At The Shelter, no one judges the runaway teens who come in off the rainy Seattle streets. Volunteers, like police psychologist Daphne Matthews, want only to rescue and rebuild lives. Being a cop, Daphne thinks she’s seen it all. But, as best-selling author Ridley Pearson’s edge-of-the-seat thriller opens, what she encounters in a sixteen-year-old girl chills her in a way she thought a case no longer could.
Daphne turns for help to the best cop she knows, a man with creative instincts and an appreciation for forensic lab techniques—Lou Boldt. Boldt isn’t a cop anymore; he’s playing jazz piano in a downtown club and doing his best to forget the past. When Daphne puts her evidence on the table, Boldt is hooked. By all appearances someone is illegally harvesting human organs for transplant. Soon the two cops—and former lovers—are drawn into the dark vortex of a high-tech, highly profitable underground industry—and into the mind of its founder, a doctor gone very, very bad…a man who began by trying to save patients unable to get donor organs through legitimate channels…a healer who let ambition, or something more sinister, turn him into a killer.
The case gets personal when Daphne’s friend and fellow Shelter volunteer Sharon Shaffer is abducted, and evidence left behind indicates she’s about to become the killer’s next organ donor. Daphne and Boldt have only days, hours, minutes to save Sharon from a killer about to make one final, unforgettable contribution to humankind. Meanwhile a woman caught in a nightmare of captivity rattles the bars of a secret makeshift prison, too far from civilization for anyone to hear her scream.
