“Fourteen. I know it sounds insane. It is insane. I never would have made the connection. But then…” She stands up abruptly and moves to her desk. Slides open a drawer and fumbles for something out of sight.

“In the pictures, Amy was wearing socks. Nothing else. They were argyle. Pink and green. I always buy her at least one pair for Christmas.”

She straightens up. Comes around the desk. Suddenly I don’t want to know, and wish I hadn’t asked, hadn’t come, hadn’t ever heard of Lilian McMann.

Mutely, she extends her hand, letting the socks hang loose as if they’re a corpse that might still come alive. Argyle. Pink and green. Unworn, and still tagged.

“He gave them to me when I left,” she says. “He left them on my desk with a note. Great socks make a great outfit. Hope these keep you warm through cold nights ahead.”

Her words trigger a long-buried memory: Jake Erickson, one of Brent’s friends, elbowing into my lab space during senior year chemistry. He was always messing with me, switching my chemicals, knocking over my test tubes, turning off my Bunsen burner so I could never finish in time, but that day he was too busy bragging about feeling up a sophomore behind the Dumpsters between classes.

She’s totally fucked in the head, he said, and I could tell he knew I was listening. The crazy ones are always the easiest. They just open up for business the second you even look at them.

“He wanted me to know.” Now her voice leaps to a note of high anguish. “Not just that he’d seen the photos. But that he’d gotten them from her in the first place.”

We can do anything we want with them. Jake Erickson’s voice fills up my head. They let us. And why not? It’s not like they’re going to complain afterward.

I stand up, suddenly dizzy. “I’m sorry,” I say, without knowing exactly what I’m sorry for.

For her daughter, for her job, for that sophomore behind the Dumpsters, men who get to do anything they want, and the people who are taken advantage of.

Because isn’t that, ultimately, what the case comes down to?

There are the people of the world who squeeze and the ones who suffocate.

Chapter Nineteen

The closest bar isn’t nearly close enough. Ray’s Tavern—a dump that shares a parking lot with a Fireworks Emporium—is already half full, despite the fact that it’s only four P.M. Some of the customers look like they may have been crusted on those same stools since the beginning of time. They appear to be grown into the décor, like alcoholic barnacles. I can’t stop scraping my palms with a cocktail napkin, as if Lilian McMann’s story has embedded itself in my skin.

I don’t know that I can believe her: not because she’s lying, but because she might simply be wrong. The problem with spending a lifetime looking for patterns is that it teaches you to see them everywhere; but coincidences happen. Colin Danner might simply have known about the pictures through his son, and decided to give one final twist of the knife before Lilian left. In all likelihood, that is what happened.