Meaning Frank Mitchell rented a storage space only a few weeks after Kaycee disappeared.

I commit the membership number to memory and slip the folded bill back into the mess just before Mr. Mitchell shoves open the door.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing in here?” He seems to swell. Or maybe I shrink, funneling back to the little kid I was when just the sight of him would make me cross the street.

“I guess I got turned around.” My smile feels sticky, as if it’s congealing at the edges.

“Get out.” His voice is a growl. Now his T-shirt looks like a direct threat. Guns don’t kill people. I do. “Now.”

I have to push by him, and for a second he gets in my way, and I have a quick flash of physical fear, a terror he won’t let me leave. But at the last second he turns, angling his body and giving me room to pass.

I practically sprint to the door; only after I’m standing on the porch, gulping air, do I realize I was holding my breath. As if a monster were about to get me. As if the house were a graveyard.

As if I were afraid to raise the dead.

Chapter Seventeen

I still haven’t heard back from the county prosecutor, Dev Agerwal, so I leave a message with his office, and, in desperation, send a follow-up e-mail through a contact form I find on his website. But I don’t hold out much hope. Agerwal has reason to be protective of his office, even if he did clean house when he took the position.

I leave the office early, while Joe is on the phone, to avoid having to give a blow-by-blow of our trip to Frank Mitchell’s house—I know he thinks we should be focusing on rooting out people who’ve had problems with their water and are willing to say so.

The cloud cover has burned off, and the evening sky has transformed into stripes of gold and auburn. Instead of turning right on County Route 12, which will lead me down past Sunny Jay’s where Condor works, the Elks Club, and, finally, the hair salon that conceals my rental house behind it, I turn left. I need to know what Frank Mitchell, whose home is halfway to hoarder, dumped in a storage space only a week after Kaycee disappeared.

U-Pack is a depressing sling of buildings ineffectively roped off by a sagging chain-link fence. I’ve always said that if you haven’t touched something for two years, then you don’t need it. But I’ve always hated junk and clutter. I don’t like stuff weighing me down. I would never need a storage locker; in fact, when people come to my condo in Chicago they ask if I’ve just moved in.

A cheerful bell tings when I open the door. The clerk, a man in his sixties, looks up from a magazine.

I can see the nicotine stain on his fingernails from where I’m standing. Smell it on his breath, too. “How can I help you?” He manages to say it as if he very much hopes he can’t.