushed, "is there anything you might've missed?"
        "No! You're not listening . . . I already told you . . . there's nowhere else he could be," Jan sputtered between choked sobs.
        Scenes of horribly tortured and murdered children tumbled over each other in his head, battling for his attention. He had thought Vietnam was as hideous as life could get, but he was wrong. Fifteen years on the Washington, D.C. Police Force had shown him more inhuman, brutal treatment of children than he had ever imagined possible.
        Although he liked being a detective, six months earlier he decided that the irregular hours and all the late night stake-outs weren't leaving him much time for the only thing in his life that meant anything to him: his son. It was a battle between the job he liked and the son he loved, and Mike won. So, with more than a little trepidation, he made a dramatic career change and took a job as an insurance investigator with the Alliance Insurance Company in the Washington suburb, Silver Spring, Maryland. "The job's a joke," he told Jan when he decided to make the switch, "but it's a nine-to-fiver so I'll finally be able to spend time with Mikey." Now, snapping back to the present, he realized that it may have all been for nothing. Mike might be . . . well, he didn't want to think about that.

*        *         *

        "I've got a weird one for you this time," Don Westerhoff said as he absent-mindedly looked around FBI Researcher Ross Huggins' messy work area.
        "What now?" Ross whirled around quickly.
        "They want you to do a profile study on pedophiles."
        "But we already have one," he told Don.
        "Yea, I know, but you know the boys upstairs. They've decided the old study is outdated. They've ordered a new one starting from scratch. You'll have to profile it all, from the pedophile's childhood to the cause of his death and everything in-between."
        "Man, Don, this one's gonna take some time."
        "Well, if you've got the time we've got the queer," joked Westerhof as he walked toward the door hesitating just long enough to see if he would get a laugh out of Ross. He didn't.