Shoes Inside

A woman vanishes on M-24. Her car is found running, wipers on. Her shoes are still on the floor mat. Six months later, it happens again.Former FBI profiler Jackson "e;Jacks"e; Dahl left the Bureau after a case that cost him more than his career. Now he works cold cases out of a converted garage in Dry Creek, Michigan — a man with a bad shoulder, a box of damage he doesn't open, and a method built on five years of studying the worst men alive.When his ex-brother-in-law, Sanilac County Deputy Tom Henderson, calls at 2:30 AM with a missing woman and a pattern that matches an unsolved disappearance, Dahl agrees to investigate off the books. What he finds is a behavioral signature that points to someone with a badge, a county vehicle, and the patience of a man who's been hunting these roads for longer than anyone knows.The investigation leads through impound lots, gas station parking lots, and six months of falsified county records to a predator dyad — a dominant and a dependent — and a sealed pole barn on a road with a number instead of a name.Emily Vance has been missing for over twenty-four hours. The system designed to protect her is the same system her abductor has been hiding inside. And the clock is running out.Shoes Inside is the first case in the Jackson Dahl PI series — noir crime fiction set in Michigan's Thumb, featuring a former FBI behavioral analyst who sees the architecture of violence the way an engineer sees a failing system.