It was clear to everyone living in Safe Harbor that a monster was on the loose. It, whoever it was, was killing the town’s children, seemingly at random, definitely at will.

Six kids had been found mutilated in wooded and secluded areas around the small, coastal town. Most of the victims—an equal mix of boys and girls between the ages of nine and young—were from middle-class families who, according to police investigators, had no clear connection to one another, other than the fact their children attended the same school.

From the hills that stood as a guard against the sometimes punishing sea winds, to the grassy plains in the south of the county in which Safe Harbor was nestled, people were scared. Nothing like this had ever happened before in the tiny community of fisher-families and woodsmen who’d been able to create moderate wealth from the area’s bountiful natural resources.

The killer, whoever it was, had come to town almost six months ago. That was when the first child, little Becky Williamson, disappeared. She had been the first of Safe Harbor’s mourning, and after five more kids turned up dead, the town knew how to mourn, it knew all too well.

In a community where death happened exclusively by accident, usually at sea during stormy weather or in the vast forests that surrounded the town, murder most heinous was a terrifying rarity.

Safe Harbor was a blue collar town in every sense of the word. The men were big and burly, with huge hands, strong arms and large frames that made them perfectly equipped for life in the bush. Huge encampments of workers fought the eternal war against the old growth forest that formed a huge, green canopy around Safe Harbor. The forest was not only a source of unlimited wealth for some, it was the omnipotent presence, the great protector against vicious winter storms conjured thousands of miles away in a remote part of the Pacific which made their way with terrifying regularity to Oregon each season. The trees not only supplied thousands of jobs, they served as a shield against winds and snows that would have otherwise leveled the town centuries earlier.