Melanie Wells - The Soul Hunter (Dylan Foster Series #2)

A magical transformation takes place when your first book gets published. Credibility, as it happens, opens a lot of doors. And waiting on the other side are articulate, accomplished professionals who are happy to help you with your research. Talking to these individuals, digging into their expertise, was the great joy of writing this book.

Im indebted to the good folks of the Dallas Police Department Crimes Against Persons Division (CAPERS), Homicide Section, who do an impossible job under difficult circumstances, yet manage somehow to retain their decency and their humanity. Any authenticity in this story is theirs. Deliberate inaccuracies (the DPD does not keep prisoners handcuffed or chained during interrogation, for instance) are mine, kept for the sake of the story. Detectives Robert Quirk and Phil Harding, two of the finest and hardest working people I know, let me follow them around and made themselves available for all of my questions. Detective Dan Krieter gave me a fascinating explanation of fingerprint technology and helped me work out crucial details regarding physical evidence. Sergeant Eugene Reyes was generous in offering me access to his squad. And Gerry Meier, Senior District Judge, Dallas County (retired), who served as my entre to the DPD, shared a pot of tea with me and helped me construct a criminal history for Gordon Pryne.

Im grateful to Bruce Feldman for help with the Hebrew. And to my former colleague, Bob Pyne, Professor of Systematic Theology at Dallas Theological Seminary, for his help with theology, and for lending me a stack of his books for the better part of a year.

Pamela Lindsay Feagins, M.D., pitched in on medical issues, as did Drs. David Missimo and Bryan Forsythe. And a big thanks to Beverly Crittendon, the only female used car dealer in Dallas, for letting me use her car lot.

At Multnomah, Kevin Marks, fiction group publisher, and Sharon Znachko, group marketer for fiction, have been incredibly supportive, as have the rest of the folks up there in Sisters. And James Hall, the Multnomah artist who designed the cover for this book and for When the Day of Evil Comes, managed to capture the eerie character of both novels in a way that compels people to pick them up off the stack and take them home.

Rod Morris, my editor at Multnomah, waited patiently while I finished the draftseveral months after deadlineand then managed, with his customary sharp eye, deft ear, and infallible tact, to excavate just the right words from the pile. What a pleasure to work with an editor who respects the writers voice, yet knows exactly when to tone it down (by cutting the parentheticals, primarily).

Lisa Taylor, my publicist, is intrepid in her pursuit of reviews, interviews, press mentions, and speaking opportunities. My agent, Don Pape of Alive Communications, is a godsend, in the truest sense of the word. Im humbled by his faith in me and grateful for his persistence on my behalf and his unflagging regard for my work.

Trish Murphy takes the solitude out of writing for me. I wrote much of this book parked at her kitchen table with my laptop while she tweaked song lyrics and made the tuna casserole. Dennis Ippolito read the manuscript several times, asking questions, offering suggestions, and helping me excise the mistakes. His input has been invaluable. And Trish and Dennis both, champs that they are, sat around a swimming pool in Phoenix with me one hot weekend in September and read the entire manuscript out loud, laughing at all the right moments and helping me with nuances of tone, rhythm, plot, and dialogue.

Thanks to Elizabeth Emerson, Kim Coffin, and Christine Carberry, who combed the final draft for errors and picked them out, one by one.

A special thanks to the staff at LifeWorks, who fill in the gaps when Im buried in book-related tasks. And to the Waah Waah Sisterhood for keeping me sane. Much love to Dot, Ron, Mike, Alissa, and Chance.

It takes a village to produce a novel. To those wonderful individuals who helped with this one, I offer my deepest thanks.

Y oud think Id have learned my lessons by now. Some people, it turns out, are not what they seem. Some secrets, it turns out, are better left untold. And some specters, it turns out, are better left unseen. And the answers, it turns out, dont always arrive in order. And when they do show up, they just might kick open a door youre better off leaving closed up tight.

I thought Id gotten all the education I needed a year or so ago, starting with an innocuous decision Id made to go to a cold spring pool on a hot summer day. Id found myself standing in the gaze of the red-hot eyes of hell and discovered, quite by accident, that Id caught the attention of the universe somehow. But not the kind of attention you want, if you get my meaning.

Id looked evil in the eye that day and faced it down in the weeks that followed, more out of necessity than anything else. It certainly had nothing to do with bravery or spirituality or any quixotic sense of adventure I might have had. Id just found myself in the target zone, so Id fought when I had to, ducked when I could, and run when I couldnt think of anything else to do. And Id eventually gotten out of the whole mess with a good-sized dose of grit, some help from the Almighty, and a couple of trips to Chicago.

It began this time, as some of my least intelligent moments do, in front of the mirror. It was the eve of my thirty-fifth birthday and I was feeling the need for self-examination, I suppose. Some misguided ritual to mark the passageway to the other side of my thirties.

Magnifying mirrors were invented by Satan, Im convinced. No human Ive ever known could spend any time at all in front of a magnifying mirror examining pores and eyebrow hairs without coming away from there with a toxic sense of shame and self-doubt.

On this occasion, I committed the additional catastrophic error of looking at myself from behind. In a department store dressing room. Under fluorescent lights. While trying on bikinis. In winter.

To my dismay, stuck right there on the back of my formerly firm legs were my mothers thighs. My mothers Texas milkmaid thighs.

I work hard to stay in shape. Though I am an academic, and most of the professors I know are thoroughly slovenly in their personal habits, I have resolutely risen above the fray. I am non-lumpy. I have fitness goals. I have completed a triathlon.

And I absolutely refuse to let my rear end slide south toward my ankles.

So the dismay I felt at that moment under the lights was genuine. I could not have been more surprised.

Now, all women know the steps to combat body-image trauma. Men would do well to memorize the procedure too. This sort of handbook-type information, if utilized correctly, could cut the divorce rate by a third, Im convinced.

The first step, of course, is to shop. Preferably for expensive fitness gear that will encourage you to work out with renewed vigor and dedication. Or, if you choose to punt on self-improvement, an alternative is to shop for a new and fetching outfit that disguises the body part in question.

I went for the fitness gear. I swim regularly, but those endless laps in the pool were not warding off the impending thigh disaster. Though I have to say, my arms looked pretty smokin.

The answer here was shoes. I needed running shoes. Now.