She stopped there but neither Bosch nor Edgar said anything. They knew there was more.

“But before I left,” Rider continued, “I learned enough to know that most often sexual abuse of children comes from inside the family, relatives or close friends. The boogey monsters who climb through the window and abduct are few and far between.”

“It’s still not evidence in this specific case, Kiz,” Bosch said gently. “This could still be the rare exception. It wasn’t Harris who came through the window but this guy.”

He pointed to her computer, though the images of the headless man’s assault on Stacey Kincaid were thankfully not on the screen.

“Nobody came through the window,” Rider insisted.

She pulled a file over and opened it. Bosch saw it contained a copy of the protocol from the autopsy of Stacey Kincaid. She leafed through it until she came to the photos. She picked the one she wanted and handed it to Bosch. While he looked at it she started paging through the protocol.

The photo Bosch held was a shot of Stacey Kincaid’s body in situ — the position and place where it was found. Her arms were spread wide. Sheehan had been right. Her body was darkening with interior decomposition and the face was gaunt, but there was an angelic quality to her in repose. His heart ached from looking at the photos of her tortured and now dead.

“Look at the left knee,” Rider commanded.

He did so. He saw a round dark spot that appeared to be a scab.

“A scab?”

“Right. The protocol calls it premortem by five to six days. It happened before she was abducted. So she had that scab on her knee the entire time she was with her abductor — if there really was one. In the photos on the web site, she has no scab. I can go back in and show you if you like.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Bosch said.

“Yeah,” Edgar added. “Me, too.”

“So these photos on the web were taken well before she was supposedly kidnapped, well before she was murdered.”

Bosch nodded, then shook his head.

“What?” Rider asked.

“It’s just . . . I don’t know. Twenty-four hours ago we were working the Elias thing and thinking maybe we were looking for a cop. Now all of this . . .”

“It changes things all right,” Edgar said.

“Wait a minute, if that’s Sam Kincaid in those pictures with her, why the hell are they still on that web site? It doesn’t make sense that he would risk that.”